Shaking
We worship a God who delights to shake things. He has done so again and again and again throughout our short history. This can be the cause of no small amount of confusion. And if you don’t know what’s coming, or what to expect, it can lead to a kind of unnecessary despair. Let me explain.
You find yourself in the normal rhythms of everyday life here in 21st century America. You’re ordering your burrito on your phone, meeting friends for happy hour, observing relatively normal political disagreements in the various Op-Ed sections of the newspaper and otherwise enjoying all the conveniences of modern day living. Here things are, continuing as they always have, only with more burritos, nifty cameras that fit in your pocket, and better TV. Your job is okay, your kids are going to school everyday, you aren’t embarrassed by the President, and you can go up to the mountains often enough. You spend your days largely concerned about how many burritos your eating, how much screen time your kids are digesting, and how you can get to the mountains a little more often. Then a pandemic hits. Your kids are now on their screens 10 hours a day to get their math homework, which is just beyond what you can recall from your own math classes. You can’t buy burritos anymore because all the burrito shops are closed. The mountain towns have become viral swamps according to the news, so you can’t go there to get away from it all. Politics have turned into a giant dumpster fire and then there are the literal fires. What, only 8 months ago was mostly a nice, normal world with some idiosyncrasies that were a bit annoying, has become an apocalyptic ball of uncertainty with no sign of where we can land this mad plane.
Now in the middle of all this, if you forget what I said up front, namely “We worship a God who delights to shake things,” you could be confused, even a little riddled with anxiety. You might think this is all just a big ball of madness being thrown into a washing machine filled with radioactive goo. But you’d be forgetting one of the most fundamental things God does, and you’d miss that this madness isn’t a flaw of this whole thing called history, but rather a feature. God shakes things and he does so according to plan. In other words, these things aren’t chaos, but rather they are headed somewhere on purpose.
The author of Hebrews reminds God’s people in chapter 12:26-29
“At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”
This shaking is filled with glorious purpose. We’ll see this weekend in Romans 8 that it is a shaking accompanied by groaning and suffering - real suffering. But that the glory that will be revealed on the other side will cause us to count that suffering as nothing. Think about that for a minute or two (or well, a lot longer)… All this shaking and the accompanying fall-out - which can be devastating and could get quite a bit worse - all of that loss which is real and the Bible doesn’t make light of (and we shouldn’t either) will be nothing compared to the glorious and gracious accomplishment of God.
You see, He shakes in order to establish that which can’t be shaken. Here is a God who, with glee, overturns all our perceived stabilities in order to give us what is truly stable. He overturns all our mediocre beauty for what is in fact beautiful and glorious and good. So what are we to do with all this shaking? Well, we should do what the author of Hebrews instructs us to do: Worship with awe and reverence. Gather with the saints, tremble and marvel in the presence of a God who can shake everything, worship Him and then, give thanks for this kingdom He loves to give in the shaking - an unshakeable kingdom full of beauty and grace.