I didn’t want to write about this chapter. I even skimmed over the part about eating…, never mind. I didn’t want to read it. I didn’t want to think it. I was about to see if I could just combine it with the next chapter in order to skip over it.

But then I remembered the potsherd. A potsherd is a broken piece of pottery. I didn’t do any research on the Potsherd Gate. Did they have a junkyard for pottery where you could go smash your vessel?

I have memorized Isaiah 45 or maybe this wouldn’t have come to mind, but there is a verse about potsherds that warns against fighting against your Maker. The broken piece of pottery doesn’t get to argue with its maker.

In Jeremiah 18 we read about the Potter forming the clay as He chooses. Here we have the flask, the thing created by the Potter, being destroyed.

It made me think about when a piece of pottery can be destroyed. What’s the difference between the pottery in 18 and the pottery in 19? They are both destroyed in a way, but one is remade. What was the difference? One was hardened.

We can and should come to a hardened, a fixed state. I, for instance, am sure of my salvation. I am in Christ. He keeps me. There’s no where I am going. My face is set like flint toward New Jerusalem. No one could convince me my God isn’t real and doesn’t save.

But there is another kind of hardening, sin-hardened. Sin hardens overs a heart; it becomes callous. Your conscious becomes seared. It can’t see the wrong and laughs at it instead of weeping over it.

The Potter loves them both. He does the same for both. The one who has hardened himself against the Lord’s ways will be destroyed. But for the one whose heart is soft towards Him, the one surrendered, it’s a time of molding, rebuilding, and perfecting.