©
Jeannie St. John Taylor
Potters call locating and excavating
clay winning the clay. That term
strikes me as strange considering the commonness of clay. It’s supposed to be
difficult to win something, isn’t it? Runners spend countless hours preparing
to win a race; students work for years earning grades good enough to win a
scholarship. But finding clay isn’t difficult.
Clay is everywhere – so easy to
find that one of my pottery books suggests searching for it as a way to enrich
any summer camp program for children anywhere in the world. It will be
educational, the book says, while greatly increasing the fun quotient of camp.
And campers will have no trouble finding it themselves. Anyone can locate clay.
They just need to know where to look and what to look for.
Around the world, most topsoil is
only about a foot and a half thick. Under that resides a layer of clay.
- Deep-cut riverbeds reveal clay. You can find clay in small streams.
- Clay covered the bottom of the murky swimming hole in Syracuse, Ohio creek where I played as a young child. After we’d played and swam for an afternoon, the dissolving clay turned the creek a slimy, muddy red.
- My mother and her siblings chinked the cracks of the Kentucky log cabin where they grew up with tan clay dug from their hillside front yard.
- On one hill on the Yorkshire moors, England three different kinds and colors of clay were found on a single slope in about 400 yards.
- Veins of clay stripe the hillside cutaways along highways.
Clay is not rare; it is abundant
and cheap. It has no value of its own. It is being produced every day by forces
of nature God set in motion. Water seeps into rocks and splits them when it
freezes. Plants gain a foothold in the rocks and crack them into smaller pieces. Streams and glaciers grind rocks, readying
them for disintegration by chemicals found in water. It has been estimated that
more clay is formed daily than potters are able to use up in ceramics.
Furthermore, as though God wanted
to prove how ordinary clay is, the chemical composition of clay is similar to
the composition of the earth as a whole. Silica (SiO2) and Alumina (Al2O3) make up
approximately seventy-five percent of the
surface of the earth. And these two oxides are the essential elements of all
types of clay.
It’s hardly a stretch to think of
clay as a representative sample of the entire earth.
God chose to shape us from the most ordinary substance on earth. He made us from earth. Of earth. That’s not allegorical; it’s fact. We are clay. The fact that we return to dirt after we die is proof of
it.
God relates our history very simply
in the second chapter of Genesis. “And the LORD God formed a man’s body from the dust of the
ground and breathed into it the breath of life (Gen. 2:7). The “dust of the
earth” is clay. Just add a little water to make it easy to shape and you’ve got
. . . well, you. And me.
Furthermore, God spoke the animals
into being using the same clay from which he formed us. “And God said, ‘Let the
earth bring forth every kind of animal – livestock, small animals, and
wildlife.’” (Gen.1:24). That makes it a little hard to feel special, doesn’t
it? Yet there is something in each of us that longs to be special, to be
extraordinary.
Have you ever rebelled, just a
little, at the idea of being formed from common clay, from the same material as
animals? Why did God make us from dirt? Diamonds are rarer. Why couldn’t he
have chiseled us from diamonds with dazzling facets for reflecting him, or rubies
with passionate inner warmth that would draw others, or emeralds glowing with
the color of life and hope? Why’d he make us from mud?
I doubt he created Satan from mud. Surely
God used some exotic substance to make him. Satan must have been too exquisite to be
shaped of clay. “You were the perfection of wisdom and beauty. You were in Eden, the garden
of God. Your clothing was
adorned with every precious stone – red carnelian, chrysolite, white moonstone,
beryl, onyx, jasper, sapphire, turquoise, and emerald – all beautifully crafted
for you and set in the finest gold. They were given to you on the day you were
born (Ezekiel 28:12.13).
I don’t see anything common in that
description of Satan, do you? Yet Satan ended up hideous, despoiled by arrogance
over his own beauty. “Your heart was filled with pride because of all your
beauty. You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor” (Ezekiel 28:
17). Pride ruined the devil.
I don’t want to end up like him and
I’m assuming you don’t either. Certainly, God doesn’t want us to fall victim to
our own bloated pride. God wants us to understand precisely who we are so we
will remain humble and not fall into Satan’s trap. “Be honest in your estimate
of yourselves, measuring your value by how much faith God has given you” (Rom.
12:3b).
God tells us plainly that he is the
potter and we are common clay. We are nothing without him. “How stupid can you
be? He is the Potter, and he is certainly greater than you. You are only the
jars he makes! Should the thing that was created say to the one who made it,
‘He didn’t make us’? Does a jar ever say, ‘The potter who made me is stupid?'”
(Is.29:16).
I’m convinced God has many reasons
for each thing he does. I wonder . . . is it possible he formed us from common clay
to continually remind us we have no basis for pride? If we vessels of clay
truly understand where we came from, pride should never be a danger for us.
Yet we do have a reason to feel
pride. We should boast because God the Potter wins us. He scooped clay from the ground, shaped it and breathed
his own Life into humankind. We alone can display his image. That makes us
special. Extraordinarily special.
Even so, the second time he won us was the best. Nothing else so
difficult and painful has ever been accomplished. He won us when Jesus died on the cross. As a result, we each have a
noble purpose, to pray and glorify him forever. We can give him pleasure.
“God forbid that I should boast
about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14).
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