Isa. xlv. 9. The prophecy concerning Cyrus. God calls him, though a heathen, for the sake of Jacob His servant, and Israel His elect. In this call God asserts His sovereignty: “Iam Jehovah, and there is none else. I girded thee when thou knewest me not.” This idea is further carried out by the figure of the potter and the clay. ‘Woe to him that striveth with his maker. Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioned it, ‘What makest thou?’ or thy work, ‘He hath no hands?’” The same thought appears in ver. 10. Shall a child remonstrate with its parents because they have brought into the world a being weak, ugly, or deformed? And again, in ver. 11: “Concerning the things to come will ye question me? Concerning my children and the work of my hands will ye lay commands upon me? It was I that made the earth and created the men upon it,” etc.
Along with these declarations of absolute sovereignty, which silence the lips of men, stand exhortations which assume the power of free choice. “I said not unto the seed of Jacob ‘Seek ye me in vain.”” ‘Assemble yourselves and come.” ‘Let them take counsel together.” ‘Turn ye unto me and be ye saved.”
Isa. lxiv. 8. “And now Jehovah, thou art our Father. We
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are the clay, and thou art our fashioner, and the work of thy hands are we all.” But ver. 5, ‘‘ Behold thou wast wroth, and we sinned, and we went astray : our iniquities as the wind have carried us away. Thou hast delivered us into the hand of our iniquities.” ‘Since thou art our fashioner, and we are the clay, look upon us : remem- ber not iniquity forever.”
By all these Old-Testament passages the idea of God dealing with men as lifeless clay, shaping them to eternal life or death ac- cording to His arbitrary will, is contradicted. The illustration points away from God’s causing unbelief, to God’s bearing with man’s voluntary and persistent disobedience, and to His making of him the best that can be made consistently with divine justice and holiness. So far from accentuating rigid narrowness of purpose, arbitrary and inexorable destination of-individuals to honor or dis- honor, the illustration opens a vast range and free play of divine purpose to turn evil to good, and to shape men into\obedient and faithful servants through divine chastisements. The potter does not make vessels in order to shiver them. God does not make men in order to destroy them. God ordains no man to eternal death. He desires to honor humanity, not to dishonor it; and the fact that men do become vessels unto dishonor, merely proves the power which God has lodged in the human will of modifying, and in a sense defeating, His sovereign purpose of love. He “will have all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth ;” yet Christ comes to His own, and His own receive Him not, and He weeps as He exclaims, “Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life.”
(22.) The argument now proceeds in regular course from ver. 18, showing that the exercise of God’s sovereign right is marked by mercy even toward those who deserve His wrath. Are you dis- posed to construe the words “whom He will He hardeneth ” into an assertion of the arbitrary, relentless, and unjust severity of God? Suppose it can be shown that God, though the spontan- eous recoil of His holy nature from sin moved Him to display His wrath and make known His power against men who were fit for de- struction—endured these with much long-suffering.
This could easily be shown from the case of the Israelites them- selves and of Pharaoh.
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