The Book Of Isaiah. Day 200, Woe To Those Who Quarrel With Their Maker

The Lord speaks about how He is the only God and about how He is the only source of righteousness and blessings. How foolish it is to rebel against Him! When we oppose Him we are being our own worst enemy because we are depriving ourselves of some good things.

"You heavens above, rain down My righteousness; let the clouds shower it down. Let the earth open wide, let salvation spring up, let righteousness flourish with it; I, the Lord, have created it." (Isaiah 45:8) The Lord wants to rain down blessings upon us. Like any good father, He wants to provide not only our needs but a lot of our wants too; it pleases Him to give us good things. But also like a good Father, He can't reward rebellion. 

"Woe to those who quarrel with their Maker, those who are nothing but potsherds among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, 'What are you making?' Does your work say, 'The potter has no hands?' Woe to the one who says to a father, 'What have you begotten?' or to a mother, 'What have you brought to birth?'" (Isaiah 45:9-10) The potter is in control of the clay. It is in the potter's power to make a beautiful vessel of the clay. The clay does not criticize the potter; it would be foolish for the clay to anger its creator who can break the beautiful vessel if he chooses. In this same way, it is foolish to quarrel with God, to criticize how He has made things, to find offense in His holy laws and commandments. We are only hurting ourselves when we strive against what is good and right.

The phrase, "The potter has no hands," is probably a reference to those who say there is no God. The people in the paragraph above believe there is a God but they find fault with Him and think He could have done a better job of things. Saying, "The potter has no hands," is like the clay saying, "Nobody made me. I just came into being when the forces of nature and the laws of physics came together in just the right way. There is no God and since there is no God that means I am the master of my own life."

The third example given in today's passage is of someone who quarrels with their father and mother, saying something like, "Why did you conceive me? Why was I even born? Why did I have to inherit some of your faults and weaknesses?" This is like a person saying to the Creator, "I wish I'd never been born or that I'd been born as something better than a human. Why did You make me with a human body? Why do I have free will? Why do I sometimes fall into temptation? Why couldn't I have been a supernatural creature instead? Why didn't You make me with an immortal body that can perform great wonders and that would never feel tempted by anything wrong and that would never suffer with any problems?"

We don't know why God created everything the way He created it. We don't know why He gave us mortal human bodies. We don't know why He created us with free will. We don't know why He gives somebody else a talent we would like to have had, and vice versa. But what we do know is that He does all things well. He does all things perfectly. If there had been a better way to do it than how He did it, then He'd have done something else instead. Another thing I believe we can be confident of is that we could never know and love Him in the way we love Him now and in the way we will love Him in eternity if we had not inhabited human bodies that are prone to temptation and if we had not lived in a fallen world. Whatever it is He intends us to be in our eternal existence with Him, I do not believe it could have been fully achieved if we had not had the human experience.