us importance that we are prone to
forget, and that truth is this, that having rejected and resisted God
for days and months and years, God cannot make of us what He could have
made if we had entered into His plans from the beginning. If you
reject God's best for you, then He tries to get you to realize His
second best. If you reject this, then He seeks to bring you to the
next best. But remember this, God cannot, in the very nature of
things, make as much out of a fraction of a life as He can out of the
whole of a life.

Now, suppose, the clay upon which the Potter was working had been
marred again. Again he would have undertaken to have made it into
another vessel. But all the while that clay would have been becoming
less and less plastic. All the while it would have been becoming more
and more difficult for the Potter to shape it according to his purpose.

Thus the time would inevitably come when it would no longer be capable
of being shaped by his hand at all. Then what would be the result?
Step outside the Potter's house and you are in the Potter's field.
About you lie broken crockery and shattered earthenware. Why is it
there? Not because the Potter made vessels for the stupid purpose of
breaking them to pieces. They are there because there was something in
the clay that so resisted the hand of the Potter that he was able to
make nothing of them but these shattered and misshapen and broken
wrecks.

Now this is the story of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. God had a noble
purpose in this man's life to begin with. He gave him every
opportunity. He brought to bear all that infinite love and mercy could
bring to bear to get Pharaoh to be a good man. The reason Pharaoh
ended as he did end was not because God did not love him and did not do
His infinite best to save Him. It was because Pharaoh resisted and
resisted, rebelled and rebelled till at last he threw himself a corpse
upon this distant seashore. And the message we hear from his clammy
lips this night is this, "Look at me and see what a terrible thing it
is to rebel against God. Behold me and see the tragic failure of the
man that persistently throws himself in wicked madness against the
bosses of the buckler of the Lord Almighty."

Look now how hard God tried to make something of Pharaoh. In the first
place, He gave to him a great and faithful minister. Pharaoh had the
privilege of knowing Moses. He had an opportunity of hearing about the
greates