An Immovable Kingdom

A family stands in the street in their coats in the middle of the night while the ground settles, looking up at their own house and working out, window by window, which parts of it are still true.

The people this letter went to were doing something like that. Their whole religious world was coming apart, the temple and the sacrifices and the visible structure of everything they had been raised inside, and the writer does not tell them to hold the pieces together. He quotes Haggai instead: Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And then he says what the shaking is for. The removing of those things that are shaken, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain. The shaking is not the disaster. It is the sorting.

Then look at the verb he chooses for the kingdom. Not building. Not defending. We receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved. It arrives in your hands already finished, which means you cannot lose it by failing to prop it up, and you were never holding it up in the first place. That is why the next clause is about grace and about serving with reverence, and not about effort. The old translators put it as let us have grace; it can just as fairly be read let us be thankful.

So if the kingdom is not yours to secure, what exactly have you been spending this year's strength on?

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 303 is By the Hearing (Job 42:5).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna