210725 Habakkuk: Trusting in the Lord

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INTRODUCTION

Today, we are going to look at the book of Habakkuk. Habakkuk is a man that once held the office of prophet… a prophet is a specially appointed man or woman authorized by God to reveal divine truth. There were never a lot of these people and none today so when they spoke it was big news.

Prophets speak for the Lord, they don’t speak what they want to say, they say, “thus saith the Lord!”

These prophets speak for God, but, today we are going to see something different, today something is new… a prophet is going to speak to the Lord, Habakkuk is going to ask God a question we are all dying to hear the answer to and then Habakkuk is going to record what the Lord has to say...

Like many of us Habakkuk, has questions. Like many of us Habakkuk has unanswered riddles that don’t make sense. One of the most common ones of our day would be, “How can a good God let bad things happen to good people?”

That’s a question that would probably make a lot of sense to Habakkuk, “why do bad things happen to good people, why does God let that happen?”

I mean why do flat tires happen and why is there cancer? What about COVID-19? Why do wicked people rise to power and seemingly stay there forever? Why do predators rip off old ladies? Why do bad things happen to good people…?

It’s a great question. A necessary question… It needs to be asked and the ones that are asking it are aware… Aware that, clearly there is a discrepancy here. “You Christians you always talk about how good God is but why is my neighbor a paraplegic? Why did I lose my job? I am a good person why did these bad things happen to me or the ones I love?”

WRY SMILE These are great questions but they start out entirely wrong. The premise itself is faulty. These questions presuppose, they assume certain things to be true that aren’t. They are based upon a faulty and unbiblical assumption that the Bible clearly negates... If the question itself is, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” that question is entirely flawed.

I want to leave that question hanging in the air because Habakkuk leaves it open and he is going to insist on an answer.

Before I start unpacking the background of Habakkuk, let’s go to prayer and ask the Lord to make this text make sense for us.

PRAYER

Father God, it is only because of Your grace that we come here today. You have blessed us immeasurably. The believer has hope when the world is hopeless. When all around the world is in flames we can say our hope is in You. You are unshakable. What You say You will do... You will do. Who You say You are is who You are. That constancy, that stability is what we need in this life. Please open our eyes to the truth revealed here today. Please, Holy Spirit, soften our hearts so that we respond. Help us to learn the truth today, that You are good, all the time. The proof of that is in Your Son, it’s in His name we come to You, amen.

Please turn, if you would to the book of Habakkuk. Habakkuk.

BIBLE BOOK SLIDE

I am going to guess that many of us cannot remember where Habakkuk is in the Old Testament, so while you are looking in your Bible’s index for the book of Habakkuk, I would just like to humbly suggest that you spend a couple of bucks this week and pick up some Bible Book tabs. They cost next to nothing and save you time and embarrassment when the preacher says, flip to Obadiah or Philemon… They come in different text directions, different colors and sizes which will perfectly complement your Bible. PAUSE

While you are heading there to Habakkuk I’d like to talk context. Context, is the color, the surrounding picture that takes a prophecy that makes no sense and makes it completely clear. PAUSE

LINEAGE SLIDE

Last week we learned about a great king in Judah, King Josiah. King Josiah was awesome. He became king when he was eight years old and what made him truly remarkable was his faith. He believed God - so refreshing after so many failed kings.

You see, Josiah was the grandson of Manasseh, the most wicked king in Judah’s history. Manasseh had filled Jerusalem with idolatry. King Josiah was not like grandpa, Manasseh. He believed God and there was a period of 31 years where Judah turned back to the Lord, the temple was repaired, idolatry eliminated and this boom time culminated in that fantastic Passover feast. Remember? They sacrificed like 60,000 animals and had the biggest barbecue on the planet - they said this was the best Passover in the past 500 years…

MAP

BREAKDOWN THE MAP.... But all around, the world was still a hot mess. Israel, geographically is located between some major powerhouses, Egypt, Assyria and Babylon… Well, the king of Egypt, Pharoah Neco, he is on his way to help his buddies the Assyrians against the Babylonians but to do so Pharoah Neco has to go through Israel and King Josiah, well, he is having none of it. “You can’t come through my back yard, I don’t care who you are upset with, Neco!” King Josiah, comes against Neco and gets killed by Neco’s archers in Megiddo. TIMELINE That slight delay that Josiah caused Neco is the main reason why Assyria fell to the Babylonians… God used Josiah’s life and his death to do some amazing things, but now Judah needs another king and the next king was picked by the people that was Josiah’s son Jehoahaz TIMELINE Jehoahaz - which was a total non-starter… He only lasted 3 months as king before Pharoah Neco came back from his trip up north and made his older brother, Jehoikim TIMELINE Jehoikim king.

It is at this point we jump into the prophet Habakkuk’s life. TIMELINE Habakkuk... Habakkuk had seen Israel reform under Josiah and then almost immediately turn back to idolatry and debauchery. CONTEXT Leadership in Judah has evaporated as puppet kings took the throne. It was amazing how fast the good times ended and now everyone is doing what is right in their own eyes, again. The Law is no longer regarded it is a mess in Jerusalem as the people flee back to evil… The year is 607, the world is on the edge of a cliff, people are going back to idolatry, evil is ascending and Habakkuk, he wants to know why. He is going to go to the One that has all the answers and here is God’s ultimate answer, which is also our main point, The one who trusts in the Lord will live by their faith… PAUSE No matter what happens in life or death, the one that trusts in the Lord will be welcomed by Him. The one who believes God will enjoy comfort and peace even though the world is in flames… Even though we may suffer to the point of death, we can know that our eternity is secured by the One who loves us most… Habakkuk chapter 1 begins the Prophet’s dialogue with God, and he starts right out the gate with a question… SLIDE

I. Habakkuk’s Dialogue with God (1:1–17)

I.a. The Prophet's First Question (1:1–4)

1 The oracle which Habakkuk the prophet saw. 2 How long, O Lord, will I call for help, And You will not hear? I cry out to You, “Violence!” Yet You do not save. 3 Why do You make me see iniquity, And cause me to look on wickedness? Yes, destruction and violence are before me; Strife exists and contention arises. 4 Therefore the law is ignored And justice is never upheld. For the wicked surround the righteous; Therefore justice comes out perverted.

Habakkuk, wants to know why is the world in flames. Why is there injustice, why is there violence and why is the law unenforced… PAUSE Boy, is that ever a question for today.... Does this not resonate with us? In our context we could ask the same things. Spend an hour on the nightly news and you will be singing the same exact song, will you not? “Lord, do something! Bad things are happening, how come You are ignoring this situation? Do something!”

Here is our first application point. God always hears and God always answers - so let your requests be made known to Him. God always hears and God always answers. There is not a single prayer that has ever been offered that was not heard with full clarity. God knows exactly what is going on your situation and everybody else’s. He knows what you are thinking and what you don’t know. He is sovereign. He is omniscient - He knows everything. Nothing is hidden from Him and all of history has been perfectly organized according to His timeline. He always hears and He always answers. Sometimes He grants requests and sometimes He says no… and sometimes He just says, “wait.”

You know, sometimes it is hard to trust, it is hard to wait, it is hard to be patient but that is one of the realities of life. Waiting has the benefit of clarifying priorities… When we wait and ask and ask and ask over years. When we pray for something over decades we have the advantage of clarity. We understand what we want more than anything and when the miraculous happens. When the Lord sees fit to grant our request, SPEAK LOW AND SLOW we know it! This strengthens our hope and our trust in God.

I will grant that it is hard to trust, to wait, to be patient to do what we have been called to do… But in all our remembering of what we have been called to do we need to remember what we have not been called to do. We are not called to understand what has not been revealed to us. We are not called to be omniscient. We are not called to know everything. We are called to believe what has been revealed in sacred Scripture and that is enough. We are called to trust in the Lord and the one who does that will live… Well,

In verse 5 the Lord answers back to Habakkuk and His answer shows that not only is God listening but also that He fully aware and in complete control. But His answer is troubling because He says that the people of Judah would not understand it even if He told them… Which is true, that actually happened then and it still happens today. Many fail to believe to the point where they are destroyed… we know people like this - that ran straight into eternal destruction. It’s tragic, they didn’t believe the word of warning. Well, God says that the Babylonians would come to destroy the people of Judah but that the Judeans wouldn’t heed the warnings. Verse 5 SLIDE

I.b. God’s Explanation (1:5–11)

5 “Look among the nations! Observe! Be astonished! Wonder! Because I am doing something in your days— You would not believe if you were told. 6 “For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans, (CHALDEAN IS ANOTHER NAME FOR BABYLONIAN) That fierce and impetuous people Who march throughout the earth To seize dwelling places which are not theirs. 7 “They are dreaded and feared; Their justice and authority originate with themselves. 8 “Their horses are swifter than leopards And keener than wolves in the evening. Their horsemen come galloping, Their horsemen come from afar; They fly like an eagle swooping down to devour. 9 “All of them come for violence. Their horde of faces moves forward. They collect captives like sand. 10 “They mock at kings And rulers are a laughing matter to them. They laugh at every fortress And heap up rubble to capture it. 11 “Then they will sweep through like the wind and pass on. But they will be held guilty, They whose strength is their god.”

God tells Habakkuk that the Chaldeans would come and destroy Judah. Habakkuk had asked, “Why are You letting bad things happen, here, Lord? Why is there injustice, evil and violence in Judah?” The Lord said in verse 5, “You won’t believe it if I told you...” Here the Hebrew uses the second person plural so we know that God is referring not to Habakkuk but to the people of Judah, collectively - we could rephrase it like this, “Y'all won’t believe it but I am going to deal with the situation - I am sending these bad guys to wipe y’all out!” PAUSE PAUSE PAUSE PAUSE PAUSE REALLY HOLD STILL AND WAIT

But that brings up more issues, am I right? “Wait a second God, You are going to use these wicked people, these Chaldeans, to destroy us? We are Your chosen people, they are evil, how can You use those rotten people against us?” Verse 12 SLIDE

I.c. The Prophet’s Second Question (1:12–17)

12 Are You not from everlasting, O Lord, my God, my Holy One? We will not die. You, O Lord, have appointed them (THEM IS THE BABYLONIANS YOU HAVE APPOINTED THEM) to judge; And You, O Rock, have established them to correct. 13 Your eyes are too pure to approve evil, And You can not look on wickedness with favor. Why do You look with favor On those who deal treacherously? Why are You silent when the wicked swallow up Those more righteous than they? 14 Why have You made men like the fish of the sea, Like creeping things without a ruler over them? 15 The Chaldeans bring all of them up with a hook, Drag them away with their net, And gather them together in their fishing net. Therefore they rejoice and are glad. 16 Therefore they offer a sacrifice to their net and burn incense to their fishing net; Because through these things their catch is large, And their food is plentiful. 17 Will they therefore empty their net And continually slay nations without sparing?

“How can You use those rotten pagans against us Lord?” “How can You let bad things happen to good people?” AH HAH! “How can You let bad things happen to good people?” Do you remember how I left that question hanging in the air? We asked that question in the introduction and it is answered here.

Even Habakkuk knows that there is not a one of them that is good. He was just complaining how Judah is violent, evil, wicked - they don’t obey the Law - there is rampant injustice and Habakkuk wanted God to do something about it and God is going to do something about it, He is going to use a wicked people to destroy a wicked people, He has to use what He has and what He has is Babylon.

“Why do bad things happen to good people” is entirely the wrong question. The Bible clearly says in

SLIDE

Psalm 14:3 | 3 They have all turned aside, together they have become corrupt; There is no one who does good, not even one.

Friend, we need to understand that if we start off with the assumption that all people are good, we are going down the wrong path. That is the wrong idea altogether. The Bible is packed with statements of how depraved and ugly humanity is. We know this! We can look at our own life and see our own dishonesty, hypocrisy, our own willingness to steal and take what does not belong to us. It’s true! People run headlong after evil not even thinking twice about it and our great enemy satan has done a wonderful job of marketing the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” SLIDE

The only one who is good is God, the rest of us deserve judgment, we deserve darkness, death, destruction. We demand it from God by refusing to listen to Him! The world is filled with people who don’t listen to God, they don’t heed the warning and satan is thrilled to have them duped. But for the believer, for the Christian, for the one that trusts in God it is not this way. The one who trusts in the Lord will live by their faith…

Colossian 1:21 tells the believer that although we were formerly apart, distant, separated from God, God freely, of His own volition, chose to reconcile us through Christ’s death. This makes us not evil, not wicked, not unjust, not liars or thieves no, no, no! Oh boy, we are now holy and blameless and beyond, past, after, away from all reproach - because when God sees Christians He sees His own Son in their place. He doesn’t see me in my filth. He doesn’t see me in my sin anymore… that has passed, I am a new creation with a new identity. Believers live because they trust that what God has told them in the Bible is true. Non-believers, non-Christians scorn this and they get what they want. They get destruction, eternal destruction in hell apart from God and apart from all that is good. SLIDE

Let’s continue… in Chapter 2 Habakkuk is going to climb the wall that surrounds Jerusalem and into the watchtower… He is going to wait on God to answer his question. How can You use evil Babylon against us? Habakkuk says,

I.d. God’s Explanation (2:1–4)

1 I will stand on my guard post And station myself on the rampart; And I will keep watch to see what He will speak to me, And how I may reply when I am reproved. 2 Then the Lord answered me and said, “Record the vision And inscribe it on tablets, That the one who reads it may run. 3 “For the vision is yet for the appointed time; It hastens toward the goal and it will not fail. Though it tarries, wait for it; For it will certainly come, it will not delay. 4 “Behold, as for the proud one, His soul is not right within him; But the righteous will live by his faith.

I want to bring out something here that I especially appreciate application point

As some of you know I spent four years in the Marines, on three combat tours in Iraq which is actually the region that the Chaldeans or Babylonians controlled in Habakkuk’s day. I spent many, many, many nights on watch - sometimes in towers and sometimes just sitting on top of our vehicle, sometimes just in holes in the ground... In the dark, in the cold, alone, awake pondering, wondering what was going on back home, praying, thinking - usually not too deep thoughts - don’t get me wrong, I’m no great philosopher, hahah!

But being awake and alone in the middle of the night has a habit of clearing things up. There is no distraction, there is no noise… there is just quiet and you can finally think, you can talk to God.

That’s where Habakkuk heads… Into the quiet. Into the dark, to pray and be alone with God. To ask questions and to listen for the response. You know, the quiet dark is the perfect time to pray, to read God’s word to think. I know that it is super easy to distract ourselves, to flip on the tube or take a drug to try to force sleep but sometimes we are up for a reason. Maybe you have been jolted out of sound sleep and immediately thought of someone or some situation that you just needed to pray for, that might just be the Holy Spirit waking you up to pray… PAUSE… don’t fail in your duty and don’t come down off the watchtower until have spent your time alone with God asking Him to do what only He can.

I like Habakkuk, I like him because he is so humble, so genuine, he is honest and he knows that he doesn’t know, he just goes to the watchtower to talk to God. Verse 1 makes Habakkuk’s character so clear. He says, “I’m going to wait and when God answers and corrects my faulty understanding I want to respond the right way...” Habakkuk is pretty cool in my opinion. This is an honest approach to the Lord. He treats God as holy and recognizes that he doesn’t know everything that is going on but still trusts God anyway! That’s pretty great and something I aspire to… SLIDE

II. The Tie in to Christ

As I begin to wind down this message I want to highlight again verse 4 - specifically, “the righteous man shall live by faith.” That last clause, which was actually the main point of the sermon, is also my tie in to Christ; because that particular phrase is quoted multiple times in the Bible. One passage that does a pretty neat job of doing that is in Galatians. Please flip over to Galatians chapter 3. Galatians 3:11.

In the beginning of Habakkuk, he complained that no one was obeying the Law, there was injustice, there was unrighteousness, wickedness etc and he cried out to the Lord, “Do something!” Well, the Lord did do something. He sent His Son to bear the punishment that unrighteous, law breaking people deserved.

Galatians 3:11–13 | 11 Now that no one is justified by the Law, (BY KEEPING THE LAW, BY OBEYING THE TEN COMMANDMENTS - NO ONE IS JUSTIFIED BY BEING GOOD) before God is evident; for, “The righteous man shall live by faith.” 12 However, the Law is not of faith; on the contrary, “He who practices them shall live by them.” 13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”—

Jesus Christ is the righteousness, the perfection that God requires. No amount of rule following will ever endear us to God. We cannot obey the ten commandments enough to warrant acceptance into God’s presence. We need someone to stand in the gap. To come between us and God… That is Jesus. The righteous man shall live by faith, that faith is the belief that Jesus is who He says He is.

The one that does that, the one that makes Jesus not just their get of hell free card but also their boss in all things, the one that does that they get Jesus’ righteousness superimposed over them, so God doesn’t see them in their filth, He sees His perfect Son. The one who trusts in the Lord will live by their faith. Habakkuk had this faith, the last part of Habakkuk, is a wonderful song that he wrote that tells us of this trust he had… You don’t have to turn there, I am just going to read it… Habakkuk has heard that the Lord is going to use wicked Babylon to judge wicked Judah and that destruction is coming but yet he quietly trusts in God… 3:16

Habakkuk 3:16–19 | 16 I heard and my inward parts trembled, At the sound my lips quivered. Decay enters my bones, And in my place I tremble. Because I must wait quietly for the day of distress, For the people to arise who will invade us. 17 Though the fig tree should not blossom And there be no fruit on the vines, Though the yield of the olive should fail And the fields produce no food, Though the flock should be cut off from the fold And there be no cattle in the stalls, 18 Yet I will exult in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation. 19 The Lord God is my strength, And He has made my feet like hinds’ feet, And makes me walk on my high places. For the choir director, on my stringed instruments.

Even though the worst is going to happen, Habakkuk could trust in God.

CONCLUSION

The one who trusts in the Lord will live by their faith. No matter what happens in life or death, the one that trusts in the Lord will be welcomed by Him. The one who believes God will enjoy comfort and peace even though the world is in flames… Even though we may suffer to the point of death, we can know that our eternity is secured by the One who loves us most…