“Then you shall break the flask in the sight of the men who go with you, and shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts: So will I break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter’s vessel, so that it can never be mended. Men shall bury in Topheth because there will be no place else to bury.’” (Jeremiah 19:10–11, ESV)
Very young in life, I began trying to fix broken things. My parents, grandparents, and their friends thought that I had some sort of logical or technical mind that was prone to this type of thing. So, they would bring me their broken items. Sometimes it would be a radio, a PA-amplifier, a wind-up clock, you name it. Much of the time, as a young man, I would be stumped, especially with electronic devices.
I remember in high school working on an old radio that was not working. I played around with it for a while. Thinking that the problem must have been with one of the vacuum tubes, I took them to the local store where they had a tube tester. All the tubes were fine. With no real electronic testing tools and little knowledge, I looked over everything and seeing nothing that was obviously wrong decided that it was broken and unrepairable. So, I desoldered all the components, the capacitors, resistors, and so on, and stored them for future use.
Today, we find much of the stuff we purchase as possibly repairable, but when this stuff breaks, we determine it to be broken and unrepairable. Yet broken things are not limited to non-living material objects. People are broken and so are nations at times.
It is a very sad state when people are broken, broken due to sin. Sadly, the Lord looked at the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem, and concluded that they were broken and unrepairable. Thus, He had Jeremiah give them an object lesson. He was to purchase a pottery jar and break it in the sight of some men, after which he would give them the Lord’s message. Here was the message.
“Thus says the Lord of hosts: So will I break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter’s vessel, so that it can never be mended.”
The Lord declared that the nation was beyond repair. Yes, a merciful God was and is always open to the repentance of the wayward. Yet here the people were given numerous warnings through the true prophets of God. They also had the Law of God and its specific warnings about their spiritual apostasy and idolatry. They had everything necessary to see the error of their ways and repent, but they did not. The Lord had been generously patient with them, constantly calling them to repentance, but they did not heed His call. They were so hardened of heart that they would not turn from their evil ways. Thus, the Lord declared that they would be broken because of their brokenness and unrepairable, just like the potter’s jar.
Today, we live in a world full of broken people. There is only one remedy for their brokenness. That remedy is faith in Jesus Christ. In His complete work on the cross, He died to pay the penalty of sin for the broken, that is all of us, delivering us from sin’s power over us and its penalty of eternal punishment.
You might think that every person would wake up to the fact that they are broken sinners who need redemption. However, the fact is that life is short and while many are called, only a few will come to saving faith.
Many will come to the end of their life after hearing the message of Christ’s salvation numerous times. They will have passed churches hundreds or thousands of times, never to darken the doors. They will have experienced Easter and Christmas holidays and never stopped to think about the spiritual implication of these times. They will have judged others sins thousands of times, wishing many to experience the judgment for their actions, without ever examining their own lives under the same standards. They will never even consider that they, like all humanity, are broken and needing spiritual repair.
At the end of their life, when they die, they will find that it is too late. Then they will realize their brokenness due to sin, but will have passed the time where they could experience the only repair, which is faith in Jesus Christ. They will find themselves at the final judgment, broken and unrepairable.
Believers, our response must be one of intercession on behalf of the lost, that God would move in a mighty way before that time comes. We must pray that He would remove the blinders from their hearts so that they might hear and understand the gospel. Yet more than understanding, we must pray that they would trust in Jesus for eternal life. Moreover, we have the message of hope written on our hearts by the work of the indwelling Spirit of God. We need to let the light of the Gospel in us radiate out to others in word and by our actions so they might come to faith and be repaired from their brokenness.
Renewing the Heart 