Friday 11 July 2014

Jars of Clay and Plastic Bags

The Evangelical Ministry Assembly met in the Barbican during the last few days and it seems to have been Mike Cain who offered this:
"We're not Louis Vitton handbags, we're plastic bags, so that the only explanation is that God is at work."
 The jars of clay in which the gospel treasure dwells are the ancient equivalent of plastic bags. Weak, ordinary and torn. (My source are a few tweets from people attending the conference.)

This is a useful contemporanization which I why I want to make a note of it here. But I’m glad the apostle Paul did not talk about plastic bags. Plastic bags are weak and ordinary and easily torn, but they are also an environmental hazard and the mass product of a consumerist throw-away society.


Ancient jars of clay were for all their ordinariness a product of the earth and hand-made for a purpose whether special or ordinary (Rom. 9:21; 2 Tim 2:20).