"Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him.
Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
Say the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off?
Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, so I do: so He."
In other words, his picture of God was that of an arbitrary tyrant who rejoiced in his power, who did what he liked, who enjoyed tormenting, who would have looked down in glee upon the pictures that have so touched us in the paper of a woman, as she taught a Bible-class, killed by a Zeppelin bomb; and most touching of all of the little child who, with the stump of his arm, ran in and said: "They've killed daddy and done this to me." These things stir our deepest feelings; but such a God as Caliban pictured his Setebos to be would have rejoiced at them and laughed to see them.
No wonder that this picture of God which has grown up in some minds produces absolute despair. People say, "If God is like that, what is the good of my doing anything? God will do what He likes, irrespective of what I do." Or, again, it produces a spirit of fatalism: "I'm made like that! It's not my fault." Like Aaron when reproached about the golden calf—"I cast the gold they gave me into the fire, and there came out this calf." And all this produces in the mind of mankind a kind of rebellion—nay, a hatred of God ("I hate God," said a man once to me)—which makes it quite impossible for any religion or trust or desire to pray to exist in the human soul. It is well worth while, then, to run this metaphor of the potter and the clay back to its source.
Here in Jeremiah is the original passage about the potter and the clay. Now if you read for yourself this passage in the eighteenth chapter of Jeremiah, you will find an absolutely different picture given. If you go with Jeremiah to the potter's house you find a humble, patient man at work dealing with refractory clay, patiently trying to make the best he can out of it, and when he is defeated in producing one object he makes another. If he cannot make a porcelain vase he will make a bowl; if he cannot produce a beautiful work of art he makes a flower-pot.
The potter has three things to notice about him. First of all, there is his patience. Then there is the fact that he is checked in his design by the clay at every moment. He has no arbitrary power; he is checked because he has to deal with a certain substance. And the last beautiful thing about the potter is his resourcefulness; he has always got the alternative of a second best. Though something has wrecked his first plan he has got another. This is the picture of God, these are the characteristics of God which we are to carry away from the potter and the clay.
1. Now just see, if this is so, what a tremendous light this throws upon the war. There are many to-day who do not think things out deeply, who look on this war as the breakdown of Christianity altogether. They say: All we have been taught, why, look how vain it is! Here are seven Christian nations at war and dragging in the rest of the world. All you have taught us about God, all you say about Christianity, is shown to be futile. We see the breakdown of Christianity indeed.
But wait a moment. Look at the potter and the clay, and see if you do not get some light from this. Here is the Potter, our great God; the great Potter knows what is in His mind; He has in His mind a world of universal peace. He is planning a porcelain vase in which the world is at peace. He meant men to be all of one mind. He made people of one blood to be of one mind in Christ Jesus. That is clearly His plan, His design, and we do well to pray for—
"... the promised time
When war shall be no more,
And lust, oppression, crime,
Shall flee Thy face before."
That is His plan, that is His design, and some day He will see it accomplished. "He shall see of the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied."