PRAYER - Habakkuk - At Last the Savior is King

Welcome to the City Covenant podcast.

We are a warm, welcoming church located in downtown Spokane, dedicated to practicing the way of Jesus in the heart of the city.

Please join us as we dive into the Word of God together.

Okay.

I think that's enough peace for one day.

Everybody stop being peaceful.

You can only do so much peace, and then it's time to settle down, right?

Um my name is Carrie Baer, and I uh am a retired um University Christian Fellowship staff worker.

Uh did that for 50 years, but now I'm retired.

So uh so I'm gonna come talk to you about prayer.

Um today is the we're finishing the series on prayer, and thank you for inviting me to bring the last one.

It's out of the book of Habakkuk, you know, that guy that we all know, Habakkuk.

I actually know Jewish people who don't know who Habakkuk is, so don't feel bad.

Um but I do think he has a very relevant message for us, very relevant.

And so I'm excited about this.

So let's dive in.

It's a short book, um, beginning and ending with prayer.

Two prayers with a whole lot in the middle.

And today we will try to figure out how he gets from prayer one at the beginning to prayer two at the very end.

Um it's a journey, and we're gonna take that journey with him.

We find Habakkuk in Judah around 608 BC.

Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar are a serious threat at the time, very violent, very good at being violent and being a threat.

A distinctive of Habakkuk is uh he's a prophet, but he does not predict things or bring a word from the Lord like most prophets do.

Instead, he addresses God directly concerning what he sees going on around him in Judah at this time.

And we meet Habakkuk in a real moment of despair.

He looks around and everything is broken.

There's violence and injustice everywhere, and there seems to be no one doing anything to stop it or to bring the unjust to account.

And Israel is not exactly turning to God.

They're not paying attention to God's laws and seeking guidance from God.

So Habakkuk is having real trouble finding a reason for hope.

And these are the first verses of his prayer, how his book opens.

How long, O Lord, shall I cry for help and you will not hear?

Or cry to you violence and you will not save.

Why do you make me see iniquity?

And why do you idly look at wrong?

Habakkuk feels like he is paying attention and seeing evil play out and getting upset about it, but God is looking at the same things, the iniquity and so forth, and God remains idle.

He does nothing, he is not active.

I cry for help, Habakkuk says, and it's like you don't hear.

I cry out to you about the horrible violence, and you don't move to come and save.

What is going on, God?

Why are you not actively doing what needs to be done to put this right?

How can you allow this to go on and on?

Do you recognize any of these feelings?

Is any of this familiar?

I think this is sometimes our prayer, too.

I know I've heard this on college campuses in my work.

How can God allow and then insert whatever horrible thing has just happened?

Say a plane crash where everybody dies, or whatever it is.

How can God allow this?

How can God allow people to starve?

Children.

Do you ever feel this way?

Where is the justice?

How can God let this go on and why does he allow it?

I know I have certainly wrestled with these things and prayed just this type of prayer.

It happened for me when Ukraine was attacked, and again when the violence in Israel and Gaza unfolded.

I really had a hard time with these things.

I spent a period of time when my prayers were filled with something like, I want to trust you, but I am having a very hard time with what you are allowing to happen here.

How are you okay with this?

Sometimes when I hear about a country that is already seriously underdeveloped and then ends up in drought conditions and people suffer even more hardships, so the suffering is increased, I feel this.

I feel this.

What are you doing, God?

How are you allowing this?

But it can also be something more local, like when a person I know loses his job and then gets a cancer diagnosis and then is in a car accident.

And I sometimes rail at God about stuff like this, and I suggest to God that He is being unfair to pile it on like this.

Now, in calmer and more sane moments, I am aware that I'm probably not in a position to suggest stuff to God, but I feel it, and I think we all do at times.

But I don't always stay in a calm, objective place about these things.

And if we spend time taking in the evil around us, the human trafficking, the substance abuse and addiction, the cycle of poverty, the sexual abuse of children, the endless, endless cancer diagnoses and Parkinson's diagnoses and Alzheimer's diagnoses, the depression and serious mental illness and suicides.

It's all too much.

How long, O Lord?

How can you let this happen?

Why don't you do something?

Habakkuk's prayer is our prayer, isn't it?

We feel this, we struggle, we doubt, we feel anger and frustration and hopelessness and despair.

So what do we do about this?

We so badly want to get back to the to a place of seeing Jesus as the good shepherd, being able to embrace the Psalms that say, You are my rock and my deliverer.

I will trust in you.

The steadfast love of the Lord never fails.

That sort of thing.

I love singing a version of Psalm 23 that says, Your endless mercy follows me, and your goodness will lead me home.

But when I look at evil and despair and despair, and I do, I can't see that endless mercy that often.

I doubt God's goodness sometimes because I can't see it.

Or I can't see it now, and it seems to be taking so long.

So what do I do?

What do we do?

Well, first, I think we need to be clear that we can do what Habakkuk does, which is to make a loud, serious complaint to God.

He is not happy, he's actually outraged, and he believes God is not coming through for him.

I think the Bible is clear that it's okay to see it this way and to bring this to God in our prayers very directly.

The God of the Bible actually understands our feelings about these things and is not in any way threatened by this.

And a close read of Habakkuk does not show God silencing Habakkuk's complaint.

Rather, God has invited us to do this, to come to him with our complaint.

This is called lament, and it is all over the Bible.

God has given us a way to express our despair and outrage.

I think of it as a pressure valve that God gave us.

The world really is an evil and broken place, and people really are getting hurt and suffering a lot of pain.

We need to be able to rant about this, and that is what lament is all about.

A few weeks ago, Asher preached on Psalm 13, which has the exact same words at the beginning: How long, O Lord.

This Psalm is also a lament.

There are a number of psalms of lament, and even a whole book called Lamentations.

God does not silence or rebuke our complaints, He encourages this type of honest prayer.

And we find this in other places in Scripture as well.

There's a little hint of this with John the Baptist when he looks around and has doubts and sends a message to Jesus.

Are you really the one who has come to save and put everything right?

Because I'm not seeing it.

And Jesus reminds him of the signs of the kingdom of God that he has been doing.

But Jesus himself has his own moments.

When he comes to visit Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and they tell him he's too late and Lazarus is already dead, Jesus weeps.

The Son of God weeps.

Because why?

Death should never, ever have been part of our story.

Death is the enemy.

And even though Jesus knows he's going to lift Lazarus up out of death very shortly, and Jesus knows that he himself is going to go to the cross to conquer death, he still weeps.

He does not say stuff like, well, never mind, we're going to fix this, not a problem.

No.

It is a problem.

It's not okay that death has entered our world and taken his friend.

And it helps me to see that Jesus weeps here.

He is not flippant about the suffering in the world.

Somehow knowing this can help us.

It doesn't solve everything, but it helps.

And again, in the garden before his death, Jesus is praying and he says to God, no problem, let's get going.

I'm ready.

No, he doesn't say that.

He does not say that.

He says, Look, if there is any way at all that I could avoid this whole horrible thing, would you please take this cup away?

This is a form of lament.

Jesus does not love what lies ahead or what brought about the need for him to go to the cross, but in the end, he submits to God's will and God's timing and God's way of doing things.

Not my will, but thy will, Father.

When I think about how Jesus operates around evil, again, I am glad to see that he also sees that things can be bad and dark.

He does not sugarcoat what life on earth is like, what a violent death on a cross will be like.

And finally, there's another place in Scripture I'd like us to look at today that can help us with this: another lament, another perspective, and a kind of odd event.

It is in the last book of the Bible.

I'm going to lift some segments of a sermon on this by Jeremy Begby, who's a British author, musician, and theologian, and has some very rich insights on prayer.

Here is what he has to say: Revelation, the last book in the Bible, but by far the noisiest.

You can hardly read more than a verse or two without someone blasting a trumpet in your ear.

It's hardly the book you'd jump to if you wanted to talk about the value of being quiet.

And heaven is about the loudest place of all.

Peace, perfect peace, not a bit of it.

In heaven, noise-free zones don't seem to be part of the package, according to the book of Revelation.

Angels yell, creatures chant, trumpet septets peal, choruses swell, in a ceaseless, blaring, sonic cascade.

Never does the stream of sound halt, verse after verse, chapter after chapter, it rolls on until now, until this point in chapter eight that Sylvia read.

Suddenly, suddenly, a shaft of silence pierces the clamor.

All speech and song cease.

There was silence in heaven for about half an hour, we're told.

Something, something stuns heaven into silence.

But what?

What silences heaven?

Make no mistake, it's not an empty silence, not the kind of silence that makes you yawn or send you to sleep.

It's the kind of silence that makes you jerk your head and look around.

The silence that catches you off guard.

Unexpected, unpredictable silence.

The silence which forces you to ask, what is going on?

It's the kind of silence the babysitter knows.

When the eight-year-old and the ten-year-old have been working themselves into a frenzy upstairs in a pillow fight, and suddenly a disconcerting, even ominous stillness.

What has silenced them?

Or when your talkative friend at the party goes quiet on you for no apparent reason.

Normally full of words, usually you can't shut her up.

The life and soul of an evening, but now not a word.

What has silenced her?

That's the kind of silence here.

The silence in heaven for about half an hour.

Unforeseen, unexpected.

What's going on?

What's silencing heaven?

We enter the vision.

An angel comes to the front of the golden altar with a golden censer.

Incense is sprinkled, and an ever-widening column of swirling smoke rises in front of the throne, symbolizing the prayers of the saints we're told.

Prayer.

Prayer has entered the throne room.

Prayer ascends in the heart of heaven.

Heaven is silenced by prayer.

And this prayer is how long, O Lord.

Heaven listens to the prayer of the saints, the ones who've come out of the tribulation.

God listens.

A half hour of silence in heaven before the throne to appeal to God and to be heard.

God listens, heaven falls silent for the prayers of his people.

Every halting attempt to speak to this God, every groan, every murmur, all of it is heard.

But that's not all.

We step inside the vision again.

The angel takes the censer, the same censor of prayer.

He fills it with fire from the altar and hurls it over the walls of heaven.

It plunges down to earth, and the language of judgment begins to roll.

Peals of thunder, voices, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake.

Judgment.

God's justice advances a step further.

The idols begin to crack.

Prayer has been to heaven, but its shock waves re-enter history.

Not only is heaven silenced by prayer, the earth shakes.

Somehow, we are told, the prayers precipitate the rolling down of justice and the earth shakes.

Now that's great, but I don't know about you.

I would like to see more of this in real time.

And I have a list of specific places that I would like God to pay attention to when he starts throwing around the justice.

And you probably do too.

But this is what I know.

Jesus believed the Father had the best plan.

Content, timing, execution.

Jesus submitted to the plan of the Father.

And that's all we all got here.

Not my will, Jesus says, my will right now, when it seems to me that not doing the cross is the better idea.

Where would that have led?

But thy will be done.

Mary, mother of Jesus, when the angel came to tell her about her part in this plan, had a few questions.

How can this be?

Stuff like that.

But after a little chat with the angel, she ends up saying, Behold, I am a servant of the Lord.

Let it be to me according to your word.

Let it be to me according to your word.

What a prayer.

Not my will, but thy will be done.

And back to Habakkuk.

He lodges his complaint, shakes his fist, expresses his frustration and despair, and God reminds him of a few things.

God first tells him, I see it, Habakkuk.

I see it.

I see it all.

And I am not happy about it.

I am not pleased with the evil I see.

Second, Habakkuk, I know what I will do about this, and you can't even imagine right now what that will be like.

But I know what I am doing.

And it is worth pausing here and remembering who we are talking about.

This is God.

God sees all of it, everywhere, everything, everyone, all through history, the entire picture, the whole picture.

So it is good to remember that God sees a much bigger picture than we do.

This is not always satisfying to me, but it is the truth.

And occasionally, it is good for me to humble myself in the presence of the all knowing.

Omniscient, God of heaven and earth, and quit acting like I am in a position to give him advice on his policies and action plans.

Though I do think I have very good ideas about these things.

Third, God does not explicitly say this, but it is implied.

God is good.

He wants good things for Habakkuk and for Israel and for the world.

And this is important.

If God is not good, then it doesn't matter if he sees the whole picture and has a plan.

If it's not a good plan, a plan that involves justice and putting things right where evil has been running rampant, then what good is it?

So we have to decide.

Is God good?

This is so, so important to get straight.

We have to be crystal clear about this one thing: the goodness, the essential, never-faltering goodness of God.

We can't get through the death of a child, the burning down of a house, the suicide of a friend, unless we can land on something very, very solid that will carry us through the horror to the other side.

Jesus could not get through the horrible criminal's death by crucifixion without a very clear and unshakable belief in the goodness of the result on the other side.

And that is what we have to become clear on.

Either God is good or he is not.

Either God is good and he knows what he is doing, or he is just messing with us and we should walk away.

But if God is good, and if God is, well, God, and therefore knows what the whole picture looks like and what the best timing for everything needs to be, then we really need to and are able to humble ourselves in his presence and trust and submit to his goodness, like Habakkuk, like Mary, like Jesus.

Once Habakkuk sees this about God, he can pivot and find his way to the second prayer.

And Jesus decides, yes, the Father is good and can be trusted even to the point of the cross.

And Mary decides, yes, I will submit to you because I see that you are good.

You brought my people out of the land of Egypt, out of slavery.

You are God who saves.

And I too have personally decided that yes, God is good.

God has met me in depression, God has taken me through cancer.

God has saved my child out of addiction.

And God has shown me in countless other ways that He is faithful.

And we all have our own stories, and we all have to figure this out for ourselves.

But that's part of my story.

And when I read scripture and watch how Jesus is with people, I see goodness, I see justice, I see love.

Habakkuk also comes to this.

He sees God's power and God's goodness, and he hears God's promise that God is planning to take action, and so he is able to make his prayer at the end of the book.

And so it is possible that we too can move through this book, this journey from outrage and lament and despair to a place where we can say, okay, now I see some things I did not see before.

Perhaps I can release my outrage, surrender my complaint.

Perhaps I can faintly begin to trust.

Perhaps I can begin to pray like Habakkuk prays at the end, because I know you to be good, God, trustworthy, and one who loves justice.

I can believe that you have a good plan and that you will bring it to completion at the right time.

And just what is this prayer at the end of the book?

Finally, we hear Habakkuk pray.

Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail, and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord.

I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

God the Lord is my strength.

He makes me my feet like the deer, he makes me tread on high places.

Habakkuk is talking about agricultural disaster, utter, complete, and total disaster, which is economic disaster in his situation.

And yet Habakkuk can find a way to rejoice because his hope is in God.

A God who is good, a God who is faithful and can be trusted, a God who sees the evil and suffering in the world and has promised to take action and work redemptively to put things right.

This God is the one we can trust.

And I'm going to close with some final verses of a hymn that I think capture where we're going with all of this and what it will look like at the end when God makes his final move and brings complete redemption.

I don't know if this hymn is familiar to you or not.

It's usually sung to the tune of Danny Boy, so it can be a little emotional.

But I think the writer says it well.

I cannot tell how he will win the nations, how he will claim his earthly heritage, how satisfy the needs and aspirations of East and West, of sinner and of sage.

But this I know all flesh shall see his glory, and he shall reap the harvest he has sown.

And some glad day his son will shine in splendor when he, the savior, savior of the world, is known.

I cannot tell how all the land shall worship, when at his bidding every storm is still, or who can say how great the jubilation when every heart with love and joy is filled?

But this I know the skies will thrill with rapture, and myriad, myriad human voices sing, and earth to heaven and heaven to earth will answer at last.

The savior, savior of the world is king.

Amen.

Let's pray, God.

We know that you are the king.

We know that you see evil and you are not happy about it.

And that though we can't always see it, and we struggle with how long it takes, we know that you are working redemptively in the world at all times, every day, to put things right.

Give us eyes to see and ears to hear.

Deepen our faith and trust in you.

Show us again and again that you are good and help us embrace that goodness.

We love you and we pray in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Thank you for listening.

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We are located at 512 South Bernard Street, Spokane, Washington, 99204.