O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the LORD. Behold, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.
O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? - refuting the Jews' reliance on their external privileges as God's elect people, as if God could never cast them off. But if the potter, a mere creature, has power to throw away a marred vessel, and raise up other clay from the ground, a fortiori, God, the Creator, can cast away the people who prove unfaithful to His election, and can raise others in their stead (cf. Isaiah 45:9; Isaiah 64:8; Romans 9:20-21). It is curious that the potter's field should have been the purchase made with the price of Judas' treachery (Matthew 27:9-10): a potter's vessel dashed to pieces (cf. Psalms 2:8-9; Revelation 2:27), because of its failing to answer the maker's design, being the very image to depict God's sovereign power to give reprobates to destruction, not by caprice, but in the exercise of His righteous judgment. Matthew quotes Zechariah's words (Zechariah 11:12-13) as Jeremiah's, because the latter (Jeremiah 18:1-23; Jeremiah 19:1-15) was the source from which the former derived his summary in Jeremiah 11:12-13 (Hengstenberg).