Jeremiah 18-19

Sovereignty

There are moments in the Bible when the author or speaker indicates that the people who are being addressed may not be ready for certain truths. Paul says in certain contexts that his listeners SHOULD be ready for solid food, but must be fed milk still. (1 Cor 3:2) Jesus says at one point

John 16:12 ““I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

And I feel that some of what is spoken about here in Jeremiah 18-19 contains spiritual issues for the very mature in Christ. For those who have reflected long and deeply upon the nature of God and the shape of our relationship to Him through Christ as mediated by the Holy Spirit.

So if you are new to the faith, or new to some of these concepts that I will be talking about today, do not choke upon them, nor should you beat yourself up or feel foolish for not entirely understanding them. Set them aside for some later date if they are not helpful. We all have a limit as to what we can digest. Broccoli is good for humans I am told, but I can assure you I cannot eat it and remain in polite company for long. I remember recently listening to a debate between William Lane Craig, one of my favorite Christian scholars and a scientist and they began to get deep into the weeds of the free will vs predestination debate and I started to not understand anything they were saying. They were referencing scholars and terms that I had little understanding of and I had no qualms just closing the video. Ain’t nobody got time for that. I am not a PhD and like many pastors I am a jack of all trades and master of none. A longwinded way of saying it is good for the people of God to know their strengths and their limitations and to accept them and give all glory to God for who he has made you.

Jeremiah 18:1–6 “The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do. Then the word of the Lord came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.”

Potter’s houses were very common at the time, as common as gas stations today. Pottery was how almost everyone carried food and water and grains and many other things. And so the Lord tells Jeremiah to go to the potter’s house and watch. And there he sees a potter making a vessel, but the vessel becomes ill formed.

Israel was formed. Israel was created, as a people and a nation, by God, and so were each of us. We are creatures that have been created. We are not random, we are not accidental, we are purposefully created, just as a potter creates a pot.

So my first point today in this sermon is blessedly simple- that you are a Creation. This is not a complex truth, and yet I hate to run by it without reflecting upon it because it has become one of those truths that we as Christians find so obvious and so instinctively true that we don’t dwell on it overly much, but it is now radically countercultural in our society.

And it is one of those non-negotiable truths of the faith. You cannot be a Christian and NOT believe it. You are created. You did not randomly evolve, you were created.

I believe in evolution, by the way, if by evolution you mean the slow process of change built into all things that is leading somewhere, guided by the providential and sustaining hand of God. I believe in that. But most people, when they speak of evolution, mean that at heart all of creation is random, unpurposeful, and without a Creator. I don’t believe in that. You don’t have to read very far into the Bible to know that this is not a Biblical truth. In the beginning, God CREATED the heavens and the Earth.

So we as Christians need, at a minimum, to be very careful when talking about evolution, so that we don’t confuse non-believers about what it is we believe and are proclaiming. Now Christians believe or hypothesize many different things about how we came to be while still believing Genesis 1 and 2. So we have old earth Christians, young earth Christians, and different permutations of these theories. None of that matters much to me, as long as you know you are a creation, and did not randomly emerge from the ether.

You were created. You are designed. You have a simple recipe of 2 parts, in essence, just like clay has basically 2 parts- dirt and water. And you are dirt and Spirit- Earth and Spirit. The Earth that we are is easily seen, easily measured, easily analyzed, all the way down to our DNA. We may be dirt, but we are gloriously designed dirt. The Spirit is invisible and without form or substance, but our spirit is the repository of our morality, our joy, our ability to worship, and indeed that which makes us aware of the spiritual world at all. It is also our spirit, our souls, that are alive to the Holy Spirit, God indwelling within us:

Romans 8:14:

"For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God." We are led by Spirit, by God’s Spirit.

1 Corinthians 2:10:

"But God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God." We are taught by the Spirit.

John 16:13:

"But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth." Truth is found through a spiritual process. And we are able to engage in that process because we are made of spirit as well.

We are both physical and spiritual creatures all at once and we are, if I may engage in a bit of human hubris here, amazing. We are astounding beings. The human brain has somewhere in the vicinity of 100 trillion connections, synapses in it. The largest supercomputers yet built by humans have roughly 10 trillion. It staggers my synapses to think of it. But we are not just astounding, we are also beautiful. Is there anything more beautiful than a wise human who is kind to others and tends well to God’s creation and who sacrifices for others out of a sense of reverence for God and love for her fellow human beings? Humans can be glorious, matched only by their ability to be terrible and selfish.

So we are Spirit and Earth, gloriously made. Much of the world no longer believes that they are creations. They believe they are random mutations that just happen to be here in this time and this space, and then when they are gone they are gone. No plan, no purpose, no direction, no calling for there is no authoritative voice to call them to anything. They believe these lies, and become like wandering stars, with nothing to guide them or comfort them beyond their own feelings and fleeting affections. Yet they are built for worship, and so worship they shall. Some will turn to money, some to relationships, some to pride, some to intellect, some to entertainment, most people to some combination of these things, but all of them alike have as their first idol the flesh and its desires.

But we know we are creations. We know we are designed. And the potter will do as He wishes with the clay.

Now, that being said, there is a beautiful truth that runs like a river underneath these chapters in Jeremiah. It is mysterious and difficult to describe, much less understand, but this is a truth that can be summarized in 2 points:

God is in charge of the past, present and future, and He knows, before you are even born, what the trajectory of your life will be, and, yes, what choices you will make. There are no mysteries to God. There is no clouded horizon which He cannot look past or must guess at the outcomes of. The shape of things to come is certain for the Lord, and He gives us glimpses of the future in His Word, although it is not our call to try and figure out OR control the future, but rather to be His servants in the only time that we live in, which is the present. God is Sovereign, and He is timeless, omniscient, omnipresent and all powerful.

You have free will. You have the ability to accept and the ability to reject the promises of God. You do. There are so many Bible verses that say this in so many different ways that it can’t NOT be true. In fact, you could say that the very existence of the Bible, and the existence of preachers and prophets whom the Lord sends, is all the evidence you need that people can be convinced of the truth of the Gospel and CHOOSE to embrace faith.

And that, my friends, is solid food. That is prime rib with a side of baked potatoes and possibly some asparagus. Yet if you can grasp it and believe it and know it to be true in your soul then you will find, as is the case every time the human soul ingests and absorbs a TRUE thing, you will find that it brings peace and blessing to your life.

English Standard Version Chapter 18

If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, 8 and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. 9 And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, 10 and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it. (7-10)

Free will.

God is saying to Judah, the remaining remnant of Israel, that you had a choice. And as He emphasizes elsewhere Judah not only had a choice, but even had an example in that Northern Israel, Ephraim, worshiped idols and forsook God’s commands, and the Lord did not keep disaster from them because of their sin and idolatry. So they were without excuse, as Paul would have said. They not only knew their sin, they knew what the consequences could be. And they not only knew what the consequences COULD be, but WOULD be, because Jeremiah was there, warning them. And others had as well...Ezekiel and Nahum, Habbakuk, Zephaniah...so much of the Bible is God saying to His people, you have a choice, now choose to worship your savior God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

When you are a child and your parent tells you what it is you are doing wrong, and what the consequences will be if you continue to do that wrong- and you had already seen your older sibling do that same wrong and be punished for it- do you have any excuse left? To be in the presence of a prophet or a preacher...to be in a sanctuary of a church hearing the Word of God is not a safe space. It is not a safe place to be because you will hear true things spoken there, and your spirit will perceive them to be true and when that happens then you become accountable to God for that knowledge- that knowledge of a good and true and righteous calling to a holy life that you surely will not live up to, that you will surely fall short of. So you become as spoiled clay in the potters hands, but the good news is that he simply reworks the clay and makes something new. This is the New Covenant, the reworking of our souls through the Cross.

Thoughts on sovereignty

The Lord has the right to do WHATEVER the Lord wishes to do with His people because they are HIS people and they are HIS creation. They would have no form at all but for the potter. And, of course, so are we. The Lord has the right to do with HIS people whatever He chooses to do. We are incapable of judging God and His purposes, His thoughts and ways are far beyond us, yet many Christians today still will read God’s Word and think in their hearts God should not have done that. The Lord should not have struck that person down. The Lord should not have commanded such a harsh command. The Lord was unkind to do this that or the other thing. And we judge our Creator, without whom we would not have reason or compassion or the ability to judge anything.

Mike Winger, who is a youtube theologian that I appreciate had a clip about this that is helpful I thought.

He said, and I am paraphrasing, we struggle to remember that God is God, with everything that word means. We often make the mistake of thinking of GOD as a very smart, very wise, undying human being. But if the God of Scripture is God, then He is not, a very wise and smart human being. Even Jesus, who is God, is not just a wise and smart and eternal human being. He IS a human being, but He is also God.

And Winger goes on to make this observation about human pride. When we are 7 years old we can look back on when we were 3 and think man was I an idiot when I was 3. I can’t bear to even think about some of the dumb things I said and did. And then when you are 18 you look back on your 7 year old self and say...how is it possible for human being to be as ignorant as I was when I was 7? And then you turn 30 and you look back and you say...actually, I think my 7 year old self WAS actually smarter than my 18 year old self but really both of them were pretty ignorant, and this process never ends, well until we get old enough that actually sometimes we do start to regress. But I turn 50 this year. I went back, because of this sermon and looked at some of my writings, my sermons, some photos, emails, things that I had said and did when I was 40. 40 year old Seth was pretty ignorant about some things that 50 year old Seth is a bit embarrassed about now. But now I am smart. NOW I understand.

So if nearly 50 year old Seth can look back upon, say, 18 year old Seth and just cringe at my ignorance, not to mention arrogance, well, how far above 50 year old Seth is the Creator of the universe. How cringe inducing ignorant am I compared to the Lord? Incomprehensibly so. See, and this is the conundrum, isn’t it? The Lord allows us to judge Him, in a sense. The Lord says in Psalm 34 to taste and see that He is good, to experience Him and know that He loves you and wants what is good and right for you. So the Lord does not tell us to shy away from Him, but to draw near to Him and experience His goodness, His love, His mercy in Christ.

But our brains get in the way, and we look at this world, broken with sin and violence and disease, and we think, I wouldn’t have allowed that to happen. I wouldn’t have created such a world. I could do better. And the 3 year old runs out of the house into the street because he thinks his parents are being mean when they discipline him- not realizing how they are loving him by having boundaries and rules- and so he flees what he perceives to be injustice into danger and death. We flee God and ruin our lives because we want to be our own gods. God invites us in and we judge Him and find Him wanting because...because we are 7 year old children judging the God who knows the trajectory of every atom in the universe through all past, present and future.

This was all a long way of saying that the Lord is sovereign. And to be a Christian means to bend the knee and bow your head before Him and say whatever you do with us Lord is Your right. You are sovereign over us.

Paul puts it this way in Romans 9:

[Rom 9:18-26 ESV] 18 So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills. 19 You will say to me then, "Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?" 20 But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, "Why have you made me like this?" 21 Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? 22 What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, 23 in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory-- 24 even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles? 25 As indeed he says in Hosea, "Those who were not my people I will call 'my people,' and her who was not beloved I will call 'beloved.'" 26 "And in the very place where it was said to them, 'You are not my people,' there they will be called 'children of the living God.'"

The Lord is sovereign and the Lord will do what He wills.

But, yes, you have free will.

God says, you have a choice. You could be doing evil, but you have the ability to turn from evil and do good. You could be doing good, but you still have the choice to leave that path and do evil. And right now, Jerusalem, you are doing evil in my sight, so turn from evil and do good!

The Lord says, you have a choice. And if the Lord says it, then it is true. You have a choice. You can choose life over death, blessing over curse.

Deuteronomy 30:17–20 “But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish. You shall not live long in the land that you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.””

But the Lord knows how they will respond.

Jeremiah 18:12 ““But they say, ‘That is in vain! We will follow our own plans, each one of us, as his own stubbornly wicked heart directs.’” (Kaiser translation)

By and large the people of Judah are not going to listen to Jeremiah, a fact that the Lord had informed Jeremiah of at the very beginning of his ministry.

Jeremiah 7:27–28 ““So you shall speak all these words to them, but they will not listen to you. You shall call to them, but they will not answer you. And you shall say to them, ‘This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God, and did not accept discipline; truth has perished; it is cut off from their lips.”

God sets choices before Israel and these are true and genuine choices, and a remnant, a precious few, choose God above the things of this Earth, but always, always the majority choose idolatry and rebellion. And the Lord knows, before you are formed in the womb, all the choices you will make. You have free will, but you are no mystery to God.

If I bake fresh chocolate chip cookies and I leave them on a plate on a low shelf in a room full of 2-3 year olds and I say make sure you don’t eat these, and I come back, am I going to find any cookies left? No, I am not. Am I a prophet, a mystic, that I know this? No, I just know little humans and who they are. And we are all little humans to God. Did those children have a choice? Sure. And I knew which one they would make.

Jeremiah 19:1-15

Thus says the LORD, “Go, buy a potter’s earthenware flask, and take some of the elders of the people and some of the elders of the priests, and go out to the Valley of the Son of Hinnom at the entry of the Potsherd Gate, and proclaim there the words that I tell you. You shall say, ‘Hear the word of the LORD, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I am bringing such disaster upon this place that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle. Because the people have forsaken me and have profaned this place by making offerings in it to other gods whom neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah have known; and because they have filled this place with the blood of innocents, and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or decree, nor did it come into my mind— therefore, behold, days are coming, declares the LORD, when this place shall no more be called Topheth, or the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter. And in this place I will make void the plans of Judah and Jerusalem, and will cause their people to fall by the sword before their enemies, and by the hand of those who seek their life. I will give their dead bodies for food to the birds of the air and to the beasts of the earth. And I will make this city a horror, a thing to be hissed at. Everyone who passes by it will be horrified and will hiss because of all its wounds. And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and their daughters, and everyone shall eat the flesh of his neighbor in the siege and in the distress, with which their enemies and those who seek their life afflict them.’ “Then you shall break the flask in the sight of the men who go with you, and shall say to them, ‘Thus says the LORD of hosts: So will I break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter’s vessel, so that it can never be mended. Men shall bury in Topheth because there will be no place else to bury. Thus will I do to this place, declares the LORD, and to its inhabitants, making this city like Topheth. The houses of Jerusalem and the houses of the kings of Judah—all the houses on whose roofs offerings have been offered to all the host of heaven, and drink offerings have been poured out to other gods—shall be defiled like the place of Topheth.’ ” Then Jeremiah came from Topheth, where the LORD had sent him to prophesy, and he stood in the court of the LORD’s house and said to all the people: “Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, behold, I am bringing upon this city and upon all its towns all the disaster that I have pronounced against it, because they have stiffened their neck, refusing to hear my words.”

(1 Kings 11:7) here we have one of the darker pictures of judgment in Jeremiah, indeed in the Bible. Judah and Jerusalem will be fully destroyed because of the depth of their sin. God’s judgment will come down severely upon Judah, because of the depth and breadth of their sin and specifically God singles out the shocking sin of burning their children alive in sacrifice to false gods- if you can imagine such a thing.

But every generation of course has the thing that they have normalized that is anathema to the Kingdom of God. Worldwide it is estimated that 73 million abortions are performed every year. 73 million. Or who could have imagined when I was a child that we would be generating billions of pornographic videos and making them available to our kids in our own homes, every home with access to the most depraved things you can imagine. And so on.

God’s promise to the Judahites is His promise to us, that He will come and destroy sin. And we are sinful. And you will die. But thanks be to God, though God will come and destroy the heavens and the earth even as he destroyed Judah, there is a path out for all of us, just as there was for Daniel who was taken into captivity in Babylon, or Jeremiah who was kidnapped and taken to Egypt. There is a way that leads to life, and that is to stay faithful to the Lord who has provided for our salvation and has given us a savior to believe who is able to clothe you in His righteousness, to make you a citizen of the new heavens and the new Earth that the Lord is making, where you will be unashamed to walk in the Courts of the Lord because you forgiven and made whole.