Let us note —
I. The Original Design of the Potter. II. The Marring of the Vessel. III. The Final Result.
I.
The Original Design.
1. The text clearly teaches that God has a plan for every life, a pattern for every character, an ideal for every soul. God is the Almighty Potter ; and, in one sense, we are but clay in His hands.
1 J. M. Munro, in The Christian World Pulpit, lxxviii. 381.
JEREMIAH xviii. 4 79
There is some definite, desirable, and beautiful ideal which God wishes us to realize. All men's lives are in God's hands. In Isaiah xlv. 5, God says of Cyrus, " I girded thee, though thou hast not known me." This is striking language. It is as if God had said, " I placed on thee the military belt, and prepared thee for war and conquest." Men who are strangers to God are often employed by God to accomplish His providential plans. Thus He raised up Cyrus on account of the Hebrew people. In a sense, Cyrus was the Lord's anointed, as we learn from the first verse of this same chapter. This does not mean that Cyrus was a worshipper of the true God ; but it means that God had set him apart to perform a most important public service. The title here given to Cyrus is one of appointment to office rather than one expressive of holiness of character. He was God's instru- ment in the accomplishment of His vast designs among the nations. All nations and kings are in God's hand. In this sense He called Nebuchadnezzar His servant, the staff of His indigna- tion, and the rod of His anger. God " doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth." He changes the times and the seasons; He removes kings and sets up kings. He makes the wrath of men to praise Him and the remainder of wrath He restrains.
TI There seems to lie in all men, in proportion to the strength of their understanding, a conviction that there is in all human things a real order and purpose, notwithstanding the chaos in which at times they seem to be involved. Suffering scattered blindly without remedial purpose or retributive propriety — good and evil distributed with the most absolute disregard of moral merit or demerit — enormous crimes perpetrated with impunity, or vengeance when it comes falling not on the guilty, but the innocent —
Desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimmed in jollity —
these phenomena present, generation after generation, the same perplexing and even maddening features ; and without an illogical but none the less a positive certainty that things are not as they seem — that, in spite of appearance, there is justice at the heart of them, and that, in the working out of the vast drama, justice will assert somehow and somewhere its sovereign right and power, the better sort of persons would find existence altogether unen-
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durable. This is what the Greeks meant by the 'Avayxjj or destiny, which at the bottom is no other than moral Providence.1
2. This implies the living presence of the Potter in this world which is being moulded. It involves the constant, direct impact, if one may so speak, of the Divine fingers. That is one part of St. Paul's great argument in the Epistle to the Komans. The Israelites thought that God had selected them and wound them up like a clock, so that they were to go on and on without further change for ever. St. Paul says No. God has not taken His fingers from the work. He never bound Himself to have mercy on you and on no one else. " He will have mercy on whom he will have mercy." And if you do not answer His purpose, He will change matters with you. And so, according to the picture before us, God is ever actively present, and what we call secondary laws are figments of the imagination, phrases that speak out our ignorance, the sign of the veil upon our eyes. We so speak because we cannot see the great Hand at work, touching every individual thing, allowing nothing, whether law or anything else, to intervene between His living purpose and the world that is being moulded by Him. If God is indeed thus moulding the world, secondary laws in any real sense are out of the question. When you start the world like a clock, as some scientists suppose, and then leave it going by its own machinery, all moulding is over, all purpose beyond that point has vanished, all progression has disappeared. You have nothing but a monotonous mechanism that goes on without progress until the wheel runs down. But in the picture of the potter God's presence here is a living presence. He has the clay in His hand ; He has moulded it, and is shaping it on His wheel.
^{ No one has shown more lucidly than Dr. Martineau has that in all our Ideals there is revealed a Divine Presence which, though felt in us, is also felt to be not of us, so that we can clearly distinguish between this self-revelation of the immanent God, which carries with it the sense of an objective reality, and those subjective desires, affections, and sympathies which pertain to us as separate individuals. But though the Divine Ideal is ever more or less vividly present in our consciousness, and is that which gives to our life all its highest features, and all its truest