Isaiah 29:16 - Exposition

Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter's clay ; rather, O for your perverseness! Shall the potter be reckoned as clay? They were so perverse and wrong-headed that they inverted the relation in which they stood to God and God to them. God was to be passive, or merely give opportunities of action, and they were to mould their own plans and carve out their own destinies. For shall the work say, etc.? rather, for the work saith . Taking their destinies into their own hands was equivalent to saying that they were their own masters, which they could not be if God made them. Shall the thing framed say , etc.? rather, yea , the thing formed hath said . To refuse to take counsel of God, and direct the national policy by the light of their own reason, was to tax God with having no understanding .