Chapter 9: On the Potter's Wheel
Chapter 9: On the Potter's Wheel
(JEREMIAH 18:4).
"He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This present thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee, and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.
R. BROWNING.
ONE DAY, BENEATH the impulse of the Divine Spirit, Jeremiah went beyond the city precincts to the Valley of Hinnom, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, where in a little hut, he found a potter, busily engaged at his handicraft. "Behold, he wrought his work on the wheels." Amid the many improvements of the present day, the art of pottery remains almost as it was as many centuries before Christ as we live after.
As the prophet stood quietly beside the potter, he saw him take a piece of clay from the mass that lay beside his band, and having kneaded it to rid it of the bubbles, place it on the wheel, rapidly revolving horizontally at the motion of his foot driving the treadle. From that moment his hands were at work, Within and without, shaping the vessel with his deft touch, here widening, there leading it up into a more slender form; and, again, opening out the lip. So that from the shapeless clay there emerged a fair and beautiful vessel, fit for the Temple court or the royal palace. When it was nearly complete, and the next step would have been to remove it, to await the kiln, through a flaw in the material it fell a shapeless ruin, some broken pieces upon the wheel, and others upon the floor of the house.
The prophet naturally expected that the potter would immediately take another piece of clay, and produce in its yielding substance the ideal which had been so hopelessly marred under his hand. Instead of this, however, to his astonishment and keenly excited interest, the potter with scrupulous care gathered up the broken pieces of the clay and pressed them together as at the first, and placed the clay again where it had lain before, and made it again into another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it. Perhaps this second vessel was not quite so fair as the first might have been, still it was beautiful and useful. It was a memorial of the potter's patience and long-suffering, of his careful use of material, and of his power of repairing loss and making something out of failure and disappointment.
O vision of the long-suffering patience of God! O bright anticipation of God's redemptive work! O parable of remade characters, and lives, and hopes! To us, as to Jeremiah, the Divine thought is flashed, "Cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the Lord. Behold, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel."
The purport of this vision seems to have been to give his people hope that even though they had marred God's fair ideal, yet a glorious and blessed future was within reach; and that if only they would yield themselves to the touch of the Great Potter, He would undo the results of years of disobedience which had marred and spoilt his fair purpose, and would make the chosen people a vessel unto honour, sanctified and meet for the Master's use.
The same thought may apply to us all. Who is there that is not conscious of having marred and resisted the touch of God's moulding hands? Who is there that does not lament opportunities of saintliness which were lost through the obdurateness of the will and the hardness of the heart? Who is there that would not like to be made again as seems good to the Potter? "But now, O Lord, Thou art our Father; we are the clay, and Thou our Potter; and we all are the work of thy hand. Be not wroth very sore, O Lord, neither remember iniquity for ever."
I. THE DIVINE MAKING OF MEN.-
(I) The Potter has an Ideal.- Floating through his fancy there is the vessel that is to be. He already sees it hidden in the shapeless clay, waiting for his call to evoke. His hands achieve so far as they may the embodiment of the fair conception of his thought. Before the woman applies scissors to the silk, she has conceived the pattern of her dress; before the spade cleaves the sod, the architect has conceived the plan of the building to be erected there.
So of God in nature. The pattern of this round world and of her sister spheres lay in his creative thought before the first beam of light streamed across the abyss. All that exists embodies with more or less exactness the Divine ideal—sin alone excepted. So of the mystical body of Christ, the Church, his Bride. In his Book all his members were written, which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there was none of them. So, also, of the possibilities of each human life. I know not if we shall ever be permitted, amid the archives of heaven, to see the transcript of God's original thought of what our life might have been had we only yielded ourselves to the hands that reach down from heaven moulding men; but sure it is that God foreordained and predestinated us, each in his own measure and degree, to be conformed to the image of his Son.
See that mother bending over the cradle where her firstborn baby son lies sleeping! Mark that smile which goes and comes over her face, like a breath of wind on a calm summer's day! Why does she smile! Ah! she is dreaming; and in her dreams is building castles of the future eminence of this child—in the pulpit, or the senate; in war, or art. If only she might have her way, he should be foremost in happiness, renowned in the service of men. But no mother ever wished so much for her child as God for us, when first cradled at the foot of the Cross.
To be like Christ, the type of perfect manhood; to be as much to Christ as He was to his Father; to reflect the face of Christ on men, as He the face of God; to fulfil the commission of Redemption; to take up the Cross; to be crucified with Christ; to rise and reign with Him—all this is God's ideal.
(2) The Potter achieves his purpose by means of the Wheel. —In the discipline of human life this surely represents the revolution of daily circumstance; often monotonous, common-place, trivial enough, and yet intending to effect, if it may, ends on which God has set his heart.
Many, on entering the life of full consecration and devotion, are eager to change the circumstances of their lives for those in which they suppose that they will more readily attain a fully-developed character. Hence, much of the restlessness and fever, the disappointment and wilfulness of the early days of Christian experience. Such have yet to learn that out of myriads of circumstances God has chosen the lot of each as being specially adapted to develop the hidden qualities and idiosyncrasies of the soul He loves. Anything else than the life which you are called to live would fail in giving scope for the evolution of properties of your nature, which are known only to God, as the colours and fragrance which lie enfolded in some tropic seed. Believe that all has been ordered or permitted, because of that which lay entombed within you waiting for his call, "Come forth!"
Do not, therefore, seek to change, by some rash and wilful act, the setting and environment of your life. Stay where you are till God as evidently calls you elsewhere as He has put you where you are. Abide for the present in the calling wherein you were called. Throw upon Him the responsibility of indicating to you a change when it is necessary for your further development. In the meanwhile, look deep into the heart of every circumstance for its special message, lesson, or discipline. Upon the way in which you accept or reject these will depend the achievement or marring of the Divine purpose.
You complain of the monotony of your life. "Day in, day out, the same round. Year after year, the same path trodden to and fro; no horizon; no space or width; only the same lane of sky between the high houses on either side. What scope is there here for the evolution of noble character? What opportunity to meditate and achieve great deeds?" Yet remember that the passive virtues are even dearer to God than the active ones. They take the longest learning and are the last learnt. They consist in patience, submission, endurance, long-suffering, persistence in well-doing. They need more courage and evince greater heroism than those qualities which the world admires most. But they can only be acquired in just that monotonous and narrow round of which many complain as offering so scant a chance of acquiring saintliness.
(3) The Bulk of the Work is done by the Potter's fingers.—How delicate their touch! How fine their sensibility! It would almost seem as though they were endued with intellect, instead of being the instruments by which the brain is executing its purpose. And in the nurture of the soul, these represent the touch of the Spirit of God working in us to will and to do of his good pleasure. He is in us all, his one purpose being to infill us with Himself, and to fulfil through us "all the good pleasure of his goodness, and every work of faith with power; that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in us, and we in Him."
But we are too busy, too absorbed in many things, to heed the gentle touch. Sometimes, when we are aware of it, we resent it, or stubbornly refuse to yield to it. Hence the necessity of setting apart a portion of every day, or a season in the course of the week, in which to seclude ourselves from every other influence, and expose the entire range of our being to Divine influences only.
The wheel and the hand worked together; often their motion was in opposite directions, but their object was one. So all things work together for good to them that love God. God's touch and voice give the meaning of his providences; and his providences enforce the lesson that his tender monitions might not be strong enough to teach. Whenever, therefore, you are in doubt as to the meaning of certain circumstances through which you are called to pass, and which are strange and inexplicable, be still; refrain from murmuring or repining; hush the many voices that would speak within; and listen until there is borne in on your soul a persuasion of God's purpose; and let his Spirit within co-operate with the circumstance without. It is in the equal working of these two—the circumstance supplying the occasion for manifesting a certain grace, and the Holy Ghost supplying the grace to be manifested—that the spirit soars, as the bird by the even motion of its two wings.
II. GOD'S RE-MAKING OF MEN.-"He made it again." The potter could not make what he might have wished; but he did his best with his materials. So God is ever trying to do his best for us. If we refuse the best, He gives the next best. If we will not be gold, we may be silver; and if not silver, there are still the earthen and the wood. How often He has to make us again!
He made Jacob again, when He met him at the Jabbok ford; finding him a supplanter and a cheat, but after a long wrestle, leaving him a prince with God. He made Simon again, on the resurrection morning, when He found him somewhere near the open grave, the son of a dove—for so his old name Bar-jonas signifies—and left him Peter, the man of the rock, the apostle of Pentecost. He made Mark again, between his impulsive leaving of Paul and Barnabas, as though frightened by the first touch of seasickness, and the times when Peter spake of him as his son, and Paul from the Mamertine prison described him as being profitable.
I have been told of a gifted son, who, when night has fallen, and his old father has gone to the early couch of age, comes into the studio where the old man's hands had been busily engaged all day modelling clay, not without some fear that they are losing their skill, and removes all trace of senility or decay. So does God come to our work, when we have done our best and failed; and when men have turned from us with disappointment. He perfects that which concerns us, because his mercy endures for ever, and He cannot forsake the work of his own hands.
Are you conscious of having marred God's early plan for yourself? His ideal of a life of earnest devotion to his cause has been so miserably lost sight of! Your career, as parent or child, as friend or Christian worker, has been such a failure! The grand chord struck in your early vows, at the marriage altar, or on the day of ordination, has been lost beyond recall; and the whole music has been so halting and feeble! For such, science and the competition of modern life have little encouragement. There seems no alternative but to go off into the rear, and let others carry away the prizes that come so easily to them. Whilst into the soul the conviction is burnt: "I had my chance, and missed it; it will never come to me again. The survival of the fittest leaves no place for the unfit. They must be flung amid the waste which is ever accumulating around the furnaces of human life." It is here that the Gospel comes in with its gentle words for the outcast and lost. The bruised reed is made again into a pillar for the temple of God. The feebly-smoking flax is kindled to a flame. The waste products are shown to be of extraordinary value, yielding the fairest colours, or providing the elementary principles of life.
III. OUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE GREAT POTTER.-Yield to Him! Each particle in the clay seems to say "Yes" to wheel and hand. And in proportion as this is the case the work goes merrily on. If there be rebellion and resistance, the work of the potter is marred. Let God have his way with you. Let his will be done in you as in heaven. Bear it, even when you cannot do it. Be sure and say "Yes." There are times when we are not conscious that He is doing right. Life is often like the gray aspect of nature in February, when spring waits just outside the portal, longing to touch all things with her magic wand. It seems as if no one is concerned about "all the miles of unsprung wheat," or responsible for leaf or bud. Yet in myriads upon myriads of graves where seeds lie buried, God's angels are busily at work, rolling away stones, and ushering in the new heaven and the new earth of spring. So when we have once committed ourselves to God, we must believe that He does not lose a single moment, but is ever hurrying forward the consummation of his ideal.
We cannot always understand his dealings, because we do not know what his purpose is. We fail to recognise the design; the position which we are being trained to fill; the ministry we are to exercise. What wonder, then, that we get puzzled and perplexed! We strive with our Maker, saying, What makest Thou? or, He bath no hands. Yet surely it is enough to know our Guide, if we do not know which point He is aiming for in the long chain of hills. He knows all the mountain-passes, and will take the easiest.
There is special comfort in these thoughts for the middle-aged and old. Do not look regretfully back on the wasted springtide and summer, gone beyond recall; though it be autumn, there is yet chance for thee to bear some fruit, under the care of the great Husbandman. In all, He inspires hope. He can turn the battle from the gate; and make the lost iron swim; and replenish the empty pitchers with new good wine; and restore the years the cankerworm has eaten; and make failures into victories. He who was able to transform the Cross from a badge of shame into the sign of victory and glory must surely be able to take the most hopeless, disreputable, and abandoned lives, and make them bloom with flowers heavy with fragrance and full of blessed promise. Only let Him have a free hand. Whatsoever He says, do it, or suffer it to be done. Seek forgiveness for the past, then restoration and re-making at his hand. Reckon on God: and according to your faith it shall be done unto you.
When the clay has received its final shape from the potter's hands, it must be baked in the kiln, to keep it; and even then its discipline is not complete, for whatever colours are laid on must be rendered permanent by fire. It is said that what is to become gold in the finished article is a smudge of dark liquid before the fire is applied; and that the first two or three applications of heat obliterate all trace of colour, which has to be again and again renewed. So in God's dealings with his people. The moulding Hand has no sooner finished its work than it plunges the clay into the fiery trial of pain or temptation. But let patience have her perfect work. Be still, and know that He is God. Thou shalt be compensated when the Master counts thee fair and meet for his use.