I. How does the Potter use and convert the clay? (1) It is clear that the clay must be purified. The blood of Jesus Christ passes over it, mingles with it, and it is pure. (2) And so God proceeds to shape and remake it. We are all of the same clay, and we are all made for one purpose, though in different ways and various degrees, to glorify God: first, to hold His love, and then to communicate that love to others. (3) And then, thirdly, God stamps His own work with His own signet and His own image; it carries its own evidence in it that it is His. To every man's own heart it carries it by a secret witness. To the world and to the Church it carries it, by a mark which characterises it, a meekness, a love, a holiness, a humility, which cannot be mistaken.
II. In order that God may fashion us, it is plain that our self-renunciation must be complete and our faith must be clear. We must accept our own utter wretched nothingness, and we must have a distinct expectation that God can and will make us all our fondest hope ever grasped, or all our utmost imagination ever painted.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,8th series, p. 152.
God is related to each of us both as a Father and a King. The idea of a Father contains more prominently the sentiment of bountiful and tender cherishing, while that of a King contains more prominently that of regulation and control; and it is not till we have combined them that we can form an adequate conception of the relation in which He stands to us.
I. We should give the idea of God's Fatherhood the first place in our meditations on His character, and not only begin with it, but carry it as the master-thought athwart all our other contemplations of Him, qualifying them with its influence. (1) Even a heathen could say, as an apostle has approvingly told us, "We are also His offspring." How much more is it not incumbent that wemake the acknowledgment with filial and confiding hearts we who enjoy that clear revelation that God created man in His own image? What else does this import than that, above all His other works, He distinguished man by producing him as a son, with a nature resembling His own? Accordingly, He endowed him with a son's prerogative the dominion over all His inferior creation. (2) If God is our Father, we should have confidence in His lovingkindness.
II. Besides being a Father, God is a King. An earthly father's administration of his family is a matter of privacy. Public interests are not concerned in it, and he may do with his own what pleases his humour. He may open his door and readmit the prodigal, even without any repentance and confession, if he choose. But God's family being the public the universal public of created moral intelligence, though this does not affect the personal love of the administrator, yet does it materially affect the mode of the administration. The family of children has enlarged into a kingdom of subjects. The order of all good government of a kingdom is, that the violation of the laws shall be visited with penal suffering before there be a restoration to the privileges of citizenship. Shall the fatherly love of God, then, resign His rebel child as lost? Behold the mystery of our redemption. The paternity of God secures that His regal justice will accept of an adequate ransom, if such should be offered. The proclamation of the gospel is not so much the proclamation of a King, declaring that no man shall be saved except through faith in Christ's sacrifice, as it is the earnest entreaty of a Father that His children should believe, so as to be saved.
W. Anderson, Discourses,2nd series, p. 1.
References: 64 S. Cox, Expositions,1st series, p. 118. Isaiah 65:1. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxxii., No. 1919; Preacher's Monthly,vol. i., p. 53.