Daily devotion – The Potters Field
Matthew 27:6–10
The chief priests took the silver pieces and said, “It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, because they are the price of blood.” And so they used that money to buy the potter’s field—a place to bury strangers. To this day it is called the Field of Blood.
The potter’s field itself tells a story that speaks to every one of us.
In Bible times, potters took great care with their craft. If a vessel developed cracks or flaws, it was rejected and thrown outside the workshop. Over time, these discarded pieces of pottery accumulated, leaving the ground littered with broken shards. Nothing could grow there. The land became barren, useless—fit only to be a burial place for strangers and travellers who had nowhere else to be laid to rest.
The blood money of Jesus Christ was used to purchase that very place—a field marked by broken pottery and death.
How fitting a picture of what we are without Christ: broken, spiritually dead, and unable to produce life on our own.
No one has any use for broken pottery.
Yet clay in the hands of the potter is not beyond redemption.
When clay is subjected to intense heat, then placed again into water, it can be reshaped and made useful once more. So too with us. When broken lives are placed back into the hands of the Master Potter:
Heated by the trials the Lord allows into our lives,
Warmed by the precious love He pours out upon us, and
Washed by the water of the Word He teaches us,
we are reshaped—not discarded—and made vessels fit for His use and for His glory.
Jeremiah 18: 1 The word which came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying: 2 “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will cause you to hear My words.” 3 Then I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something at the wheel. 4 And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; so he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make.
5 Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying: 6 “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter?” says the LORD. “Look, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel!
The Field of Blood reminds us that what the world discards, Christ purchases with His own blood.