Sovereign Potter and Silent Pots

Daniel Christensen

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Introduction

We continue in Romans 9 as Paul vindicates God’s sovereign freedom in saving grace.

Thus far, Paul has asserted the promise of God, as in the story of Isaac, the call and choice of God, as in the story of Jacob and Esau, the willful freedom of God, as in the story of Moses, and the merciful desire of God, as in the story of Pharaoh, are singularly operative in God’s saving economy. In other words, God is the one who saves, and He does so alone, of His own will, His own desire, in an outpouring of His own grace, to the praise of His own glory.

Paul now continues that train of thought by dealing with yet another objection to these assertions, and he will deal with it, as we are now accustomed, by appealing to the Old Testament, relying on the Word of God to make his point.

Question: How am I accountable?

Paul’s next anticipated objection is another one that, unfortunately, has stood the test of time.

It’s essentially the assertion that if God is sovereign, I am a robot, and if I am a robot, how am I accountable for my actions? You don’t hold the gun responsible for the crime, you hold the shooter. You don’t praise the ball, you praise the player. If I am an inanimate object with no liberty, I am therefore faultless in whatever may involve me since I have no control over it.

Dan Doriani provides a helpful summary here:

Romans How Can God Find Fault with People Who Cannot Resist His Will? (9:19)

That is, how can God condemn people who do his sovereign will, even when they sin? How can he judge mankind if he does not simply permit human actions, but actually governs with power?

The question of divine sovereignty and human responsibility arises repeatedly in Scripture. The answer is consistent: People are accountable for their sins, even if they serve God’s purposes, because they did evil as responsible moral agents. In Genesis, after Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery, they eventually begged him to forgive them. Joseph responded, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good,” to keep the covenant family alive (Gen. 50:17–21). In Isaiah, God commanded the king of Assyria to “spoil” and “plunder,” but the king’s pride overcame him and he set “his heart to destroy” with fantasies of invincibility. Therefore, the Lord “will punish” that arrogant and boastful man (Isa. 10:5–16). Above all, the crucifixion of Jesus occurred according to God’s “definite plan,” and yet at Pentecost, Peter rebuked his Jewish listeners: “You crucified and killed” him with “the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23; cf. 1 Kings 8:58–61; Prov. 16:4–5). Thus, people are accountable for sin, even if God sovereignly superintends their actions, because they act freely and responsibly.

So the objection is essentially human culpability and responsibility for their own actions.

Counter-question: Who do you think you are?

Paul answers this objection in a surprising way. As a brilliant scholar and theologian, and one writing under the inspiration of the Spirit, one would assume Paul is privy to the divine mystery of the balance between sovereignty and accountability. At every other point, Paul has refuted objections and supported those refutations with Old Testament Scriptures.

Here, Paul does not refute the idea itself. Instead, he refutes the sinful attitude that is situated directly behind the idea.

Paul thus does not feel the need to address this objection, at least not in depth. What he is concerned with is the heart of the objector. Here then Paul reveals his pastoral heart, and he demonstrates to us the necessary intersection of high theology with deep soul care. Paul doesn’t want to win the argument, he wants to win your soul. Paul doesn’t want to vindicate himself, he wants to vindicate God and his ways.

But he does not do so without Biblical warrant. We have seen so far that Paul in chapter 9 has alluded to Jeremiah, directly quoted Moses four times, and he continues the pattern here, this time invoking the book of Job.

Now that is an interesting prospect. Job. The most linguistically and theologically difficult book of the Old Testament, seemingly completely disconnected from the rest of the canon. Not once is Job quoted, referenced, or alluded to in the teaching of Jesus. Paul only directly quotes Job twice: once in Romans 11:35, where he synthesizes Job 35:7 and Job 41:11, and once in 1 Corinthians 3:19 where he quotes Job 5:13. The only other direct appearance of Job in the New Testament is in the book of James where he is held up as an exemplar of perseverance.

Yet Paul here makes a subtle but clear appeal to Job here in verse 20.

He does so first by laying a foundation of sanctified snark. This phrase “Who are you, O man” is dripping with sarcasm. Who do you think you are? You’ve got a lot of nerve! That’s the sense of Paul’s statement here as he declares “Who are you, O man!” In utilizing this language, he plays upon the assumption of someone who would question or presume upon the justice and righteousness and wisdom and freedom of God. He exposes them as they elevate themselves to the place of God, standing outside him and above him, casting judgment upon his decrees and operations in the world.

This was the problem for Job and his friends, as they tried to philosophize and theologize about the nature of God in light of Job’s suffering. Paul thus looks to Job in the twilight of his suffering as an example of how one should respond to the difficult providences of God. Let’s look with Paul at Job.

First we need to look at the rebuke of Elihu. Elihu is a rather brash young fellow, not at all unlike a modern Bible college or seminary student who has his theology down pat, and thinks he can stand in judgment over his elders.

Now you should never tell your resident seminarian or Bible collegian this, because they’re already puffed up theologically, and we shouldn’t tell Elihu this either, for the same reason, but many times they’re right. And Elihu is certainly right in his assessment of Job and his vindication of God. Turn with me to Job 32.

At least three times we see Elihu implore Job to be silent and to cease seeking to decipher the difficult providence of God. After 31 chapters of foolish talk and speculation amongst Job and his friends Elihu enters the conversation like a cannon ball and gives his best attempt to vindicate the ways of God to men.

But where things really get interesting is when God Himself steps into the conversation, out of the whirlwind, and for 5 glorious chapters, declares His greatness and power to Job. But the most powerful and most perplexing part about Job’s story is that God never once gives an answer for Job’s suffering. Not once does He provide the reasoning for allowing Satan to bring about the calamities that Job experienced. Instead, God demonstrates to Job that He is powerful and majestic beyond all that Job could imagine, and therefore is beyond questioning. The consequence of these 42 chapters for Job is humility, repentance, and ultimately silence before the power of God. Job went beyond his pay grade and was humiliated.

That is Paul’s point in Romans, and he makes it by invoking Job. God does need to make an account to men for His decisions made in the infinity of His wisdom. Trying to probe beyond his paygrade resulted in humiliation for Job and it results in humiliation for Paul’s objector.

Who are you, O man, who answers back to God? Will He ask you, and you instruct Him? Will the faultfinder contend with the Almighty? Paul is clear: you have declared that which you do not understand, that which was too wonderful for you, that which you did not know.

Job’s final state, according to chapter 42, was humility. He laid His pride at the foot of the throne of the universe, and the Lord blessed him in his latter days more than in the former.

Paul’s exhortation to the objector, and also to us, regardless of whether or not we object to the doctrines of God’s sovereignty, is the humility of Job. These things are too wonderful for our comprehension. Just because we can’t fathom it does not mean that it is not true. God does not require that we understand completely, but He does require that we worship Him willingly and with a heart of humility.

So Paul is really telling us two things here: 1) the sovereign outworking of God’s eternal plan in our own lives and over the course of history is a near-incomprehensible reality, and 2) our response should not be questioning, but humility. Paul thus exhorts us all to know our intellectual limits and worship God with humility.

Support 1: An appeal to the creation account

Paul supports his point by an allusive appeal to the creation account. He asks a rhetorical question with an obvious answer: does the created talk back to the creator? Does the one made hold the one making accountable?

As a kid, there was a family in my church who had seven kids. The dad was a truck driver, so he spent a lot of time on the road, and so the mother was kind of a single mom, which is quite a feat with any number of kids, but with seven, it is truly remarkable.

I’ll never forget this one time where the oldest son, who was about my age, was arguing with his mom about something, and the back and forth was getting more and more heated, and finally the kid’s mom raises her voice and says “Boy, I made you! Keep ya mouth closed!” And I laugh now, and I also laughed in the moment at my friend, but the enduring truth of that statement applies directly here. Paul is essentially saying “Boy, God made you! Keep ya mouth closed!”

Paul’s language here is evocative. The word here translated molded is from the Greek root plasso. This word is only used 4 times in the New Testament, twice here in this verse with molded and molder, in 2 Peter 2 in the context of false, fabricated, and created stories used to exploit Christians, and in 1 Timothy 2:13 to describe, you guessed it, the creation of Adam and Eve.

But even more compelling is the use of this word in the Septuagint, the Greek Bible with which Paul would have been intimately familiar. It occurs nearly 50 times and is used exclusively to speak of God’s creative power. Paul is building on Isaiah 29, which we will look at closely in a few moments, and Isaiah is building upon the varied reflections of David in the Psalms upon God as creator, and David is reflecting upon Moses in the very first use of the word plasso in the Greek Bible: Genesis 2:7

Genesis 2:7 NASB95

Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

Adam in his innocence does not think once to question God’s wisdom in creating Him exactly the way He did. Paul’s exhortation to the objecting Christian is to reflect upon and imitate Adam’s innocent silence, accepting with gratitude the call and purpose placed upon Him by His creator. By extension we ought be drawn to the escalation of this Adamic behavior seen in the New Adam, when He declares, not merely in innocence but in active obedience to His Father: not my will, but Yours be done.

Simply put, by rebuking the molded who would dare to speak against the molder, Paul encourages humble, silent submission to the will of God in all things.

Our response to God’s sovereign will and working in the universe should not be to bark questions and claim that God is not just, as Job did, but rather to humbly and quietly affirm before God, like Adam in his innocence and Christ in His obedience: not my will, but Yours be done.

Support 2: An appeal to the prophets

Paul now parallels the molded/molder language with a new analogy: the clay and potter, which will evolve into the vessel and potter in the final verses of the section.

This analogy makes enough sense on it’s own, and goes with the molded/molder language of the previous verse. But when we dig into the origins of the analogy, we find a rich Biblical-theological thread that bolsters Paul’s argument and proves to us once again that Paul is teaching no new ideas, but is rather expositing the Old Testament for his Roman readers and also for us.

First, we will consider the clay and potter pattern in Isaiah, then in Jeremiah, and then draw some conclusions about Paul’s use of the pattern here in Romans.

Isaiah’s Clay and Potter

Isaiah introduces the motif in Isaiah 29:13-16

Isaiah 29:13–16 NASB95

Then the Lord said, “Because this people draw near with their words And honor Me with their lip service, But they remove their hearts far from Me, And their reverence for Me consists of tradition learned by rote, Therefore behold, I will once again deal marvelously with this people, wondrously marvelous; And the wisdom of their wise men will perish, And the discernment of their discerning men will be concealed.” Woe to those who deeply hide their plans from the Lord, And whose deeds are done in a dark place, And they say, “Who sees us?” or “Who knows us?” You turn things around! Shall the potter be considered as equal with the clay, That what is made would say to its maker, “He did not make me”; Or what is formed say to him who formed it, “He has no understanding”?

Contextually, Isaiah is speaking polemically against Israel and Jerusalem. They have rebelled against Yahweh and have sought to elevate their own wisdom against that of Yahweh. So He declares in verse 14 that because of their rebellion, He will establish His own wisdom as utterly wonderful and utterly astounding, and the wisdom of the wise will fade away and the discernment of the discerning will be hidden.

Then in verse 16, the motif arises for the first time in the Old Testament, with a question of similar rhetorical bite to Paul’s question. It’s almost as if they were speaking under the inspiration of the same Spirit.

For Isaiah, to elevate human wisdom and discernment to the level of God’s wisdom and discernment, to the point where you actually have the arrogance to equate yourself with your creator and maker, and insist that God is not the source of all life and to further insinuate that he knows nothing, this is the height of human folly. This was the plight of Judah, this is the plight of many in our own culture today, and this is the plight of the one who would dare to deny God’s sovereignty in salvation. Paul’s objector has flown in the face of God’s sovereignty and has essentially placed himself in the position of God.

By invoking Isaiah, Paul underscores his response to the objector with a deadly serious note: Your arrogant opposition to God and His wisdom is akin to the arrogant opposition to God that sent Jerusalem and Judah into exile.

God takes His wise and sovereign freedom seriously. So does Paul. So must we, lest we be guilty of blasphemy against God Himself.

Now Isaiah, having established the motif, returns to it in the very next chapter, briefly, as He describes God’s response to the people of Israel in their arrogance:

Isaiah 30:12–14 NASB95

Therefore thus says the Holy One of Israel, “Since you have rejected this word And have put your trust in oppression and guile, and have relied on them, Therefore this iniquity will be to you Like a breach about to fall, A bulge in a high wall, Whose collapse comes suddenly in an instant, Whose collapse is like the smashing of a potter’s jar, So ruthlessly shattered That a sherd will not be found among its pieces To take fire from a hearth Or to scoop water from a cistern.”

Isaiah’s tone becomes even more serious: God does not take lightly those who approach Him and His attributes with flippant arrogance. Just as quickly as He formed the pot, He can ruthlessly, utterly, and eternally shatter it. Just as quickly as He formed you, He can ruthlessly, utterly, and eternally shatter it.

This is illustrated even more powerfully in the prophetic declarations and experience of Jeremiah.

Jeremiah’s Clay and Potter

Isaiah spoke of the clay and potter as an abstract idea in his mind. Jeremiah writes of it experientially, out of an object lesson that the Lord gives him.

Jeremiah 18:1–4 NASB95

The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord saying, “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will announce My words to you.” Then I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something on the wheel. But the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make.

Isaiah spoke of a pot, Jeremiah sees it in the flesh, and the Lord uses it as an object lesson for Jeremiah, as He declares in verse 6 that He is the potter and Israel is the clay. In verses 7-10, God elucidates that He will do whatever He pleases, according to His will, with the clay of the nations. Verses 11-17 continue on as God declares that He has purposed judgment against Israel for their sins.

Jeremiah is clear: as the potter does what he wishes with the clay, forming, breaking, remaking, so also God will do with Israel, with the nations, and by extension with all people. God, like the potter, is absolutely sovereign and absolutely free over that which He has made.

But God isn’t done with Jeremiah and the potter and the clay.

In chapter 19, God tells Jeremiah not only to observe the potter and clay, but actually to purchase a jar. He then instructs Jeremiah to take the jar to city gates, meet with the elders, declare God’s judgment, smash the pot on the ground and tell them that God is going to judge you and there is no return from that judgment. The pot will be broken beyond repair.

But the hope is this: As the potter was able to re-form the clay in verse 4 into something new, so also, out of the shards of God’s judgment He will reveal salvation. The typological people of God are destroyed to make way for the eschatological people of God. Out of the destruction of Israel grows the shoot from the root of Jesse, the shoot that will bloom and grow into the true vine. And that true vine will yield branches, both natural and grafted, and those branches will bear fruit.

And it is this new pot that so occupies Isaiah’s attention in Isaiah 43-45, in which Yahweh, through the mouth of Isaiah, declares that He is making, forming, literally potting, a new people and a new land through a new seed, the seed of the suffering servant Jesus Christ.

And in the end, God’s people come around. The last occurrence of this pattern in Isaiah is at the very end in chapter 64, when Israel removes their arrogance, and humbly acknowledges the sovereignty and freedom of God as the potter to do with His pots whatever He pleases. The people plead with God according to His promises to not forsake His covenant.

So Paul invokes Jeremiah and Isaiah again to teach us this: God is completely sovereign. He will not be robbed of His freedom to do exactly as He wishes with men and nations.

If God desires to save some and harden others, as the potter He is free to do so, and will not tolerate the arrogant attitude that suggests otherwise.

God is free to do whatever He wants with His own lump of clay. Notice for Paul here there is only one lump. In other words, we all start out as part of the same group: dead in trespasses and sins. There is no honorable clay and common clay. There is no mercy clay and wrath clay. The clay is the same. The difference lies in what God as the potter chooses to make out of it. He will leave some to their destruction, brought upon their own heads. He will redeem others out of that and make them into vessels of mercy for the sake of His Son Jesus Christ. But however God decides to exercise His sovereignty, He is free in that, and Paul goes to great lengths to defend that sovereign freedom from objection, and He does so from the Old Testament.

Before we move on, I want to briefly point out a major consequence of this text. Paul is implicitly urging us, with Isaiah, to have the attitude of eschatological Israel in Isaiah 64. We must humbly acknowledge God as the potter, ourselves as the clay, and His freedom to do with us as He wishes. The song of Isaiah 64 acknowledges full well that God would be within His right to leave the people to their wickedness, but at the same time appeals to the truth of His character as a gracious and loving God, who desires to redeem His children for His glory. That humility, that acknowledgement, and that appeal must mark our lives and must mark our evangelistic prayers. We know full well who God is, who we are, and who those we are praying for are. We know what we and they deserve. Nevertheless we appeal to God’s grace, knowing that He is willing to save.

The sum of the matter: Patience and preparation, grace and glory

Paul now moves to conclude his argument, in many ways wrapping up what he has been seeking to prove since verse 6: the word of God and the works of God and God Himself have not failed. God’s sovereign decree of salvation is demonstrated by events and patterns and statements in the Old Testament, and that sovereign decree is one that reaches through Israel to the world.

Let’s spend the rest of our time this morning engaging with Paul in verses 22-24.

Paul phrases verse 22 in the form of a rhetorical question. To state it plainly, Paul is asserting that God has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction. This is despite that fact that God is ready, willing, and able to demonstrate His wrath and display his power in an instant.

So what Paul is saying here is that God could and should destroy all people instantly, upon the first instance of sin. God would have been within his right to immediately retract His breath out of the lungs of Adam and Eve as soon as the fruit touched their lips. The same is also true for us. God doesn’t owe us mercy. God doesn’t owe us grace. He only owes us what we deserve, and that is the death penalty for cosmic treason against the Great King of the universe. Adam and all his children violated the covenant of creation and should be rightly and instantly destroyed.

But God does not destroy. God endures, God waits with patience. Yes, wrath is being stored up, ready to be revealed at the last time. But God is nevertheless patient with His wrath, not pouring it out instantly. Why?

So that out of those common vessels, the potter might recreate, re-form a new set of honorable vessels, vessels of mercy, vessels prepared for glory.

God’s patience is a saving patience. God’s patience with His wrath is so that His mercy might be known. If God destroyed sinners instantly, there would be no need and no opportunity for mercy and grace to break into our lives and draw us sweetly and willingly to our heavenly Father.

Thus, the riches and glory and mercy, prepared beforehand, now break like a beam of light into the lives of God’s people.

And the identity of that people is how Paul wraps up his argument, tying it all the way back to verse 6: these vessels of mercy, prepared for glory, are constituted by the church in Rome, by the church at West Hills, and they are not only Jews, but Gentiles.

This is the unfailing word of God, that the promise of Isaac and the calling and choosing of Jacob and and the mercy of glory shown to Moses and the wrath of glory shown to Pharaoh, were not merely for national Israel but for who nation Israel typified: a people of God from every tribe and tongue and language and people, upon whom God sets His mercy, so that He might prepare them for glory.

The word of God has not failed because the word of God was not intended only for Israel, but in the providence of God it was, as Peter says, written for Rome. Written for West Hills. Written for both Jew and Gentile, for those not born of perishable seed, but of imperishable, for those not born of physical descent, but of promise descent, for those not born of the flesh, but born of faith.

Israel was a means to an end, a way for God to teach the world how He would relate to them in Christ. Nevertheless, the means is not discarded once the end is reached, as we will see over the course of the next few weeks and months, but rather they are grafted back into the vine in abundance.

Look at how great the wisdom and mercy of God is as laid out before us by Paul. How then could we be so arrogant as to speak back to him? How could we be so full of foolish pride as to think that we know better than him? His word has not failed. His purpose has not failed. His works have not failed. He himself has not failed.

So what are the consequences of this truth? How should we then live?

I hope it has been abundantly clear this morning that Christians are to walk with quiet humility before the sovereign providence of God. We are temped constantly by the world, the flesh, and the devil, to ask “Did God really say?” And perhaps never more strongly than when dealing with God’s absolute sovereignty and freedom. We are tempted to diminish His power and providence and elevate our own autonomy. Paul’s word to you this morning is to not walk like Job in his arrogance, who questioned the ways of God and chafed against the clear revelation of His character. Rather, we are to walk like Adam, who in his innocence was silent before the Lord and walked in submission to His word and to His will, and like the second Adam, Christ, who when faced with the deadly requirements of both the covenant of creation and the covenant of redemption, said “Not my will, but yours be done.”

A second practical consequence concerns our gratitude. We all are like Pharaoh, like Esau, like Edom, common vessels of wrath prepared for destruction. But God, being rich in mercy, took from the same lump clay to be prepared by mercy for glory. Therefore we should thank God for the provision of grace. Thank God for the gift of Christ.

A third practical consequence concerns our confidence in God’s revelation. His word has not failed, and we are living proof of that. When skeptics question our worldview, when doubts creep in, we can stand with our heads held high, knowing that the fact that we believe is proof enough that God is, and that He will do what He said He will do, and that His word will not fail.

A fourth practical consequence concerns our unity. God is indiscriminate in the distribution of His grace, calling both Jew and Gentile into one people. As one people then, we ought to walk in love and harmony, willing to sacrifice our wants and our desires for the good of our brothers and sisters. We ought to stand together as one people with one voice humbly and confidently and thankfully proclaiming the truth of God’s gospel grace to a watching world.

Paul is not done with his Old Testament proofs, and next week we will turn our attention to his explanation of the eternal inclusion of Gentiles in His sovereign plan of salvation. Join us next week as we consider verses 24-29 together.

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