The clay does not command the potter

This post is drawn from a sermon I preached for the first time in Florida at FBC Sunny Hills. It is an introductory sermon looking at the overall problems of dealing with false teaching on the subject of God’s sovereignty. As such it is the first in a series of sermons on the subject of God’s sovereignty. I will publish the additional sermons in the form of blog posts at the appropriate time. You can view the sermon on Youtube here.

We see the same wording regarding the potter and the clay in both Isaiah 45 and Jeremiah 18. While the theme of Gods sovereign will flows through the entire scripture we see this very specific warning being raised again and again.

So what exactly is it warning against?

The sin condition.

Well if we look at the individual texts we will see a rejection of Christ, or a demand that God only saves the Jews of the time, or a desire to be able to earn favour with God. The ultimate theme however is mans hunger for power and self determination, peoples wish to decide what constitutes righteousness, their wish to be their own God, or indeed to command God, to subjugate God even. To make God subordinate to their authority, finally to replace God, to become their own gods.

We are going to come back to this but first lets look at this repeating theme in peoples desire for self determination, which is the over arching problem. Something I refer to as the sin condition.

Now I am going to introduce something here that some people may object to.

Free will!

The Bible at least to some degree confirms that man has free will. Now, what does man do with that free will? Does man do good with his free will? Well, in secular terms, by the notions of the world, yes occasionally he does good, in spiritual terms however, man does nothing good.

People have no righteousness, their natural position is to sin. My natural position is one of a sinner. I wish it was not so, but invariably when I examine myself, when I look at my day-to-day life, I find myself failing. All it takes is for me to turn my eyes from God.

My flesh rails against my spirit. In Romans 7 the apostle Paul explains this battle in detail;

“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.”

He concludes in saying “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

The law

Now many of you will know this text is primarily directed at the error of trying to live by the law, but that is exactly what the problem we are looking at here is, the law was God demonstrating to man the futility of attempting to self determine, to earn Gods favour, to say “look at me, look how good I am! I deserve the prize!”

It can be no coincidence that Paul subsequently moves onto the subject of sovereignty.

Proverbs 16:9

“The heart of man plans his way”.

That’s incomplete but we will complete it later, I use it here to demonstrate that man has some level of free will, and we know that this free will is a constant victim of sin.

There is a disturbing trend among popular preachers trying to claim that while God is sovereign he is not in control and this is simply not true. We must be very wary of preachers appealing to our vanity telling us that we are special, telling us that we are more than we are, telling us that we are little gods. 

I can show clearly from scripture that any preacher making these claims is not of God but is of his, or her father the devil.

Christian television

Now I don’t know if you watch Christian television and to be honest I hope you don’t, the so called “christian” television channels are anything but christian. I have to make a confession here, I used to work in christian television production, it was eye opening. In my case it led to me completely disowning the genre, I can say without any exaggeration that I met some of the most horrible people I could imagine running christian television channels and programs. It rocked my faith to its core, but by Gods sovereign grace I am still here. Don’t get me wrong, I met some good people in christian television as well but they were few.

Unfortunately false teaching is not limited to christian television, I will just add here as an aside. Don’t for a moment think that if something is on television it has been vetted for truth or accuracy, nothing could be further from the truth, these channels are a business, they sell airtime to these false preaching ministries which then give them a platform so they can ask millions of people for money while selling lies. It’s all about the money.

As I say it is not limited to christian television, such is the influence of television that these false preachers have become celebrities, their wealth identifies them as successful individuals to be emulated and listened to, you see them on news programs being interviewed and then go check them out on Youtube and suddenly you are hearing false teaching that tickles your ears and makes you feel good.

Nothing new

I do keep up on the false teaching because as an evangelist I am often posed with statements from people who will say, “but I heard this preacher say this or this other preacher said that”. The most common theme however is that they have “heard” that God is not in control and he needs us. He needs us to empower him, to authorise him to act. Basically he needs us to command him, in fact we don’t really need him other than to be there to reward us, we have the power of God. I have yet to see anyone making these claims who has been able to demonstrate the power of God, I am still waiting for someone to speak a Ferrari into existence. I live in hope that they will speak one into existence for me too, I will sell it and buy more motorcycles.

So in my research I have heard such people as Todd White and Bill Johnson amongst others who will say that God is sovereign but he is not in control. He needs us to authorise him etc. They will even say that the bible does not say that God is in control. I have to assume that they rely on people not reading the bible. Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer and Kenneth Copeland all preach that people are little gods, that they have the “spiritual DNA of Jesus”, Copeland goes so far as to say that when God says “I am” he says “I am too”. Blasphemy! In reality they don’t need to work hard to convince people because people love being told that they are special.

People simply want to be better than other people.

They want to feel special, they want to say look at me! They want to say I am great, God must love me, I deserve a reward. The false teacher, looks on, smiles and says, all God needs now is to see how sincere you are. And how do you show your sincerity? You show it by sending me your seed money.

 It’s a symbiotic relationship, the false teacher gets paid, and you get your ego stroked. 

If this is the extent of your faith then you don’t belong to God, you belong to sin. You are not destined for heaven, salvation is not your reward, damnation is.

The false teachers that are spreading this doctrine are not agents of good, they are agents of evil. I will go so far as to say that based on the amount of time that they have been preaching this kind of falsehood that they don’t even believe in God. They have one God and one God only and that God is money and to a lesser degree power. They receive worship from their followers. But if you worship a false Christ you are damned.

Even without this false teaching though, it is all too easy to start relying on yourself, you think if you do just enough good works, if you go to church on a regular basis, if you go to Bible study. If you pray the right amount, if you give to the poor, if you say the right things, if you set the right example, then you will earn your place in heaven. Many of these things are laudable, but they are works and salvation is by Grace alone.

God is in control.

So why is this sin so tempting to us? I’m not sure I can fully answer that, but suffice to say, it surely does tempt us. The desire to be in control of ourselves, to determine our own fate. Think of the stress you feel when things aren’t going your way, when something is out of your control. When you get that phone call that your child has been in an accident, when you hear that a relative or friend is ill. When you try to complete a task and it just doesn’t work out, it’s so frustrating.

Such is the way when you think of your own salvation. You want to enact something, you want to have some defining thing that you can point at and say, I earned my salvation that day. 

However, that isn’t how it works. That isn’t the format that we are offered in the Scriptures. It is the format that false teachers will offer you, it is the format that has been trapping mankind throughout history. We see it time and time again throughout the Scriptures. 

The trap

People keep falling into the same trap of thinking, indeed of believing, that they can enact something in order to earn salvation. Whether that be the Jews worshipping a law that they can’t follow, or believing a mark of the flesh will somehow magically redeem them from their own sin. Or perhaps the Roman Catholic put money in the poor box and saying Hail Mary’s will somehow earn them salvation, or indeed relying on being baptised as a baby will somehow set them aside for God regardless of how bad they are. Or as we have seen, the follower of the celebrity preacher who has been told they are special and don’t need to read the bible or worry about grace because they have bought their way into heaven.

No, in all these cases people have earned the same empty reward.

Just as Jesus says in Matthew 6

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.”

So why is this lie in our heart, why is it repeated by workers on iniquity?

Simply because it is the first lie, it is the lie that caused the fall off human kind, it is the lie that proved that given free will people will pursue unrighteousness, it is the lie that shows everyone of us why we need a God who is sovereign and in complete control.

So let’s unpack this, the serpent is described as crafty, deceitful, appealing to Eve’s vanity and then enlists her help to also lure Adam into sin, after all Adam trusted Eve, she came from him, he was able to justify his sin by this but be under no illusion, he was complicit, he also wanted this knowledge.

So here we have vanity and pride being fed and the complicity of a seemingly trustworthy third party. Seems very familiar does it not?

The lies continue, “You will not certainly die”, some people say that because Eve did not suddenly drop dead that God obviously lied about this but lets look at this properly. In verse 19 God clearly says;

“By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”

Before this they were immortal, after this, after sin they became mortal.

They earned death

They earned death, the wages of sin, the serpent is the liar, the false teacher. 

More than that they became prone to sickness and no longer were provided with everything they needed. They were cursed to work all their days until they died.

When faced with her sin by God, Eve replies;

“The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

Well that’s fine then, its not your fault, that nasty serpent did it, I’ll put all the blame on him says God? No, just as the judge will tell you that just because your friend talked you into stealing a car with him that you must pay for your crime, God is just and requires Eve and of course Adam to pay for their transgressions. The serpent pays but so do his followers, the serpents reward is in Eve believing his lies just as the false teacher gains his or reward by people believing their lies. 

Especially this lie, the first lie and what will be the last lie, that God is not needed, he is not in control, that people can be gods, that they can determine their own fate, that they deserve eternity in paradise for being good, for supporting false teachers financially and by following them.

The lie

This is a lie we see not only in fake preachers and false ministries, but also in day to day life, it is the lie that infects secular society, a society that bases its success on money and popularity. How earth shattering is it when a teenager does not get a high number of likes on their latest Tik Tok or Facebook post? Or the horrors of being cancelled by the cool kids.

This of course isn’t restricted to children, there are ministries on Youtube that are being deemed as being successful and trustworthy because they have ten million followers regardless of them preaching heresy, while people preaching truth have followers in the hundreds or perhaps thousands and are deemed as marginal due to this. We see the false ministries capitalising on this, they have teams of people who have the sole purpose of filing copywriter strikes and legal challenges on people speaking the truth about their falsehoods, why? 

Well one reason is they can, this is the culture, another is to protect their revenue streams, the legal costs are far outweighed by the revenue they receive from people who believe the lies. Of course the main reason is that the enemy loves the lie that God is not in control and will do anything to keep this lie being told.

The hope.

However the warnings are just that, warnings. They don’t exist in microcosm, they are not offered to send people into despair, they are offered according to the central tenets of all scripture.

2 Timothy 3:16-17

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

They are offered to arrive at hope and at truth.

Before we reach that place of hope, we must have first explored what the errors of this teaching are and why the scriptures warn significantly about it. We must look at the person of God, we must recognise that this is god’s story. It is not our story. So having done that where is our hope? Our hope is in Gods sovereignty. In fact without God being in control, having absolute sovereignty we can have no hope, we can have no confidence in salvation, it is absolutely necessary if we are to be saved from damnation, from our own sin, for God to be sovereign. 

Proverbs 16:9 

The heart of man plans his way,
    but the Lord establishes his steps.

Ah look as promised earlier I have completed it.

The heart of man plans his way and that way based on what we have read is a way of sin, of unrighteousness, but the Lord establishes his steps.

Commentary

“The core message is that while humans can make plans, God’s divine will ultimately directs and fulfills them. This truth encourages trust in God’s overarching plan, as seen in MacArthur’s messages on God’s sovereignty, and calls for humility in recognizing that human plans are limited compared to God’s infinite knowledge and purposes.”

I would go so far as to add to that in as much as when peoples plans are problematic God can and will according to his purpose completely derail those plans and set the person on a path according to his will. The great beauty being that he will do it in such a way that the person will not realise they have completely changed direction. This is so because of things like the tower of Babel where God thwarted the peoples plans by confusing their language.

I also speak from personal experience

I certainly never planned on becoming an evangelist, I had a plan, I was a captain of industry, I was destined for a bright and very lucrative future in tech, my plan was to work hard, support some ministries, sit at the back of the church and stay quiet. This was my limit, I really had reached the conclusion that I was not the caliber of person to be involved in ministry and certainly not in an office of the church. The lord however established my steps in a very different way. Some would say it was done with significant brutality, I basically lost almost everything, but I can say with total confidence now that is was all necessary and I am thankful for it.

Job

For a time I would read the book of Job and identify with Jobs despair and depression. Now I read it and see Gods sovereignty and find great comfort in it instead. 

Job actually references Proverbs 16:9 in Job 31 which is interesting because the book of Proverbs appears after the book of Job in the Old Testament. A reminder that the books of the OT are not necessarily in chronological order.

The book of Job is good reading on the subject of Gods sovereignty and I could spend an hour just reading out the most relevant sections as it would be wrong to just cherry pick given that we must retain context. Instead I will ask that anyone interested in learning more about Gods sovereignty, reads the book of in its entirety.

Encouragement

Yes we can see the warning, we can see the scolding, but it is far outweighed by the encouragement.

God is able to make vessels for honourable use, he enacts his will to demonstrate the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy which he has already prepared for glory. Of all people.

For what glory?

Genesis 1:11-12

And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants[e] yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

Continuing through to verse 24

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. 25 And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

This was the world he prepared for human kind whom he blessed, this was paradise, it was perfect, it was the world without sin, he wanted human kind to enjoy this world without sin, he wants human kind to enjoy existence without sin. But we sinned. 

It could have ended there,

but God in his sovereign mercy, in his perfect control of all things, set in motion his plan to put sin to death and for justice to be served, him being perfectly just. 

Beyond that he made plans for human kind to be able to understand its own failing and be aware of the cost and the need for the ultimate sacrifice. Then he made that sacrifice on behalf of mans sin by allowing his perfect son to die the death of a criminal on a cross, rising from the dead after three days and so defeating death itself so that all who believe can have eternal life in paradise, in a new earth with all the benefits of the pre sin garden of eden.

Did Jesus ask permission from his disciples before he did all this? Did he ask “what would Kenneth Copeland do?” (We already know that Kenny would have asked for a few rounds of seed money and bought a jet or two before disappearing into the sunset.)

Of course not, he did what he always intended because that is what pleased him to do.

Psalm 115:3

Our God is in the heavens;
    he does all that he pleases.

He loves us far more than we deserve, he has spent the entire history of human kind teaching us how to turn to him so that all who can, all whom he draws, will.

If you sincerely believe that Jesus is the Christ, the saviour and you sincerely repent of your sins and you continue in penitence being thankful to the lord, you will be saved.

What’s more, you can be 100% confident in your salvation because God is sovereign and totally in control.

He’s got this.