Life of Faith
Notes
Transcript
Passage
Passage
Last week, we began a series from the book of Habakkuk on how we can grow in faith even during turbulent times like these.
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.
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?
You make mankind like the fish of the sea,
like crawling things that have no ruler.
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.
Therefore he sacrifices to his net
and makes offerings to his dragnet;
for by them he lives in luxury,
and his food is rich.
Is he then to keep on emptying his net
and mercilessly killing nations forever?
Introduction
Introduction
This morning, we want to look at three main points from this verses as well as the rest of chapter 2.
The struggle of faith
The prayer of faith
The life of faith
We all know that God can work in different ways during different periods of history. Most of us have been blessed to live in peace and prosperity for the vast majority of our lives. Unlike so many people in the world, we have not felt the sting of war, economic hardship, famine, or the loss of our freedoms. For all the moral problems that we have as a society, God has been incredibly patient and long-suffering with us. We are fortunate to live where we live and largely limited to dealing with first world problems.
But there is a dark side to living in such wealth and prosperity and that is the trap of having a shallow faith that may have the outer form of Christianity but in reality it lacks the substance. This was the main issue with God’s people during the time of Habakkuk. Israel had experienced a great deal of material blessing but that didn’t translate into greater faithfulness to God as Moses warned them.
“Take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery,
Body:
Unfortunately this seems to be the general pattern that we see in societies that experience the blessings that often come through Christianity. We’ve seen this play out not only in the history of Israel, we have seen it in Europe, we are seeing it now here in the United States, and it’s beginning to happen in South Korea. If you are wondering why there are so many Korean pastors, it’s because this small nation experienced an incredible revival in the mid-20th century and for a period of time, it sent out the most missionaries per capita and most of the largest churches in the world were found in Korea. A church of 1000 people was once considered small. But with the influx of wealth, churches are shrinking and it seems faith has greatly decreased.
And against this backdrop of God’s patience and His material blessing, it’s hard to accept seasons of God’s judgment. And this is the situation that we find Habakkuk in and he’s struggling with faith. After a long period of national prosperity, he now has to accept the fact that the turbulence around him is actually God’s discipline. That there would not be any immediate deliverance from this situation and he now has the task of having to warn people about this. It’s an unenviable job. I think it is easy to paint the prophets from the Bible and even those with prophetic inclinations in our modern times as Christians who hate people and love to see God’s wrath poured out.
But when you read about the inner thought of the prophets, you see the intensity of their love for both God and for people and often those two pursuits collide in heart-breaking fashion. The prophet Jeremiah who had a similar ministry as Habakkuk was very honest about how he felt about the message that He was given by God.
My heart is broken within me, all my bones shake, I am like a drunken man, like a man overcome by wine, because of the Lord and because of his holy words.
Maybe I’m from the old school of thought but I tend to be more trusting of someone who is willing to tell me some hard truths regarding God as opposed to a lot of nice words that may or may not be true. In times like this, I’m more inclined to listen to someone who has a realistic view of what is going on in the world and is wrestling deeply with God and His word concerning these matters. My deceitful heart wants unrealistic hope but what I need is hope based on the truth of God and the reality of the world. That is the prophet’s struggle of faith.
After God tells Habakkuk, that He has raised the Chaldeans for His purpose and that they are His chosen instruments for judgment, Habakkuk can’t believe what He is hearing. Why would God use a foreign nation that is so evil to discipline his own people. In his complaint against God, Habakkuk reminds God and maybe himself that God is of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong. But what the prophet is currently witnessing in the world is not only confusing, it is deeply troubling to him. He recognizes fully that God’s people are deserving of some judgment but certainly not in this way! Why would God allow the wicked to swallow up those who are more righteous?
(If you are here this morning and you are exploring the Christian faith, it may surprise you that a religious leader like Habakkuk is openly questioning God about how He is handling the current situation. I think we are all aware that one of the main barrier for belief is the question of, why God allows suffering but here the prophet is wrestling with even a deeper question, why does God ordain suffering even against His own people. We will get to that answer later in the message.)
Our situation may be different but our complaints are probably similar. God, we know the world is screwed up and there needs to be some correction but does it have to be this severe? Do so many people have to suffer and experience the loss of loved ones? Does this have to last this long, wasn’t one year of the pandemic enough but now we are moving into year 2 and we are just beginning to feel the social, political, and economic fallout from everything that has happened. Like the prophet, the disaster that is looming over us doesn’t make any sense in our minds because we are so accustomed to God operating in one particular way and we forget that God’s ways are higher than our ways, his thoughts are greater than ours. And like the prophet, we have a choice in the face of judgment: allow these difficult questions to cause our faith to erode or dare to turn to God for the real answers.
To hear from God in times of prayer requires an attitude of faith that we see being modeled in the first verse of chapter 2.
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.
There is an attitude of faith that we need to bring into times of prayer especially in times of deep distress and trouble
Commit to seeing your problem from God’s perspective
Watch and wait for God to answer
Prepare to respond
One of the hardest things that I have struggled with in terms of counseling people in this generation is their refusal to look at the world from any other perspective than their own. We are so entrenched into this idea that my own viewpoint on life is the only one that is true and so it never dawns on us that we could be mistaken. Habakkuk is clearly a man of prayer but he prays differently than most people are accustomed to, he has learned to pray like a watchmen.
A watchmen is a military term for someone who takes the highest vantage point so that he can see the entire battle, not from ground but from the air. To see what is going on at every angle, so that the enemy cannot come in undetected. Habakkuk makes a point in his prayer life to elevate himself above the fray, above everything that is going on, and even going above his emotions. The prayer of faith begins with the commitment to accept the perspective of God, to desire to see the world, the way God sees it and to be okay with that.
Second, you have to watch and wait for God to answer. I love what Martyn Lloyd Jones says, “Nothing speaks more about your faith than what you do after you have prayed.” Do you look out to see how God will answer your prayer? Do you keep an attentive ear to his still small voice? Do you comb the Scriptures and read with the expectation that the Holy Spirit will highlight a passage that will give you and answer to your dilemma? And I wonder, how many prayers that God has answered but because we didn’t have the faith to watch, that answer was simply ignored or unheard. God speaks to those who listen, who have ears to hear.
Third, when you pray, you need to muster the faith to respond to whatever answer God is going to provide. And the thing is, it may not be the answer you want and I’ve prayed enough to realize, that many times God’s answer to my prayers is not what I want and in fact it is often the exact opposite of what I thought I wanted. Habakkuk is preparing in his prayer of what he will answer when God responds because God surely will. You may not believe this but God always answers our heartfelt prayers, it may be yes, no, or wait but it is up to us to prepare the right answer in response to Him. Habakkuk realizes, I’ve made a complaint and when God responds, I am responsible to answer Him.
The rest of chapter two is God’s answer to Habakkuk’s prayers and chapter three represents one of the most beautiful human responses to the voice of God that you will read anywhere.
The summary of God’s answer to Habbakuk is found in verses 4
“Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him,
but the righteous shall live by his faith.
God is talking about the Chaldeans, this enemy army at the doorsteps of Israel. He essentially tells Habakkuk, you are right about these people, they are more wicked and they too will be judged for their evil ways but before I do that, I am going to use their wickedness to turn the heart of my people back to be in faith.
The Chaldeans better known as the Babylonians are used in the Scriptures as the prototype of the evil in this world or if we want to use current our vernacular, they represent the systemic evil that we see in humanity.
And he called out with a mighty voice,
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!
She has become a dwelling place for demons,
a haunt for every unclean spirit,
a haunt for every unclean bird,
a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast.
For all nations have drunk
the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality,
and the kings of the earth have committed immorality with her,
and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxurious living.”
Essentially, the world is under the control of this controlling spirit that is embodied by this enemy army that is at the gates of God’s people. And is using their evil and sin, to warn His own people, that is not the way with you, you are chosen for a higher purpose, to live by faith and not by your own pride.
The purpose of God’s judgement is so that we will see the evil of this world for what it is and turn to Him in faith. You either live by faith or you live by human pride, there is only two ways to live this life. There is no middle ground and we may think, we don’t live in the house of demons. Yeah, people tried to burn down our cities, start an anarchist revolution, tried to kill each other over masks, and make Squid Games the runaway number one show, but there are are no demons here.
It seems like the forces of Babylon have picked up a quite a bit of strength because they were far less insidious at the time of Habakkuk. I want to highlight a few of the curses or woes that God pronounces over the Babylon empire and I think it will strike us how tame the house of demons seems like back in the day:
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!”
“Woe to him who gets evil gain for his house,
to set his nest on high,
to be safe from the reach of harm!
“Woe to him who makes his neighbors drink—
you pour out your wrath and make them drunk,
in order to gaze at their nakedness!
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.
In His judgment, God exposes His people to the evil of the world so that we are faced with a stark decision. Will I continue to walk down the road of the cursed life or will I turn towards the blessing of living by faith. That choice is ours!
Conclusion and Communion
This one verse from Habakkuk lays down the theme for the greatest theological book, not only in the Bible, but in all of human writing, the book of Romans:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.