The Folly of Inverted Pots Text: Isaiah 29:15-16
Introduction: The Delusion of the Dark
We live in a world that has mastered the art of self-deception. Modern man believes he can conduct his affairs in the dark, whispering his plans in back rooms, crafting his little rebellions in the shadowy corners of his heart, all the while imagining that the God of heaven is either blind, deaf, or simply indifferent. He thinks he can hide his counsel from the one who invented counsel, conceal his deeds from the one who sees all deeds, and live as though the ultimate authority is a committee of his peers.
This is not a new problem. It is the ancient lie of the garden, repackaged for a sophisticated age. The serpent’s insinuation was that God was holding out, that His command was arbitrary, and that man could, in fact, become his own god, defining good and evil for himself. This lie always results in the same pattern of behavior: first, a secret counsel against God, a hiding of the heart’s true intent. Second, deeds done in the dark, consistent with that secret counsel. And third, a defiant challenge to God’s knowledge and authority: "Who sees us? Who knows us?"
Isaiah the prophet confronts this very delusion in the leaders of Judah. They were engaged in high-stakes political intrigue, seeking an alliance with Egypt against the Assyrian threat. They were holding their strategy sessions, drafting their treaties, and making their plans, all without consulting the Lord. They believed their counsel was deep, clever, and, most importantly, hidden. But Isaiah comes with a word from Yahweh that is like a sudden floodlight thrown into a dark cellar, exposing the rats and the rot. The woe that he pronounces is not just upon their bad foreign policy; it is upon the foundational insanity of their worldview. It is a woe pronounced on any man, in any age, who forgets who the Potter is and who the clay is.
This passage is a bracing dose of reality. It is a divine mockery of human pretension. It reminds us that our attempts to hide from God are as foolish as a clay pot trying to hide from the potter who is, at that very moment, holding it in his hands. The issue is not merely that God sees what we do in the dark. The issue is that the darkness itself is His creature. He made it. There is no place to hide from the God who is everywhere, and no secret to be kept from the God who knows everything.
The Text
Woe to those who deeply hide their counsel from Yahweh,
And whose deeds are done in a dark place,
And they say, “Who sees us?” or “Who knows us?”
You turn things around!
Shall the potter be considered as equal with the clay,
That what is made would say to its maker, “He did not make me”;
Or what is formed say to him who formed it, “He has no understanding”?
(Isaiah 29:15-16 LSB)
The Woe of Secret Counsel (v. 15)
We begin with the divine denunciation in verse 15:
"Woe to those who deeply hide their counsel from Yahweh, And whose deeds are done in a dark place, And they say, 'Who sees us?' or 'Who knows us?'" (Isaiah 29:15)
A "woe" in Scripture is not a petty curse. It is a declaration of ordained misery. It is a statement of cause and effect, as certain as the law of gravity. If you leap from a great height, woe to you. If you hide your plans from the omniscient God, woe to you. The leaders of Judah thought their counsel was "deep." The Hebrew word suggests something dug down, a mine shaft, a hidden bunker. They were proud of their shrewd, subterranean statecraft. They were making deals with Egypt, a nation synonymous with idolatry and reliance on the flesh, the very thing God had forbidden.
Their counsel leads to their deeds. What is plotted in the secret heart will eventually be performed by the hands in a dark place. Sin loves the dark. It seeks anonymity. John tells us that "everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed" (John 3:20). The dark place is not just a physical location; it is a moral and spiritual condition. It is the place where accountability is denied and consequences are ignored.
And from this darkness, they issue their challenge, their pathetic taunt: "Who sees us? Who knows us?" This is the functional atheism that infects the hearts of even covenant people. They may not deny God’s existence in their formal theology, but they deny His relevance in their practical affairs. They live as though God is confined to the temple, as though His jurisdiction ends where their political strategy begins. But the psalmist has already answered this fool's question: "Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there... even the darkness is not dark to You, And the night is as bright as the day; Darkness and light are alike to You" (Psalm 139:7-8, 12).
To ask "Who sees us?" is to be profoundly ignorant of the God you are dealing with. He is the one to whom "all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account" (Hebrews 4:13). The desire to hide from God is the very essence of the fall. Adam and Eve tried it in the garden, hiding among the trees. Jonah tried it on a boat to Tarshish. Achan tried it with a Babylonian garment under his tent. It has never once worked. It is a strategy with a perfect record of failure.
The Great Inversion (v. 16)
Verse 16 is God's incredulous, almost sarcastic, response to their foolishness. He exposes the root of their error, which is a complete inversion of reality.
"You turn things around! Shall the potter be considered as equal with the clay, That what is made would say to its maker, 'He did not make me'; Or what is formed say to him who formed it, 'He has no understanding'?" (Isaiah 29:16 LSB)
The phrase "You turn things around!" captures the essence of all sin. Sin is a perversion, a twisting of the created order. It is taking God's reality and flipping it upside down. Man, the creature, puts himself in the place of God, the Creator. This is the fundamental lie. And God uses the clearest possible analogy to expose its absurdity: the potter and the clay.
This is one of the Bible's central metaphors for divine sovereignty. The potter has absolute rights over the clay. He can make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor from the same lump, and the clay has no standing to object (Romans 9:21). The distinction between the potter and the clay is absolute. The potter is the active agent; the clay is the passive material. The potter has the design, the intelligence, and the power; the clay has none of these things. It is entirely dependent on the potter for its existence, its shape, and its purpose.
For the clay to be considered "as equal with the potter" is the height of insanity. But this is precisely what the leaders of Judah were doing. Their secret counsel was an assertion of equality. They were acting as if their plans were just as valid, just as sovereign, as God's plans. This is the sin of pride in its rawest form.
And this pride leads to two blasphemous declarations from the clay. First, the pot says to the potter, "He did not make me." This is practical deism or atheism. It is the denial of our createdness. The pot, admiring its own glaze and shape, concludes it must be self-existent. Modern man does this constantly. He looks at the universe and his own consciousness and declares, "It all just happened. No one made me." He denies his own origin in order to escape his obligations to his originator.
Second, the pot says of the potter, "He has no understanding." This is the blasphemy of intellectual arrogance. The clay criticizes the potter's intelligence. The creature presumes to judge the Creator's wisdom. The leaders of Judah were effectively saying, "God's plan to save us through faith is naive. He doesn't understand geopolitics. Our plan to make an alliance with Egypt is far more clever." This is the sin of the garden all over again. Eve looked at the fruit, listened to the serpent, and concluded that she knew better than God what was good for her. She judged God's understanding and found it wanting.
The Gospel for Inverted Pots
This passage is a harsh word, a "woe." But like all of God's law, it is meant to drive us to the gospel. We are all, by nature, inverted pots. We are all born with a rebellious instinct to hide from God and to question His authority and wisdom. Our hearts are little factories of secret counsel against His law. We live out our days as practical atheists, saying by our actions, "He did not make me," and as arrogant fools, saying by our pride, "He has no understanding."
The law exposes our condition. It shows us that we are nothing but clay, and rebellious clay at that. We have no standing before the Potter. He would be perfectly just to smash us to pieces and discard the shards.
But the good news is that the Potter is not just a potter. He is also a Father. Isaiah 64:8 says, "But now, O Yahweh, You are our Father; We are the clay, and You our potter; And all we are the work of Your hand." The Potter has a father's heart for His chosen people.
And in the ultimate act of turning things around, in the right direction this time, God the Son, the one through whom the Father fashioned all things, became a clay pot Himself. The eternal Word "became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). He, the Potter, took on the nature of the clay. He was "formed" in the womb of a virgin. He lived a life of perfect submission to the Father's will, never hiding His counsel, never acting in the dark. He never once said to His Father, "You have no understanding."
And then, on the cross, this perfect vessel was broken. He was smashed for our iniquities. He endured the ultimate "woe" that we deserved for our proud, rebellious inversion of reality. He went into the deepest darkness so that we could be brought into the light. Because He was broken, we, the shattered and rebellious pots, can be remade.
When we repent of our pride and trust in Christ, God does not just forgive us. He begins to reshape us. He is the Potter, and we are the clay. Sanctification is the process of the Master Potter putting us back on the wheel, applying the pressure of His Word and His Spirit, and conforming us to the image of His Son. Our response is not to question His methods or to complain about the pressure. Our response is to yield, to trust that the one who formed us in the first place knows what He is doing. He is making us into vessels fit for His use, for His glory. He is turning us right side up.