When His Promise Delays (Habakkuk 2:2-5)

How do you do with delays? In 2017, our family moved back

to America from having lived for three years in England.

So when moving day came, we had vacated our house.

We packed up 10 suitcases, we bundled up three small children,

got them into a van, headed from Cambridge to Heathrow, got to

the airport, got their security, got onto the plane, got

everybody seated and sat for a couple hours on the runway

because there's a mechanical issue.

Then it was determined that the mechanical issue couldn't be

fixed and so the flight was cancelled and the soonest they

could reschedule the flight for was wait for it the next day.

So we D boarded the plane. We got delivered to a hotel.

There's a pretty sketchy bus ride in between where with all

this oversized luggage, it was like flying off the storage

compartments and the buses going around turns.

We get to the hotel, we're being deposited out for 24 hours, go

into our room, start unpacking a couple of suitcases.

Now, we'd especially prepared our son William for the trip

because he was only two years old.

He doesn't really know what's happening.

So OK, William, here's what's going to happen.

We're going to take a van. We're going to get on a plane.

We're going to be on a plane for a long time.

When we get off the plane, we're going to be in America.

So we get into the hotel room. William starts bouncing on one

of the beds, and he shouts in triumph.

We in America think about how much fun it is to load up three

small children in 10 suitcases and get them onto a plane.

And think about how much fun it is to keep those three small

children busy in a hotel with nothing to do for 24 hours.

Delays are not usually very much fun.

Delays often try your patience. They push your buttons.

They reveal sore spots in your personality and weak spots in

your character. What's the last big delay you

had to deal with? And did it show you anything

about yourself? For those of us who are

believers in Jesus, sometimes it seems like God takes his sweet

time to fulfill his promises. He made a promise to elderly

Abraham that he would give him a son, and he did. 14 years later.

He promised to deliver his people Israel from slavery in

Egypt. And he did.

After 430 years of oppression almost 2000 years ago, Jesus

promised to return and make all things new.

He obviously hasn't yet. From one point of view, that

looks like a delay. Would you say it's been a long

time and that promise hasn't been fulfilled yet?

There are also other circumstances that can make us

acutely aware of how long God is taking to fulfill that grand

promise. There could be circumstances

that tempt us to question whether He'll keep other

promises, like the promise never to leave us or forsake us.

We go through all kinds of trying circumstances as

Christians. Sickness, disappointment,

betrayal, discouragement, and doubt.

There can be problems that just get worse with time.

It can make you wonder, why is God taking so long?

Why is His promise so long in coming?

In our series so far in Habakkuk, we've seen that the

prophet Habakkuk wrestled with God's seeming in action toward

injustice. So he cried out to the Lord in

prayer. The Lord answered.

But then Habakkuk's problem was God's solution looked even worse

than the problem. And so he wrestled with God in

prayer again. And he resolved at the end of

that prayer in chapter 2, verse one, to wait for an answer.

In our passage for this morning, chapter 2, verses 2 to 5, God

answers Habakkuk loud and clear. Please listen as I read those

verses. Habakkuk 2 verses 2:00 to 5:00.

And the Lord answered me, Write the vision, make it plain on

tablets so he may run who reads it?

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. Behold, his soul is puffed up.

It is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by

his faith. 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. In the book of Habakkuk so far,

Habakkuk lamented, the Lord answered, Habakkuk lamented

again. And now in our passage, the Lord

answers again. But his answer makes it clear

that Habakkuk's waiting is far from over.

Habakkuk is going to have to wait a lot more, and so are all

of God's people. In this second answer, the Lord

tells Habakkuk that he must wait, and he tells him what he's

waiting for, and he tells him how to wait for it.

So here's our big question for this morning.

What should you do when God's promise seems slow in coming?

What should you do when God's promise seems slow in coming?

Our passage gives 4 answers. We'll see one in each verse .1

in verse 2. Read it.

Read it. Here's verse 2 again.

And the Lord answered me. Write the vision.

Make it plain on tablets so he may run.

Who reads it? This verse explicitly says that

this is the Lord's answer to Habakkuk's prayerful waiting.

This is the response Habakkuk has been waiting for.

But before the Lord gives him the content of that response, he

tells Habakkuk what to do with it.

Write it. Make it plain on tablets.

Now we have to ask, what exactly is the vision that Habakkuk is

to write down? The passage doesn't tell us

explicitly, but for reasons I'll explain as we go, I think that

verses four and five are basically the key to the whole

book. So I think that at minimum,

verses four and five are what Habakkuk has to write down.

But the section running from verse 6 to verse 20 in chapter 2

unpacks the promise of judgment that verse 5 implies.

So it's kind of hard to separate verses four and five from what

follows. Maybe he he wrote down more.

The point is not super important for our purposes.

In any case, what Habakkuk was to do with the vision is clear.

Write it down. Make it plain.

Now the tablets he wants to write on could have been wood,

could have been clay, could have been stone.

The purpose of having him write it on tablets was that it was

like a picture you could frame and hang up where everybody

could see it. It was like an announcement on a

bulletin board that you could put in a public place so that

anybody walking by could read it.

Now that last phrase in verse 2 might be a little confusing.

So he may run. Who reads it?

I think that the running here is a metaphor, meaning that whoever

reads it can do so easily and quickly.

Anyone can walk up and have no trouble getting the message.

They're not going to be stalled by it being too small or obscure

or anything like that. Maybe Hibakuk was supposed to

use big bold letters so that even if you stood across the

street, you can make it out just fine while this fanfare.

Why such emphatic instructions about what to do with the

message? What Hibakuk is supposed to do

with the vision? The reason is that the vision

the Lord is about to give Him is extra important.

All of these kind of trumpet blasts before it actually comes

are signaling how important it is.

God is about to provide deeper insight into the meaning of

events that are to come, and He's about to provide deeper

instruction about how to wait for His promise and how to live

well in the time between. God is about to reveal both what

to expect and how to live in light of that expectation.

That, I think, is why verses four and five are key to the

whole book. I'm not a big fan of billboards.

They're distracting and ugly. But here's the thing, they work.

They grab your attention, you're driving by and it's hard not to

look at that 40 foot wide sign here.

It's as if the Lord is saying to Habakkuk, make it like a

billboard, make it unmissable, make it so that it will grab

everybody's attention, so that everybody in the city of

Jerusalem can see this. What we hear in verse 2 is that

the Lord is determined to publish His word.

The Lord is determined to propagate His word.

There's a sense in which what the Lord told Habakkuk to do in

a special kind of format here, He also instructed all the

prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles and their

associates who wrote the New Testament to do the same thing.

The Lord could have, if he chose, simply given his

revelation in verbal form and said, all right, preserve it,

pass it down, teach it, memorize it, don't forget any of it.

Just pass it down, mouth to mouth, mind to mind, generation

to generation. He could have done that, but

what he did instead was instruct prophets and apostles to write

it down. He gave it a more fixed and

stable form, a form that could travel from region to region,

country to country, A form that could be translated into new

languages, a form that could be preserved over time, over

generations and centuries and millennia.

God's given us his word in a form that's reliable and

trustworthy. It's available and accessible.

It's able to be read by anyone who can read.

It's able to be heard by anyone who can listen to it being read

aloud. In other words, I think verse 2

supports the biblical doctrine of the clarity of Scripture.

God has given us His revelation in a form anyone can understand.

It's teaching about how to be saved and how to live a godly

life is accessible to all. You can get what you need from

Scripture to be right with God and live a life that's pleasing

to him. When God's promise seems slow in

coming, what should you do? Read it.

There's a sense in which the whole Bible expounds God's

promises. Of course, the Bible contains

more than promises, but it's promises that hold the whole

Bible together, promises that set the plot moving.

Abraham wasn't doing much of significance in terms of

salvation history before God's promise comes to him, calls him,

sets a whole new thing in motion.

God's promises and their fulfilment structure the whole

of Scripture. Now God's Word is packed with

detailed descriptions of what he promises to all who believe.

One good spiritual exercise is to read through the whole Bible

and pay attention to everything that is promised to stir up love

for your true Fatherland during your exile.

Read the letters your father has written to you about your

homeland. You could even take a certain

color pen or highlighter and mark every promise that you find

in that same color. Reading scripture with a view to

storing up God's promises is like filling up your gas tank

for a long road trip. The Christian life involves a

lot of waiting. Most of us will likely have to

cover a lot of Spiritual Rd. miles between now and heaven.

What do you have to do on a long road trip?

Say you're driving from here to Maine or you're driving from

here to Kansas City. You will have to fill up your

tank multiple times. One tank of gas is not going to

do it. When you study God's Word to

mark its promises, you are filling up your gas tank

spiritually to enable spiritual endurance.

So when you find God's promises in Scripture, you should also

meditate on those promises by turning them into prayer.

Ask God to enable you to trust His promises more than you trust

market projections. Ask God to enable you to desire

what he has promised you in heaven more than you desire

health or prosperity now. And remind each other of God's

promises. When you do that, you put a

little gas into another church member's tank.

Think of a promise that's especially encouraged you.

And tell someone else. Talk to him in person, or call

him on the phone, or text them or e-mail.

Help a fellow believer see and savour what God has written in

big, bold letters. When God's promise seems slow in

coming, keep reading the book that declares those promises to

you, and then read it some more. It's going to be a long drive.

Settle in point #2 wait for it. That's the Lord's exhortation in

verse three. Wait for it, 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. The beginning of verse 3 says

still. Still the vision awaits.

Why the word still? Because it might look to

Habakkuk like it's already been a long time coming, and because

the full fulfillment of what God is promising here is going to

take a while. Just to preview a little bit.

In verse 5, we get just a hint that God will judge the

Babylonians for their sins. That's part of what Habakkuk has

been asking for. And then verses 6 to 20 predict

that judgement in detail. Babylon's downfall, historically

speaking, would come 70 years later when Cyrus the Persian

would conquer them. In historical terms, it's not

very long, but Habakkuk would almost certainly have been dead

by then. God's people would have to wait

a long time even for the initial fulfillment of the first part of

this promise. But the following verses in

chapter 2 point even further into the future.

We'll see more next week, Lord willing.

But just here's verse 14. For the earth will be filled

with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover

the sea. That didn't happen in Habakkuk's

lifetime. That didn't happen 70 years

later with the fall of Babylon. It still hasn't happened 2500

years later. If it seems slow, wait for it.

The vision the Lord gives Habakkuk is immediately

fulfilled in the historical downfall of Babylon and the end

of Judah's exile. But it is ultimately fulfilled

in both the 1st and the second coming of Christ.

That's why at the beginning of verse 3, the Lord says still for

still the vision awaits its appointed time.

Despite the long time between promise and fulfillment, it's

still coming. Despite the seemingly long

delay, God will still do what He said.

Why? Because the vision has an

appointed time to be fulfilled. We have to ask, appointed by

whom? Appointed by God who made the

promise. Appointed by God who sovereignly

rules the whole universe. People have different ways of

managing their upcoming appointments with other people.

You might have a journal kind of notebook that has a calendar in

it. You might have the one you put

up on your fridge or a wall in your kitchen.

For me, it's pretty much Google Calendar.

If I'm going to make an appointment, it's going into my

Google Calendar. If I don't put it in there, I'm

probably forgetting about it. There's a friend I used to have

lunch with once a month when we lived in DC.

He lived a block from me, and so we'd be walking back from lunch

and every time we got to his place, we're going to say

goodbye. I would just schedule the next

lunch, send him an invite right then and there.

He would laugh at me. The the predictability end of

lunch, we're going to schedule the next one.

The Google invite's going to show up from Bobby in two

seconds. Here we go.

Why did I do that? It's because I valued his

friendship. I didn't want to just forget

about it and have us stop getting lunch because we're

busy. Stuff's going to happen.

If we leave it the next time I might not see him.

So just put it on the Google Calendar right now, for still

the vision awaits. It's appointed time.

Verse 3 is telling us that God Himself has put the date of the

fulfilment of this promise on His own personal Google

Calendar. It's there.

He's not going to forget about it.

He's not going to miss it Now, unfortunately for our desires to

know more than we need to know, this is not a Google Calendar He

can share with any creature. You will not be getting viewing,

much less editing access to this calendar.

But who cares who needs it? God Himself has set the time.

That's all we need to know. God's not going to miss it.

Nothing could take it off His calendar.

Nothing could interfere with His commitment to fulfilling His

promise. God will fulfill it no matter

what the next little bit of verse 3 says.

It hastens to the end. It will not lie.

The word translated hastens is literally pants or breathes,

like someone working hard to reach a destination.

The point is that even if it seems like God's not doing

anything, He's active in ways we can't see.

He is purposely moving history toward its fulfilment.

Even when it looks to us like He's not doing anything, God's

purpose is working. God's promise is painting, and

it won't prove false because the God who gave it won't prove

false. The vision cannot lie because

the God who revealed it does not and cannot lie.

God will never rethink His priorities and decide to not

pursue that course of action. After all, there is no on again,

off again with God's promises. The rest of the verse says if it

seems slow, wait for it. It will surely come.

It will not delay. It might seem slow to us, but it

is not our job to judge God's timing.

God is like Gandalf and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings,

Frodo accuses him. You're late, Gandalf replies.

A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins, nor is he early.

He arrives precisely when he means to.

God's promises are never late, nor are they early.

They arrive precisely when he means them to.

So how can you keep faithfully waiting on God's promise when it

seems slow in coming? The first thing is to remember

that it's spoken by God himself. God has said it.

That's the only assurance we need.

That's the essence of faith. As Martyn Lloyd Jones reflected,

faith means taking the bare word of God and acting upon it

because it is the Word of God. It means believing what God says

simply and solely because he has said it.

You also have to make sure that what you're waiting for is

something God has actually promised.

There are all kinds of good things we hope for and long for

and yearn for that God hasn't actually promised us.

He might give them, He might not.

If you're counting on it, it better be God's promise that

you're counting on. Count on Christ's return.

Count on the resurrection of your body.

Count on inheriting the new heavens and earth.

Count on God never leaving or forsaking you.

But don't count on something you want that God hasn't guaranteed.

In this series so far, we've repeatedly come back to the

theme of waiting on the Lord. And here it is again.

The Lord knows we need repeated reminders to wait for Him.

The Lord knows we're impatient by nature, need to be told again

and again to wait on His promises.

When we're suffering and struggling, we can be tempted to

forget what we knew for certain in the clear light of day.

So when God's promises seem slow, how can you wait?

Well, it's about what weighs heavier in your heart.

God's promises or your plans. God's promises or your

suffering. God's promises or your fears.

Let the certainty of fulfillment outweigh the uncertainty of its

timing. Let the certainty of God's

promises being fulfilled outweigh the uncertainty of so

many of your desires being realized.

Let the certainty of God's promises outweigh your fears and

anxieties. Many of them won't happen.

Even if they do, the fulfillment of God's promises will more than

make up for it. As we sang earlier, the King

there in his beauty without a veil is seen.

It were a well spent journey those 7 deaths lay between.

How can you get God's promises to weigh heavier in your heart

than anything else? The fundamental thing to do is

pray that God will renovate your heart so that His promises are

the foundation of your life. Helps to examine your heart in

light of Scripture. Ask God to show you what you're

relying on instead of His promise, or that's competing

with His promise that you're putting more hope in than His

promise. And talk to another church

member about that. Open up the contents of your

heart. Say, help me rely on God's

promise more than on my plans. When God makes a promise, you

have only two options. Believe it or reject it.

Accept it or refuse it. And which option you choose

determines your relationship with Him.

It determines the course of your life.

Ultimately, it determines your eternal destiny.

So what should you do when God's promise seems slow .3 Trust it,

Trust it. That's the posture commended in

verse 4. Behold, his soul is puffed up.

It is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by

his faith. This verse really begins the

vision itself. This attention getting word

behold is a clue that this is the start of the vision.

Now in this vision, verse 4 begins a contrast between faith

and unbelief that also runs through verse 5.

It paints side by side portraits of someone who rejects God's

promises and someone who accepts God's promises.

In the first part of this vision, the Lord is describing

unbelief in terms that especially fit the Babylonians

and their kings. He's doing that to show how the

Babylonians exemplify and typify unbelief and evil in general.

The Babylonians who are about to swoop down and judge them are a

moral and spiritual example to avoid.

They're what God's people should not to be like.

They're examples of people who don't submit to the Lord and

don't trust His promises. So first, in verse 4, we learn

of the person whose soul is puffed up and whose soul is not

upright. In other words, they're proud.

They reject God's word because they think they know better.

They reject God's ways because they would rather be in charge

of their own life. Pride and unbelief are two sides

of the same coin. Refusal to believe and refusal

to obey are two aspects of the same reality.

If you're not a believer in Jesus, how do you respond to

pride? It's easy enough to spot it in

others, easy to see when someone has a too high view of

themselves. But what about spotting pride in

yourself? How easy is it to detect?

How do you respond if someone else ever suggests to you that

you are proud? It's hard to see your own pride.

It's maybe even harder to acknowledge when someone else

points it out. And it's harder still to get rid

of your pride. What can do that?

How could such a fundamental change be accomplished?

So that's 1/2 of the contrast. Pride, unbelief being puffed up.

What about the other half of the contrast?

Look at the second part of verse 4.

But the righteous shall live by his faith.

Now the whole focus of the context is waiting on God to

fulfill His promise, trusting that God will make good on His

Word even when you don't see any evidence of that coming.

So when Habakkuk refers to someone here as righteous, I

think he implies that what puts them into that category of

righteous is their faith. They're counted righteous by

faith. I think there's a deliberate

echo here of Genesis 15-6, which says Abraham believed God and he

counted it to him as righteousness.

So here the righteous person doesn't rely on themselves, but

on God's promise by faith. The righteous person looks not

to their own strength, but to God's strength.

They rely not on their plans but on God's promise.

Now, what does it mean that the righteous will live by faith?

I don't think this is describing the kind of course of life or

way of life, although that's true theologically.

I think it's a compressed way of promising ultimate salvation.

They will live. Finally, they will live

eternally. When all things are said and

done, they will be found living. Whereas the Babylonians, and

like them, all the wicked will ultimately be judged.

Those opposed to God will ultimately receive his

condemnation. Those who are righteous by faith

will be vindicated. So I think this promise of life

points ahead. I think it points to the climax

of history and beyond history, to the eternal life God promises

his people. It points to a life that is

beyond the reach of any invading army and every unjust oppressor.

It's a promise that might seem slow in coming, but it will

certainly come. This passage paints a stark

contrast. We often resist that.

We don't like that. We want there to be categories

in between. Well, what about the really

righteous person who maybe they don't believe in God, but they

do a lot of moral good works And shouldn't God just kind of look

at that person and say, oh, you're kind of doing the right

thing. You're kind of on my team.

I know you don't really get it or pay attention to me, but

you're you're doing sort of socially good things.

You're a good person. That's fine.

That counts. We don't like the absolute black

and white one or the other, yes or no.

But that's the picture God is painting here.

He's showing that the key to being right with Him is

believing Him. The only way to be accepted by

Him is trusting His promise. And He's made good on this

promise by sending his Son into the world to save all those who

had turned from sin and trust in him.

He made good on this promise that the righteous will live by

faith by sending his Son to become Incarnate, to live a

perfect life for us, to die on the cross for all who would

believe, and to rise from the dead three days later, beginning

in himself that eternal life that would be promised to God's

people. There's such a binary here

because when it comes to the good news of Jesus, you either

accept or reject. There's only two options,

because only by believing in Jesus can you receive this

eternal life. There's only a yes or no, black

or white, on or off, because this good news of what Jesus

came to do is the only way to receive life from God.

It's the only way to be right with God if you've not turned

from sin and trusted in Jesus, believe in him today.

So this verse, Vagad 24, is one of the most important verses in

the Bible for understanding how you can become right with God,

how anybody can get into a right relationship with God.

And so it's not surprising that this verse is quoted multiple

times in the New Testament. To that end, as we heard in our

call to worship, the apostle Paul quotes this verse twice at

key places in his letters. One of them is the Feast of

Statement of the book of Romans, chapter 1, verses 16 and 17.

Romans 1:16

I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for

salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew 1st, 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. So Paul takes this verse,

Habakkuk 2 four, to be a prophetic witness, pointing

ahead to the reality that all who trust in Jesus will be

declared righteous by God. Paul sees in Habakkuk's promise

a preview or a paradigm of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Whoever is rightly believing in God's promise in Habakkuk's day

is looking forward to its fulfillment.

Whoever believes in Jesus today is looking back on its

fulfillment. Everyone who trusts in Jesus

will be declared righteous by God, not because of anything

good we've done, but only because by faith we receive

Jesus's righteousness. That's the biblical doctrine of

justification by faith alone. As we confessed earlier in

Article nine of our church's statement of faith, we believe

the justification is God's gracious and full acquittal of

sinners, wherein He removes our guilt, reconciles us to Himself,

and declares us righteous. Now, justifying faith will

always show itself to be true over time by bearing the fruit

of love and obedience. But we are not justified by our

love or obedience. As Calvin put it, faith strips

us of all arrogance and leads us naked and needy to God, that we

may seek salvation from Him alone, which would otherwise be

far removed from us. In Romans 4 verse 5, Paul

Romans 4:5

teaches that the one who does not work but trusts him who

justifies the ungodly has their faith counted as righteousness.

In Galatians 311, Paul denies that anyone can be justified by

the law. And then he quotes our verse

Faith is how we receive Christ and perfect righteousness in

Him. We're justified by faith alone,

and the faith that justifies is never alone.

A helpful analogy for holding both those truths together is

like the role of the eye in the body.

The eye is not separated from the body.

It can't exist and do its function apart from the body.

But of all the parts of the body the I alone sees, faith alone

receives Christ and his righteousness.

There are infinite rich applications of this truth that

we could consider. Our pastor Michael will lead us

in considering a few of them in the devotional tonight.

For now, I'll just say this. What should this truth of

justification by faith alone do to your relationship with God?

If you trust in Christ, the doctrine of justification should

grant you a massive stable assurance.

Your standing before God does not rise with obedience or fall

with disobedience. Your peace with God does not

diminish based on how you feel or how warm or cold your love

for Him is. Because you've been justified by

faith, you have peace with God. There is therefore now no

condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, those whom God

has justified who will condemn. So when God's promise seems slow

in coming, trust it, receive it, rely on it.

If you do, what will be the proof .4 in verse 5?

Be satisfied in it. Be satisfied in it.

Now that's the opposite of what the wicked person in verse 5

does. So we're giving the opposite of

what is being warned about. Be satisfied in it.

Verse 5 continues the contrast by switching back to focusing on

the unrighteous, and it shows that those who are ruled by

sinful appetites are never satisfied.

Look at verse 11. Sorry, not verse 11, Verse 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.

Again, remember that in this vision the Lord is describing

unbelievers in general in terms that especially fit the

Babylonians. One reason for that is to warn

his people not to be like them, but instead to live by faith.

But I think another reason for describing the wicked in terms

that fit the Babylonians is sort of to start profiling them, to

start forecasting their fate. Here's who they are.

Here's what they're like. You start filling in the dots

based on what you know of God's character and his purposes.

How do you think it's going to wind up for them?

Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a

fall. What's implicit here?

Verses 6 to 20 are going to make very explicit.

Babylon's days are numbered. He's going to judge them for

their greedy domination of the world.

And so we begin to see how verses four and five together

are the answer to Habakkuk's lament.

How can God let the Babylonians get away with all this?

He won't, but he's going to deal with them in his own way and in

his own time. So how can Habakkuk and the rest

of God's people live with that tension?

How can they bear up in the face of present devastation and

injustice and questions about God's righteousness?

It's by trusting in His promise that's the key.

That's the key that God gives His people through Habakkuk to

hold on, to keep trusting the promise.

It will become plain. There will be a difference

between the righteous and the wicked.

Those who trust in Him will inherit life.

Those who oppose Him will be judged.

And you have to keep holding on to that promise for as long as

it takes. So here in verse 5, the Lord

returns to what His people shouldn't do and shouldn't.

B. He begins with a warning about

wine and you might see a footnote in your Bible.

That's the Dead Sea Scrolls copy of this verse has the word

wealth. It's a very similar word in

Hebrew. You basically change one pen

stroke and it could have been wealth.

I think wine though is the original reading.

It's it's in the most of the manuscripts that makes sense in

the context. Here's how it fits.

Wine is a reference not to the beverage as such, but to

drunkenness. According to scripture, wine is

a good gift from God, but drunkenness is treacherous and

arrogant. To be drunk is to be never at

rest. Why?

Because you're giving into cravings and you always want

more. Too much is never enough.

When you want too much and drink too much, it will turn on you,

it will turn against you. You will be seeking enjoyment

and you will be damaging yourself and others.

So drunkenness is a sin, but it isn't merely a sin.

It's also a picture. It's it's a paradigm, it's a

parable. A drunkard always wants more,

and so does the king of Babylon. What does he want more of?

Peoples, nations, kingdoms and all of their resources to suck

up and take back to the capital and to tax to create a ever

flowing income stream. He wants more, always another

one. Where's another Kingdom I can

drink up for myself. Babylon's foreign policy is like

a drunk always wanting another drink.

Idols deliver for a time. Idols give you something that

keeps you coming back to them. If they didn't, they would have

no worshippers. It's not that idols don't work

at all. In fact, they can seem to work

really well for a time. Drunkenness, sexual immorality,

greed, lust for power, you name it.

If you give yourself to that idol, you will get something

from it. But eventually there will be

diminishing returns. Eventually your idol will turn

on you. That's why God calls it a

traitor. Idols demand more and more while

giving less and less. The longer you worship an idol,

the more you give it and the less it gives you.

That's the warning in this verse.

His greed is as wide as Sheol. Like death, he never has enough.

He gathers for himself all nations and collects as his own

all peoples. Ultimately, when you devote

yourself to any sinful desire, you never have enough.

That word for Sheol there, it's just a kind of Hebrew idiomatic

way of referring to the realm of the dead.

Kind of a synonym for death. Just like death swallows up

everyone eventually. That's how big the King of

Babylon's appetite is. It's a gruesome picture.

Kids in the congregation, what do you want that you can never

have enough of? Is there a snack that once you

start to eat it, it is hard not to eat the whole bag?

Maybe your parents wouldn't let you eat the whole bag.

Maybe sometimes. You've eaten the whole bag

anyway and didn't tell anybody about it, only got found out

later. Those snack foods are engineered

to make you want more without filling up your stomach.

That's what they're designed to do.

They're hard to resist. I have my own that I could name

that would be difficult for me not to eat the whole bag, but

that's a picture of what sinful desire is like.

In general. You want more and it isn't

enough. You have a ton and it doesn't

fill you up. You keep going and getting more

of it, but then you start to feel sick.

So what's the alternative? If endless craving is what we

shouldn't give in to, then what does God want us to cultivate

it's satisfaction in Him. You cannot grow as a Christian

through simple denial, only denial.

There is a denial we should denial selfish and sinful

desires, but only denial doesn't do it.

You can only drive out a desire for satisfaction in sinful

things or a sinful to great desire for something that in

itself could be legitimate. You can only drive that out by

aiming for a greater satisfaction in God.

You have to be more satisfied to have His promise then you would

be to possess the whole world. What Jesus said in Mark 836 is

so on point. For what does it profit a man to

gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

So again, this passage presents us with a stark choice.

You can chase sinful desires that will never satisfy you and

always leave you wanting more. Or you can trust the God who is

Himself infinitely satisfying. The more you trust Him, the more

satisfied you'll be in Him. The more you rely on Him, the

more you find every good thing you're looking for in Him.

The more you submit to His commands and put sinful desires

to death, the more you'll find deep delights springing up in

places that used to be overrun by sinful desires.

The more you uproot the weeds of sinful desire, more

satisfactions in God will grow up in their place.

The battle for your soul is a battle for your satisfaction.

The war for your soul between Satan and God is a contest for

your love. It's a contest for your

affections. It's a contest for your desire.

Satan wants you trapped in a cycle of addiction to sin,

always craving, always wanting, never satisfied.

God wants to free you to be satisfied in Him.

But devoting yourself to the one true God produces exactly the

opposite of that kind of always craving and never being

satisfied. The more you love God, the more

you can be satisfied with whatever He gives and whatever

He withholds. The more you trust God, the more

happy you can be with God, even if being happy with God means

for now having nothing else to be happy about.

Every Christian has the universe as their inheritance.

The new creation will be yours. Everything that exists is held

in trust for you. What Paul says to the

Corinthians we considered a couple weeks ago in our Bible

study. He says in First Corinthians

322, starting in verse 21, For all things are yours, whether

Paul or Apollo's or Cephas or the world or life or death or

the present or the future, all are yours and you are Christ's

and Christ is God's. You don't have to crave for more

because God has granted you possession of everything, not

just Christian teachers like Paul starts with, but the world.

The world is yours. How?

Because Jesus is its true ruler and master and owner, and he

will grant you an inheritance in it.

Life is yours How? Because you share an eternal

life now. You already have a life within

you that will never stop, never end, never die, that nothing can

kill, nothing can threaten, and you will one day come to the

full inheritance of it. What else is yours?

The world, life, Death. Death is yours.

What on earth could that mean? It means death isn't supreme

over you. You're supreme over death.

Yes, unless Jesus comes back first.

You'll have to submit to death. Yes, unless Jesus comes back

first. You'll have to be, in one sense,

defeated by death. But Jesus already defeated death

itself. And if you trust in Jesus, you

will live to outlast death. You will live to see death's

final defeat. You will live to laugh at death

and mock death and taunt death. Death doesn't have the upper

hand on you. You have the upper hand on

death. That's what God has given you to

possess. That's what God has liberated

you from. That's what God has made you

free from. That's what it looks like to be

satisfied. In him.

Endless riches are coming, so you can endure poverty and

hardship now. God Himself will be the sum and

substance of the riches He promises you.

God Himself is enough to satisfy you forever.

What is making it hard for you to wait on God right now?

How are you doing with the delay?

Whatever it is, remember to look in two directions, backward and

forward. Look back on the promises God

has already fulfilled. He did fulfill this promise in

Habakkuk. If the vision seems slow, wait

for it. He fulfilled it in 539 BC when

Cyrus the Persian toppled Babylon.

A big chunk of this promise has already been fulfilled.

An even bigger chunk of this promise has been fulfilled when

Jesus came and died on the cross and rose again to give eternal

life to all who trust in Him. Look back to the promises God

has already fulfilled and then look forward what God has said

God will do. Our present sufferings are not

worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us,

and that's a glory that God has promised us.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we pray that we

would patiently wait on You to fulfill your promise because you

have proven so spectacularly faithful to so many promises

both in the history of your people and in our own lives.

Father, we pray that we would trust in you and wait for you.

Be satisfied in You as we look forward to the day when all your

promises will be fulfilled in Jesus name, Amen.