19. Great shaking. Here is a feature to which writers call attention. They tell of fearful convulsions of nature that will precede the coming of the Son of of man. Jesus mentions “the sea and the waves roaring” and “men’s hearts failing them for fear,” not so much because of some military threat to their security, but because all nature seems to be out of its course (Luke 21:25, 26; GC 636). John the revelator gives an even more graphic description of the tremendous upheavals in the natural world (Rev. 16:18-20). Men have always depended upon nature. Not once during the long history of the earth, except in connection with the events recorded in Joshua 10:12, 13 and 2 Kings 20:8-11, has the sun failed to move in its normal cycle. All natural law has operated with regulated consistency. Men have relied upon the permanence of these operations, forgetting Him by whom “all things consist” (Col. 1:17). They have chosen in His place the idol of science and, in reality, “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). The “great shaking” in the natural world will come to them as a fearful awakening to the fact that the god whom they have chosen, “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2), has no power over the elements. Yet he claimed a position and power equal to that of the Son of God (see on Eze. 28:13) and asserted that, if given an opportunity, he would exercise a more equitable control over the world than Christ. He has been given an opportunity for such a demonstration. Now, in the midst of a reeling earth, all men see the falseness and arrogance of his claims and discover too late that probation’s hour has closed forever.