Significantly, the clay is not portrayed as passive in these passages but rather as challenging its maker, serving as a satirical image for Israel’s rebellion and accusations against YHWH. In this context, as with Jeremiah, the potter/clay images in Isaiah do not suggest that YHWH works irresistibly—the very rebellion that has prompted these oracles demonstrates Israel’s capacity to resist. Instead, these passages rebuke the stubbornness of the people, who should submit to their creator rather than resisting him. In the same way, Paul’s (slightly amended) quotation of Isa 29:16 in Rom 9:20 is not an assertion of unilateral divine fiat but instead calls attention to the foolishness of humans imagining they could rightly impugn God’s justice, a point he further reinforces by appealing to God’s pathos in the next verses.[…]
These echoes and the potter/clay metaphor itself remind the reader not only that the divine potter has the right to make vessels of dishonor from disobedient Israel but that God has always reserved the right to respond to Israel’s disobedience in this manner. Indeed, God has previously made an unfaithful portion of Israel into a vessel for dishonorable use and cast that worthless vessel among the nations. Not coincidentally, God is now calling instruments of mercy from among the nations where Israel was sown (Zech 10:9; cf. Hos 2:23), redeeming the not-people from their useless state (9:24-26). The master potter has therefore used even the disobedience of his people to bring about mercy and redemption (cf. Rom 11:25-26), a purpose that has paradoxically been facilitated even by disobedient instruments of wrath. By implication, if God has made redemptive use even of Israel’s past disobedience, the same can be expected of any disobedience in the present. The incorporation of transformed gentiles therefore serves not as evidence of God’s unfaithfulness but rather as proof that God’s faithfulness to unfaithful Israel extends even further than previously imagined. God’s mercy ultimately supersedes his wrath, completing the circle of redemption (cf. Rom 11:28-36).