When I was young, about the time I was attending here as a teenager, there were some references going around Christian circles about “the shaking.” There were even Contemporary Christian songs about it, and it was one of those things that was never really defined. They talked about it, but they didn’t explain it. It was as if you were supposed to already understand it. But I didn’t, and so I just shrugged my shoulders and thought, oh well, it’s one of those things I’ll learn eventually.
After I became an adult, I was drawn to that expression again, and it was still used as if you were supposed to already understand what it meant. But I still never did. How can you learn something if no one tells you what it means, right?
Lately, that phrase, “the shaking,” has been popping up again, especially among Christian internet circles talking about what they sense God is saying in the New Year. Not only are many of them consistently talking about “the shaking,” I even came across one of those old songs in my eBay vinyl records search. I had been looking for a classic Christian album, and it’s hard to find on vinyl; and when I do find it on vinyl, they want a pretty penny for it. So I came across the radio single for the song “Shake,” the actual pressing that they would send to radio stations, and it made me wonder if it’s a coincidence that this reference to “the shaking” is all happening at the same time.
So I thought I’d look into it, and it came to me that this is what I should talk about this morning.
If you have your Bible, we’re going to look at Hebrews, chapter 12, verses 25-29. If they sound familiar to you, verses 28 and 29 were our scripture verses at the end of November when I talked about not taking God for granted and God being a consuming fire. And for some reason, never saw the ‘shaking’ concept in the previous verses; I focused on the idea of inheriting a kingdom that cannot be shaken.
Here’s what I said at the time:
Because of God’s grace, we will live eternally as heirs in a kingdom that will never be disturbed or politically unsettled or in any way economically fragile or suffer hardships like drought or famine or earthquakes or defeat; it won’t be a kingdom that will have good rulers and then be taken over by tyrants. We are heirs to an eternal, victorious, wonderful, perfect kingdom. And we should never take that for granted.
Scripture: So we will inherit a kingdom that will not be shaken, but what will be shaken? Let’s take a look at that starting with verse 25.
25 See to it that you do not refuse him who speaks. If they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, how much less will we, if we turn away from him who warns us from heaven? 26 At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” 27 The words “once more” indicate the removal of what can be shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain.
28 Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, 29 for our “God is a consuming fire.”
So, again we read about a ‘kingdom that cannot be shaken.’ One of the interesting things about The Kingdom of God is that it is not just a place called Heaven. The Kingdom of God includes everything and everyone in it. It includes the way of God. When Jesus talked about The Kingdom of God and what The Kingdom of God is like, he didn’t go on about the sky, the trees, the beauty, the mansions, or the streets of gold…he talked about what God is like. What his way is like. What His love is like when it pertains to us, and what our love should be like toward others.
So inheriting a kingdom that will not be ‘shaken’ not only gives us an indication of the strength and security of Heaven, it also gives us a sense of the Holiness and perfection of Heaven. But first, on earth, there must be a sifting among the people of the earth; and within his people. In order to be His, in order to be His Kingdom––not just in his Kingdom––but to be His Kingdom as we are His Church or His Bride, we must be shaken; we must have our impurities sifted out.
We won’t be perfect, but God will do a work in us, and it may take some ‘shaking’ in order to get those things loosed out from us.
Biblereference.com said: Not all things are eternal, and not all things can survive the judgment and holiness of God. In the new covenant, God offers us those things which are truly everlasting, which cannot and will not be swept away with the rest of a fallen world (Hebrews 12:28–29).
So let’s go back to the beginning of those verses. God is talking about a ‘shaking’ or a separation. In Amos chapter 9, verse 9, God talks about a shaking that he is going to bring about to the people of Israel.
He says, “For I will give the command, and I will shake the people of Israel among all the nations as grain is shaken in a sieve [or a strainer], and not a pebble will reach the ground.”
God is talking about a shaking or a separation of good and evil among His people in Israel in the Old Testament. And in Hebrews, the writer is warning his readers to ‘not refuse him who speaks.’ In the Old Testament, they often refused the word of the prophet. In the New Testament, they often refused the word of the prophet. The prophets didn’t say what the people wanted to hear. So God, respecting our humanity, lets us choose whom we would serve.
Joshua so famously said: 14 “Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. 15 And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
So, ‘choosing this day whom you will serve’ may be a right that we have as free-willed human beings, but it bears consequences. And the writer of Hebrews warns his readers by saying, “25 See to it that you do not refuse him who speaks. If they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth [the prophets], how much less will we if we turn away from him who warns us from heaven? [The Holy Spirit]”
In other words, God sent his prophets to warn his people. Now, we still have prophets, we still have priests, we have pastors, we have preachers, we have teachers, we have the scriptures, we have missionaries all over the earth, we have radio, TV, and internet, we have books, we have CDs and we have The Holy Spirit. God is not unjust in that he does not give us ample warning and time for repentance.
When he told Noah to build the ark, he gave the people 120 years to repent. When Jesus told his disciples that he is coming back soon, it’s been 2,000 years.
But God gives everyone a chance to repent, and the Bible says that God makes a way for those who haven’t heard the gospel to still have the chance to seek him out. There are many testimonies of people from other nations and religions who have sought God and found God through dreams or visions. I came across One for Israel on Youtube the other day, where a group of Messianic Jews talk about their conversion to Christianity.
I’m sure you’ve heard about conversion testimonies from Muslims or other religions where God made a way to reach people who were so far off. I wonder if some of the Native American religions might have been God revealing himself as The Great Spirit.
Crosswalk.com reminds us that: Deuteronomy 4:29 proclaims, “But if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul.” This passage teaches an important principle, everyone who truly seeks God will find Him because God makes Himself known in all of His creation. Two passages in Romans explain this point further. “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Romans 1:20) and “the requirements of the law are written on their hearts” (Romans 2:15). The complexity of the world around us teaches us there is a God.
Paul preaches in Acts 17:26-28, “From one man He [God] made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being.”
So the writer of Hebrews is warning his readers not to shirk at the warnings that have come from God in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and are still being preached to this day, and do not ignore the tug in your heart from The Holy Spirit.
If we go to the next two verses, we read, 26 At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” 27 The words “once more” indicate the removal of what can be shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain.
And this is where we get more into what this ‘shaking’ is all about. What does it mean? What is shaking? How is it being done?
This begins with “At that time,” which indicates the ‘shaking’ in The Old Testament. Here’s another set of Old Testament verses to give you an idea.
Haggai 2:6-9 say:
6 “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘In a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. 7 I will shake all nations, and what is desired by all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory,’ says the Lord Almighty. 8 ‘The silver is mine and the gold is mine,’ declares the Lord Almighty. 9 ‘The glory of this present house will be greater than the glory of the former house,’ says the Lord Almighty. ‘And in this place I will grant peace,’ declares the Lord Almighty.”
Asbury Bible Commentary says that the metaphor of an earthquake is extended to describe another political upheaval similar to when Darius took the throne. In a future shaking of the nations, God will cause the wealth of the nations to flow into the temple so that it might be decorated in a manner more splendid than Solomon’s. The “desire of all nations” means the precious things, or silver and gold, of the nations.
So shaking is an upheaval. It’s “shaking things up” or “stirring the pot.” It’s unsettling things. It’s God intentionally causing confusion, division, or political or economic insecurity.
Why? Why would a loving God do that? To get people’s attention. In this word, in Haggai, when God caused upheaval, the gold and silver went where? To his temple. It got people’s attention. All the gold and silver went where? Oh, this was an “act of God.”
Have you noticed when there’s a natural disaster, they call it “an act of God?”
I always used to be bothered by that. But what if God caused or allowed these things to happen to get our attention? I don’t think God caused 9/11, but it got our attention. And what happened? People started coming back to church. People started waking up. People started seeking God. It didn’t last, unfortunately, and I think we went downhill pretty quickly.
But I don’t think God is done. I believe, and what I hear from a lot of others lately, that God is still going to shake the earth and shake his people. And he’s going to do it to get our attention and use it as an opportunity to sift out the wheat from the chaff––or the sheep from the goats––and he’s going to shake out our impurities so that we, His Church, His Bride, can shine brighter in darker times. We need to be purer than we’ve ever been. We’ve gotten some muck on us, I think, from all of our exposure to living in this dirty old world. Have you ever had your mom come at you with a washcloth and scrape your face? You didn’t know you were dirty, and you didn’t care. We might not even see how dirty we’ve gotten spiritually, but God has. And he’s coming to clean us off.
So how do we get cleansed of something if we don’t know we’re dirty? God uses a personal shaking experience to bring it to the surface. We go through the ‘shaking’ first, to drive out our impurities so that we’re ready to take our positions when the rest of the world undergoes upheaval.
It’s kind of like full-time firefighters. We’ve got to be ready at the station to get our uniforms on and trucks ready to go when the alarm goes off. I think it’s going to be that way with God’s people. We’re going to be the spiritual EMTs when the alarms go off.
We’ve got to be ready, and we’ve got to be trained. We’ve had to get used to a little smoke and scorching. We had to get close enough to the fire to get those impurities burned out of us. Going back to Old Testament prophets again.
Malachi said: But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years (Malachi 3:2-4).
Zechariah said: This third I will put into the fire; I will refine them like silver and test them like gold. They will call on my name and I will answer them; I will say, ‘They are my people,’ and they will say, ‘The Lord is our God’” (Zechariah 13:9).
Isaiah said: “See, I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction” (Isaiah 48:10).
This is from Proverbs: The crucible for silver and the furnace for gold, but the Lord tests the heart (Proverbs 17:3).
Here’s a similar Proverb. Think about this one: The crucible for silver and the furnace for gold, but people are tested by their praise.
So God puts us through the fire to see if we’re still willing to praise Him, like Job. The very next verse in Proverbs says:
Though you grind a fool in a mortar, grinding them like grain with a pestle, you will not remove their folly from them.
Think about how it means that some who are not His, or maybe on the edge of being His, will fall away when the going gets tough rather than drawing closer.
And lastly, the psalmist said: For you, God, tested us; you refined us like silver (Psalm 66:10).
So this process can be described as a sifting, a shaking, a pruning, or a refining. They all require a little heat, a little pressure, being uncomfortable, being divinely discontent. That ‘ouch!’ that comes with pruning or refining. I like the idea of pruning from the vine because of our local wineries. We can imagine God as the vine, we as the branches and The Holy Spirit as the pruner.
I suppose another good way to illustrate this is the old Civil War-era medicine. Have you ever studied what it took to get a bullet out of a Civil War or Revolutionary War soldier before anesthetics? The old phrase “bite the bullet?” You have to inflict pain in order to treat the wound.
That’s what this shaking will require. Like the crucible, in order to purify silver, you have to turn up the heat, melt the silver and let the impurities rise to the surface. Then you scoop the impurities out.
What sort of impurities requires God to turn up the heat and inflict this type of hurt?
Maybe there are impurities that God is going to bring to the surface. Maybe it’s past hurts that we’ve stuffed down and don’t want to deal with. Maybe he wants to heal you of those things and he’s got to heat things up in order to bring them to the surface like the dross in the silver. Maybe by turning up the heat or shaking things up a bit, he’s going to bring to the surface bad habits that need to be dealt with. We often find unhealthy ways of dealing with stress, so maybe God’s got to shake things up and create some stress so that he can bring those unhealthy habits to the surface and we can let God finally deal with them.
God wants to get those impurities out, he wants to shake things up so that anger or that attitude can rear its ugly head and we have to come face to face with it, and we have to come to terms with these things. Maybe he wants to deal with that other bad habit you use to medicate yourself with when things get tough. We can’t be effective spiritual EMTs when there’s a worldwide upheaval like an economic collapse or a natural disaster or more wars and rumors of war, and we’re just as shaken up by it and as hurt and helpless and broken up as everyone else. We have to be refined, of sober mind and ready to minister.
I’m reminded of Peter’s words, “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. 9 Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings.”
There’s a verse in Deuteronomy that states,
like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young,
that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them aloft.
God has to stir our nest so that we can learn to fly.
Isaiah 40 says
He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.
30 Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall;
31 but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
At that time, when we’re soaring on eagle’s wings, our whole demeanor will be one of calm assurance. We know that we know that we know that God is in control, that He is good, and that He is our rock and our salvation. And how do we know?
Because we’ve had the nest stirred. We’ve learned to fly.
Whatever ‘it’ is in your personal life, you’ve already gone through ‘it’ and have come out as more than a conqueror through Christ Jesus. This shaking or stirring of our nest will be a time of trial and testing of our faith.
Peter said:
6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy,
Job said:
But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.
Our Daily Bread explains that the picture of that eagle stirring its nest is a picture of a mother eagle disturbing the twigs of the nest, making it an uncomfortable place to stay. Then she will pick up a perplexed eaglet, soar into the sky, and drop it. The little bird will begin to free-fall. Where is Mama? She is not far away. Quickly she will swoop under and catch the fledgling on one strong wing. She will repeat this exercise until each eaglet is capable of flying on its own.
Are you afraid of free-falling? Remember, God will fly to your rescue and spread His everlasting arms beneath you. He will also teach you something new and wonderful through it. Falling into God’s arms is nothing to be afraid of.
Get ready. Your nest just might be stirred. You might just be dropped so you can learn to fly. Or maybe you’re about to be sent into a battlefield, and the surgeon isn’t going to use anesthetics. But the surgeon will be successful and on the other side of it, we will be ‘more than conquerors’ as Paul said, and then it’ll be our turn to be the surgeons on the battlefield.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on First Baptist Church of Watkins Glen
Featured Image by Tumisu from Pixabay
GREAT ON TIME MESSAGE! GOING TO USE IT IN MY SERMON..
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