The Righteous Will Live By Faith

It’s a question which proves Dr. R.C. Sproul’s statement when he said, “Everyone is a theologian.” Theology is the study of God, so every time someone thinks about or tries to answer a question about God, they are doing theology.

But the method of theology matters. Many rely solely on reason and logic. Others rely solely on the observable, what can be measured, or they may rely solely on their feelings about what seems to be right.

But, the best way to do theology, to answer questions about God, is to look in all the places where God has revealed Himself. As the children taught us this morning, God reveals Himself to us in many ways — yes, we use our hearts and our minds, yes we use His revelation in creation, but we must also go back to God’s revealed Word, His special revelation, in the Holy Scriptures.

This morning, we will be in the Book of Habakkuk, so you can go ahead and turn there.The whole of the Book of Habakkuk is found on pages 534-535 of the white pew Bible.

Habakkuk is one of what we call the Minor Prophets in the Old Testament. That simply means that their messages were short, not that their messages were less important.

Habakkuk, working with the prophets which surround his book — Nahum before and Zephaniah after — begin to answer that question, "If there is an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God, why do bad things happen?”

Nahum assures God’s people that God will one day judge evil. That judgment is going to be devastating and powerful. He’s not going to let evil last forever.

Zephaniah reveals God’s final answer of future change and redemption. In Zephaniah God pronounces that He will change the hearts of evil people to good through a great sacrifice on their behalf. He will make evil people good and bring them home to dwell with him forever — in the New Testament, we see that revealed and accomplished in the person and work of Jesus the Christ.

"If there is an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God, why do bad things happen?”

Nahum reveals that God will one day judge evil. Zephaniah reveals the future glory of God making all things new.

But Habakkuk lives in the messy middle. How do we live in the middle of the bad things as we await the future glory?

The pinnacle point of the Book of Habakkuk is found in chapter 2 at the end of verse 4, look at it with me, the final sentence of that verse.

(CSB)

But the righteous one will live by his faith.

Through His prophet Habakkuk, God gives us part of His own answer to the question, “How do we live when our world is falling apart? How do we persevere when bad things happen? When our spouse dies? When our teenager goes off the rails? When an election doesn’t go the way we’d hoped? How do we continue when our marriage is falling apart? How do we persevere as we age and death looks closer and closer every day? What do we do when our child is in the NICU or we get a terminal diagnosis from the doctor at age 50?

Through Habakkuk, God answers, “Trust me.”

And if you are anything like me…sometimes that is a very unsatisfying answer. When I’m in the middle of the valley of the shadow of death, the last thing I want to hear is, “Keep walking.”

The walk of faith in the midst of chaos is not an easy exercise. It certainly wasn’t for Habakkuk. The whole book is a dialog between the prophet and God about why God seems unwilling to judge evildoers. Why all these bad things are happening in Judah.

And the dialog between Habakkuk and the Lord brings us our big idea for the book:

Big Idea

Because God has revealed His character, Christians can live by faith in crisis.

Because God has revealed His character — He is all-good, He is all-knowing, he is all-powerful, Christians can rely on what he has revealed about himself in the good times to persevere in the bad times.

One pastor said it this way, “Never doubt in the dark what God has revealed in the light.”

Because God has revealed His character, Christians can live by faith in crisis.

Let’s pray then we’ll look at the text.

Blessed Lord, you have caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning — grant us that we in such a way may hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them; that by patience and comfort of your holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of eternal life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Habakkuk lived in the southern kingdom of Judah after the fall of the northern kingdom, but before the Babylonian invasion of Judah. And he looks around and sees all sorts of wickedness going on amongst God’s people. And he cries out to God, look at verses 2-3 of chapter 1:

Habakkuk 1:2–3 CSB

How long, Lord, must I call for help and you do not listen or cry out to you about violence and you do not save? Why do you force me to look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Oppression and violence are right in front of me. Strife is ongoing, and conflict escalates.

This is the prophet’s opening charge. He sees injustice amongst God’s people and cries out, “How long are you going to let this go on, God?”

So, God answers in verse 5.

Habakkuk 1:5–6 CSB

Look at the nations and observe— be utterly astounded! For I am doing something in your days that you will not believe when you hear about it. Look! I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter, impetuous nation that marches across the earth’s open spaces to seize territories not its own.

Uh, not exactly the answer Habakkuk was expecting! Have you ever had an answer to prayer and felt like, “Yeah, that’s not what I meant, God.” Habakkuk gets it.

To his horror, God says He’s going to answer the problem of injustice among his people with something that seems like a greater evil. He’s going to use a wicked nation bring about the Exile of God’s people from their promised land.

Habakkuk’s response to God is the rest of chapter 1 and the beginning of chapter 2, but a good summary of his thoughts come in verse 13 of chapter 1:

Habakkuk 1:13 CSB

Your eyes are too pure to look on evil, and you cannot tolerate wrongdoing. So why do you tolerate those who are treacherous? Why are you silent while one who is wicked swallows up one who is more righteous than himself?

Sure, God’s people have their issues. But they’re nothing like the Babylonians! How can Yahweh be both good and sovereign over a universe where evil clearly exists? And how on earth can he use the wicked like this!?

Let me pause right there and remind you that asking questions like that is OK. Sometimes, like in the case of Habakkuk, asking those questions is what God wants us to do. In verse 1 of chapter 1, Habakkuk says that he recieved an oracle or pronouncement from God, and then he starts recording the questions — God gave those questions to Habakkuk to ask.

Lamentation and questioning are gifts of God to the believer. They provide a pathway of honest faith and conversation with Him in horrible times. 50 or so of the Psalms are songs of lament, asking questions like “How long? Where are you? Why do you allow this?” There’s a whole book of the Bible called Lamentations. Jesus was reciting Psalms of lament on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s straight out of Psalm 22.

There mere act of asking desperate questions does not indicate a lack of trust on the part of a believer. Conviction that God is good all the time does not necessarily silence the questions and stop the pain. But, it does focus the questions into dialog rather than a diatribe. Those questions become a conversation with the loving Creator and the gracious Redeemer. And He accompanies you in the midst of that suffering and will, in His perfect time, bring victory, healing, and restoration.

There can be great hope on the path of lament and faithful questioning for those who long for the peace, love and goodness of the kingdom of God.

Herman Bavinck, one of the greatest, possibly the greatest theologian of the modern era, wrote this, and man, what truth:

There is no faith without struggle. To believe is to struggle, to struggle against the appearance of things.

Easy answers lead to our weakness. Christian growth is born out of the struggle for faith against the appearance that everything is falling apart.

Graciously, in chapter 2 God chooses to answer Habakkuk’s questions. We won’t read the whole thing, but let me highlight a few sections.

First, God says that He is going to judge these Babylonians. Even though they are doing His work in judging Judah, they are still committing evil and will be judged for it. He says, essentially, they are building up a debt of evil and, verse 7, one day the creditor is going to come to call. Like a bookie with a crowbar coming after a gambler’s kneecaps, God is going to judge Babylon for their evil.

Second, like I said earlier, in verse 4, God tells Habakkuk that the righteous person will live by faith in the face of the inflated ego of Babylon.

Third, Look at verse 14:

Habakkuk 2:14 CSB

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord’s glory, as the water covers the sea.

And finally, verse 20:

Habakkuk 2:20 CSB

But the Lord is in his holy temple; let the whole earth be silent in his presence.

That’s the highlight reel of God’s response in chapter 2, now let me try and piece it together for you.

We don’t need to worry that God is not longer just since He is bringing judgment on His people with an evil nation. We can rest surely in the knowledge that he will in fact judge these Babylonians. He knows what they are like, prideful and wantonly destructive, so He will not let that go forever.

But beyond that, he has greater purposes in mind: that the knowledge of his glory might fill the earth as the waters cover the sea. While we toil and worry and lose sleep over a little piece of land, God is about something much, much bigger. His ways are indeed higher than our own.

So...bad things are happening. Yet we know that ultimate justice is coming and that God is using all of this for good purposes. What do we do in the meantime? We trust. “The righteous one will live by his faith.”

In times of calamity, God’s people are called to trust. Now, the people of Habakkuk’s day had reason to trust. After all, they’d seen how God used slavery in Egypt and the Exodus to proclaim his might for the good of his people. He’d delivered them from judgment over and over again for the sake of His name. They could have faith in God’s goodness toward them.

Habakkuk 2:4 is a crucial text in the Old Testament; it gets close to the truth of the gospel. The righteous one will live by his faith. Those who are righteous are those who live by faith. To be righteous, having a right standing before God and men, requires faith.

But the reason I say it gets close to the gospel is because Habakkuk, being an Old Testament prophet, was not able to see the fullness of the relationship between righteousness and faith. How does faith bring righteousness?

Well, that’s what Paul writes about when he picks up this verse in Romans 1 and Galatians 3. In Romans 1, he writes that the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel, just as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. And the rest of Romans 1-11 are him explaining the core truths of the gospel: that God is the sovereign Creator of all things but Adam rejected Him and plunged all of humanity into death by His sin. And despite our best efforts, we cannot bring ourselves to back to life, in fact, we love living as dead people. But, he says in chapter 3, the righteousness of God that we need is brought through faith in Jesus Christ. Because God sent Jesus, His perfect begotten son, to live under the law and fulfill it, God was pleased to accept his death as a sacrifice for those who would believe in Him.

Verse 24 of Romans 3 says, Rom 3:24 “they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

The glory of the gospel is the essence of Reformation Day. Dead sinners are brought to lief by the Holy Spirit, then given faith and called by grace to come to Christ in that faith.

Sinners, saved by grace alone, through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. And this glorious salvation is taught in the scriptures alone and it is all for the glory of God alone.

The Bible says that outside of Christ we are all dead in our sin and love sin only. The natural man prefers and does only evil. Even the good deeds of mankind outside of Christ are filthy rags, Isaiah says. No one does that which is really and truly good, Paul says, quoting Psalm 14. But God, being rich in mercy and abounding in steadfast love, brings sinful people to life in Jesus even though they are dead in their sin. It is by grace alone that we are saved through faith, that faith is a gift from God so that no one can say they did it themselves.

As much as Habakkuk had reason to trust God, we have so much more! God has used the greatest evil in history, the murder of his perfect son, for our redemption. His ways may be mysterious, but for those whose faith has been credited as righteousness, we know that in all things he works both for his glory and our good.

Habakkuk 3

Let’s look quickly at the final chapter of Habakkuk — chapter 3 is his faith-filled response of praise to Yahweh for His wisdom and salvation, and trust in His sovereignty. Let’s read his conclusion in 3:16-19.

Habakkuk 3:16–19 CSB

I heard, and I trembled within; my lips quivered at the sound. Rottenness entered my bones; I trembled where I stood. Now I must quietly wait for the day of distress to come against the people invading us. Though the fig tree does not bud and there is no fruit on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though the flocks disappear from the pen and there are no herds in the stalls, yet I will celebrate in the Lord; I will rejoice in the God of my salvation! The Lord my Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like those of a deer and enables me to walk on mountain heights! For the choir director: on stringed instruments.

What a powerful confession of trust in God despite worldly circumstances!

Habakkuk understands God’s message. And his response is that he will wait patiently for justice, in the midst of great suffering. Beyond that, though his circumstances be bleak, he can rejoice in God.

Habakkuk had joy amidst suffering! And here’s the deal, so can Christians! How is this possible? Because God is his strength and he remembers the times where God has specifically revealed His goodness. Therefore, he knows he can trust in God’s character even when it looks bleak.

He finds joy amidst suffering because he has come to find God so trustworthy that when God says his good purposes are worth suffering invasion and decimation...Habakkuk can be content. He can wait, and in that trust, find joy.

The pain is worth it, because God is trustworthy. The crisis is worth it, because it is God’s sanctifying tool to make you more like Jesus, more humble, more gentle, more compassionate. The suffering is worth it because I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed to us.

Even when wickedness abounds, things are not outside of Yahweh’s control, and everything is happening for his purposes. So when Yahweh’s people are surrounded by calamity and injustice, we can trust in God and worship Him. Because we know that He is good, that He sees all things, and in holiness controls all of space and time.

Related Media

Related Sermons