Our life here on earth a whisp in time, but God’s plans for us span eternity. Sometimes, we confuse the terrible things that happen with His lesson teaching or the soul’s heavenly preparation. In some cases, we won’t know the entirety of something until our minds are freed in heaven, unencumbered by the limitations of this earth. We have eyes that see the temporal. Though we may not always know the cause of our suffering, we can’t go wrong if we allow our souls to be pliable in God’s hands.
Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. Isaiah 64:8
Sometimes It’s Us
God is gracious and gives us many opportunities to turn to Him, to be healed, loved, and saved. When we allow ourselves to become pliable in God’s hands, He heals us and turns us into vessels of His grace and truth. We can become like hardened pottery that life’s circumstances can utterly crush. Sometimes, God allows this for our eternal good. in 1 Corinthians 5, when this man was committing incest, Paul instructed that they hand him to Satan, essentially excommunicating him through his body being destroyed so his spirit might be saved. It shows us that God cares about our eternal soul more than our earthly comfort.
you are to [b]hand over this man to Satan for the destruction of his body, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. 1 Corinthians 5:5
As It Is With Israel
God gives us the Old Testament to learn about Him. How He dealt with Israel is how He deals with Christians, but now we are under grace, forgiven through the precious blood that Jesus shed for us. In Jeremiah, Israel is being rebellious, and God is talking about reshaping them after they had been shaped by sin and the world. God wants to reshape us and heal those insecurities rooted in the wrongs that life and others have perpetrated on us. When we allow Him to heal and redefine us, we become His beautiful treasures housed in clay jars.
“O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?” says the Lord. “Look carefully, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel. Jeremiah 18:6
Pliable
Being pliable hunks of clay sometimes takes a bit of work. We need to plow up the hard ground formed in our arid hearts. We can allow the Potter to baptize us in a new life as He works through our souls in the water of His word. When we can cooperate with His word and become pliable in His hands, He transforms us into treasures, vessels of honor used to demonstrate His message to others. Today’s poem is also my prayer, asking God to form me into the person He wants me to be.
But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. 2 Corinthians 4:7
