The Undesirable Vessel: Judgment on Moab
Introduction: The God Who Grieves
We come now to a passage that is heavy with the sorrow of God. This is a difficult thing for modern Christians to get their heads around. We are comfortable with a God who is loving, a God who is merciful, and perhaps even a God who is angry in a righteous, detached sort of way. But a God who moans? A God whose heart wails like flutes over the destruction of a pagan nation? This is not the impassive deity of the philosophers. This is the living God of Scripture, who is fully engaged with His creation, and whose judgments, though perfectly just, are carried out with a grief that should sober us to the bone.
The oracle here is against Moab. Moab was a perennial thorn in Israel's side, a nation born out of incestuous shame, a people devoted to the vile worship of Chemosh. They were proud, arrogant, and had taunted the people of God. By every standard, they deserved what was coming to them. The Babylonians were God's instrument, and the judgment would be thorough and devastating. And yet, what we find in this passage is not divine gloating. We do not find a celestial "I told you so." Instead, we find the language of profound lamentation. God Himself takes up a funeral dirge for the people He is about to break.
This reveals something essential about the nature of God's wrath. His wrath is not a capricious, uncontrolled rage. It is the settled, holy, and sorrowful opposition of the Creator to the sin that is destroying His creation. It is the grief of a potter who must break a vessel that has become utterly undesirable, not because He enjoys the smashing, but because the vessel has rejected its purpose and embraced corruption. To understand this passage, we must understand that God's justice and His sorrow are not contradictory. They flow from the same holy character. He is holy, and therefore He must judge sin. He is love, and therefore He grieves over the sinners who must be judged.
As we walk through this text, we will see the cause of the judgment, the character of the judgment, and the consequences of the judgment. And in it all, we should see a stark warning against pride and idolatry, and a profound glimpse into the heart of a God who judges with tears in His eyes.
The Text
"I will make Moab cease,” declares Yahweh, “the one who offers offerings on the high place and the one who offers offerings in smoke to his gods. Therefore My heart moans for Moab like flutes; My heart also moans like flutes for the men of Kir-heres. Therefore they have lost the abundance it produced. For every head is bald and every beard cut short; there are gashes on all the hands and sackcloth on the loins. On all the rooftops of Moab and in its open squares there is lamentation everywhere; for I have broken Moab like an undesirable vessel,” declares Yahweh. “How shattered it is! How they have waled! How Moab has turned his back, he is ashamed! So Moab will become a laughingstock and an object of terror to all around him."
(Jeremiah 48:35-39 LSB)
The Root of the Rot (v. 35)
The Lord begins by identifying the central issue, the very heart of Moab's rebellion that necessitates this judgment.
"I will make Moab cease,” declares Yahweh, “the one who offers offerings on the high place and the one who offers offerings in smoke to his gods." (Jeremiah 48:35)
The problem is not political. It is not fundamentally about Moab's foreign policy or their GDP. The problem is worship. God is going to bring an end to Moab's public, institutionalized idolatry. The "high place" was the nerve center of their pagan cult. It was where they gave honor and glory not to the Creator of the heavens and the earth, but to Chemosh, a demonic non-entity. They were burning incense, a ritual of worship, to "his gods."
This is the essence of all sin. It is a misdirection of worship. It is giving the glory due to God to something that is not God. For Moab, it was a carved idol on a hill. For modern man, it is the idol of the self, or the state, or sexual autonomy, or wealth. But the principle is identical. All of humanity is created to worship. The question is never whether we will worship, but what we will worship. Moab chose to worship demons, and in doing so, they chose their own destruction.
Notice the active agency of God: "I will make Moab cease." This is not a random geopolitical event. This is not Nebuchadnezzar having a bad day. This is the sovereign Lord of history executing His decree. God raises up nations and He casts them down. He is not a passive observer in the affairs of men; He is the king on the throne, and the nations are but a drop in the bucket before Him. Moab's sin was their worship, and God's judgment is to shut down the blasphemous franchise for good.
The Divine Lament (v. 36)
What follows is one of the most startling expressions of divine emotion in all of Scripture.
"Therefore My heart moans for Moab like flutes; My heart also moans like flutes for the men of Kir-heres. Therefore they have lost the abundance it produced." (Jeremiah 48:36)
The word "therefore" connects the judgment directly to the grief. It is because God must judge that His heart moans. The sound of flutes here is not the sound of celebration, but of a funeral procession. God Himself is leading the mourning. He is not just the judge; He is the chief mourner at the funeral of the nation He is sentencing to death. Kir-heres was a major fortress city in Moab, a symbol of their strength and pride. God's heart moans for the men of that city, the very men whose idolatry He is punishing.
This should demolish any caricature of God as a distant, unfeeling tyrant. The God who pronounces judgment is the same God who pleads with sinners to turn and live. As He says in Ezekiel, "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live" (Ezekiel 33:11). God's wrath is not at odds with His love; it is the sorrowful, necessary expression of His holiness in a world that has rebelled against Him.
The consequence of their sin is stated plainly: "they have lost the abundance it produced." Their idolatry was tied to their prosperity. They believed Chemosh gave them fertile fields and victory in battle. They trusted in their wealth and their works. But all of it was a gift from the very God they ignored. And now, the God who gave the abundance is the one who is taking it away. When a people turns from God, the hedge of protection is removed, and the blessings they took for granted evaporate.
The Uniformity of Grief (v. 37-38a)
The scene of judgment is painted in the colors of universal mourning. The grief is total, affecting every person and every place.
"For every head is bald and every beard cut short; there are gashes on all the hands and sackcloth on the loins. On all the rooftops of Moab and in its open squares there is lamentation everywhere..." (Jeremiah 48:37-38a)
These are the external signs of extreme grief and humiliation in the ancient world. Shaving the head and cutting the beard were signs of shame and sorrow. The gashes on the hands were a pagan mourning practice, a form of self-mutilation forbidden to Israel, but practiced by the nations around them. It was a desperate, fleshly attempt to appease their gods or express their agony. Sackcloth was the uniform of repentance and mourning.
The point here is the totality of the grief. It is on "every head," "every beard," and "all the hands." The lamentation is not confined to private homes. It is on "all the rooftops" and in the "open squares." The public square, once the place of commerce and celebration, is now filled with wailing. This is a corporate judgment producing a corporate grief. Their sin was national, and so their sorrow is national. There is no escape. The judgment of God is comprehensive.
The Potter's Prerogative (v. 38b-39)
God now gives the reason for this universal lamentation, using a powerful and common biblical metaphor.
"...for I have broken Moab like an undesirable vessel,” declares Yahweh. “How shattered it is! How they have wailed! How Moab has turned his back, he is ashamed! So Moab will become a laughingstock and an object of terror to all around him." (Jeremiah 48:38b-39)
Here is the heart of the matter. God is the Potter, and the nations are the clay. He has the right to do with His creation as He sees fit. Moab had become an "undesirable vessel." The word means a vessel for which there is no pleasure, no delight. It had become marred, corrupted, and useless for the purpose for which it was made. And so, the Potter does what any potter would do with such a piece. He breaks it.
The breaking is complete. It is "shattered." The response is wailing and shame. "How Moab has turned his back, he is ashamed!" The pride that once characterized Moab is now replaced with the burning humiliation of public defeat. The nation that once boasted in its strength and its gods is now exposed as weak and foolish. Their shame is not a godly sorrow leading to repentance; it is the raw, public disgrace of having your pride and your idols proven to be utterly worthless.
The final result is that Moab becomes a "laughingstock and an object of terror." The surrounding nations will look at the ruins of Moab and react in one of two ways. Some will mock them, seeing their downfall as a joke. Others will look on in terror, realizing that the God who brought down Moab is a God to be feared. The judgment of God on one nation is always a sermon to all the other nations. It is a public display of His power and His justice, intended to bring either ridicule upon the unrepentant or a holy fear to those with eyes to see.
Conclusion: The Vessel of Mercy
This is a hard word. It is a word of unrelenting judgment. And yet, for us who are in Christ, it is a word that should drive us to our knees in gratitude. For the apostle Paul picks up this very same imagery of the potter and the clay in Romans 9.
He asks, "Has the potter no right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?" (Romans 9:21). The answer is yes, He does. By nature, because of our sin, we are all part of that same lump of rebellious clay. We are all, in Adam, "undesirable vessels," fit only to be shattered. There is nothing in us that makes us inherently more desirable to the Potter than the Moabites were.
But then Paul tells us the glorious good news. He says God, "desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory" (Romans 9:22-23).
We who have trusted in Christ are those vessels of mercy. We were just as undesirable, just as marred, just as fit for shattering. But the Potter, in His sovereign grace, chose not to break us. Instead, He broke His Son in our place. On the cross, Jesus Christ endured the shattering that we deserved. He became a laughingstock. He bore the full measure of divine wrath against our idolatry and our pride. He was broken so that we, the undesirable vessels, could be remade into vessels of honor, filled with the treasure of His Holy Spirit.
Therefore, we must not look at the judgment of Moab with smug detachment. We must look at it with sober fear and overwhelming gratitude. Fear, because the God we serve is a consuming fire who will not tolerate pride and idolatry forever. And gratitude, because the only reason we are not shattered alongside Moab is because of the sheer, unmerited grace of God shown to us in His Son. He took the undesirable and made us His beloved. He took the vessels of wrath and made us vessels of mercy, prepared beforehand for glory.