Jeremiah 18:5-11

God is long suffering towards man  and wants everyone to be with Him forever but there will come an end to His patience with us. Love is the line drawn in the sand for man, we either love God above all and others as much as we love ourselves and prove it by our actions, or we will put up walls of defense to the agape love of God and shut Him out of our life. 

The Holy Spirit will do whatever it takes to teach us the destruction of following our flawed human nature and teach us the way to eternal life with God......we can learn the hard way or the easy way but we will learn our lessons. 

The potter’s remolding of the clay into an acceptable and unblemished work symbolized God’s action in reforming Israel. The people had become marred and defiled and had to be reformed into a vessel fit to be identified with the Lord.

If a nation threatened with destruction would turn from its evil, God would relent of the promised disaster. God the Potter was more than willing to forgive the iniquity and stubborn rebellion of Judah. In Gal. 4:19, Paul uses this imagery to depict the formation of the image of Christ in the obedient Christian.

A nation to whom God has promised His blessing may forfeit its preferred status through disobedience. In such a case, God would relent of the good He had promised and bring calamity upon the rebellious people. God was fashioning a disaster, a calamity, for Judah if it did not repent or return to Him and change its actions from evil to good.

Jeremiah 18:5-11

⁵ Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying: ⁶ “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter?” says the Lord. “Look, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel! ⁷ The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it, ⁸ if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it. ⁹ And the instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it, ¹⁰ if it does evil in My sight so that it does not obey My voice, then I will relent concerning the good with which I said I would benefit it. 

¹¹ “Now therefore, speak to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord: “Behold, I am fashioning a disaster and devising a plan against you. Return now every one from his evil way, and make your ways and your doings good.” ’ ”