Year 9, Day 72: Jeremiah 19

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Today we continue the pottery themed images in the book of Jeremiah.  In today’s lesson, Jeremiah is to go buy a clay flask.  He is then to go to people and break the flask.  It is to be a sign to the people that like the flask, they are to be broken as well.

There’s a neat dynamic to this story.  My wife does a lesson every year in her classroom that is about archeology.  She has the kids draw on clay pots and then give them to another student.  The class gets to go out and smash them by dropping them.  Then they pick up the pieces they can find and glue them back together.

The cool part of this story is that the kids find most of the big pieces.  Since the pots are drawn upon, they can put them back together in a few class periods.  However, they are never put back together completely.  They can’t find all the small pieces.  They get the big parts.  They even get the small pieces.  But they don’t get every piece.  Even after two or three weeks of walking across the parking lot where they are broken we find small pieces of pottery that were overlooked.  The pots are never completely reassembled.

This is also a message that is near and dear to the western world.  How many of our stories about broken people trying to put their lives together.  How often are we nostalgic back to times in our life when things were simple, together, and whole?  Is this not the point of the Children’s Rhyme Humpty Dumpty?

God is sending a message to Jeremiah.  Their lives are going to be broken.  After they are broken, they will try to put their lives back together.  They’ll try to return to normal.  They will be unsuccessful.  Some will be scattered.  Some will be dead.  Some will be maimed and injured.  Some will be in exile.

The broken flask is a sign to the people that judgment is coming and they’ll never be able to go back to right.  They won’t be able to come through judgment and recover.  Their only option is repentance.  Only God can put them back together again.  Sounds like a lesson Humpty Dumpty could have benefitted from learning, too.

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