This earthy imagery repeats itself throughout the Scripture. In Psalm 103, David sings that God shows compassion on us, in part, because “He remembers that we are dust.”6 The prophet Jeremiah likens humans to a lump of clay on the potter’s wheel, being shaped and formed by the sovereign hands of the Potter.7 In the parable of the sower, Jesus compares the human heart to different types of soil that either receive or reject God’s word. And in his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul reminds them that we are simply “jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.”
