The Potter Still Has the Wheel
War, Weather, and the Ancient Truth That Humanity Is Clay
Wars often begin with words. A president speaks from a lectern. Clerics thunder from pulpits. Analysts draw arrows across maps. Yet behind the choreography of power there is always a quieter truth waiting to be noticed. In late February the President of the United States announced that American forces had begun major combat operations against Iran, targeting its leadership, missile arsenal, and nuclear infrastructure. In the address he acknowledged the cost that inevitably accompanies war: “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war.”
Meanwhile, across the other side of the conflict, an Iranian cleric has publicly called for vengeance, declaring that the blood of America’s leader should be shed. Such rhetoric, presidential declarations on one side and religious calls for blood on the other, quickly moved from words to consequences. Iranian sailors aboard a warship in the Indian Ocean were killed when the vessel was torpedoed. Civilians across the region have been caught in missile strikes and falling drones. Cities have sounded sirens from Tel Aviv to Tehran. American servicemen have also died. Only hours earlier many of these individuals had been planning ordinary things: meals, duties, phone calls home. Then the moment arrived that none of them could resist. Death, when it comes, does not ask whether the calendar is convenient.
Scripture has long insisted that this boundary in human life is immovable. “No one has power over the spirit to retain the spirit, and no one has power in the day of death; there is no discharge in that war” (Ecclesiastes 8:8). Armies can be mobilized and missiles launched, but when the appointed moment of death arrives, there is no negotiation with it. Even the strongest soldier cannot push it back. Death comes with a quiet authority that human strength cannot challenge.
The Bible explains why this is so through imagery so simple that it follows the reader from Genesis all the way to Revelation. Humanity, Scripture says, is clay. In the beginning, “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7). Before there were nations, ideologies, and military alliances, there was simply dust in the hands of God. Human life began the way a pot begins on a wheel, shaped by a potter’s hands.
This imagery quietly dismantles human pride. Isaiah once asked a question that still echoes through history: “Shall the thing formed say to him who formed it, ‘He did not make me’? Shall the potter be regarded as the clay?” (Isaiah 29:16). Later he answers the question plainly: “We are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand” (Isaiah 64:8). Clay does not determine its own destiny. It does not decide how long it will sit on the shelf or whether it will survive the kiln.
Even the patriarch of faith understood this. When Abraham spoke to God about the fate of Sodom, he did so with remarkable humility: “I who am but dust and ashes have taken it upon myself to speak to the Lord” (Genesis 18:27). The man through whom nations would be blessed still saw himself for what he ultimately was, dust briefly given breath.
Oddly enough, one does not need a battlefield to rediscover this truth. A farm will do. I own a farm in Voi, Taita Taveta County. Late last year, I prepared the land thoroughly in anticipation of the short rains. A tractor was hired at considerable cost, and the soil was tilled beautifully. The Kenya Meteorological Department had predicted that the rains would be very heavy, even warning of possible flooding. Encouraged by those forecasts, I purchased several varieties of seeds and had my farmhand plant them across the freshly prepared shamba.
The rains arrived, but only briefly. Within days, they disappeared. What followed felt almost like the sun had adopted a scorched-earth policy. Calls from the farm reported that it seemed as if the sun had descended a few metres closer to the earth. Germinating seeds were burned at the moment they emerged. Tender sprouts were sizzled before they could even unfold their first leaves. Meanwhile, the meteorological forecasters grew suddenly quiet while the public supplied the ridicule.
That relentless heat persisted until late February. Yet as I write this on the 5th of March, something unexpected has happened. The rains have returned, perhaps the beginning of the long rains. The soil is soaked again. Wild vegetables such as mtango and mnyinya have reappeared on people’s plates. The difficulty now is that no one knows whether the rain will continue or vanish again. Seed stores are empty because merchants were not expecting rain so soon. Farmers hesitate because the sky has become unpredictable.
Standing between the theatre of war and the theatre of farming, one begins to notice the same lesson written in both places. Presidents declare operations. Clerics cry for blood. Meteorologists forecast the behaviour of clouds. Farmers prepare fields as if the sky had signed a binding contract. Yet the clouds rarely attend the briefing. Events repeatedly remind us that the clay is not actually in charge.
Jeremiah once stood in a potter’s workshop and watched the craftsman shaping clay on the wheel. When the vessel collapsed in his hands, the potter calmly reshaped it into another form (Jeremiah 18:4). The lesson was unmistakable: nations themselves are clay on the wheel of history.
The New Testament echoes the same imagery. Paul writes, “Does not the potter have authority over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honour and another for common use?” (Romans 9:21). Yet he adds an unexpected twist: these fragile vessels carry something extraordinary inside them. “We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Corinthians 4:7).
Perhaps the most striking moment in Scripture that reveals God’s perspective on human life appears in a quiet sentence about the childhood of Jesus. After King Herod attempted to kill the infant Jesus, Joseph fled with the child to Egypt. Later, God spoke again to Joseph in a dream and said: “Arise, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead” (Matthew 2:20). It is a remarkable line. God speaks as one who sees both sides of existence, the land of the living and the realm where the dead have gone. Those who once possessed the power of a king and the authority to issue death orders had themselves passed beyond the reach of their own commands.
And so the story of humanity continues. Nations clash. Farmers wait for rain. Meteorologists publish forecasts. Clerics and politicians issue declarations. The clay debates, predicts, commands, and prepares. The Potter shapes.
The wheel turns. Clay rises and collapses. Vessels appear and disappear.
And the Potter still has the wheel.