Habakkuk
Messengers - The Minor Prophets • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
0 ratings
· 1 viewMAIN IDEA: FAITH IS PRESSING IN TO GOD WHEN CIRCUMSTANCES TRY TO PUSH YOU AWAY FROM HIM
Notes
Transcript
Section 1: Me
A couple of years ago I was in a conflict with someone in a church where I served as the pastor. It was such a convoluted mess - it grew into something beyond just the other person and I and encapsulated my family and the leadership above me. My heart was ripped out in the process for a few reasons:
1) It revealed some leadership weaknesses I had and whenever you are confronted with a deficiency in yourself, it hurts.
2) It created an atmosphere where my family didn’t want to attend the church I was leading.
3) I lost trust in the other person and in the leadership above me who didn’t handle the situation as well as I would like and ended up hurting my family in the name of peace-making.
That season made me deeply question whether I wanted to still be a pastor.
And so I had a choice before me: quit and move on, or press in and try to resolve it.
I chose to press in and to listen for God’s leading - which always points to forgiveness, and where possible, reconciliation. And to the degree that it was up to me, reconciliation was achieved and instead of digging in to my rightness, I was able to learn and grow from the experience.
Section 2: We
We all go through situations like that: where circumstances so rock our soul that we have to make a choice: either press in to God or push away from God. For too many of us, our hurt, our anger, our pride, overtake our reason and we push away.
I read a Reddit thread this week entitled “What made you leave Christianity?” Here are some of the responses (edited for appropriateness). I want to be clear: I am not judging the rightness or wrongness of any of the opinions of these people. This is their experience:
How Christians flocked to Donald Trump (sub-post - add to that their response to COVID-19) and preached a political agenda
The Patriarchy - feeling dismissed as a woman.
Lack of proof that what they believed was real.
Abusive pastors - one tried to force a person with a neurodivergence to stand and worship, even though they couldn’t at that moment and also told them they could pray the divergence away.
How the OT showed God so differently, it’s like a separate religion - which this person now believes.
The hypocrisy of the church - in particular how Christians hate LGBTQ2S+ people, condemn them to hell, and how some gleefully viewed women who died because they had an unviable pregnancy and held an anti-abortion viewpoint as martyrs.
There are a multitude of reasons why people leave the faith. And, if I’m honest, I understand with the reasons people gave. I’ve felt those as well.
But faith is pressing in to God even though circumstances want to push you away from him.
Section 3: God
We have been in a series in the OT called Messengers, looking at the minor prophets. Today we are in the book of Habakkuk.
If you remember from the first week of our series, around 930 B.C., Israel split into two kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Habakkuk’s work is directed to the southern nation of Judah, sometime before the Babylonian’s would attack and force a mass exile.
Many scholars have dated Habakkuk’s ministry to the time of Manasseh, who was the son of Hezekiah and is described as the most evil king of either kingdom.
Look at how he is described in 2 Chronicles:
1 Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem fifty-five years. 2 He did what was evil in the Lord’s sight, following the detestable practices of the pagan nations that the Lord had driven from the land ahead of the Israelites. 3 He rebuilt the pagan shrines his father, Hezekiah, had broken down. He constructed altars for the images of Baal and set up Asherah poles. He also bowed before all the powers of the heavens and worshiped them. 4 He built pagan altars in the Temple of the Lord, the place where the Lord had said, “My name will remain in Jerusalem forever.” 5 He built these altars for all the powers of the heavens in both courtyards of the Lord’s Temple. 6 Manasseh also sacrificed his own sons in the fire in the valley of Ben-Hinnom. He practiced sorcery, divination, and witchcraft, and he consulted with mediums and psychics. He did much that was evil in the Lord’s sight, arousing his anger.
9 But Manasseh led the people of Judah and Jerusalem to do even more evil than the pagan nations that the Lord had destroyed when the people of Israel entered the land.
This is what’s going on in Judah when Habakkuk is writing. The culture in Judah at the time was pushing people away from God and away from the way God called them to live.
But Habakkuk presses in towards God and prays.
2 How long, O Lord, must I call for help? But you do not listen! “Violence is everywhere!” I cry, but you do not come to save. 3 Must I forever see these evil deeds? Why must I watch all this misery? Wherever I look, I see destruction and violence. I am surrounded by people who love to argue and fight. 4 The law has become paralyzed, and there is no justice in the courts. The wicked far outnumber the righteous, so that justice has become perverted.
He doesn’t walk away from his faith, he presses in with his questions, with his struggles, with his frustrations and his hurts.
And, miraculously, God answers him and tells him that He is sending the Babylonians, who themselves were pretty evil, to discipline Judah for their sins.
This response from God worries Habakkuk. It’s one thing to conceptualize God disciplining your nation, it’s another to hear God is going to send a foreign nation to conquer you as the means of that punishment.
Once again, a choice is before Habakkuk. He can run away from God in his fear, or he can run to God. But faith is pressing in to God, even when circumstances are trying to push you away.
So he prays again and brings his fears to God?
12 O Lord my God, my Holy One, you who are eternal— surely you do not plan to wipe us out? O Lord, our Rock, you have sent these Babylonians to correct us, to punish us for our many sins. 13 But you are pure and cannot stand the sight of evil. Will you wink at their treachery? Should you be silent while the wicked swallow up people more righteous than they?
17 Will you let them get away with this forever? Will they succeed forever in their heartless conquests?
And again, God responds to this audacious faith of Habakkuk’s.
3 This vision is for a future time. It describes the end, and it will be fulfilled. If it seems slow in coming, wait patiently, for it will surely take place. It will not be delayed.
And in this vision, which is the rest of chapter 2, God talks about how He will hold Babylon accountable for their evil ways.
It didn’t happen in Habakkuk’s lifetime. But it did happen. The Babylonians were eventually overtaken by the Persians and Medes. When God promises it, he guarantees it.
Habakkuk pressed in to God despite seeing evil and suffering all around him and God answered him. So Habakkuk spends the last chapter praising God. He praises God for who He is, for what he has done and for what he will do and in that praise, he expresses his faith in God.
17 Even though the fig trees have no blossoms, and there are no grapes on the vines; even though the olive crop fails, and the fields lie empty and barren; even though the flocks die in the fields, and the cattle barns are empty, 18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord! I will be joyful in the God of my salvation!
His faith wasn’t dependent on happy circumstances now. In the midst of everything he saw, he had faith that because God is sovereign, it would all be okay.
And make no mistake about it church, that’s the main idea of the book of Habakkuk - that God is sovereign over all nations and because he is sovereign, our future is secure even when our present feels shaky. That because he is sovereign, we can trust his justice. And because he is sovereign, we must pursue holiness.
Sound familiar? It should. That was the message of Nahum. The messages are similar because the problems were similar.
But, as I was reading and praying about the book of Habakkuk, I was just struck by Habakkuk’s relationship with God. Instead of seeing the evil and suffering that was everywhere around him as evidence that God is either immoral or impotent for allowing it and then walking away from the faith, he presses in and takes his complaints to God and awaits a response.
Faith is pressing in to God when circumstances try to push you away.
Section 4: You
I know there are some out here today who struggle with the question of “Why does God allow suffering and evil?” I know that some of you know people that have left the faith over that question.
And I don’t really believe that there is an answer that satisfies a person’s soul. Any answer we give feels either uncompassionate, untrue, or too simplistic.
But when I look at the book of Habakkuk, I see, in this one instance - not a blanket reason for all suffering - but in this specific case, God declare the purpose of that suffering - to discipline his wayward people and bring them back to him.
Why does God allow suffering and evil? I don’t know. Sometimes it might be to correct us. Sometimes God allows it because it’s the consequence of either my or someone else’s sin and the time of dealing with all that sin is still in the future.
Whatever God’s reason, I do know that it’s not because God does not love us. God loves us so much that he sent Jesus to earth to experience suffering and be a victim of evil as he is crucified and takes on the punishment for all humanity’s sins. We all want to be spared the horrors of evil and suffering but in the cross Jesus shows us that those things are not to be removed but must be endured.
So if you are someone wrestling with the question of suffering and evil, if you are looking around at the world and and feel like what you see is pushing you away from God, then you have a choice to make: you can either follow that and let the circumstances push you away from God or you can press in to God and bring all your frustration and anger and sadness at the injustice and evil around us to Him, like Habakkuk does.
What does pressing in look like:
First, pressing in means articulating our pain, our anger at the injustice we see to God in prayer. We call this form of prayer lament and the Bible is full of it. In addition to Habakkuk’s cries of complaint in chapter 1, the Psalmists cry out to God and say “How long” 17 times in the book of Psalms alone. And throughout the Bible, we see prayers of lament. Contrary to how some of you grew up, expressing those negative, anger-filled, sad-tinged feelings to God is an expression of faith, not doubt. Doubt turns away from God where faith turns towards him.
Second, we move from complaint to praise. As NT Christians, we are afforded a peak at the end of the book. We see that God’s justice will ultimately prevail and so we can express both our frustrations and sadness AND we can praise God, just as Habakkuk does. In chapter 1, he expresses his complaints and then he finishes chapter 3 with prayers of praise to God.
We are those who live in the tension of the now and the “Not yet” - of the pain and hurts that we all experience here and the eternal bliss of the new heavens and earth where this is no more sin, no more death, no more war, no more tears, no more hunger. We live in the tension and we don’t have to resolve the tension, we just need to continually move along it.
Section 5: We
My hope in this teaching today is to bring you a sense of freedom.
Freedom to lament the wars, the genocides, the famines, the deaths of our loved ones and the pain we feel when the ground under our feet feels shaky. God is not offended by our laments, he welcomes them.
Freedom from having to have all the answers. The church hasn’t always been great at leaving room for questions and doubts. Too many Christians see doubt as the opposite of faith. I don’t. I think healthy doubt is an expression of faith - it asks God why and how. And anything that invites us to ask God questions is an act of faith.
I don’t know why God is allowing the war in Ukraine or in Gaza to continue. I don’t know why he’s allowing the persecution of Christians in Niger. I don’t know why he’s allowing the oppression of women around the world or children to go hungry.
I do know that God loves us. The cross is proof that God was willing to suffer at the hands of evil to show us his love. I know that he promises to walk with us through the valley of the shadow of death, not to keep us from experiencing it. I do know that when I my world feels shaky, I can grasp hold of Jesus as an anchor for my soul.
And freedom to praise God in the middle of the storm, in the face of unspeakable evil and suffering, because we know the end of the story and in the end, justice for evil and redemption is perfected.
When I experienced that conflict that rocked my world, I had to make a choice - to run away from the church and maybe from God, or to press in by faith and allow God to both speak to me and to shape me. I chose the harder of the two paths - I chose to press in and like Robert Frost says in his poem “The Road Not Taken,” it has made all the difference.
God was able to shape me into being a better leader through it. And I can testify church, I prayed more in that dark season than in other seasons when everything was great. God used it to draw me closer to him.
When you experience evil, suffering, heartbreak and pain, what will your response be? Will you run away or will you press in to God, like Habakkuk does, and trust that God knows what he’s doing, even if we can’t see the reasons why.
