Route 66: Habakkuk - Wrestling with Unanswered Questions

Well, good evening all.

I invite you to take your Bible and turn over with me to the book of Habakkuk, or, if you're English, habakkuk.

So if I say it both ways, please forgive me.

Sometimes my vocabulary is somewhere over the mid-Atlantic and I'm not sure.

Yeah, yeah, if you're looking in the Pew Bible, you can find it on page 832, or you can turn two pages into your Bible and find a table of contents and it'll show you what page in your Bible the book is in.

In 1995, royal and I and our two boys were living in Southern California, a very hot climate, it was in the middle of summer and we were serving with a number of college students and we went on a camping trip together.

All of the four of us were in one tent.

Royal doesn't do camping, she does glamping.

Her idea of camping is me handing over the credit card and saying can I have the room key please?

So anyway, we tried to make it as plush as we could for her.

I was sleeping near the tent door and in the middle of the night our son, ben, who was five at the time, was waking up several times and needing to go to the bathroom.

And I would go with them and, of course, being on the campground, you have to go, walk over to the bathroom area.

And after about the third time I kind of said well, there's some bushes right over there, ben, why don't you just kind of go over there?

And he thought that was pretty cool.

However, ben, that summer had been losing what we thought was his baby fat and he was drinking a lot.

And when we're in the tent we're obviously very much more aware of what's happening in the middle of the night, because he was waking us up in order to go to the bathroom and Royal's nurse radar was going off right, sort of half not wanting to think what it was and half being fearful of what it actually was.

And so she went to our doctor and they tested his blood sugar and said it looks like diabetes.

And so they sent Ben and Royal to UCLA, to the medical center there, and he was admitted overnight and diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and our life changed completely from that day forward.

Time doesn't allow me to tell all the details, but I can tell you that we shed a lot of tears and we've shed them over the years.

A lot of adjustments to a lot of decisions and things to consider that we had never given thought to before and had to deal with every day.

Shortly after that, we were walking in the mall and we walked by one of the candy stores in the mall and, for whatever reason, that was when the dam broke for me.

I just wept and wept and wept in the middle of the mall, just in the realization of what this disease was going to be in my son's life and our life, that even something as running over there and grabbing some candies without any thought of doing it before was not something we could do with him.

He had to be fed at a certain times and a certain amount and a certain type of food.

You know, whenever I face situations and difficulties that I don't understand or provoke a lot of questions, one of the places that I go to is the book of Habakkuk, because it's a book that deals with perplexing issues.

These questions that we don't have answers for and aren't necessarily going to find an exact answer to, we can find a resonation in the book of Habakkuk.

It's a little book, three chapters.

It's tucked away in an area in the English Bible we call the minor prophets and usually when we read these Old Testament prophets, we have some expectation of what it's going to be like.

There's going to be a prophet who has a message to a people and he's going to be saying thus says the Lord, and in doing so there's likely to be a call to repentance, or a message of judgment to the rebellious, or an oracle of woe sometimes, and even messages of hope of a coming day of restoration.

But Habakkuk's different than that.

Habakkuk isn't constructed that way.

The bulk of Habakkuk is a conversation that the prophet Habakkuk has with God, in which Habakkuk, strangely enough, seems to be the one who is more concerned about what's right and wrong and more concerned for judgment to come and for God's people to be preserved than seemingly God is.

For Habakkuk, it starts off with him being concerned about the evil that's arising within the people of God in Judah.

He's concerned about injustices that are reigning once again.

A good king, josiah, had just died and the land had had peace for a while.

But now, after the death of that good king, an evil king takes up the throne and evil is starting to flood right back in to the land and Habakkuk's wrestling with this.

Why is evil prospering again after such a peaceful reign?

Isn't God going to do something.

Why did it have to come back to this?

Maybe you're here this evening with your own questions, far removed from the questions that Habakkuk has, but no less filled with tension and no less perplexing to your heart and no less perplexing to your heart.

And if you could have an audience with God, like Habakkuk has, what would you ask him?

What would you talk to him about?

Life brings things that we don't understand.

Life brings us into situations that disturb us.

Life provokes questions that sometimes feel almost wrong to even ask.

Why isn't God doing anything?

It's not a new feeling.

It's exactly the feeling Habakkuk is filled with right here, and here's a whole book about that very question what is God doing in the world?

Well, this evening I want us to look through Habakkuk.

We'll hover in a few spots, but we'll kind of move through it.

Habakkuk begins by wondering and worrying over the world around him and God seemingly being indifferent to it all, but he ends with worshiping God.

So let's begin by looking first of all at Habakkuk's perplexity.

In verse 2, here is the pronouncement that the prophet Habakkuk saw.

How long, lord, must I call for help and you do not listen?

Or cry out to you about violence and you do not save.

Why do you force me to look at injustice?

Why do you tolerate wrongdoing, oppression and violence, which are right in front of me?

Strife is ongoing and conflict escalates, and this is why the law is ineffective and justice never emerges, for the wicked restrict the righteous and therefore justice comes out perverted.

Habakkuk just launches right in, doesn't he?

I mean, he doesn't spend any time saying Lord, oh mighty God, creator of all the covenant keeping.

He just jumps in.

This question is so much on his heart he just has to talk about it.

And, like I said, josiah had died and Jehoiakim is now the king.

Jeremiah preached about Jehoiakim in chapter 22.

And he talks to him this way he says woe for the one who builds his palace through unrighteousness, his upstairs rooms with injustice, who makes his neighbors serve without pay and will not give him wages, who says I will build myself a massive palace with spacious upstairs rooms.

And he goes on just denouncing the evil of this man and when he's brought to an end, jeremiah says this they will not mourn for him saying whoa, my brother.

They will not mourn for him saying whoa Lord, whoa his majesty.

They're going to be glad the king is dead.

But the problem wasn't just in the royal court, it was everywhere.

In verses 3 and 4, habakkuk mentions about six different problems and he uses a lot of Hebrew words for sin.

In our translation it'd be like sin and wickedness and destruction and violence and the lack of justice and unrighteousness.

And in verse 4, he says the law is just being ignored and the unjust people are restraining righteousness.

This is the cause of Habakkuk's perplexity.

Why does evil go unpunished?

Why do the wicked prosper?

Why doesn't God do something?

And evidently he's been praying that way for a long time.

Take a look at verse 2.

Take a look at verse 2.

How long, lord, must I call for help or cry out to you about violence?

And you do not say this wasn't just a momentary rush of being upset.

This was a deep-seated concern that he had brought before the Lord time and time again and he's thinking well, god is either indifferent or not going to do anything about it.

Some people think that people of faith don't ask questions.

They do.

It's right here.

Habakkuk trusts God.

He trusts God, but he also can talk to God very, very directly and frankly in the midst of trust.

This return to wickedness and the seed of power in Judah and its influences in society had caused him to question God's silence and his apparent lack of taking any punitive measures against the wickedness that was increasing in the land and seemingly indifferent to purging his covenant people.

But Habakkuk is going to learn some lessons, and it begins in verse 5 with God's answer.

God is going to do something, but it's not what Habakkuk expects.

In fact, in verse 5, he said Look at the nations and observe and be utterly astonished, for I'm doing something in your days that you will not believe when you hear about it.

I don't operate the way you think I should.

Habakkuk, what is he going to do?

He's going to raise up, in verse 6, the Chaldeans, that bitter, impetuous nation that marches across the earth's open spaces to seize territories not its own.

And it goes on to describe just how powerful and just how wicked these people are as they go after land grab after land grab of all the nations around them.

They're fierce, terrifying in their views of justice, and sovereignty stems from them.

Their horses are swifter than leopards, more fierce than wolves of the night.

Their horsemen charge ahead.

Their horsemen come from distant lands.

They fly like eagles, swooping to devour.

All of them come to do violence.

Their faces are set in determination.

They gather prisoners like sand.

They mock kings and rulers are a joke to them.

They laugh at every fortress and build siege ramps to capture it, and they sweep by like the wind and pass through.

They're guilty.

Their strength is their God.

They were a powerful military force and they knew it.

They were the biggest bully on the block and they knew it, and they exercised their power.

This was not the answer, god, that Habakkuk wanted from God.

He was giving him an answer that he didn't expect and, as we'll see in a moment, did not like.

It takes him some time to process this, but in verse 12, we move from his perplexing question to actually even kind of drilling in and offering to God a protest about this answer.

He doesn't like it, and in verse 12, he said Are you not from eternity?

Lord, my God, my holy one, you will not die.

Lord, you appoint them to execute judgment.

My rock, you destined them to punish us.

Now, if you just stopped right there, you would think well, habakkuk accepted the answer, but that's not the case.

Verse 13, your eyes are too pure to look on evil and you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.

So why do you tolerate those who are treacherous.

That's where the heart of Habakkuk's at.

Why are you silent while one who is wicked swallows up the one who's more righteous than himself?

Now we're bad people, but those Chaldeans, they are the worst and you're going to let them destroy us.

That's the question.

That is his protest.

How could God allow someone as wicked as the Chaldeans march upon his covenant people and crush them?

If the problem is injustice, this seems like an extreme injustice, and he begins to argue with God by bringing back to God who God is.

In verses 12, to the end of the chapter, he talks about God's eternal nature, about his self-existence, about his holiness, about his power by his immutability.

He brings up all these things, god, this just doesn't work for me.

I know who you are, and that doesn't seem to correspond to who I know you to be.

That doesn't seem to correspond to who I know you to be.

He just doesn't understand the answer.

He knows that God hates evil, but he's amazed that God would use a nation that he thinks is worse than Judah as one of his instruments.

And this exposes part of the problem of Habakkuk's protest.

He thinks the Chaldeans are worse than the Judeans.

He's measuring people by his own standards.

He's measuring people by his own standards.

When we went through the book of Amos together, one of the things that Amos points out is that the people of Israel are actually worse than the other nations because they knew better.

They had been given more revelation.

It turned against it.

Well, these are the people of Judah, and they had that same revelation and they did know better.

But Habakkuk keeps digging.

In Verse 16, they sacrificed to their dragnet and burned incense to their fishing net, for by these things their portion is rich and their food plentiful.

The net is a metaphor for their military might.

Their God literally is how strong their armies are.

They're not giving credit to God, they're giving credit to their own abilities and their own war machine.

So Habakkuk has received one answer, but it hasn't solved anything.

It's actually prompted more questions, and so his perplexed concern turns into this protest, as he seeks to affirm that God is good and God is holy and God is just and the world is wicked and unjust.

He's trying to understand these conflicting realities, and these weren't just theoretical questions for him to sit down, you know, on a rainy evening next to a fire and just kind of muse away.

These were real issues for him.

But when he went to God for resolution, it seemed like his answer was worse than the problem.

And so, in verse 1 of chapter 2, he says this I will stand at my guard post and station myself on the lookout tower and I will watch to see what he will say to me and what I should reply about my complaint.

All right, god, I need a better answer than that.

All right, god, I need a better answer than that.

I just not going to accept that answer.

Well, wonderfully, god answers him and he tells Habakkuk write down this vision.

All right, you wanted a lesson.

It's not going to be a lesson just for you, it's going to be a lesson for everybody who reads this.

This is the opportune time just to set some things straight.

Habakkuk, write this down Clearly, inscribe it on tablets so one may easily read it.

All right, and he begins to tell him the answer that God is going to bring an answer to this.

It may seem to take some time.

Verse 3, the vision is yet for the appointed time.

It testifies about the end and will not lie, though it delays.

Wait for it, since it will certainly come and not be late.

You want an answer and you want it now.

I have an answer, I have a plan, but I'm not going to do it according to your timetable.

What you need to do, habakkuk, is to remain in a position of trust and remain in a position of faithfulness, and this is precisely what he tells him to do.

Continue to trust me, verse 4,.

The righteous one will live by his faith.

Habakkuk, the way you need to respond is to continue to depend upon me, even if you don't understand me, to continue to believe on me, even though I'm doing things in a different way and at a different speed than you expect.

What is faith?

It is trusting God for his promises to be true in your life.

What is faithfulness?

Living your life in the realization that those are true promises and letting them control your life rather than your questions.

And so he's told to sit by and just wait.

It's not a blind faith.

It's a faith in the knowledge that God has said that these things are certainly to take place, that he's going to be operating, that things are going to be different, but he's going to do it in his own way, in his own time.

Are going to be different, but he's going to do it in his own way in his own time, and so he needed to pray like Jesus taught us to pray your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Lord, do your work in your way, according to your will, and let me be happy to say yes to that.

And then, finally, we get into what seems to be a familiar territory for prophets.

Habakkuk begins in verse six with a series of five woes, as we've talked about recently.

Woes are not finger wagging, self-righteous people looking at sinners and saying you're going to burn.

It's not that.

It's a cry in the midst of a funeral, agonizing over the loss of righteousness in people agonizing over the coming doom of a sinner.

It is a warning, and yet it's a mourning at the same time.

And what's interesting about these five woes that are addressing the proud and the greedy and the dishonest and the violent and the sensual and the idolater is now Habakkuk is not saying the injustice of the Judeans, oh, the worst injustice of the Chaldeans.

Now he's just naming sin, and we don't know who he's actually talking about, because he's starting to realize that evil is pervasive in the human race, and from the vantage point of God rather than the vantage point of his own sense.

It isn't the sinful Judeans and the more sinful Chaldeans, it's the sinful all of us.

Now.

And what brought him to understand that is found at the end of these oracles, in verse 20 of chapter 2.

The Lord is in his holy temple.

Let the whole earth be silent in his presence.

And back it says I need to be quiet because God is holy and the Judeans aren't, the Chaldeans aren't and I'm not.

I have no right to tell God he's unjust Just because he does things different than I think he should.

He's in his holy temple.

Let everyone be silent.

And now Habakkuk shifts once again.

He goes from this perplexing concern to this protesting demand, to a prayer of praise and dependence and even humility In chapter 3 and verse 1, the prayer of the prophet Habakkuk according to Shigionoth, which is perhaps a type of song.

Lord, I've heard the report about you.

Lord, I stand in awe of your deeds.

Revive your work in these years and make known in these years in your wrath.

Remember mercy.

Remember mercy to me, lord.

Remember mercy to your people.

Remember mercy, remember mercy to me, lord.

Remember mercy to your people.

Remember mercy.

Is he going to act justly?

Yes, is he going to act justly now, or is he going to act justly on the final day?

Yes, is he going to execute that judgment in a way that satisfies us?

Maybe not now, but definitely then.

And for those who live by faith, the reality of living in the light of his rule means that we know his justice will finally come, but the exact timing is not going to be disclosed to us until it happens.

And so he prays and he praises and he remembers who God is and he pleads for that mercy.

And it's a wonderful prayer.

I won't take time to look at it, but I would encourage you just to spend some time with chapter three and perhaps even before you rest this evening, to spend some time making it an expression of your own prayer.

Let it guide you.

It's a short little book, isn't it?

Three little movements.

But let me offer just very quickly and briefly, six principles that we can find here, and these come from Martin Lloyd-Jones in his book From Fear to Faith.

The first thing is that history is in God's control.

It's not in our control.

He's sovereign, he's in complete control of things and nothing happens outside of that things.

And nothing happens outside of that.

We can't pretend to know why tragedy happens, perplexing things are allowed to continue, but we can rest in the assured promise of God that he is good and he is true and he does not lie, and that all things, even evil things, will eventually work out for the good.

The second thing we learn in this little book is that history follows a divine plan.

God is working out his eternal plan in human history.

It has a goal and it's moving forward.

It isn't like other religions where things are cyclical or just random.

It is linear and moving a direction that will ultimately usher in a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness makes its home.

Righteousness makes its home.

The third thing we learn in this little book is that God's plan includes calamity as well as blessing.

It includes prosperity and pain.

I don't understand all of that, but when men sin and wicked men cause other people to be in painful positions or filled with agony, god can incorporate the sinful acts of people as well as the righteous acts of people to accomplish his purposes.

We see that ultimately, in the cross of Jesus Christ, you, with wicked hands and determinations, have crucified the righteous one.

According to his eternal plan, he incorporates the activity of all of us in working out his perfect will.

He's not limited to using simply the obedient deeds of his people.

The fourth thing we learn in this is that God's divine plan is not often apparent to us.

I tell folks who are wondering about the why question.

I tell them I said you know, often we just have a few threads of what we think the why answer is.

But the reality is God isn't dealing with three or four or 30 threads of answers, he's dealing with an infinite number of threads of which we're just but a part.

We can't understand that God's ways are above our ways.

When God marched his people out of Egypt and put them right up against the Red Sea, someone I think Chuck Swindoll had a sermon that he titled Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea right Kind of stuck there with the sea in front of them and Pharaoh at their back.

And where could they go?

It seemed like God made a mistake to lead his people into the wilderness there, but that wasn't a mistake.

Was it lead his people into the wilderness there?

But that wasn't a mistake, was it?

God opened up the way for them to cross on dry land and to close that sea on top of their enemy Pharaoh.

But at first it just felt very, very wrong until they saw God's activity and understood it by looking back at it.

My mother used to do a lot of stitching and on one side of the stitch of the fabric was a beautiful pattern full of color and beauty and design.

But when you flipped it over it was pretty ugly.

Life is like that.

We see the backside of the fabric.

One of the days God's going to flip it around and we're going to see the front side of the fabric and the beauty of his pattern is going to be known, and then we'll say we understand is going to be known, and then we'll say we understand.

The fifth thing we learn here is that, as I've said, history follows God's timetable, not our timetable, and our response is to be one of faith and faithfulness when things aren't going the way we expect or hope and, last of all, just to acknowledge that God's ways are not ours.

He is far wiser than we are.

He is far stronger than we are.

He knows everything and every contingency of everything.

He knows the end of every possibility and has ordained the reality of what occurs.

He knows things far better than we do.

So whenever we're perplexed, whenever we face wrongs, whenever questions arise, whenever our hearts seem to demand from God an answer in a moment of question, go to Habakkuk and remember you've got liberty to speak to God, but you also have a responsibility to listen to God, and you may not get an answer to your question, but what you'll come away with from Habakkuk is the understanding that you're talking to a God you can trust.

You're talking to one who will fix it all one day, even the thing that's bothering you right now.

Let's pray now.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for this little book that gives us an understanding of the things that we wrestle with in this fallen world.

Lord, we long for the day when we won't have to deal with these kinds of questions, because there'll be nothing to mitigate the full unfurling of your goodness and grace and glory, and we'll be in your presence forever, living a life of unmitigated joy, fully and unhesitatingly serving you and one another with the fullness of love that we only get blushes of in this time.

Father, thank you for quieting our hearts, if not answering our questions, and we give you praise for that.

In Christ's name, amen.