 very quick survey, very quick, because when we talk about God shaking the nations, I know people want to know, well, how do you see things working out, you know, and I've been on the air doing this kind of thing since 1987, and that first year I was on the air, the first big thing that came up was a little booklet called 88 Reasons the Rapture will occur in 1988, and so, you know, I was skeptical then, and I'm skeptical now of people who claim to have such knowledge, but there's also something I've seen, and that is a definite change in the temperament of our country. There's absolutely no question that religious faith, for instance, has been pushed more and more to the margins of our life. More and more there are competing spiritualities and philosophies and theologies out there, and at the same time there's more and more religious illiteracy, you know, probably you remember, it's been almost 20 years ago now, when the Da Vinci Code came out, that novel by Dan Brown, which I couldn't believe the number of people who I thought were of good will who actually bought Hookline and Sinker the nonsense in that book regarding the Catholic Church. I mean, I remember reading one comment saying something like, let's see, John Grisham teaches us about torts and the law, and Tom Clancy teaches us about the military establishment and the intelligence community, and Dan Brown teaches us about the Catholic Church, and I said, yeah, right, and I get tutored, I get tutored in anthropology by Fred Flunestone, but that's the kind of religious illiteracy that was out there almost 20 years ago now, and it hasn't gotten any better. Unfortunately, in spite of the fact that there's still many people interested in, quote, spiritual things, we are looking at some unusual things, though, that have happened. We now have the threat of cyber warfare and the Biden administration just last week came out publicly and said that Russia has been engaged in internet activity, social media activity, which is intended to inflame further divisions among Americans. And of course, we probably know that there's more, on the Facebook anyways, it looks to me like there's more hostility between left and right today than I can remember in my lifetime. To me, it seems even worse than we saw in the late 60s, early 70s. I mean, we've never seen anything like January 6th, for instance, happen, where a crowd, which normally is associated with the maintenance of law and order, fairly conservative crowd, actually has a riot, not a coup d'etat, it's not a coup d'etat, but it had a riot at the Capitol building. You don't see that kind of thing. You don't see a sitting president claim that there was election fraud, whether there is or isn't is not my point. But we've never, in my lifetime, we've never seen a president do that. We are winning in religious liberty issues in the courts, I think, but we're losing in the culture. It is very difficult for committed Catholics in the academic world to find the places in secular institutions. We've got, well, again, I think we might be winning a little bit in the religious liberty area. We definitely are not winning in the culture. And so, Mary has pointed out, the cancel culture has intimidated a lot of people, and we're going to have to regain a real boldness here. In the church, well, listen to this. In 2000, 1998, 1999, 2000, right around there, as we move towards the Jubilee, the greatest, the two greatest moral authorities in the world, the two people with the highest universal esteem were St. John Paul II and the late Mother Teresa. That, so when people thought about the Catholic Church, that was the face of the Catholic Church. 2002 comes along, and all of the enormous goodwill that those two saints had generated towards the church got squandered because of the behavior of roughly maybe 4% of priests. Nobody knows exactly, but the point is, we know it's not a majority, but it is, it's been a problem. And last week, we learned of the general secretary, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who was in fact out using a hookup app to have anonymous sexual trists with people when he was on the road. So we have a problem here. This is not the era of St. John Paul II or Mother Teresa. It's easy for the Catholics to feel as though we're not getting the respect we deserve, but that's okay. We worship a God who, when he took on human flesh, came to his own and his own did not receive him. So we shouldn't be, we shouldn't expect that the world's going to love us. We, I don't think that there's any denying that something is going on in the phrase, God shaking the nations is a good phrase. What do we do as God is shaking the nations? You know, you don't get a, you don't get a little scorecard. You don't get a player's manual to figure out who all the players on all the actors are. We all have to deal with the fact that we have limited perspectives that we are small. And in fact, that's one of the reasons life is so shakeable, so unstable. Why so often, things seem to be at the edge of the cliff. We are small and we're sinful. We don't like being small, and so we engage in sinful behavior to con others that we aren't really so small, or we con ourselves and deny that we aren't too small. And of course, to be small is not necessarily to be sinful. I mean, what's wrong with being small? In principle, everybody's small in comparison to somebody else, right? In fact, to say you're small is to say very little more than that you are limited. And that's the essence of being a creature. To say we are small, we're saying simply that we are not God. When people, however, especially in a fallen world, people adopt behaviors which violate the will of God in order to mask their creatureliness. And this is one of those things which we know a lot about, of course, just simply from these scriptures. We go back to the Garden of Eden on this. Adam and Eve knew they were creatures. They knew they were not God. Adam knew it was not good for man to be alone. He was definitely limited and incomplete without Eve. But we also see how the devil seduced both of them into thinking that God was somehow withholding some good thing from them. Basically, the serpent saying, look, you guys are small and you can be big. You know, you just have to do the one thing that you've been commanded not to do. Eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And you know how the story goes. They reach for the forbidden fruit. They take a big dive down in their brought low. They destroy the relationship with God. The theological dimension of life is all messed up. They then turn against one another. The blame game begins and they destroy the sociological dimension of life. They are filled with fear and shame and guilt and they destroy the psychological dimension of life. And even nature turns against them. Adam's only get thorns and thistles now out of the earth for all of his labor. So you have a theological rupture. You have a sociological rupture. You have a psychological rupture. You have an ecological rupture. You know, why? Because Adam and Eve couldn't accept the fact that they were, quote, small. And to mask their limits, they engaged in sin. Years ago, there was a play that always tickled me. I never saw it, but I love the title of it. Your arms are too short to box with God. And this is, you can imagine, this is the telegram that the serpent sent to Adam and Eve after the fall. You can almost hear him sneering and laughing. Now, it's often difficult to trace the relationship between an individual's moral choices and how these end up, end up impacting society and culture around us. I'm not talking about things that are obvious, like it was immoral for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. I'm talking about the immoral choices that are made much earlier in the causal sequence. And in fact, oftentimes made in private. So when I say King David's sin to you, my guess is, what do you think of? Bathsheba. Maybe a secondary sin is Uriah the Hittite, the murder of Uriah the Hittite. But let me point out that before those terrible acts of betrayal, King David was already shirking his duties. And second Samuel 11, verse one, in the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king's men. When David was supposed to be leading, he was lounging. One evening he gets up from bed. I'd like to figure out why he says one evening. Today may be a little different in ancient Israel, but one evening he gets up from bed, he walks down through the roof of the palace. And from there he spies a beautiful woman bathing. And he sends for her. And he knows that he's told that Bathsheba is the wife of one of his most faithful warriors, Uriah the Hittite. I've always thought it'd be nice to know what Bathsheba thought of this whole thing. But all we know from her is a statement. I am pregnant. That's her response. And as all Americans who live through Watergate and Monica Lewinsky and the Hillary Clinton email dust up, no, the cover-ups are always worse than the crime. And what follows from lounging instead of leading is a wickedly deliberate plan to cover his treachery and his sin escalates from adultery to deceit, abuse of authority, and then murder and betrayal of one of his top warriors. He's violated at least four of the 10 commandments. And the last chapters of Second Samuel demonstrate the subsequent history of the royal family as well as the nation, dominated by King David's sin. The consequences of that sin, lounging rather than leading, I like to put it, because insherting his responsibility to govern properly, he led his family and his nation into disaster. Now, King David was too small for his outsized desires, right? He refused to recognize the boundaries of his creatureliness. He wanted to command and get what he wanted when he wanted as soon as he wanted. And this changed the future for his family and for the nation. Now, talking about an individual so far being small, but nations are small too and societies are small and they want to be big. And they engage in all kinds of projects intended to suppress their smallness. Individuals have, of course, a fantasy life in which they're the star of the show and they're the hero in their own legend. But nations undertake means to reassure them of their greatness. In Scripture, we see this, of course, with Pharaoh's project in Egypt. We see it in the Tower of Babel project. And these projects are ultimately to eliminate God from the center of our lives and somehow elevate some human construct as supreme and absolute. Now, in our own day, we're seeing this once again in communist China. We thought we had kind of demonstrated the superiority of, quote, democratic capitalism, a kind of a Christian-based understanding of free markets. We thought we had won that battle back in 1989, 1990, with the collapse of Soviet-style communism. And by the way, something to keep in mind is that when Soviet-style communism was knocked out, I remember an interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, who, by the way, I understand is a Catholic, Polish Catholic. And Brzezinski went and asked, why did Soviet-style communism collapse? He responded immediately. He said, it's because they misunderstood the nature of man. They misunderstood his need for creativity and his need for freedom. It was a spiritual battle. That's what was going on behind the scenes. That's what was going on in the heavenlies between the Soviet Union and the West. But what's funny is, you can't even trust that the nation in which you are, we all feel patriotic. I'm a child of the Cold War. I still love America and the stories of her greatness and the brilliance of the founding fathers. So don't get me wrong here. But I've come to the place where I've had to recognize that I'm living in a land which is engaged on a project which may not be what I thought it was. This is so close to us that I sometimes think we don't really see it. Human beings have civilizing impulses that a good society wants to foster. A good society wants to help cultivate these civilizing impulses so that people will flourish. One of the most important of those civilizing impulses is what we call maternal love, the impulse that mothers feel to protect their children. Mama Bear wants to protect baby bear. Everybody knows that. In America, we have one of the most permissive abortion policies in the world right now. And at least when Democrats are in the White House, they want to export abortion. Now, we've been fighting this since 1973, but think about that. We're part of a nation that has chosen to approve and applaud a practice in the name of liberty that actually corrupts one of the most basic civilizing impulses that women feel. Let's take something else. It's one of the most civilizing impulses that go through human beings is the impulse of a man for a woman. We have the story of Jacob working for his bride. In our case, men work to provide a home for wife and children. There's something in that impulse that allows a man to flourish if, in fact, he cultivates it properly. But we're living now in a country which has formally, formally approved and applauded and celebrates the fact of a man laying down with another man and redefining marriage so that that thing is possible. If that were being done in another country, right, and we were back in America of the 1930s or 40s, we'd look at that and we'd say that country has fallen off the cliff. But it's happening. And I think that we should recognize that it is quite possible that in spite of the stories we tell ourselves about the founding of this country, it's quite possible that there's an inner logic to it, which is going to, once the Christian influence within the culture, kind of a restraining force of Christian influence, once that is pushed to the margins of life, the ugly logic of that hidden premise may end up turning this nation not into a nation under God, but a nation against man. Now, we don't, we see in communist China now, this kind of thing most clearly, we saw it with the Soviet Union now, communist China, we saw it with the Third Reich of the Nazis. But we had a 75 year experiment of Soviet communism. So just as individuals have ways that they deny their limits and push God to the margins, nations do the same. And there are plenty of intellectuals glad to provide a rationale for projects like this. So I mean the mid 20th century, I just mentioned one, because the statement is just so impressive, mid 20th century French existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, he's an architect of this vision of the city of man. He wrote atheism is the permission or excuse me, atheism is the persuasion that man is the creator and that he's abandoned alone in the world. But because we're made to image God, right, we're not able to help making moral judgments. So even though Sartre's an atheist, he is still because he's a human ends up making moral judgments. He has to. And so I mean this is a man who defended Joseph Stalin, even while Khrushchev was denouncing Stalin during a notorious trial of three people charged with sexual abuse of minors. Sartre was about urging that they lower the age of consent. His ethical impulses had been twisted, I would argue, by his rejection of God. Now we hear that and we say to ourselves, my gosh, that is a man who believed that if God was dead, he could do anything he wanted. And in other words, he could simply invent his own morality, invent his own approach to life. And of course in the United States we still find that appalling, except that the US Supreme Court, in a few decisions now, beginning with Planned Parenthood v. Casey and then Lawrence v. Texas, wrote this, at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe in the mystery of human life. At the heart of liberty is your right to define reality, to define the meaning of the universe. This is the same view of life that Atheists like Jean-Paul Sartre believed, and here it is, part of Supreme Court jurisprudence now. We don't know what the future holds. God is shaking the nations, he's shaking the culture, he's shaking the church. We haven't even talked about the claim that somehow mid-century there's going to be the need to develop artificial intelligence prosthetics that can be worked into a union with our natural brain so that we can stay ahead of the growth of these new artificial AI devices. We haven't talked about experiments that are being done, human, not here in the United States, but experiments being done of new human-animal combinations. We haven't talked about researchers who are saying they're trying to reverse engineer the human genome so that we might live forever. These are not the fantasies of science fiction. Whether they can do these things or not, beside the question, beside the point. What is the point, though, is that they are attempting it and they're getting significant amounts of money from various foundations and philanthropies. Saint Augustine told us there's an ongoing battle between the city of God and the city of man and our choice by virtue of our baptism is to side with the city of God. Now what I'd like to do is take a look at Hebrews chapter 12 and beginning it at verse 18. I think we'll start there. The Hebrews, the letter to the Hebrews might have been a sermon to a number of Hebrew Christians. It's hard to know exactly. They may have been in Rome. They may have been in Jerusalem. We do know that they had been through some persecution, although not to the point of shedding of blood yet. We know they had been imprisoned and that they actually had developed a sympathy for people in prison. We know that they had become very good at hospitality. We also know that many of them were beginning to lose their faith and they weren't attending Mass any longer. They had to be urged to get together again. Don't go drifting off on your own. They were living at a time where God was shaking the nations. In all likelihood, the letter to the Hebrews or the sermon to the Hebrews took place a few months to a few years before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. This letter assumes on the part of its audience a great deal of knowledge regarding the Jewish ritual, the Jewish customs. So the argument through the epistle is to demonstrate the superiority of Jesus, the initiator of the new covenant, the great high priest, the one who gave the ultimate sacrifice. The argument through the entire sermon or the letter to the Hebrews is this. Don't apostatize. Don't fall away. Three times are these flaming challenges to stay faithful. So they're undergoing some big changes. And what we know now, what's ironic about this is that they are on the verge of seeing one of the great confirmations of Jesus's prophetic status. Jesus had prophesied that the temple would be destroyed. They were in months or just a few years of seeing that happen. But when they got the letter, Caesar was still on the throne and the Jewish religious establishment was still in place. So let's take a look and take a look at verse 18. I love the contrast that begins here. But you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest. And the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. For they could not endure the order that was given. If even a beast touches the mountain, it will be stoned. Indeed. So terrifying was the sight that Moses said, I tremble with fear. Now, I read through that quickly because it probably doesn't necessarily flash in your mind what's going on here. But what's being set up is a contrast between the old covenant, the new covenant, between Moses and Jesus, between Sinai and Mount Zion. And this is carried out throughout this end of Hebrews chapter 12. So it starts out by saying, but you have not come to, and then what follows is what I call the trauma of the holy. He's describing what happened back when the law was given at Sinai. You had all these gloom, tempest, sound of trumpet, a voice that was so thunderous that even Moses was scared to death. And he's saying, you have not come to this. The same verb is picked up and he says, but you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, to the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festival gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. See that you do not refuse him who is speaking, for if they did not escape when they, this is Israelites at Sinai, if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven. At that time, God's voice shook the earth, but now he's promised, quoting from Haggai here, a kind of an aversion of it, yet once more I will shake, not only the earth, but also the heavens. This phrase, yet once more, indicates the removal of things that are shaken, that is things that have been made in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, all this stuff, right? Therefore, in light of all this, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, an unshakable kingdom, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe for our God is a consuming fire. So, you have come, you have not come to this trauma of the holy that the children of Israel experience at the base of Mount Sinai. You have come to Mount Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem. This happens in the Old Testament over and over again. I don't know who came up with the phrase, the trauma of the holy, but you see it frequently. You see it, for instance, when an angel breaks through, the angel is coming from the realm of the sacred, and when the angel comes into the realm of the profane, there's fear that's generated, and so an angel will frequently say fear not. That's a little taste of the trauma of the holy, but there's also the consequence of poor Azza, who was struck dead when he reached out to study the Ark of the Covenant, which was the most holy object in ancient Israel. He may have had good intentions to study the Ark, but that didn't excuse his violation of Israel's holiness code. The trauma of the holy is what happened to Isaiah when in chapter 6 he sees the Lord high and lifted up, and the angels are chanting holy, holy, holy, thrice, holy, and he sees all this and he says, woe unto me, for I am undone. Basically, he's unraveling. He's disintegrating. He can't find any center in himself. He can't find any merit in being in the presence of this overwhelming light and power of God, and so in almost kaleidoscopic fashion, the writer to the Hebrews goes over all these vivid impressions of doom that happen at Sinai, the mountain burning, blazing with fire, darkness, gloom, a storm, kind of a whirlwind, peals of thunder, you have lightning, a heavy cloud over the mountain, God's voice booming like a trumpet blast, such that the people in the earth quaked, and then you have from the midst of the blazing mountain the thunderous voice speaking words of voice so fearsome that those who heard it begged that no message be further addressed to them. They couldn't bear it, and we even learn later in Deuteronomy 19 that Moses himself was scared to death at this God's breaking through, but you have not come to the trauma of the holy. You've come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God, innumerable angels in festival gathering, basically a big old party going on in heaven. It's a strange word there. You come to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. Notice the continual contrast between the old and the new here. Those of us who are part of this new covenant are a different breed. The writer to the Hebrews has advice for those who are going through a period of shaking. He's saying, look, remember, remember who you are and remember whose you are, and remember you must live that. Remember who you are, your identity. Remember whose you are, your Savior, and being conformed, living a life worthy of that calling. In social psychology, there's a phenomenon they call the looking glass self, and it's the process wherein individuals develop their sense of self, their self-concept, their self-image based on what others believe about them. Of course, this is especially important for parents, for instance. Children develop a sense of self really in large measure because of the way parents respond to them. Spouses develop a sense of self by the way they are reflected in the eyes of their spouse. For Christians, our identity should be formed by what God thinks of us. Who are we in him? Who are we? And if you take a quick look at St. Paul's life, something pops out right away at the moment of his great conversion. New Testament scholars actually think this encounter on the road to Damascus might be the touchstone for all of his subsequent thinking. So Saul, as you know, is on the murderous rampage going to Damascus. He's stunned by a light from heaven. He falls to the ground. A voice says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Who are you, Lord? Saul says, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But Saul wasn't persecuting Jesus. He was persecuting Jesus as followers. Unless, of course, Jesus and his followers are in some mystical fashion, one. And as we learn later, Paul becomes the greatest champion of this idea of the mystical union between Christ and His church, Christ the head in heaven, the body here on earth. Jesus is so identified with his body that to inflict suffering on members of his body is to inflict suffering on he who is the head of the body. Now St. Paul uses a phrase over and over again. Remember we're talking about who we are? St. Paul uses a phrase about 160 times in Christ. It's a strange phrase. I don't know where we use a phrase like that in our everyday life. If you learned that I was intimate friends with George H. W. Bush when he was alive and I'd written a biography of him and we spent summers together at Kenny Bunkport in Maine, you'd say, well, tell me what he was like. And I said, we'll go read my biography of him. Or I would say, or I would say, well, he was this, you know, I admired him, I revered him, I even loved him. But I would never say, I am in Bush. Right? You wouldn't say that. It would not even occur to you. They use a phrase like that. But St. Paul can only be accurately described as a man in Christ. And that's us. We are in Christ. Our identity is directly related to he who is the head in heaven and we the body here on the earth. Now, what's interesting is that through this, through the New Testament, you frequently have these contrasts between the old and the new. And it's in those passages where we actually get a very clear sense of who we are on this side of the cross and resurrection, ascension and Pentecost. John chapter one gives us a real quick one. The word became flesh and dwelt among us. We have seen his glory, glorious of the only son from the Father full of grace and truth. For from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses, Sinai, trauma of the Holy. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ, Mount Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem. No one has ever seen God. The only God who was at the Father's side, he has made him known. So these Hebrew Christians are watching the world around them. They're not seeing that they're seeing that the Jewish establishment is still in place. They thought it was going to collapse. Caesar is still on the throne and they need to be reassured that stay in the fight. And again, the first thing to be clear about this passage is this contrast. You have not come to the trauma of the Holy. You have come to the heavenly Jerusalem. And this is not talking about the future. It's a present reality for us today. The spirit of God is saying to us, you are now citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem. And look, Jerusalem is going to be destroyed, or the temple is going to be destroyed by Titus in another 50 years or so. Jews are going to be expelled from Jerusalem. Again, the world's going to be, the religious world's going to be turned on its head. But whatever the Jewish leadership, whatever corrupt priests or weak leaders or two-faced politicians or an unstable economy or the changing fortunes of pandemics or the coming war with China or the new emergence of Antichrist or the beast government, regardless, remember who you are. You're citizens of another country. The first Pope put it this way. You are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God's very own opposition. And as a result, you can show others the goodness of God because he called you out of darkness into this wondrous light. You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, the innumerable angels in festival gathering. To God, the judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect. Remember all those saints in Hebrews chapter 11, the heroes of faith who are watching us, cheering us on as we go forward. Jesus leading us, the author and perfecter of our faith. This is how he is encouraging them to stay faithful and be all that God has created them to be, all that he has called them to be. One of St. Paul's great phrases, make yourself worthy of the calling. That's what he's urging these Hebrew Christians to do. There's an incident in Luke 10 that actually illustrates this a little bit more. So we're called to the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven. Again, the Hebrew Christians are encouraged with that. In Luke 10, we've got the passage where Jesus is appointing the 72 and he sends them out two by two and they go bring Jesus' message of the kingdom and they are able to cast out demons. When they report back to Jesus, they said, Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your name. Whoa, that is big stuff that we've got here. Jesus puts it in perspective. He says, do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven. Sure, be glad that you can perform mighty acts of power, but more importantly, remember who you are before God. Your identity is not dependent on your performance. Your identity is determined by the most important person in your life, the Lord Jesus. You see the same theme is showing up in the book of Revelation. St. Paul has it as well. The idea that our names are written in the book of life and that we are citizens of this heavenly kingdom. There's another passage in the New Testament where the superiority of the new covenant is demonstrated. Remember now, something happened with the installation of the new covenant that makes the spiritual experience of the human race very different. In Philippians chapter 2, we're told not just to think a lot about Jesus, but to actually have the mind of Christ. I'm sure you know the passage. Have this mind in you which is also in Christ Jesus, and then St. Paul gives us this beautiful picture of Jesus, his humility existing in the form of God, but not considering equality with God, something that he would exploit or cling to, but he takes the form of a servant being obedient even unto death. Then he closes off what many people think is a hymn, an early Christian hymn. He closes off that hymn by saying that eventually every knee will bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. It's considered one of the peak moments in St. Paul's writing. And then he goes back to advice. He says, therefore, in other words, in light of this picture of the self-giving Christ whose mind you're to make your own, therefore, in light of that, my dear friends, just as you have always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence, but even more in my absence, work out your salvation in fear and trembling for it's God who is work within you both to will and to do according to his good pleasure. Well, okay, this is pretty great stuff, but then he gives us this bit of advice that at first glance sounds pretty trite and pretty banal. The next piece of advice he gives is do everything without grumbling and arguing. I mean, here he is, he's telling us to adopt the mind of Christ for heaven's sakes. And then he says, oh, by the way, do everything without grumbling and arguing. Look, I remember I first saw, I was actually pastoring a church and I was teaching through Philippians when I noticed this. Paul's not being banal or trite. When he states his confidence that the Philippians will obey not only in his presence, but in his absence, he actually flashes back to one of the most notorious incidents of disobedience in ancient Israel, the murmuring and complaining that took place under Moses' leadership. We don't have water. It took us out of Egypt in order to kill us here in the desert. The murmuring, the complaining, and exegetes have pointed out that Paul is modeling his letter probably after the farewell speech of Moses in Deuteronomy 31. But there's a huge difference that goes to our identity. There's a huge difference. Paul doesn't adopt Moses' negativity. So Moses, in his farewell speech, says, I know that after my death, you will act corruptly. Paul, in prison, he may live, he may die. But Paul from prison says, as you have always obeyed, you'll do so much more in my absence. He's not expecting you or me to follow the path of the ancient Israelites. He's expecting us to follow the path that's been laid out for us by Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith. Something is different in the new covenant. There's new power here. There's a new spirit at work. Moses said in his farewell speech, they, Israel, are no longer God's children because they are blemished. They have become a perverse and crooked generation. Paul, to the Philippians, says that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God, without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. Moses saw that the Israelites were not going to be the lights shining in the darkness that God had originally intended. Paul, in contrast, knows that you, in Christ, are those lights in the darkness. You're the stable center that God is providing the world as he's shaking the nations. Remember who you are and whose you are and live a life worthy of that calling. Why am I so confident that the new covenant is superior and allows us to do what wasn't accomplished under the old covenant? What's the difference between the old and the new? Now, others may know much more about this than I do, but it seems to me that major difference between the old and the new covenant, that under the new covenant, both parties keep it perfectly. Jesus is our representative in the new covenant, and his perfect obedience makes it possible for us by virtue of his example, by virtue of his sacrifice and Calvary, by virtue of his resurrection power, by virtue of his seeing at the right hand of the Father in the ascension and sending forth the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. He's created a situation where we have the resources, we have him, we are in Christ, and we can do what couldn't be accomplished under the old covenant. He is the last atom. Moses was never regarded as the last atom, but Jesus as the last atom has relaunched the human race. You are part of a new breed. We are meant to stand firm and talk about this unshakable kingdom, where the whole world around us is being shaken. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe for our God is a consuming fire. You know, fidelity to Jesus is what we do when God is shaking the nations. It's what we're doing all the time. If we knew that Jesus was coming back tomorrow, I hope you won't be doing too much differently today, because today you're doing what you think Christ has called you to do. Fidelity to who we are, to who he is, and fidelity to do the work of conformity to Christ. The unshakable kingdom is because we have an unshakable king. There's a funny little crude caricature. This is probably the earliest example of a crucified man that we have. It goes back to maybe the third century. It's a crude caricature. It's a piece of graffiti. It was written in mockery. What you have is an ass's head with a man underneath nailed to a cross. It's mockery. Basically, what a jackass Christians are for worshipping crucified man. You have this crude caricature, and under it are the words. Aleximenos worships his God. So it's an early bit of hostility, part of the cancel culture of the third century. The next room in the house has a bit of repartee, because on the wall of that room is written, Aleximenos Fidelis. Alexenos is faithful. To be faithful is to remember who we are and whose we are. Many created things are going to be shaken aside. Many sinful things are going to be brought out into the light. Pray that in this time of distress that you'll be the conscience of a nation that itself is going to be terribly shaken. You've been seeking that unshakable kingdom. The best way to continue on is to continue on being who Christ has called you to be. Thank you.