Jeremiah 19

The clay is not attractive in itself, but when the hands of the potter touch it, and the thought of the potter is brought to bear upon it, and the plan of the potter is worked out in it and through it, then there is a real transformation. J. Wilbur Chapman

The prophet, of course, was Jeremiah. We don’t know who the potter was, although he played an important part in the drama. The policeman was Pashur, the priest in charge of temple security, whose job it was to keep peace in the temple and punish troublemakers. Since Pashur considered Jeremiah to be a troublemaker, he punished him by making him spend a night in the stocks. Jeremiah is the chief actor in this three-act drama.

The theme of the potter continues with another action sermon from Jeremiah, a sermon that cost him a beating and a night in the stocks.

Jeremiah preaches the sermon (19:1–9). At the command of the Lord, Jeremiah made a second trip to the potter’s house, this time as a customer and not a spectator, and he took with him some of the Jewish elders. Knowing their evil plots against him, it’s an evidence of his faith that he was willing to walk with them and then do so daring a thing as declare in their very presence that disaster was coming to the land because of their sins. Obviously his prayer to the Lord had brought him peace and courage.

The east gate was the Potsherd Gate, where the potters worked and the broken pottery was thrown. It overlooked the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, the Jerusalem garbage dump (Gehenna). But Jeremiah turned the gate into a pulpit and declared impending disaster because of what the kings of Judah had done: forsaken God, worshipped idols, desecrated the temple, murdered the innocent, and offered their children in altar fires dedicated to Baal.

This valley had been a center for idol worship, but Josiah had desecrated it by making it a garbage dump. Topheth means a “fire pit, a hearth,” because the little children had been put through the fires there. After the Babylonian invasion, however, the new name would be “The Valley of Slaughter.” The siege would be so bad that the Jews would have to eat their own children to stay alive!

Jeremiah announces judgment (19:10–15). “I will make void the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem in this place” (19:7). To demonstrate this, Jeremiah broke a clay jar and said, “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will smash this nation and this city just as this potter’s jar is smashed and cannot be repaired’” (v. 11 niv). The nation was beyond discipline (2:23), beyond prayer (7:16), and now, beyond repair! They had so hardened themselves against the Lord that all hope was gone.

In the Near East in that day, kings and generals often smashed clay jars in a special ceremony before they went out to battle, symbolic of their total defeat of their enemies. This image is also used of the Messiah in Psalm 2:9: “You shall break them [the enemy nations] with a rod of iron; You shall dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel” (nkjv). But here it was God smashing His own people!

We can only imagine how angry the elders were who had accompanied Jeremiah to the Potsherd Gate. After all, they and the priests (and Jeremiah was a priest) had endorsed the “peace messages” of the false prophets as well as the political schemes of the civil leaders who hoped to get help from Judah’s ungodly allies. But what Jeremiah did next made them even more angry, because he went to the temple and preached the sermon again! For a man who was broken before God, he certainly had courage before his enemies, but he was trusting God’s promise of help (Jer. 1:7–10, 17–19), and the Lord was sustaining him.

Can nations and individuals sin so greatly that even God can’t restore them? Yes, they can. As long as the clay is pliable in the hands of the potter, he can make it again if it’s marred (18:4), but when the clay becomes hard, it’s too late to re-form it. Judgment is the only response to willful apostasy. The northern kingdom of Israel refused to repent, and the Assyrians took it captive. Now the southern kingdom of Judah was resisting God’s truth, and Babylon would destroy the land and deport the people. The Jewish people rejected their King when they asked Pilate to crucify Jesus; forty years later, the Romans did to Jerusalem what the Babylonians had done six centuries before. “There is a sin unto death” (1 John 5:16).

Jeremiah experiences pain (20:1–6). What before had been threats now became a reality. Pashur, son of Immer, assistant to the high priest and chief security officer for the temple, didn’t like what Jeremiah was saying. Therefore, he had Jeremiah arrested, beaten, and put into the stocks until the next day. The stocks were located at a prominent place in the temple area, in order to add shame to pain. Spending all night with your body bent and twisted wouldn’t be at all comfortable, and when you add the pain of the beating, you can imagine how Jeremiah felt.

Being beaten and put into the stocks was the first of several acts of persecution the leaders inflicted on Jeremiah. They threatened to kill him (Jer. 26), they accused him falsely and imprisoned him (37:11–21), and they put him into a pit (38:1–13). He was an official prisoner until Nebuchadnezzar set him free (39:11–18).

God, however, met with Jeremiah that night (see Acts 18:9–11; 23:11; 27:23–24) and gave him a special message and a new name for Pashur: Magor-Missabib, which means “terror on every side” (niv). Jeremiah had used this phrase before (Jer. 6:25) and would use it again (46:5; 49:5, 29). It described what would happen to Jerusalem when the Babylonian army finally moved in.

For the first time, Jeremiah named the king of Babylon as the invader (20:4). Previously, Jeremiah had announced an invasion from the north (see 1:13–15; 3:12, 18; 4:5–9; 6:1, 22–26; 10:22), but he hadn’t named the invading nation. Now the tool of God’s discipline was identified as Babylon, and Jeremiah would mention Babylon in one way or another about two hundred times in his book.

Pashur’s treatment of Jeremiah would receive just recompense, for he and his family would be taken captive to Babylon, and there they would die. For a Jew to be buried outside his own land was considered a judgment, for the Gentile lands were considered unclean. For Pashur and his friends, however, what difference would that make? They’d been preaching lies in the name of the God of truth and had been encouraging idolatry in the temple of the holy God. So why not live in a land of lies and idols and eventually be buried there? They’d be right at home!

If the events described in Jeremiah 18—20 took place during the reign of Jehoiakim (607–597 BC), then it didn’t take long for Jeremiah’s prophecy to be fulfilled. In 605, Nebuchadnezzar plundered the temple and took Jehoiakim and the nobles to Babylon. In 597, he carried off over ten thousand people, and eleven years later, he burned the temple and the city and left it in ruins. Five years later, he deported another group of exiles.