Habakkuk’s Burden

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†CALL TO WORSHIP Isaiah 64:1; Psalm 145:18

Pastor Austin Prince

Minister: Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence –

Congregation: We gather because you have called us and you alone are worthy of our worship. Now, we call upon you, for the Lord is near to all who call upon him in truth.

†PRAYER OF ADORATION AND INVOCATION

O God, our resurrection and life, the promise of new life in Christ is like cool, sweet water in a dry and thirsty land. We have gathered as believers and as those seeking your truth, which is truth. Guide our worship this hour; speak to us, touching not just our intellects but also our affections–the yearnings of the soul. We bring our daily concerns and our eternal questions. Send your Holy Spirit to us that we may be welcomed into your presence. By His work in us today may you shed light upon our walk and unite us forever with you.

†OPENING PSALM OF PRAISE #134

“Come, Bless the Lord With One Accord”

†CONFESSION OF SIN & ASSURANCE OF PARDON

based on I Tim. 1:15; I Pet. 2:24

Minister: Man is humbled, and each one brought low, and the eyes of the haughty are brought low. But the Lord of hosts is exalted in justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness.

Congregation: Forgive us our sins, O Lord. Forgive us the sins of our youth and the sins of our age. Forgive the sins of our hearts and the sins of our hands. Forgive our secret and our whispering sins, and our presumptuous and our careless sins. Forgive the sins we have done to please ourselves, and the sins we have done to please others. Forgive us the sins that we know, and the sins that we know not. Forgive them, O Lord. Forgive them all, through the atoning work of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” (1 Peter 2:24, ESV)

CONTINUAL READING OF SCRIPTURE James 1:1-18

Paul Mulner, Elder

THE OFFERING OF TITHES AND OUR GIFTS

CONGREGATIONAL PRAYERS

THE LORD’S PRAYER

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.

†HYMN OF PREPARATION #397

“Breathe on Me, Breath of God”

SERMON // Habakkuk’s Burden // Habakkuk 1:1-11

PRAYER OF ILLUMINATION

Almighty God, enter our hearts, and so fill us with your love, that, forsaking all evil desires, we may embrace you, our only good. Show unto us, for your mercies' sake, O Lord our God, what you are unto us. Say unto our souls, "I am your salvation." So speak that we may hear. Our hearts are before you; open our ears; let us hasten after your voice and take hold of you. Amen. —Augustine

TEXT Habakkuk 1:1-11

Habakkuk 1:1–11 ESV

1 The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw. 2 O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save? 3 Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. 4 So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted. 5 “Look among the nations, and see; wonder and be astounded. For I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. 6 For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, who march through the breadth of the earth, to seize dwellings not their own. 7 They are dreaded and fearsome; their justice and dignity go forth from themselves. 8 Their horses are swifter than leopards, more fierce than the evening wolves; their horsemen press proudly on. Their horsemen come from afar; they fly like an eagle swift to devour. 9 They all come for violence, all their faces forward. They gather captives like sand. 10 At kings they scoff, and at rulers they laugh. They laugh at every fortress, for they pile up earth and take it. 11 Then they sweep by like the wind and go on, guilty men, whose own might is their god!”

AFTER SCRIPTURE

As for God, His way is perfect, the word of the Lord is flawless.

INTRO

“In this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my name forever, and I will no more remove the foot of Israel from the land that I appointed for your fathers, if only they will be careful to do all that I have commanded them, all the law, the statutes, and the rules given through Moses”, says the Lord. (2 Chron. 33:8)

But long after the people of Israel possessed the land of the Canaanites, and as the kings that succeeded David began to waiver and their character rotted, no more was Solomon’s grand temple filled with priests and the sound of worship to YHWH, but with the incantations of mediums and necromancers, divination, and the cries of innocent life being sacrificed. Under the reign of Manasseh, Judah had become more abominable than even the Amorites (2 Kings 21:11), filling one end of land to the other with the shedding of innocent blood. It was Manasseh who had changed the landscape of Judah, setting up altars to other gods — even setting up an Asherah pole (a Canaanite fertility goddess) inside of the house of the Lord. It was Manasseh, their leader and king, this rogue heir of David, who also sacrificed his own son by fire to Moloch. And at some point through all of this, the book of the law was placed on a shelf for the last time, disregarded and lost for generations before being found again in Josiah’s reign.

The history of the people of Israel was that they were to take over the land of wicked nations after their exodus from Egypt and that the Lord was to be their King. But these stiff-necked people asked for kings of their own and ended up adopting the ways of those wicked nations. And by the time we enter our story, 2 Kings says of this time that, “they did not listen, and Manasseh led them astray to do more evil than the nations had done whom the Lord destroyed before the people of Israel.” (2 Kings 21:9, ESV).

They had abandoned their true king. They had lost their way. They were worse than the Canaanites. And shortly, king Manasseh, one of the last of David’s line before his lineage is broken and lost (until the coming of Christ), is hooked by mouth and dragged into Babylonian captivity (2 Chron 33:11). God judging Israel as Israel was to have done to the nations.

Such was the state of things in the time of Habakkuk.

Which leads to Habakkuk’s prayer — his oracle, which also translates as burden.

Habakkuk’s Burden

“O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save? Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted.” (Habakkuk 1:2–4, ESV)

Habakkuk’s burden is to see all the wickedness around him — all the pain and all the havoc that sin and wickedness produce and not be able to see where God’s hand is in fixing it. “How long, O Lord shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?”

And this is a wickedness from within the camp. From their king down to the violence in the streets, Habakkuk says that it is the law that is paralyzed. No more is God pulling the reigns of people’s hearts, but they are doing as they please and the result is the same as it always is throughout history when a people abandon God and do what is right in their own eyes. It’s the same if you take the fear of God out of your home and heart, and that’s a reign of terror.

But this moment was foretold to Samuel by God when the people of Israel insisted upon the establishment of a monarchy. The Lord warned them, saying, “And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” But the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel. And they said, “No! But there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”” (1 Samuel 8:18–20, ESV).

The Lord gave them what they wanted, and here was the fruit of it.

And among the wreckage is Habakkuk crying out, “Where are you, Lord? And how long?” But all he seems to receive is silence. A situation that we find ourselves in often.

“Where are you, God?” when there’s another school shooting

“Where are you, God?” when our leaders are debating how late in a pregnancy we can kill our unborn children

“Where are you, God?” when our children are running from you into the deceits of the world

“How long, O Lord?” will our marriage be loveless and lonely

So what do you do in the silence? What can you hold onto when you are in free fall?

First, we don’t get omniscience.

The heart of man wants answers more than faith. We want security in the immediate at the expense of the security of God’s hands. Adam did. The tree where he fell was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He wanted to know but he had no right to. And what he gained by trying to be like God was death.

It’s not wrong to want to know answers, we’ll address that in a minute. But it is wrong to expect omniscience — to know as God knows when God knows. The heart of man wants every mystery solved, to have every next step visible and accessible and stable in our understanding before we will be willing to move forward. We would rather dig and question and disobey and cower in fear and worry and stress and fight before we will trust. We want easy explanations, clear paths, and a faith-free life. But that is a life of attempted omniscience — of trying to be god ourselves with our own sovereign set of timing and controls. And God loves us too much to give us that. God’s greatest gift to us is Himself, but we would trade him in for knowledge — Adam did. As we will see later, the thesis of this book is that the righteous live by faith. But this isn’t what we want. We don’t want faith, we want certainty and immediacy, personal omniscience and sovereignty. But God is God and we are not.

We would trade walking through the valleys with a good shepherd for walking through a field alone. But that’s not even an option. There is no peaceful walk alone.

And so what Habakkuk teaches us to do, along with many faithful men in scripture, is to wrestle with God in the silence.

There is a good and a bad way to complain to God.

The bad way, of course, is mere complaining, like Israel in the wilderness. You don’t like what God is giving you (your marriage, your health, your leaders, your school) and you don’t like that you cannot see what He is up to, so you whine and grumble and scoff. This won’t do. This is wicked and ungrateful and contemptuous. This is the position of a fool who has no perception of the ocean of grace with which he swims or the sovereign hand of God. We are to do all things without grumbling and complaining.

But the good way to complain is to take God at His word, like Habakkuk does here. When you are wrestling with God’s promises, when you are abiding in Him and tucking into Him further and further for help, God loves that. In the midst of the whirlwind the Christian draws His strength from God’s promises, even at times repeating them back to God and asking Him to fulfill them.

This is as our quarterly focus teaches us (which you can see on the front of your bulletin)

“Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:5–7, ESV)

Habakkuk asks God to answer according to His word, which God does. Just not always in the way that we expect. He answers in ways that we need to learn from.

We don’t always get what we want. And this is the life we are in — we need help here.

The Lord’s Answer

The Lord answers in v.5:

““Look among the nations, and see; wonder and be astounded. For I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, who march through the breadth of the earth, to seize dwellings not their own.” (Habakkuk 1:5–6, ESV)

The Chaldeans are the Babylonians. They are here described as those whose horses are swifter than leopards, more fierce than evening wolves (v.8). They scoff and laugh at kings and fortresses (v.10), sweeping over lands like the wind and worshipping their own strength as a God (v.11).

They are the ones who lead Manasseh away by hooks in his mouth. Who will kill King Zedekiah’s children before his eyes and then pluck his eyes out. Who throw Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego into the fiery furnace and Daniel into the lion’s den.

God says, “Don’t worry, Habakkuk. I see the wickedness of your king and the corruption of your priests. And I’m raising up the chaldeans (Babylonians) to judge you all and take you into captivity.”

“Uhh, don’t do that. Wouldn’t that be worse?” Says Habakkuk.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

But first, God is just in judging Israel, and judgement starts in the house of God.

And second, we need to see is that God’s ways are not our ways.

We would lean on our own understanding. We would chose what seems reasonable and easy and comfortable. But God says, “I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told” (Habakkuk 1:5, ESV).

And this is so often exactly where God likes to put us. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know how we are going to get relief. We no longer have any options. We can’t trust our kings or the strength of our hands. Our back are to the Red sea and the Egyptian army is marching down towards us, but God parts the sea. Our Messiah comes, Jesus, but it seems that all is going wrong. He is taken the Romans, judged corruptly by Pilate, mocked by the crowds, and dies on a cross. But you’re telling me that that was the plan all along? If God had told you, would you have believed Him?

God knew what He was doing. And this is frequently the kind of situation that God is putting us in as he refines us. These scary, last minute, desperate situations are often where God takes his people. But He isn’t pushing us into ease. He is pushing us to Him, so that even the valley of the shadow of death causes us to fear no evil — He is with us. Again, we don’t want faith, but the righteous live by it.

God is not able to be put under your thumb. He is God; you are not. He does not have handles for you to control Him. Our frustrations and doubts of Him are juvenile and stupid, the scoffing of a fly in the wind. But God loves us and condescends to us. And has given us Christ who shed His own blood for us, and will freely give us all things.

But He frequently doesn’t give to us what we ask for. Come November of this year, you may not get what you ask for. It may be that you feel that we are going from bad to worse, but God is giving as he pleases, sometimes to judge. He will be vindicated and Holy no matter what comes. God may not heal your sickness in the timing that you would like. He may not heal it at all. Paul praises God for keeping his thorn in the flesh, even after praying many times for relief. God is working all things for our good, not our ease.

Have you ever stopped and thanked God for the things that he didn’t give you? Are there things that you are glad that he didn’t give you when you wanted them?

Structure & Conclusion

Let me make a comment about the structure of this book as we close.

Habakkuk is written as a seven part chiasm. That means that certain parts of this book correspond with other parts. Imagine a piece of paper. If you fold it in half, the two ends that meet correspond to each other — the beginning and ending of this book. And so forth in the middle. At the crease is where you will have your thesis statement. We are always taught to put our thesis statement at the beginning and work from there, but here it is in the middle. It comes at Habakkuk 2:4, which says that the righteous shall live by faith. This thesis from Habakkuk is also Paul’s thesis statement in the book of Romans which explores this theme in detail.

But why do I tell you this? Because the questions that this first section raise are correspondingly answered at the very end of the book, which won’t make much sense unless we see them together. The literary structure of this book demands to be seen this way.

What are we to do when God seems silent? Or, what are we to do when God doesn’t answer us in the ways that we want?

From Habakkuk 3:16-19, Habakkuk responds not with some cheap and easy formulaic platitude, but with depth of faith.

“I hear, and my body trembles; my lips quiver at the sound; rottenness enters into my bones; my legs tremble beneath me. Yet I will quietly wait for the day of trouble to come upon people who invade us. Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on my high places.” (Habakkuk 3:16–19, ESV)

The answer is the wait. To wait in hope. To wait in the joy of God. To wait when it hurts. To wait when there is no fruit on the vine. To wait in such a way that God becomes our strength. Sometimes it take s lot for God to draw out this poison of self and insecurity, to have us rest in His sovereign hands. But they are hands you can trust. They have the scars to prove it.

If there is no God you have chaos

If God can’t stop evil you have confusion

But if God is sovereign over all things, and can bring good even through the wickedness, you have comfort — he even knows the way out of the grave

God is moving us to dependence upon Him, not the surety of our circumstances or the clarity of our next steps. We are to quietly wait — for the just shall live by faith. It’s not that we are only saved by faith, we are. But we are also to live by faith (a theme that we will take up next week). As the Kings have failed the Israelites and as our idols fail us, God is moving us all to see that He will be king and share his glory with no one.

†HYMN OF RESPONSE #227

“How Great Thou Art”

THE MINISTRY OF THE LORD’S SUPPER

Minister: Lift up your hearts!

Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord.

Minister: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

Congregation: It is right for us to give thanks and praise!

THE WORDS OF INSTITUTION Mark 14:22-25

And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”

CONFESSION OF FAITH Belgic Confession, Article 35

Minister: This is a table for people of faith. Without faith, we cannot receive Christ here. Let’s confess what we believe about this meal.

Congregation: We believe and confess that our Savior Jesus Christ has ordained and instituted the sacrament of the Holy Supper to nourish and sustain those who are already born again and ingrafted into his family: his church.

This banquet is a spiritual table at which Christ communicates himself to us with all his benefits. At that table he makes us enjoy himself as much as the merits of his suffering and death, as he nourishes, strengthens, and comforts our poor, desolate souls by the eating of his flesh, and relieves and renews them by the drinking of his blood.

With humility and reverence, we receive the holy sacrament in the gathering of God's people, as we engage together, with thanksgiving, in a holy remembrance of the death of Christ our Savior, and as we thus confess our faith and Christian religion. By the use of this holy sacrament we are moved to a fervent love of God and our neighbors.

As the elements are distributed let’s sing #433, Amazing Grace

DISTRIBUTION OF THE ELEMENTS

HYMN Amazing Grace! # 433

SHARING OF THE LORD’S SUPPER

PRAYER

†OUR RESPONSE #567

“Doxology”

Praise God from whom all blessings flow;

Praise him, all creatures here below;

Praise him above, ye heavenly host;

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

†BENEDICTION: GOD’S BLESSING FOR HIS PEOPLE

The Lord will keep you from all evil; He will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forever more. Amen.