“What’s happening?”  As these words are being written, some form of that question is on the lips of many people in the United States and around the world.  Financial upheaval with its concomitant repercussions in other areas has struck with a force that the current generation has never experienced.  Some see neither reason nor explanation for our present situation; others offer a host of political and economic explanations of the cause of this crisis, authorities offering completely contradictory explanations about what got us here.  Virtually entirely lacking in the public discourse, however, is any consideration of the underlying Source of these circumstances—the God of heaven and earth.

            Many might be aghast at the suggestion that the current turmoil is in any way attributable to God.  But to think otherwise is both to deny the character of God and the plain teaching of the Word of God.  For every page of the Bible clearly declares that God is actively at work in the affairs of men—whether that be His chosen people and the Gentile nations or whether that be the church and the world.

            One of the purposes of the vision given to Ezekiel that opens the book by his name is to reveal that God presides over the affairs of men.  In his vision, Ezekiel (ch. 1) sees four living creatures, angelic beings.  Part of the vision of these beings includes a picture of a “wheel in the middle of a wheel” (v. 16), wheels that are “dreadful” (v. 18) partially because of their enormous size, which reaches from earth to heaven.  The fact that the wheels touch both realms  reveals the truth that God’s heavenly throne presides over the activities of earth.  We have only to read the pages of the Book to discover this truth more fully.  From the pages of the past, we see God afflicting Israel and Judah, using Gentile nations to decimate His chosen people, killing, capturing, and enslaving them until they ceased to be a nation.  From the pages of the future, we see prophesied that God is going to send a period of seven years of horrendous universal judgment, the depth and extent of which are without precedent.  To think that between these two monumental events, God is leaving man to his own devices is erroneous.

            In fact, regarding the coming judgment of the tribulation, we read in Haggai, “For thus saith the Lord of hosts; Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land; and I will shake all nations” (2:6, 7a).  Then the writer of the Book of Hebrews, quoting this passage, offers the further explanation that this shaking signifies “the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain” (12:27).  As was said, this prophecy clearly has reference to the period of the seven-year tribulation yet future, but it sheds light on God’s methodology.  “Natural” events come from God’s directive or His permissive will to accomplish His purpose.  Whatever else the purpose of currents events, then, we must recognize the hand of God graciously “shaking” anything that can be shaken.  This shaking serves at least a two-fold purpose:  first, that the lost might forsake their false security and cling to Him by faith; second, that the saved might trust Him only, live for eternity and not for time, invest in heaven and not in earth, forsake the uncertain riches of earth for the unsearchable riches of Christ, and live for the glory of God.  To be shaken is a fearful thing, which no one enjoys.  But it is God’s gracious means of showing the lost that He disapproves of their ways and that, unless they repent, they are facing the wrath of a holy God.  And it is a reminder to the saved to set our affections on things above, not on things on the earth.  The Lord is instructing us to prepare for eternity—now.