When Life is Unfair

NOTE:

This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.

Engagement

Although they have been attributed incorrectly to Bill Gates, political commentator Charles Sykes developed a list of 10 rules that you don’t learn in school for a television commentary back in the 1990’s. That list was later expanded to 11 rules, then 14 and finally to 50 for a book that he wrote in 2007.

I think we can all relate to rule #1:

Rule No. 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it. The average teenager uses the phrase, "It's not fair" 8.6 times a day. You got it from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever. When they started hearing it from their own kids, they realized Rule No. 1.

While I was searching for the phrase “life is not fair” I also ran across this gem I decided I just had to share.

Tension

It’s very possible that right now you’re going through something in your life that’s just not fair.

Maybe in your job, you got passed over for a promotion that went to someone else who was not as deserving.

Maybe in your marriage relationship, things aren’t going so well and you’re trying to make things work, but it just doesn’t seem like your spouse is interested in doing his or her part.

Maybe you kids think your parents are being unfair with you. They won’t let you play video games as much as you want or they are making you do chores you don’t want to do.

Maybe you are working really hard, but your finances are in a mess and you don’t know how you are going to make ends meet.

Maybe someone has been making some false accusations about you or spreading rumors about you.

None of those situations are easy and in many cases, we can’t do anything about the circumstances that we find ourselves in. We can’t always remove ourselves from those unfair situations. But we can do something about how we respond to them.

Truth

As we saw last week when we began our study of the book of Habakkuk, the idea that life isn’t fair isn’t new. In fact, when Habakkuk began to question God one of the first two questions he asked God was:

Why aren’t things in this world fair?

When God answered Habakkuk’s questions, and revealed that He was going to use the violent, wicked Babylonians to bring judgment against Judah, Habakkuk seemed to be even more confused, so he asks God a second set of questions. We’ll pick up our study in verse 12 of chapter 1:

Habakkuk 1:12–17 ESV

12 Are you not from everlasting, O Lord my God, my Holy One? We shall not die. O Lord, you have ordained them as a judgment, and you, O Rock, have established them for reproof. 13 You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he? 14 You make mankind like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler. 15 He brings all of them up with a hook; he drags them out with his net; he gathers them in his dragnet; so he rejoices and is glad. 16 Therefore he sacrifices to his net and makes offerings to his dragnet; for by them he lives in luxury, and his food is rich. 17 Is he then to keep on emptying his net and mercilessly killing nations forever?

While Habakkuk asks God a series of questions, essentially they all boil down to one main question that he is posing here:

God, how is that fair?

From Habakkuk’s perspective, the Babylonians are far more evil than his own people, the nation of Judah. While Habakkuk might agree that the nation of Judah deserves to be judged by God, the fact that God is going to use the Babylonians to do that seems inconceivable and unfair.

Just like we saw last week, Habakkuk is honest with God. He brings his doubts and his questions to Him. And once again we’ll see that God actually delights in the fact that Habakkuk does that and He delights in answering Habakkuk. But before we look at how God answers Habakkuk, we need to spend a moment talking about what Habakkuk does after he asks his questions.

Habakkuk 2:1 ESV

1 I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower, and look out to see what he will say to me, and what I will answer concerning my complaint.

Habakkuk wasn’t sure how God was going to answer him so he made the decision to wait and to listen for God. We really don’t know how long he waited. We only know he waited until God spoke. This is something we could all probably do a lot better. I think Pastor J. Sidlow Baxter was right when he offered this observation:

“People say that God does not speak to men as he did long ago. The truer statement is that men do not listen today as they did long ago.”

We’re pretty good about whining and complaining about things, but at some point we just need to take our complaints to God and leave them with Him and wait for Him to speak.

Once Habakkuk does that God did eventually speak to him.

Habakkuk 2:2–20 ESV

2 And the Lord answered me: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it. 3 For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay. 4 “Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by his faith. 5 “Moreover, wine is a traitor, an arrogant man who is never at rest. His greed is as wide as Sheol; like death he has never enough. He gathers for himself all nations and collects as his own all peoples.” 6 Shall not all these take up their taunt against him, with scoffing and riddles for him, and say, “Woe to him who heaps up what is not his own— for how long?— and loads himself with pledges!” 7 Will not your debtors suddenly arise, and those awake who will make you tremble? Then you will be spoil for them. 8 Because you have plundered many nations, all the remnant of the peoples shall plunder you, for the blood of man and violence to the earth, to cities and all who dwell in them. 9 “Woe to him who gets evil gain for his house, to set his nest on high, to be safe from the reach of harm! 10 You have devised shame for your house by cutting off many peoples; you have forfeited your life. 11 For the stone will cry out from the wall, and the beam from the woodwork respond. 12 “Woe to him who builds a town with blood and founds a city on iniquity! 13 Behold, is it not from the Lord of hosts that peoples labor merely for fire, and nations weary themselves for nothing? 14 For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. 15 “Woe to him who makes his neighbors drink— you pour out your wrath and make them drunk, in order to gaze at their nakedness! 16 You will have your fill of shame instead of glory. Drink, yourself, and show your uncircumcision! The cup in the Lord’s right hand will come around to you, and utter shame will come upon your glory! 17 The violence done to Lebanon will overwhelm you, as will the destruction of the beasts that terrified them, for the blood of man and violence to the earth, to cities and all who dwell in them. 18 “What profit is an idol when its maker has shaped it, a metal image, a teacher of lies? For its maker trusts in his own creation when he makes speechless idols! 19 Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, Awake; to a silent stone, Arise! Can this teach? Behold, it is overlaid with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all in it. 20 But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.”

We obviously don’t have time to study this entire passage in great detail, but I think the main idea that we find here is clear:

When life seems unfair, I need to live by faith

In verse 4, we see a clear contrast. When life seems unfair or when we can’t figure out what God is doing, we will either live by “unfaith” or we will live by “faith”. Those are the only two options.

Let’s briefly look at how God describes what it’s like to live by “unfaith” and then we’ll spend most of our time talking about what it means to live by faith.

Beginning in verse 5, God describes the Babylonians and the fate that awaits them. He begins by describing their arrogance and then follows that with a series of five “woes” that each consist of three verses. While those woes are aimed specifically at the Babylonians, Judah didn’t get a pass here and neither do we because the same sins that characterized the Babylonians as a people were also widespread in Judah and they are pervasive in our culture today as well.

Since we don’t have time to look at each of these woes and the associated sins in detail, let me just summarize them for you briefly:

Sins of Babylon (and Judah and the United States in 2020)

Arrogance

Greed

Injustice

Violence

Sensuality

Idolatry

Most of these are pretty obvious and self-explanatory so I didn’t see any need to comment further. But I think it’s a little harder to understand how the sin of idolatry is manifest in our culture. That is because today America’s idols are no longer some kind of carved images or statues we keep in our homes or places of work or our places of worship. Instead we ride in them, live in them, dress like them, talk like them and mimic them.

But obviously we are not to live like that. As God tells Habakkuk in verse 4:

…the righteous shall live by his faith.

Without a doubt, this is the central verse in Habakkuk and one of the most important verses in the Bible. It is quoted in three different books of the New Testament - by Paul in Romans 1:17 and Galatians 3:11 and by the writer of Hebrews in Hebrews 10:38.

In order to understand the way God uses the term “faith” here, we need to move beyond the way we tend to use that word in our western culture that has been heavily influenced by a Greek mindset. To us, we usually equate “faith” with “belief”. So we see it primarily as an intellectual exercise. But the Hebrews, and that would include Paul and the author of Hebrews, thought of faith much differently.

Right now I’m reading a book titled The Forgotten Jesus by Bobby Gallaty. It is subtitled How Western Christians Should Follow an Eastern Rabbi. In the book he writes this about the Hebrew concept of faith:

What does this suggest? One way of saying it is that the opposite of Hebrew faith is not unbelief, as we might typically think. The opposite of faith is understood as a matter of faithfulness, in the context of a covenantal relationship. The opposite of faith is disobedience or disloyalty…Faith is not just believing facts despite contrary evidence. It is obeying someone in spite of consequences, It’s faithfulness...

That really fits with the idea that is expressed in verse 4 that the righteous will “live” by faith, and not just “think about” faith. That’s why our main idea today is:

When life seems unfair, I need to live by faith

Before we talk about some practical steps we can take to do that, I need to remind all of us that the Bible is clear that none of us can be righteous on our own. That is why in the Old Testament there was a sacrificial system that had to be followed when men could not keep the law to perfection. But that was only a shadow of what was to come in Jesus.

Jesus came to this earth, put on a body of flesh, lived a sinless life and then died on the cross to make it possible for us to be righteous before God. Here is how Paul describes that process:

2 Corinthians 5:21 ESV

21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Talk about life being unfair! The fact that Jesus had to die on the cross for your sins and my sins is absolutely more unfair than anything else we have or will ever experience on this earth. But He willingly did that because He loves us so much. When we put our trust in Him alone, we are given right standing before God and we are seen by God as righteous because we are clothed with the righteousness of Jesus.

Application

So when the world is unfair - notice I said “when” and not “if” - how do I live by faith?

HOW TO LIVE BY FAITH

Get to know God

There are going to be times in our lives when God’s ways may not make sense to us. They might seem unfair. That was certainly true for Habakkuk. The idea that God would chose to use the evil Babylonians to judge His own people seemed to conflict with what He knew about God. But when that happens the one thing we can be sure of is that God will never act in a way that is contrary to who He is.

That means that the way to deal with our doubts is to do what Habakkuk did and go back to the beginning and review what we know about God. For Habakkuk, he began with the fact that God was eternal and holy and just and that He keeps His promises. And as he meditated on those truths, he eventually comes to live by faith, as we’ll see more clearly in chapter 3 next week.

And if we do what Habakkuk did and we still have doubts about what God is doing, that does not mean that God is wrong, it always means that our understanding of who He is is just incomplete. And the way we deal with that is to get into His Word so that we can get to know Him better.

I like the very practical advice Bobby Gallaty gives in the book I mentioned a few minutes ago:

The next time you read the Bible, don’t just look at what God said, but observe what he did and think about what it means to faithfully imitate him.

Wait for God to speak

We live in a microwave world where we value instant feedback and gratification. We post something on social media and then we check our phones 30 seconds later to see who has liked our post. We send a text and if we don’t receive an answer immediately, we think something must be wrong with our phone.

So we’re not real great at waiting on anything, including waiting for God to speak. But, as we saw earlier, Habakkuk did wait to hear from God before he did anything else. We don’t know exactly how long he waited, but the important thing to note is that he did wait.

Far too often, we’re so busy living our own lives, doing our own thing, that we don’t take time to wait for God to speak. Today, God could speak audibly to us like He did to Habakkuk, but He doesn’t seem to do that much. But He does speak nonetheless. Here are a few of the ways He speaks:

The Bible - that is the primary method God uses to speak to us today.

Prayer. While we are praying our mind is tuned into God and God can more easily speak to our spirit by His Holy Spirit.

Other people. God often uses other godly people to speak into our lives.

Circumstances. God can use circumstances, but a word of caution is on order here. Since Satan can also use circumstances, we need to consider them in conjunction with the other ways we have already mentioned.

Before we leave this idea, let me just say that we aren’t always going to like what God says when He speaks. Sometimes He is going to reveal sin in our lives and point out areas of our lives that aren’t consistent with His character and His Word. And the true test of whether I’m living by faith will be what I choose to do then. That leads to the third and final principle we’ll talk about this morning.

Obey God even when I don’t understand

The first thing that God tells Habakkuk is that the vision God gives him isn’t going to be carried out for some time. We know that the woes that God pronounces against Babylon aren’t fully fulfilled until around 530 BC - roughly 70 years later - when the Medes and Persians conquer Babylon. That means that Habakkuk is going to have to be obedient to God even though He won’t see God’s Word fulfilled in his lifetime.

Like us, Habakkuk was faced with a choice - he could either live by faith and listen to the word of God and obey it and live by it even though it didn’t make sense and he didn’t understand it all, or he could live by “unfaith” and live by his own rules.

As we talked about earlier, the kind of faith that God speaks of here to Habakkuk isn’t really faith unless it is acted upon. We can say that we believe God all that we want, but whether we are living by faith or by “unfaith” will be revealed by our actions.

When life seems unfair, I need to live by faith

Action

It seems likely to me that this morning everyone here is experiencing some area where life just isn’t fair - maybe in your marriage, or with your parents, or in your job, or in your neighborhood or your community. So as we close this morning, I’d encourage each one of us to identify just one of those areas in our life and then develop a practical plan of how we are going to live by faith in the midst of that unfairness.

If you’re struggling in your marriage will you choose to live by faith by loving your spouse and being committed to your marriage or will you live by unfaith and seek a divorce?

If you’ve been wronged in your job, will you live by faith and continue to work as if you’re working for Jesus or will you live by unfaith and badmouth your boss or come in late and leave early or steal from your employer to get back at him?

If your finances are tight, will you live by faith and continue to give the firstfruits to God or will you live by unfaith and use that money the way you want to use it?

If your parents won’t let you do what you want, will you live by faith and treat them with respect and obey them, or will you yell mean things at them and refuse to do what they ask?

Inspiration

I’m not going to tell you that it is always going to be easy to live by faith. But the good news is that you don’t have to do that on your own. God will help you do that if you let Him.

Chapter 2 ends with one of the most encouraging phrases in the entire Bible, It is one that is found 78 times and appears in both the Old and New Testaments:

…but the Lord...

Habakkuk may not understand everything that is happening, but the one thing he can be confident in is that the Lord is in His holy temple, sitting on His throne. He is still sovereign. He is still in charge. And if we will allow Him, He will help us live by faith.