What can be shaken
The God whose voice shakes the heavens
At Sinai, God's voice shook the mountain until the people trembled. But the letter to the Hebrews reaches for a greater promise: Yet once more, God says, I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens. Then the writer stops to read the meaning of that one phrase, yet once more. The shaking, he says, is a sifting. God shakes in order to remove the things that can be shaken — the made things, the temporary scaffolding — so that the things which cannot be shaken are left standing clear.
This is the promise that hangs over every upheaval in this book: the ones that crack open a soul, and the ones that crack open a church. Upheaval is not God losing His grip on the world. It is God clearing the ground. He does not shake what He means to destroy; He shakes what He means to keep — the way you shake a sieve to find the gold, the way a storm strips a tree of everything that was already dead. What falls in the shaking was always going to fall. What remains was always the real thing.
“Yet once more, I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens.”
— The LORD, quoted in Hebrews — Hebrews 12:26 (WEB)
“This phrase, Yet once more, signifies the removing of those things that are shaken... that those things which are not shaken may remain.”
Before the four phases begin, hear the promise that covers all of them. Every upheaval moves through a shape — disconnect, disorientation, reorientation, reconnect — and God is in each one. The shaking is not random; it has a destination. You are not merely falling; you are being sifted toward what lasts.
The diagnosis, the doubt, the loss that has shaken your private world feels like collapse, like the floor of your own life giving way. But hold it up to this promise. What is being shaken in you is being separated from what cannot be shaken in you. You are not losing your faith; you may be losing the scaffolding around it, the borrowed certainties and the props you mistook for the structure, so that the real thing can finally stand on its own. Ask the truer question now. Not how do I make this stop, but what is being revealed here that was always going to last?
We meet our upheavals as emergencies — something has gone wrong, and the first instinct is to stop the shaking and get back to how it was. But what if the shaking is not the disaster? What if it is the mercy — the only way the temporary things could be sifted out from the permanent ones, in a soul, or across the whole Church, that had quietly let the two blur together?
God shakes what He loves. He lets the false floor give way precisely because He means to leave you standing on the real one.
One thing must be held carefully here, because a wounded reader needs both halves of it. God is not the author of evil — He does not work the cruelty or author the sin, and when others have sinned against you, the guilt is theirs and not His. And yet nothing reaches you from outside His hand. He allows what He allows, and at times He Himself sends a hard providence: a severe mercy that disciplines, that lets a smaller ruin come in order to spare you a greater one, that wounds the way a surgeon wounds, to heal. The shaking is not God losing hold of your pain.
He is not the author of the evil, but He is the Lord of the wreckage, and He bends even what He would never call good toward what cannot be shaken.
So when the ground moves under you — your certainties, your plans, the very faith you were raised on — the truest question is not how do I make this stop, but what is being revealed here that cannot be shaken? Everything that survives the shaking of your soul, you get to keep forever.
The Church is shaken too, and in our day the tremors are loud: institutions discredited, a generation walking out the door, old certainties cracking, a watching world unconvinced. Phyllis Tickle traced a longer rhythm beneath it, paraphrasing her here, not quoting: roughly every five hundred years the faith's hardened shell breaks open and the whole Body hauls its inheritance onto the lawn to sort. The same promise that steadies a soul steadies the Church universal. God shakes the Body He means to renew, not the one He means to abandon. What the great traditions lose in such a season is rarely the gospel itself; it is the scaffolding the gospel had been hiding behind, the made things that were never the unshakable thing.
A kingdom that cannot be shaken. When the made things are gone, Christ and His reign remain — the one floor that holds in every earthquake, personal or ecclesial, the thing you were standing on all along without knowing it.
- What is being shaken in my life right now — and what if it is a sifting, not a disaster?
- Which of my certainties were scaffolding, and which is the unshakable thing underneath?
- Can I trust that God only shakes what He means to keep?
Lord, when everything shakes, steady me with this: You shake what You love, in order to keep it. Sift out of me, and out of Your Church, whatever was never going to last, and let me find my feet on the one kingdom that cannot be moved. Amen.