Day Two: Treasure in Earthen Vessels

“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” Second Corinthians 4:7.

The word Paul chose for earthen is a common one, and it is not flattering. It describes the cheap baked clay that ordinary household pots were made of, the kind of pottery that filled a first century kitchen and filled the trash heap outside of town when it cracked. Nobody wrote an inventory of their clay pots. Nobody repaired one. When it broke you swept it up and got another, because the whole point of a clay vessel was that it was expendable.

That is the container God chose for the treasure. Not a strongbox. Not something reinforced. A pot that anyone would expect to break, because breaking is what those pots do.

I have spent a lot of years feeling like the wrong container. There is a particular kind of grief that comes from watching your body become unreliable, and it goes deeper than the pain itself. It is the sense that you have been disqualified. That whatever God might have done with you, He would need someone sturdier to do it through, and you are now a liability He is graciously putting up with rather than a vessel He is actually using.

Read the verse again and notice that Paul does not defend the pot. He does not argue that clay is stronger than it looks. He says the fragility is the reason, “that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”

The weakness of the container is not a problem the treasure has to overcome. It is the condition under which the treasure becomes visible as treasure and not as the container’s own accomplishment.

Gideon understood this before Paul wrote it down. Three hundred men went down against an army with nothing in their hands but a trumpet and a pitcher with a lamp hidden inside it. The light did not shine while the pitcher was intact. Judges tells us they brake the pitchers, and only then did the valley fill with light. The vessel had to fail before anyone could see what was in it.

I am not going to tell you that makes your condition feel better. It does not, and I distrust any writing that pretends otherwise. Paul certainly did not feel better about it. Look at what follows in the very next verses: troubled on every side, perplexed, persecuted, cast down. Four hard words in a row, and he only softens them with the phrase “yet not.” Not distressed. Not in despair. Not forsaken. Not destroyed. He does not say the pressure lifted. He says it did not finish him.

Here is what I would have you carry out of this. The people around you who seem strong are clay too. Their pots have simply not cracked yet, or the cracks are in places you cannot see from the outside. There is no category of Christian who is made of better material. There is only the treasure, which is the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, and the fact that some of us have been broken open in public.

If you have been carrying the belief that your usefulness to God ended when your body failed, you have gotten the verse exactly backward. The failure of the vessel was never the disqualification. It is the whole reason anyone will know the light was not yours.