Your ShelfYour Projects

Potsherd's Striving

20%

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 20, 1871

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 38, No. 1.

Read the full edition

Potsherd's Striving.

By John Norton Loughborough

WHEN my attention was called a few days since to the article in the REVIEW on the propriety of entering into debates with spiritualists, I had just been reading testimonies from their writings in which they declare that there is no God, and especially one from a writer in Ohio who said, “Belief in a God is degrading, whatever character is ascribed to him. I can stand up and look your God in the face, and declare that I have a right to life and happiness, whether he is pleased to grant them to me or not. If I can beat your God in one case I can in a thousand, so it is his Godhead or my manhood that must succumb. So where is your God? He is nowhere, utterly routed.”
Well, thought I, what is to be gained by discussing with such men?—no God, no law, no right, no wrong, no injustice, no justice, no light, no darkness, no evil, and of course no good, no anything; and when a man should come out of such a contest, he would feel very much as though he had been very successfully beating the “airy nothing,” without habitation or name.
In the course of my meditations, Isaiah 45: 9, came to my mind, “Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands?”
A potsherd was a piece of broken crockery which, though used sometimes to carry coals on, or to dip water, was considered an article of little value. A man that riseth up against his Maker is compared to such broken crockery; but what of a man that says his Maker does not exist? Instead of striving with such, he says, Let them strive with one another. Yea, brethren, “let the potsherd of the earth strive with the potsherds of the earth,” but let us faithfully, in the fear of God, do our duty, warning, instructing, trying to help all who will receive help; but when it comes to those who strive with their Maker, let them strive with one another. J. N. LOUGHBOROUGH.