Daily Manna · Day 303 · October 30
An Immovable Kingdom
“Wherefore we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear.”
Imagine a family standing in the street in their coats at night after an earthquake. While the ground settles, they look up at their own house and work out, window by window, which parts of it are still standing.
The people who first received Hebrews were living through something like that. The letter has already told them that the old covenant they grew up with, its priests and its sacrifices, "is ready to vanish away." Instead of telling them to hold the pieces together, it quotes the prophet Haggai: "Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven." Then it explains what the shaking is for: "the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." So the shaking is God sorting what lasts from what does not.
Now look at the verb Hebrews uses for the kingdom: "we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved." We do not build it; we receive it, already finished. That means you cannot lose it by failing to prop it up, because you were never holding it up in the first place. That is why the next words are about grace and reverence: "let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear." The Greek behind "let us have grace" can just as fairly be translated "let us be thankful."
So if the kingdom is not yours to keep safe, ask yourself what you have been spending this year's strength on. What God has given you in Christ will remain, so you can rest your weight on it and give Him thanks.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 303 is By the Hearing (Job 42:5).