What real power does Jesus have?

These last four verses of the book, Haggai 2:20–23, are subversive, because if king Darius had seen them, he would not have been pleased—because these final verses are telling us that although he is the king and the emperor of the Persian Empire, the kind of power that he wields is not lasting power. And there are two sides to this; the first I call the fragile powers that seem so strong. Haggai 2:21 tells Zerubbabel, the governor of Judah, I am going to shake the heavens and the earth; I am going to overturn royal thrones and shatter the power of the foreign kingdoms. God says that he is going to shake the kind of authorities that there are in this world.

Our problem—if we are trying to be Christians in our schools, in our colleges, workplaces or homes—our problem is that the King we serve seems so pathetic, and the authorities, the powers, the pressures on us from around seem so strong. In 1935, Joseph Stalin was asked whether he would encourage Catholicism within the Soviet Union, so as to conciliate and to make friends with the Pope. And in a very famous reply, he sneered, saying of the Pope, How many military divisions has he got? The implication was clear: that this Pope is pathetic. And people often think that about Christian faith: Jesus: how many divisions has he got? What real power has he got?

The first thing that God teaches us in this passage is that the powers that seem so strong around us are not as strong as they seem. There is going to be a shaking and an overturning and a shattering. You know, sometimes in human history God shows us this visibly, so that we can see it.  I guess some of us are old enough to remember what happened in 1989. When I was growing up there were two power blocs in the world. There was the United States of America and there was the Soviet Union. And when I became sort of conscious of the rest of the world, they seemed always to have been there, and I was sure they always would be. I expected to live the rest of my life with these two great superpowers. And then really very suddenly in 1989, some cracks appeared in the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, and very suddenly—East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia—quite suddenly the whole thing collapsed. It was like a shaking, and there is no Soviet Union anymore. There is no Soviet Empire anymore. And it happened very, very quickly.¹

Christopher Ash