Paul uses a picture everyone understood: a potter at work with clay. No one questions a potter's right to make a fine vessel and a plain one out of the same lump. Barnes explains that "power" here means not mere force but "authority, right." Gill calls it "the sovereign and unlimited power which God has over his creatures." The question presses the objector to admit that the Maker has a right the thing made does not have, and so to stop arguing against God.

The question expects the answer "Yes." Paul does not stop to state it; he moves straight to how God has actually used that right: He "endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath," and He made known "the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy" (Romans 9:22-23). Those vessels of mercy are "us, whom he hath called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles" (Romans 9:24).

The potter and the clay was a familiar picture from Israel's prophets. Barnes points to Jeremiah 18:6 ("as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel") and Isaiah 64:8 ("we are the clay, and thou our potter"). The Greek word for "power" is exousia, authority or the right to act. The "lump" is phurama, a mass that has been mixed, a word also used for dough. Gill sees in the clay an allusion to the first creation of man out of the dust of the earth (Genesis 2:7).

This question is about who God is. He is the Maker, and His people are the work of His hands. Matthew Henry asks whether men would not allow the infinite God "the same sovereign right to manage the affairs of the creation, as the potter exercises in disposing of his clay."

But Paul does not leave the picture as cold power. The very next verses show how this Potter uses His right: with "much longsuffering" toward those who deserve wrath, and with "the riches of his glory" toward vessels of mercy (Romans 9:22-23). Barnes adds that God does no injustice to anyone, since all are undeserving and none has a claim on Him. The God who holds the clay is patient and merciful.