Job 33:13
11 He puts my feet in shackles; he watches closely all my paths.’ 12 Now in this, you are not right—I answer you, for God is greater than a human being. 13 Why do you contend against him, that he does not answer all a person’s words? 14 “For God speaks, the first time in one way, the second time in another, though a person does not perceive it. 15 In a dream, a night vision, when deep sleep falls on people as they sleep in their beds,
Romans 9:20
18 So then, God has mercy on whom he chooses to have mercy, and he hardens whom he chooses to harden. 19 You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who has ever resisted his will?” 20 But who indeed are you—a mere human being—to talk back to God? Does what is molded say to the molder, “Why have you made me like this?” 21 Has the potter no right to make from the same lump of clay one vessel for special use and another for ordinary use? 22 But what if God, willing to demonstrate his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the objects of wrath prepared for destruction?
Notes and References
"... The theme of God’s impartiality in Romans 2 also stands in the background of the question in verse 19, and the vocative address ὦ ἄνθρωπε (“Oh man”) in the reply echoes Romans 2:1, while the “vocabulary of wrath and power and patience and glory” calls back not only to 1:18–32 but also to 2:4–11. The rebuke of Romans 9:20 evokes numerous potter-clay analogies in biblical and other early Jewish literature, especially recalling Isaiah 29:16 / 45:9, Job 9:12 / 33:13, and Daniel 4:35, and the image of a potter making different kinds of vessels from the same clay (9:21) borrows heavily from Wisdom of Solomon 15:7–8 ..."
Staples, Jason A. Vessels of Wrath and God’s Pathos: Potter/Clay Imagery in Rom 9:20–23 (pp. 1-22) Harvard Theological Review, 2022