Read: Jeremiah 20:1-10

You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. But if I say, I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name, his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot. Jeremiah 20:7-9

Here, in poetic form, we have the thoughts of Jeremiah while he is in the stocks, waiting for what would happen on the morrow. This is a remarkable account of what the prophet thought while he was imprisoned. He was, to say the least, a profoundly perturbed prophet! Here we get another look at the honest humanity of this man, at the way he faced circumstances just as we do, with fear and despair, alternating at times between faith and confidence.

The first thing he feels is that God himself has deceived him. Here is a bitter cry in which Jeremiah charges God with having lied to him, and with having taken advantage of him. Have you ever felt like that toward God? Jeremiah is probably thinking back to the promise with which he began his ministry. God had called Jeremiah as a young man, and Jeremiah had objected. Remembering those words, he is saying, What happened, Lord? What happened to your promise? You said you’d be with me to deliver me, but here I am in these miserable stocks. That is the way the heart can easily feel toward God. Like so many of us, Jeremiah took these promises rather superficially. He read into them assumptions God never intended, and so he charges God with lying. That, of course, is the one thing God cannot do. God cannot lie. Yet Jeremiah feels, as many of us have felt, that God has failed his promise. I do not know how many times people have said to me, referring to the word of God, Well, I know what it says, but it doesn’t work! That is just another way of saying, God has deceived me; God’s a liar! That was the prophet’s predicament.

The second thing he found was that people were mocking him. Though they could not answer the keenness of his logic, they did the only thing they could do — they began to ridicule his person. That is always the refuge of petty minds. When people cannot handle a logical argument they begin to attack the person, and try to destroy him personally. They laughed at Jeremiah, poked fun at him, ridiculed him. Mockery is hard to bear, hard for the human spirit to take, and this was getting to Jeremiah.

Continue reading Ray Stedman – Jeremiah’s Complaint →

Read: Jeremiah 19:1-15

Then break the jar while those who go with you are watching, and say to them, This is what the Lord Almighty says: I will smash this nation and this city just as this potter’s jar is smashed and cannot be repaired. They will bury the dead in Topheth until there is no more room. Jeremiah 19:10-11

Jeremiah was told, in the striking figure God employed for the benefit of these people, to take the potter’s vessel he had bought and dash it to pieces on a rock. As they watched it fly into smithereens, so that it was impossible to bring it back together, these people were taught that they were dealing with a God whose love is so intense that he will never alter his purpose — even if he has to destroy and crush and break them down again.

You see, that is the way the world sees God right now. They see the hell which is coming into our world. And soon it will be worse, according to the prophetic Scriptures. There will be worse signs taking place, worse affairs among men. They will cry out against God as being harsh and ruthless and vindictive, filled with vengeance and anger and hatred. That is all the world sees.

But the people of God are taught further truth. Jeremiah had been to the potter’s house. He had seen the potter making a vessel, and he knew that it was love behind this Potter’s pressures, and that when the vessel was marred, this Potter was also capable of crushing it down again, bringing it to nothing but a lump, and then molding it, shaping it again, perhaps doing this repeatedly, until at last it fulfilled what God wanted. That is the great lesson Jeremiah learned at the potter’s house, and that we can learn at the potter’s house, as well.

One of the great lessons we can learn from the New Testament’s use of the figure of the potter is in the book of Acts — the incident when Judas brought back the thirty pieces of silver and flung them down at the feet of the priests, after having betrayed his Lord. The priests gathered the money, took counsel together and bought with the money a potter’s field. It was known thereafter as the field of blood, (Matthew 27:6-10). This again is God’s wonderful reminder of the heart of our Potter. For if you watch this Potter very carefully, at work in your life, you will find that his hands and his feet bear nail prints, and that it is through blood, the blood of the Potter himself, that the vessel is being shaped into what he wants it to be.

When we are in the Potter’s hands, feeling his pressures, feeling the molding of his fingers, we can relax and trust him, for we know that this Potter has suffered with us and knows how we feel, but is determined to make us into a vessel useful to the Master (2 Timothy 2:21). What a tremendous lesson Jeremiah learned at the potter’s house — one which can guide and guard us under the pressures of life.

Lord, you have used the trials and pressures in my life to teach me to surrender to you. I invite you to use the means to continue to mold and shape me into the person you want me to be.

Life Application

Are we learning to recognize that God’s disciplines are evidence of his unquenchable Love? How do we respond to this love that persists in making us whole?

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