The Theology of the Potsherd Gate
Introduction: Divine Street Theater
We live in an age that prefers its religion to be abstract, private, and above all, polite. We want a God who communicates in gentle suggestions, in inspirational quotes suitable for a coffee mug, or perhaps in a vaguely spiritual feeling we get while walking in the woods. But the God of the Bible is not a polite abstraction. He is the living God, and He is not above a bit of street theater to get His point across. When the stakes are eternal, and a nation is hurtling toward self-destruction, God does not send a memo. He sends a prophet with stage directions.
The prophetic sign-act is one of God's favorite teaching tools. Isaiah walked around naked and barefoot for three years. Ezekiel built a model of Jerusalem and laid siege to it, lying on his side for over a year. And here, in Jeremiah 19, the prophet is commanded to perform a living parable, a visceral and unforgettable sermon in three dimensions. God is going to make His point not just with words, but with the sound of shattering pottery.
This is not a negotiation. This is not a friendly warning. This is a public indictment and a sentencing, delivered at the scene of the crime. God is bringing the leadership of Judah to the very place where they committed their most grotesque abominations to show them, in graphic detail, what He was about to do to them. We must understand that God's judgments are never arbitrary. They are always fitting, always just, and often laced with a terrifying, poetic irony. The punishment is tailored to the sin. What God does here through Jeremiah is to hold up a mirror to Judah, and what they are about to see is the reflection of their own damnation.
The Text
Thus says Yahweh, "Go and buy a potter's earthenware jar, and take some of the elders of the people and some of the elders of the priests. Then go out to the valley of Ben-hinnom, which is by the entrance of the potsherd gate, and there call out the words that I tell you and say, 'Hear the word of Yahweh, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem: thus says Yahweh of hosts, the God of Israel, "Behold, I am about to bring a calamity upon this place, at which the ears of everyone that hears of it will tingle. Because they have forsaken Me and have made this a foreign place and have burned incense in it to other gods, that neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah had ever known, and because they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, a thing which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever come upon My heart, therefore, behold, days are coming," declares Yahweh, "when this place will no longer be called Topheth or the valley of Ben-hinnom, but rather the valley of Slaughter. I will empty out the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem to the point of destruction in this place, and I will cause them to fall by the sword before their enemies and by the hand of those who seek their life; and I will give over their carcasses as food for the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth. I will also make this city an object of horror and of hissing; everyone who passes by it will be horrified and hiss because of all its slaughtering. I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they will eat one another's flesh in the siege and in the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life will distress them."
(Jeremiah 19:1-9 LSB)
The Prop, the Place, and the People (vv. 1-2)
The scene is set with three crucial elements: the object, the location, and the audience.
"Thus says Yahweh, 'Go and buy a potter's earthenware jar, and take some of the elders of the people and some of the elders of the priests. Then go out to the valley of Ben-hinnom, which is by the entrance of the potsherd gate...'" (Jeremiah 19:1-2)
First, the prop. Jeremiah is to buy a common clay jar. This is significant. In the previous chapter, God had used the image of the potter and the clay to show His sovereign power to shape and reshape the nation of Israel. He could make it a vessel of honor or, if it resisted, a vessel of dishonor. This jar represents Judah. It is a finished product, fired in the kiln, and set in its ways. It is brittle, and once broken, it cannot be repaired. It can only be smashed into sherds.
Second, the audience. He is to take the "elders of the people and some of the elders of the priests." This is not a message for the common man on the street; this is a direct confrontation with the leadership. These are the men responsible for the spiritual and civil corruption of the nation. They are being summoned as official witnesses to hear the verdict against the kingdom they have ruined. God's judgment will not be done in a corner; it will be legally attested by the very criminals He is condemning.
Third, the location. The symbolism here is thick enough to cut with a knife. He takes them to the Valley of Ben-hinnom, just outside the "potsherd gate." This valley was, in effect, the municipal dump of Jerusalem. It was a place of filth, refuse, and perpetual fire. The potsherd gate was the gate through which the city's trash, including broken pieces of pottery, was hauled to be discarded. But it was far worse than a landfill. The Valley of Hinnom, or Topheth, was the very epicenter of Judah's most depraved idolatry: the place where they had set up high places to Baal and Molech and burned their own children alive as sacrifices. So God tells Jeremiah: take the leaders, holding a clay pot that represents the nation, to the city dump, which is also the site of their child sacrifice, and stand by the gate named for broken pottery. Every detail is screaming judgment.
The Indictment (vv. 3-5)
With the stage set, the prosecutor, Yahweh of hosts, lays out the charges through His prophet.
"'Hear the word of Yahweh, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem... Behold, I am about to bring a calamity upon this place, at which the ears of everyone that hears of it will tingle.'" (Jeremiah 19:3)
This is a formal, legal summons. The verdict is a "calamity" so shocking that the report of it will cause a physical, tingling sensation in the ears of those who hear it. This is not a recession or a political shake-up. This is a civilization-ending catastrophe. And God gives the reason why. He does not judge without cause. The indictment has two main counts.
"Because they have forsaken Me and have made this a foreign place and have burned incense in it to other gods... and because they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal..." (Jeremiah 19:4-5)
The first charge is spiritual adultery. They forsook Yahweh, their covenant husband, and turned Jerusalem into a "foreign place," a spiritual brothel filled with the worship of every pagan deity they could import. The second charge is the horrific result of the first: murder. Specifically, the murder of their own children. "They have filled this place with the blood of the innocent." When you abandon the true God, you do not become a sophisticated secularist; you become a bloodthirsty pagan. Our own nation should take note. Having forsaken God, we too have filled our land with the blood of the innocent, sacrificing our children on the altar of convenience at the local abortuary.
God's own reaction to this sin is one of divine revulsion. He says this practice of child sacrifice was something "which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever come upon My heart." This is God saying that this act is so alien to His character, so monstrously evil, that the very thought of it is an abomination to Him. This demolishes the pathetic modern notion that all religions are just different paths to the same God. The God of Abraham has nothing in common with the demonic idols that demand the blood of children.
The Sentence (vv. 6-9)
Because of these high crimes, the sentence is pronounced. And the punishment is designed to fit the crime with terrifying precision.
"...this place will no longer be called Topheth or the valley of Ben-hinnom, but rather the valley of Slaughter." (Jeremiah 19:6)
God renames the place. He who has naming rights has ownership rights. He is reclaiming this valley from Baal and re-christening it with the name of His judgment. The place where they shed innocent blood will become the place where their own blood is shed en masse. The fire-pit of Topheth will become the killing field of Judah.
"I will empty out the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem... and I will cause them to fall by the sword... and I will give over their carcasses as food for the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth." (Jeremiah 19:7)
There is a grim pun in the Hebrew. The word for "jar" is baqbuq. The word for "empty out" is baqaq. God says, just as this baqbuq will be emptied and smashed, so I will baqaq your clever plans and military strategies. Your political alliances with Egypt will be worthless. All your worldly wisdom will be exposed as folly. And the result will be total humiliation. To be killed by the sword and left unburied, for your corpse to become food for vultures, was the ultimate covenant curse. It was a sign of complete and utter abandonment by God.
"I will also make this city an object of horror and of hissing... I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters..." (Jeremiah 19:8-9)
The horror intensifies. Jerusalem, once the joy of the whole earth, will become a ruin that passersby will gawk and hiss at. And the ultimate, most stomach-turning judgment falls. The sin of child sacrifice is punished with forced cannibalism. In the desperation of the coming siege, they would eat their own children to survive. The very sin they committed willingly in their prosperity to appease their idols, they would be forced to commit in their desperation to fill their own bellies. The sin becomes the judgment. This is the terrible endpoint of apostasy. This is what happens when a people forsakes God.
The Other Broken Jar
The earthenware jar, representing Judah, was to be smashed in that valley of filth and fire, with no hope of repair. The Valley of Ben-hinnom, Gehenna, became the very name for Hell in the New Testament, the place of eternal, fiery judgment. And that is the judgment we all deserve. We have all, in our own ways, forsaken God. We have all built high places to idols in our hearts. We are all cracked pots, fit only for the potsherd gate.
But the story does not end in the Valley of Slaughter. For there was another vessel, another "earthenware jar," who willingly went to the place of the curse for us. The apostle Paul tells us that "we have this treasure in jars of clay" (2 Cor. 4:7), referring to our frail bodies. But Christ Himself took on a jar of clay, a human body.
And that body was broken. On a hill just outside Jerusalem, Jesus Christ was shattered under the full force of God's wrath against our sin. He endured the horror. He bore the hissing. He descended into the true Gehenna, the ultimate valley of slaughter, and took the curse that we deserved. His innocent blood was shed, not to appease a demonic idol, but to satisfy the perfect justice of a holy God.
And here is the glorious difference. The potter's jar in Jeremiah's day was smashed beyond repair. But when the body of Jesus was broken and laid in a tomb, the Divine Potter did not discard the pieces. On the third day, He put the vessel back together, raising Him from the dead, glorious and indestructible. Because that jar was broken and remade, we who are shattered by sin can be made new. God does not just patch up our old, sinful lives. Through faith in the broken and risen Christ, He makes us entirely new creations. He takes those who were vessels of wrath, fit for the Valley of Slaughter, and by His grace He transforms us into vessels of mercy, prepared for glory.
The choice before us is simple. We are all jars of clay. We will either be shattered under the righteous judgment of God, or we will find our life, our hope, and our salvation in the one Jar who was shattered for us.