Around the middle of the eighth century, roughly 750 b.c., the northern kingdom of Israel fractured like poorly mixed mortar. Kings rose and fell in a violent quarrying of power. Shallum struck down Zechariah to seize the throne. A mere thirty days later Menahem struck down Shallum. The violence leveled cities down to their foundation stones. To secure his unsteady throne from foreign armies Menahem extracted over half a year of labor wages from every wealthy man in the land to buy off the Assyrian king. His royal decree rattled against the stone walls of Samaria like a dropped chisel. Meanwhile in the southern kingdom King Azariah contracted a severe skin disease. The illness forced his permanent quarantine in an isolated structure. It left his royal chambers empty and his authority transferred to his son Jotham. The new ruler immediately ordered his stonemasons to construct the Upper Gate of the Lord’s house.
The Creator watches the nations stack their fragile bricks. While human rulers frantically pile up extracted wealth and fortify their perimeters he measures the integrity of their foundations. He does not act like a chaotic demolition crew tearing down structures without purpose. He works with the slow precision of a master architect. He aligns his plumb line against the leaning walls of Israel and judges the stress fractures running through their leadership. He permits the structural failure they themselves engineer. When he allows a corrupted kingdom to collapse into rubble he carefully preserves the base intact for future rebuilding.
Men constantly hoist loads heavier than their frames can bear. They haul heavy stones of ambition and cement them together with fear. You construct thick walls around your daily routines to blockade the unpredictable winds of tomorrow. You chisel out small defensible towers and hoard provisions behind towering parapets. The Master Builder understands the finite load limit of a human frame. He provides structural support invisible to the naked eye. He embeds keystone truths into the archways of daily survival. You stack your anxieties high into precarious pillars. He quietly removes the unstable stones from your parapet and replaces them with solid block. He shores up the sagging joists of the mind to prevent a total collapse.
The newly cut stones of the Upper Gate caught the late afternoon sunlight. They stood as heavy load-bearing testimonies to a brief season of stability in a crumbling era. The workers packed thick mortar between the massive limestone blocks to seal out the corrosive elements.
A life built upon solid rock requires no frantic reinforcements when the ground begins to shake. The dust settled over the quarry, leaving only the shadow of what had just passed by.