03/10/2026
What Is the Potter's Freedom?
There are potters near my house. I have seen them at work many times, right through the day, with a lump of wet clay turning on the wheel and a man's hands deciding what it will be. From the same clay he may make a lamp for a house and a pot for carrying waste, and nobody watching thinks the clay had a say in it.
Since I came to the truth, I cannot pass them without a smile. Every time I ride by, I remember what God has said about Himself and about me, and I thank the Lord.
Scripture takes that picture and uses it for God and us. Paul writes, "Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use?" (Romans 9:21). That right is what people call the potter's freedom. I want to go through what the Bible means by it, where the picture comes from, and what it does and does not say.
The potter before Paul
Paul did not invent the picture. It begins at creation. "Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground" (Genesis 2:7). The Hebrew word for "formed" is the word used for a potter shaping clay. So, from the first man, we are what God shaped with His own hands.
Isaiah uses it three times. When Israel acted as if God did not see them, he said, "Shall the potter be considered as equal with the clay, that what is made would say to its maker, 'He did not make me'?" (Isaiah 29:16). When they questioned God's plan to deliver them through a pagan king, he said, "Will the clay say to the potter, 'What are you doing?'" (Isaiah 45:9). And when the people were broken over their sin, he gave them the right words for clay to say: "But now, O LORD, You are our Father, we are the clay, and You our potter; and all of us are the work of Your hand" (Isaiah 64:8).
In all three the lesson is the same. God made us, so He has rights over us, and we are in no place to put Him on trial.
The potter's house in Jeremiah
Jeremiah 18 is the only place where God sends a prophet to watch a potter at work. "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" (Jeremiah 18:3-4). Then God speaks. "Can I not, O house of Israel, deal with you as this potter does? Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in My hand" (Jeremiah 18:6).
God goes on to say how He deals with nations. If He announces judgment on a nation and "that nation against which I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent concerning the calamity I planned to bring on it" (Jeremiah 18:8). If He promises good and the nation turns to evil, He will withhold the good.
We should take this as it stands. God's warnings are real. He does respond to repentance, as He did with Nineveh. No one who turns to Him will find Him unwilling.
But some read this chapter as if the clay decides what kind of vessel it will be, and the scene does not say that. The clay does nothing in the potter's house. It was spoiled, and the potter remade it "as it pleased the potter to make." And see what the people answer when God calls them to turn. "But they will say, 'It's hopeless! For we are going to follow our own plans, and each of us will act according to the stubbornness of his evil heart'" (Jeremiah 18:12). Left to themselves, they will not repent.
So where does repentance come from? Jeremiah tells us. "Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then you also can do good who are accustomed to doing evil" (Jeremiah 13:23). And then the promise: "I will give them a heart to know Me" (Jeremiah 24:7). The Potter Himself must do the remaking.
The next chapter finishes the lesson. God tells Jeremiah to buy a potter's jar that has already been fired and to smash it before the elders. "Just so will I break this people and this city, even as one breaks a potter's vessel, which cannot again be repaired" (Jeremiah 19:11). Wet clay can be reshaped, but a hardened jar can only be broken. Judah would not turn, and judgment came.
Why Paul brings the potter into Romans 9
Paul starts the chapter in grief. Most of Israel had rejected their own Messiah, and he could wish himself "accursed, separated from Christ" for them (Romans 9:3). So, the subject is salvation. The question is whether God's promise has failed.
His answer is that God never promised to save every physical descendant. "For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel" (Romans 9:6). God chose Isaac and passed over Ishmael. He chose Jacob over Esau, "though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that God's purpose according to His choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls" (Romans 9:11).
Some say this is only about two nations, since God told Rebekah, "Two nations are in your womb" (Genesis 25:23). Nations did come from them. But Paul's point rests on two unborn children who "had not done anything good or bad." And he applies it to persons: "even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles" (Romans 9:24). God calls people out of nations. He quotes Hosea, "I will call those who were not My people, 'My people'" (Romans 9:25), and Isaiah, "it is the remnant that will be saved" (Romans 9:27). A remnant is made up of persons inside a nation.
Paul knows what we will say to all this. "There is no injustice with God, is there?" (Romans 9:14). His reply is God's word to Moses: "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy." Then he concludes, "it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy" (Romans 9:16).
It helps to see where that word to Moses was first spoken. Moses had asked, "show me Your glory." God answered, "I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the LORD before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious" (Exodus 33:18-19). When God shows His glory and proclaims His own name, this is what He says about Himself. His freedom in mercy is part of who He is.
Then the second objection comes. "Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?" (Romans 9:19). It is here that Paul brings in the potter.
Those two objections tell us what Paul was teaching. If he had only said that God chooses those who first choose Him, nobody would cry "unjust," and nobody would ask how God can still find fault. Men raise those objections only when they hear that the choice lies with God.
What the freedom is
The clay comes "from the same lump." There is not a good lump and a bad lump. Jacob and Esau came from the same parents and the same womb, and both were sinners. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). All of us "were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest" (Ephesians 2:3). So, the difference between one vessel and another is not in the clay. "For who regards you as superior? What do you have that you did not receive?" (1 Corinthians 4:7).
This is why the charge of injustice fails. If the lump were innocent, we could ask why God makes any vessel for wrath. But the lump is guilty. Justice would destroy all of it, and nobody could complain. When some people told Jesus about men who had died in a terrible way, He did not say they were unlucky. He said, "unless you repent, you will all likewise perish" (Luke 13:3). The surprise in the Bible is that God shows mercy to any of us.
The word "right" means authority. It is the Maker's right over what He has made. "But our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases" (Psalm 115:3). Jesus put it in a parable. The owner of the vineyard paid the last workers the same as the first, and when the first complained he said, "Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with what is my own? Or is your eye envious because I am generous?" (Matthew 20:15). The owner wronged no one in that story. Some received justice and some received generosity.
This freedom is the freedom of mercy. Mercy that is owed is not mercy. "But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace" (Romans 11:6). If God were bound to show mercy to all, or bound to show it to those who qualify, it would be wages. The potter's freedom is simply God's right to give what nobody has earned to whom He will.
And it is not blind or careless. He chose "according to the kind intention of His will" (Ephesians 1:5). God has His reasons. They are in Him and not in us. "The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples... but because the LORD loved you" (Deuteronomy 7:7-8).
One more thing must be said. This mercy is free to us, but it was not free to God. He could not simply overlook our sin and remain just. So He gave His Son. God put Christ forward "so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:26). "He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all" (Romans 8:32). The Potter is free to show mercy to whom He will, and every vessel of mercy was paid for at the cross.
The two kinds of vessels
Paul continues, "What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory" (Romans 9:22-23).
These are not two kinds of service. Paul names where each one ends, and the words he uses are "destruction" and "glory."
Paul uses different words for the two. Of the vessels of mercy he says God "prepared beforehand." He does not use those words for the vessels of wrath. God does not put evil into any man. "Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am being tempted by God'" (James 1:13). Sinners are made ready for destruction by their own sin. Paul has already said so: "because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself" (Romans 2:5). God judges every one of them "according to his deeds" (Romans 2:6). With the vessels of mercy, He does something else. He steps in and remakes them. "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus" (Ephesians 2:10).
Pharaoh shows us the first kind. God said, "I will harden his heart" before Moses ever stood in the palace (Exodus 4:21). Pharaoh also hardened his own heart, and each time the text adds, "as the LORD had said" (Exodus 8:15). Both are true. Pharaoh was a cruel man who was already killing Hebrew children. God did not make a good man bad. Hardening in Scripture is a judgment on sinners. Three times in Romans 1 Paul says, "God gave them over" (Romans 1:24, 26, 28). He takes away His restraint and hands a man over to what he already loves. God owed Pharaoh a soft heart no more than He owed one to me. Through Pharaoh He showed His power, as He said: "For this very purpose I raised you up" (Romans 9:17).
Why is God patient with vessels of wrath? Paul says it is to show His justice and power, and to make the riches of His mercy known to the vessels of mercy. We would not know what mercy is if we never saw what we were spared from. It is also during this patience that His people are gathered in. Paul was once a persecutor, and he says he found mercy "so that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience" (1 Timothy 1:16). Anyone looking at Saul of Tarsus would have called him a vessel of wrath. So we cannot look at any living man and say what he is. We preach to all.
What the Potter is making
The Potter does not stop when He has saved a man. He has a shape in mind. "For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son" (Romans 8:29). Every vessel of mercy is being made to look like Christ.
That work goes on all our lives, and sometimes it hurts, because the Potter's hands press hard. But He does not leave His work half done. "He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus" (Philippians 1:6). And He keeps us weak on purpose. "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves" (2 Corinthians 4:7). We remain clay, and He gets the credit for what He makes of us.
Does this cancel our responsibility?
It does not, and Paul will not let us think so. In the same passage he says Israel stumbled because they sought righteousness "not by faith" (Romans 9:32). He quotes God saying, "All the day long I have stretched out My hands to a disobedient and obstinate people" (Romans 10:21). The branches "were broken off for their unbelief," and they will be grafted in "if they do not continue in their unbelief" (Romans 11:20, 23).
Paul sets both truths side by side. Men are lost through their own unbelief, and "those who were chosen obtained it, and the rest were hardened" (Romans 11:7). He does not make one of them smaller to fit the other, and we should not either.
The same is true of God's heart. He says, "I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked" (Ezekiel 33:11), and He means it. Through the same prophet He commands, "make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit" (Ezekiel 18:31), and then promises, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you" (Ezekiel 36:26). In chapter 36 He gives the very thing He commanded in chapter 18.
Paul writes to Timothy about vessels too. "If anyone cleanses himself from these things, he will be a vessel for honor" (2 Timothy 2:21). That is a real call, and we must obey it. But two verses earlier he says, "The Lord knows those who are His," and four verses later, "if perhaps God may grant them repentance" (2 Timothy 2:19, 25). So, the man must cleanse himself, and it is God who grants him the repentance to do it.
"Who are you, O man?"
Paul's question to the objector is, "The thing molded will not say to the molder, 'Why did you make me like this,' will it?" (Romans 9:20). This is the oldest excuse there is. Adam used it in the garden. "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate" (Genesis 3:12). He sinned, and then he blamed the One who made him. Every one of us has done the same.
Some hear Paul's answer as a refusal to answer. But it is the answer. The objector has forgotten who he is and who God is. Job made the same discovery. When God had finished speaking, he said, "Behold, I am insignificant; what can I reply to You? I lay my hand on my mouth" (Job 40:4).
Paul did not end this subject with an argument either. He ended it with worship. "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!" (Romans 11:33).
What this does to us
It humbles us. If the difference between me and an unbeliever lies in God's mercy, then I have nothing to boast about, and that is how God meant it, "so that no man may boast before God" (1 Corinthians 1:29).
It gives us assurance. My salvation does not hang on the strength of my own decision. It rests on the purpose of God. "Who will bring a charge against God's elect? God is the one who justifies" (Romans 8:33).
It sends us out to preach and pray. God told Paul in Corinth, "I have many people in this city" (Acts 18:10), and Paul stayed and preached. We pray for the lost because God can change a heart.
And if you are not yet in Christ, do not sit asking whether you are chosen. God has not told you to find that out. He has told you to come, and His Son has promised, "the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out" (John 6:37). Take the words Isaiah gave to sinful people and pray them: "We are the clay, and You our potter."
"For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen" (Romans 11:36).
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Jeremiah Knight
The Reformation Resurgence
