Habakkuk: Chapter One
Good morning. You know, one of the best things that we can do as Christians is to look back on God's faithfulness, his faithfulness through our lives and his faithfulness through all of time. And we're gonna do a little bit of that today as we get into one of the older books of the Bible. If we've not met or if you're new here, my name is Josh and I'm glad you're here this morning. I'm excited because we're gonna jump into a new series today.
But I'm glad that you're here today because no matter where you are on the scale, whether you showed up begrudgingly or you're like on cloud nine that you're here today, we all showed up pursuing God in some way today. And that's good. That's good. We all showed up in community with others who are doing the same thing. So I'm excited because I know that God has something in mind for you today, for me today, for us to grow and be challenged.
If you have interest in connecting with Whitewater any further after the service, the best first step that you can take is to go out to the information desk in the lobby. We got some folks out there that would love to meet you, answer questions that you have, help you take a step or get connected here at Whitewater. So today we start a three week series on a lesser known and lesser read book of the Bible. It's the book of Habakkuk. And when I have shared that we're getting into Habakkuk, that the, the general response has been, oh, Habakkuk, that sounds boring, but it's not.
It's fantastic. I love the book of Habakkuk. He is one of the minor prophets. And not minor because he worked underground. Not minor because he's less important.
Wait for it. It'll click. You'll get it. Not minor because he's less important, but minor because his book is small. That's it.
He's just one of the lesser prophets. Now, I think when most of us hear the word prophet or prophecy, we think of like Miss Chloe or something, like one of those commercials late at night, someone fortune telling with a crystal ball or something. But prophets in the Bible had a lot more as their responsibility. Primarily they were truth tellers. They shared difficult truths.
And God chose these people. He spoke messages to them and then told them to go out, go tell other people. Prophets most often show up on the scene when sin and disobedience is at play, either by a nation or by an individual. And the prophet's job is to confront them with the truth. They often bring messages of God's impending judgment.
If you don't turn around, they things are not going to be good for you. But their messages weren't just doom and gloom. They also revealed God's character, His mercy, his justice, his love, his kindness, his patience. And they look forward to the coming Messiah, Jesus, and the fulfillment of God's ultimate redemptive plan. So in short, prophets shared tough truth.
They warned people when they were getting off track, and they longed and proclaimed a day long for and proclaimed a day when God would bring ultimate salvation. Now, I found over the years that Christians I've talked to have either skipped over reading Habakkuk because it sounded boring, or they read it and it never really stuck with them. Most people don't know what's in the Book of Habakkuk, but the Book of Habakkuk is one of my top few books of the Bible. I love the Book of Habakkuk. It's so unique and it's a very difficult book.
Inside of the Book of Habakkuk is one sentence that to me is one of the simultaneously most troubling sentences in the entire of the Bible and the most comforting at the same time. It's paradoxical and I'll get to that sentence here in a little bit. But as I said, the guy who wrote this, his name is Habakkuk. And in Hebrew, names were very significant. They meant deep things.
In fact, in the Bible, names often conveyed identity, character, destiny, and divine purpose. And the name Habakkuk means to grab ahold of or to wrestle with. And both of these things play out big time in Habakkuk's life. Now, most scholars believe that the Book of Habakkuk was written about 600 BC. Now, in the 1200 years prior to 600 BC, lots and lots of stuff has happened.
So we'll do a very fast run through history. So 1200 years prior to this, the Israelites have been enslaved in Egypt for 400 years. That brings us to Moses, who comes and brings the people out of captivity. They cross the Red Sea, and we then get to the period of the desert. After the desert, God prepares his people to bring them into the Promised Land.
And this is about 1400 BC, about 800 years before Habakkuk is written. And as they're about to go into the Promised Land, God says, hey, if you want to thrive in the Promised Land, there's a way that you need to live to ensure that you will thrive. This is what he shares with them. And this is in Deuteronomy chapter 6. And it is no coincidence.
This is the exact same thing that when Jesus was asked, hey, Jesus, what's the most important commandment from God? He quotes Deuteronomy 6 nearly 1500 years after God originally shares it with his people. Deuteronomy 6, starting in verse 5. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.
Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. He says, memorize them. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
God's been saying all along to his people from then and still saying to us now. Love me with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. This is the most important thing that you can do. Raise your kids like this. Make this the commandment and the guide in your homes.
Memorize this and take it wherever you go. It's the most important commandment in your life. And then God gives the people a promise connected with a warning. God says, if you do this, when you go into the promised land, I'll fight for you. I'll protect you.
I will feed you. I will take care of every need you have. You will have more than you will ever need. You will be the lender and not the borrower. You will eat from fields you did not plant and live in homes that you did not build.
But if you do not, he doesn't say, you'll have a bad week. He. He says, I will destroy you. He says, I will destroy you. This is way bigger than a bad day.
Well, fast forward. And after leading the people, well, Joshua dies. And it seems like there are no good leaders to step up in his place. And so we get into this period of the Judges. You might be familiar with this period.
During this time, the. The Bible says these terrible words. It says, and everyone did what was right in their own eyes. Does that sound familiar to anyone? This is the mantra of our day.
Do whatever is right in your own eyes, your truth. Well, this is a terrible plan. This is a terrible plan. And over and over and over, over 150 years, God's people are doing what is right and their own eyes. If you really want to grapple with some Scripture, go read you some judges.
There's some messed up stuff in there. And the whole point of the book is to show you this is what it looks like to put on repeat people doing whatever they feel like. And every time they fall into a trap and they're hurting and they need help, they cry out to God and they love him with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. And God says, I can help with this. And he brings them back, he takes them back and he provides a judge.
And this is on repeat for 150 years. Now, by the time we get to the book of Habakkuk, God has been extremely patient and gracious to his people for a period of 800 years. 800. By the third time that I have to tell my kids to do something, I lose my mind. God is patient for 800 years.
This is significant. In fact, we read throughout the other prophets in the Old Testament that God's people have forsaken God altogether. Jeremiah describes that their houses are full of deceit. They've become rich and powerful and have grown fat and sleek. Their evil deeds have no limit.
They do not seek justice. They do not promote the case of the fatherless. They do not defend the just cause of the poor. In he goes on to say that they're all greedy, even the prophets and priests. Micah says that they despise justice and distort all that is right.
That they build their city with bloodshed and wickedness. Their leaders judge for a bribe. Isaiah calls them to wash and make themselves clean, to stop doing wrong, to seek justice, to learn to do right. This is what's happening with God's people. This is the context that is happening.
As Habakkuk is writing. Chapter one, a people called the Babylonians are an eastern nation and they are being raised up right now. They are sweeping across the land and they are taking out every town, village, city and nation that they can. They are raping, pillaging, murdering. They are killing babies.
There's a whole song from them about bashing babies, heads on the rocks. They are evil, nasty people. Okay, file that away. And the last thing I'll point out before we read Habakkuk chapter one, is this. The book of Habakkuk as a book of prophecy is different than all the others.
In this one thing, every other book of prophecy in the Bible, the prophet is speaking to the people on behalf of God. In the book of Habakkuk, Habakkuk is speaking to God on behalf of the people. And as the Babylonians are ravaging City after city and coming across, Habakkuk is crying out to God and this is what he says. Habakkuk 1 starting in verse one, how long, Lord, must I call for your help? But you do not listen or cry out to you violence, but you do not save.
Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me. There is strife and conflict abounds. Therefore the law is paralyzed and justice never prevails.
The wicked, him and the righteous, so the justice is perverted. Habakkuk is saying, God, what are you doing? How can you watch this and do nothing? And as the nasty people get closer and closer, you're just letting them win. God, I know we've not been honoring you.
I know we're broken. I know we might even need correction. But God, they are way worse than us. How can you let this happen on your watch? And then we get this wild response from God.
This should rattle the foundations of everything we think we know about God. This should disrupt us deeply. Habakkuk 1 Starting in verse 5, this is God's response. God says this, look at the nations and watch and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe even if you were told.
And Habakkuk's like, this sounds great. I am raising up the Babylonians.
What?
These are God's words. I just described them to you. He says, I am raising up the Babylonians. He doesn't say, hey, this is free will and it just plays out and I let things happen and this is just a result of evil in the world. He doesn't say, habakkuk is not as bad as you feel like it is.
He doesn't say, it looks like they're winning, but they're not going to win. He says, yep, I did that.
I don't know what to do with that. We should be grappling deeply with this, just like Habakkuk did. And just in case we think that maybe God doesn't know what he's doing, or maybe Habakkuk thinks that God doesn't understand how nasty these people are. This is what God goes on to say in verse six. I'm raising up the Babylonians, that ruthless and impetuous people who sweep across the whole earth to seize dwellings not their own.
They are feared and dreaded people. They are a law to themselves and promote their own honor. Their horses are swifter than leopards, fiercer than wolves. At dusk their cavalry gallops headlong they. Their horsemen come from afar.
They fly like an eagle, swooping to devour. They all come intent on violence. Their hordes advance like a desert wind and gather prisoners like sand. They mock kings and scoff at rulers. They laugh at all fortified cities.
By building earthen ramps, they capture them. Then they sweep past like the wind and go on. Guilty people whose own strength is their God. This does not make me feel better.
This is inconceivable.
God is raising up the Babylonians. And when God tells Habakkuk to watch and be utterly amazed, that literally means watch and be dumbfounded. Watch and be dumbfounded. So what do we do? When?
With this. Why is this even in the Bible? How can this be true?
Because I feel like this is incongruent with everything else I think I know about God. Everything else that the rest of the Bible seems to say about God. How can a loving, just, good God not only allow, but cause a savage nation to capture, rape, pillage, murder, and enslave his people? This does not compute.
The logic in our heads leads us to only one conclusion. If he is good and he is all powerful and he is perfectly just and he is loving, he must stop the Babylonians. There is no other option. He must stop the Babylonians. Except he doesn't.
He does the exact opposite. So what do we do with this tension? Well, most of us do exactly what Habakkuk did. We argue with God starting in verse 12. Lord, are you not from Everlasting?
Did I misjudge you, my God, my holy one? You will never die. You, Lord, have appointed them to execute judgment. You, my rock, have ordained them to punish. Your eyes are too pure to look on evil.
You cannot tolerate wrongdoing. Why then do you tolerate the treacherous? Why are you silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves? You've made people like the fish in the sea, like the sea creatures that have no ruler. The wicked foe pulls all of them up with hooks.
He catches them in his net, he gathers them in his dragnet, and so he rejoices and is glad. Therefore he sacrifices to his net and burns incense to his dragnet. He thinks he is his own God, for by this net he lives in luxury and enjoys the choicest foods. He is to keep on. Is he to keep on emptying his net, destroying nations without mercy?
I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts. I will look to see what God will say to me and. And what answer I will give to him, what answer I am to give to this Complaint. Habakkuk says, I don't like this God. And in fact, I'm going to stand here and stamp my feet and cross my arms and I'm going to wait for a much better answer than this.
This is an unacceptable answer.
Why is this in the Bible?
What do we do with such a disruptive reality? Well, remember I said that there's a sentence in the book of Habakkuk that I think is the most troubling and most comforting sentence.
I believe that this sentence is the key to our understanding and the key to our wrestling with this deeply troubling reality. Here's the I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe even if you were told, or I'm doing something that you couldn't understand or get behind even if I explained it to you in exhaustive detail. I believe that this sentence is a key that if we allow it, can unlock a deeper level of faith than we've ever tasted before.
How? Well, I'll tell you a story from my own life that helps kind of lay the path for how we can adjust our understanding of what's going on here. From the time that my daughter Adah was really little, like a little baby. We got there a little soon, but this is her. That's Adah and Garrett and my second child there.
Her. I can looking at this picture, I can just hear her cute little lisp with her crazy hair. This is what it looked like every day. But she was obsessed with drinking out of a straw, like from little tiny baby. So much so that by the time she could carry around her own cup, you can see we didn't get her the regular sippy cups.
We got her sippy cups with straws because she loves straws. And so one day when she's about 2, this is about what she looked like. Then she comes to me with that cute little voice and that crazy hair and she goes, daddy, I thirsty. And I said, okay, baby, I'll get you a drink. So I go into the kitchen and I go to get one of her sippy cups.
Except all of her sippy cups are dirty, the ones with the strawberry. All we have left is the regular sippy cups, you know, the ones you pick up and drink like a regular cup. And so I go to the refrigerator, I get her favorite juice, I put it in the cup, I hand it to her, and I said, here you go, baby. And she holds it up like this and she sucks on the top and nothing comes out. And she says, all gone.
And I Said, oh, no, baby, it's not all gone. And I hand it back to her. She tries a second time and she is not happy with the result. She throws her cup on the floor and says, oh, God. And it's this moment that my brain explodes with an understanding of a thing that literally has changed my faith and changed my life.
What's happening inside of her changes my thinking about God. Think about this. Adah asked for a drink. Up to this point in her life, she knows me to be someone who is kind and loving, who protects her, who provides for her, who can give her things that she does not have access to.
She watches me get the cup. She watches me fill it with juice. I hand it to her. She can feel the weight of it in her hands. All of this tracks.
Then she sucks on the top. Nothing comes out. I said, no, it's not empty. She tries a second time and her whole foundation of understanding falls apart. It completely falls apart.
If she could articulate her feelings at two, she might say, what kind of trick are you playing on me? I'm thirsty. I came to you. I trusted you to provide for me. You pretended like you put something good in this cup.
This is sick. Do you think this is funny to watch me suffer? I thought I could trust you. I thought you loved me. And you had the nerve to trick me and make me look like an idiot.
Idiot? I thought you were the one who was supposed to take care of me. Clearly, you are not who I thought you were. Clearly, I can't trust you anymore. Except none of that is true, because what's the real problem?
Gravity.
Gravity is the real problem. And so imagine I say, oh, well, I'll just explain it to you. Ada, you misunderstand what's going on. The problem isn't me. The problem is, you.
See, there's a sophisticated science of fluid dynamics and gravitational forces at play. Your cup is profoundly influenced by what we call gravitational acceleration. An omnipresent force compelling all matter, even your favorite juice, to seek the Earth's central mass. Consequently, as the juice resides within the Cassippi cup's vessel, gravity exerts. This would be ridiculous.
If I explained it to her in perfect detail, she could not understand it. And if this is the gap between a 2 year old and a 30 year old, how much greater the gap between us and the creator of the universe?
Even if I explained it to her, she couldn't understand.
We trust doctors to tell us what's good for us despite the fact that we don't understand most of it. We trust them to put us to sleep with chemicals and gases that we can't even spell, let alone understand how they interact with one another. Then we trust them while we're naked and asleep to cut into our bodies to solve problems that we can't solve for ourselves and we couldn't solve even if we needed to. And then we trust them to wake us back up without killing us. And then we trust them with when we hurt for the next 10 weeks, we don't question them.
We just say, well, they said I was gonna hurt for 10 weeks and so it'll get better, right? We trust pilots to fly us around at 30,000ft in the air at over 500 miles an hour, and yet most of us have no idea how thrust, lift, drag, altitude and temperature affect flight. We have no problem high hopping into an elevator and going up to the 34th floor of a building that was designed by some engineer that we never met. We just trust that they're smart enough. We drive our cars across bridges that go over water, and we never hesitate because we're sure that the excellent engineers are trustworthy.
We trust electricians to come into our homes and put an invisible power into our walls, and that can kill us and set the house on fire. And we can't explain Ohm's Law or alternating current. Why do we have such a difficulty trusting that the almighty creator God of the universe, the only one who can speak life into being, could possibly do something that doesn't add up in our skulls? Why do we struggle so much with this idea? And some of you might be thinking, you just want me to have blind faith.
Absolutely not. There is no more logical argument in the universe. If you believe God spoke the world into being, if you can grapple with the idea of there being an almighty creator God, how could you possibly not believe that he knows things that you can't know? Of course he can. That's the most logical argument on the planet.
All of us parents listening. We easily understand we are being good parents when we limit our kids screen time, even though they hate us for it. We understand that we're being good parents when we make our kids study or do homework or practice piano or apologize for something nasty that came out of their mouth or take back the thing that they stole or go to bed at a reasonable time. And while I have done all of those things as a good father, never one time ever in all the history of parenting has one of my kids ever come to me after doing one of those things and said, thank you for Being a good father never once.
Now, in the next two weeks, we're. We're going to see God's response and Habakkuk's impossible faith played out. But as painful as it is today, today's message is not going to have a nice, neat bow tied on the top of it. We're going to do what Habakkuk did in chapter one, because we don't know how much time he cried out before God gave him the first answer. And we don't know how much time went by after God gave him that answer.
And he said, I want a better answer. But we're gonna watch a miraculous thing happen in Habakkuk's life in the face of something impossible. But today, we're gonna wrestle. We're gonna wrestle. We're gonna share in communion together.
We'll have a little bit of quiet time during that time where I want us to be processing and thinking, what are the things that right now, the answers from God, the realities in your life, the difficulties in your daily life that you. That cause you to stamp your feet and cross your arms and say, I don't like it. I want a better answer than this. I want you to think about the things that make you keep God on an arm's length because you can't swallow them. I want us to wrestle because we're all wrestling, and don't think that you're the only one.
And if you are wrestling and you are struggling, I want you to know this is a safe and fantastic place to wrestle and struggle because you're in a room full of people who are wrestling and struggling, and you're in great company with a guy that God chose 3,000 years years ago to struggle in an impossible way and come out with faith so that we could read his story. He has kept this story for us for 3,000 years so that we could learn how to wrestle like him. And I guarantee you that is not what he was thinking about while he was stamping his feet and crossing his arms. He had no idea how many generations would find hope in his story.
So we're going to sing. We're going to sing a song that some of us will be able to sing easily, and some of us will have to grit our teeth and squeeze our fists to make this come out today. You're a good, good father.