A kingdom that cannot be shaken

On the first day this series named the promise from its dark side: what can be shaken is shaken so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Now turn the same verse over and read the bright side. The writer to the Hebrews does not stop at what is being removed; he tells you what you are receiving in its place. We are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken. While the made things fall away around us, an unshakable kingdom is being handed over into our hands.

Daniel had already seen it. In his vision a stone is cut out of a mountain without human hands, and it strikes the great statue of the empires and grinds it to chaff the wind carries off — and then the stone becomes a kingdom that shall never be destroyed and shall stand forever. That is the kingdom Hebrews says we are receiving. The shaking, then, is not pointless demolition after all. It is the clearing-away of everything breakable so that the one unbreakable kingdom can be seen for what it is, and taken hold of. And the right response, the writer says, is not panic. It is grateful, reverent worship.

Stand in the wreckage of your upheaval and do a hard, clarifying accounting. Everything the shaking has taken from you was, by definition, shakable — or it would still be standing. The certainties that cracked, the securities that gave way, the arrangements you leaned your weight on: they fell because they were made to fall. Grieve them honestly. But do not mistake them for the kingdom. They never were.

What you are left holding when the breakable things are gone is the only thing that was ever finally worth holding — a kingdom that cannot be moved. The temptation in any upheaval is to spend your strength clutching at what is already sliding away, as if gripping harder could make a shakable thing permanent. It cannot. So loosen your grip on the falling things, and receive the standing one. The proper posture in the rubble is not a white-knuckled fist; it is open hands, and reverence, and a strange and stubborn gratitude.