The Minor Prophets | Habbakkuk

Today's teaching scripture comes from the book of Habakkuk.

Habakkuk. It's one of those, I promise.

Chapter 2, verses 1 to 4. Habakkuk Chapter 2, verses one

Habakkuk 2 · chapter mention

to four. I will stand at my watch post

and station myself on the rampart.

I will keep watch to see what He will say to me and what He will

answer concerning my complaint. Then the Lord answered me and

said, Write the vision. Make it plain on tablets so that

a runner may read it, for there is still a vision for the

appointed time. It speaks of the end and does

not lie. If it seems to Terry wait for

it, it will surely come. It will not delay.

Look at the proud. Their spirit is not right in

them, but the righteous live by their faithfulness.

This is the word of the Lord All.

Right. Hi, everybody.

Good morning. Welcome.

I've I've missed you, Jared and I were away.

So for those of you who may be newer or weren't aware, for a

couple of weeks, we were visiting some of Central

vineyards work with Asia's Hope in Cambodia.

So I spent something like 16 days there.

Jared was there for a little bit more than a week.

And before we get into the text this morning, I want to just

take a few minutes to share with you a little bit about our trip

because I think it actually sets the scene really well for what

we're looking at together. So, you know, we, we partner

with Asia's Hope. They support vulnerable kids

through family style, residential care, education,

discipleship in Thailand, Cambodia and India.

And we had the opportunity to spend time with the leaders

there, to visit the student Center for college students that

Central Vineyard supports, to spend time with the kids.

They're in the homes we worship with the kids.

We met the staff, we spent time listening to people's stories,

and we were there to deepen this partnership.

And speaking for myself as someone who is actually still

relatively new to this community, I've not yet been

here for two full years trying to understand the long history

that Central Vineyard has with Asia's Hope.

And really just the the substance, the meaning of this

work that we get to do together to to ask strategic questions

about the future and to clarify what our church's role can and

should be over the coming years. And so this is going to be, you

know, way shorter recap of the trip than I would like to give

you. I'd love to be able to stand

here and go through all of the, you know, 1400 photos and, you

know, the stories of like, every day that we spent, you know,

doing what we were doing and all the delicious food and wonderful

conversations and so on. But we don't have time.

I just want to say this plainly. This is one of the most

impactful and strategic things that our church could possibly

be involved in. And so over the coming weeks and

months, we'll get to share this story in more detail.

We'll get to share more of our hopes in in greater detail for

what the future of this partnership will look like.

But friends, I just want you to know that the work that we get

to support with Asia's Hope makes a tremendous, tremendous

difference in the lives of many kids there.

And it is thanks to the generosity of this church, of

this body. And so I want to thank you those

of you who have been around for a long time giving to this

partnership, or even those of you who have just started, thank

you. It's incredibly powerful work.

And the whole time I was there, I was thinking, I wish you could

all be here with me experiencing this.

And we'll take more trips. We'll go.

So we'll talk about that later. But guys, the thing that

continued to sort of stand out to me while we were there, I was

thinking about this passage and and, and this week, knowing that

I was going to come back and preach this text.

And as I sat at table after table in Cambodia, Can you give

me the the picture of the the beautiful.

Oh, this is go back. This is good.

Sorry, I thought that was behind me.

This is just, you know, a handful of the kids and the

parents receiving us at the airport when we got there.

But the next one that look at that.

So as I sat at table after table in Cambodia with beautiful

spreads in front of us that looked like this, with fish and

fruit and herbs and the aromas, all of it, I, I found myself

thinking about the beauty and the joy and the abundance of

those moments. Particularly because tables like

this sit in a country where a genocide that killed as many as

2 million people is close at hand in living memory for the

people that we were spending time with.

Where dissent against the government is complicated.

Where it's not uncommon to know someone who's been retaliated

against for speaking negatively about their government on the

Internet, per SE. Where evil once tore through

neighborhoods that still bear the scars of that period of

time. And Even so, life goes on and

everywhere you look, there's beauty and there's joy and

there's connection and friends. This is just one example of the

way that this works out all over our lives.

We see this, you know, places like Sanctuary Night where just

tremendous adversity faces people in our city, in our

community. And yet beauty and joy and

goodness breakthrough every day as people sit around tables, as

people unpack their experiences of life and the kindness and the

tenderness of Jesus meets them there.

This kind of stuff is happening on every street corner in our

neighborhood. It's not just in Cambodia with

beautiful spreads like that. Or if you go to the next

picture, maybe it's it's, it'll happen.

Cute kids like this who have just, you know, known tremendous

pain in their stories, but you see them experiencing the joy

and the welcome of family. And I was, I was struck over and

over again by this joy rising through scar tissue.

How do people live like this? How do we find joy in a world

that has known real evil, where just, you know, in our personal

lives, in our life together, we have faced down tremendous

challenges. And Even so, goodness continues

to breakthrough. And so I'm asking this question

in part because that's precisely what the prophet Habakkuk is

writing about in in the short book that we're looking at

today. So we're in this series where

we're talking about the Minor Prophets or what's sometimes

called the Book of the 12. And Habakkuk is an interesting

one. It's one that I was excited to

preach because this is one of the only prophetic books, I

think maybe the only prophetic book where there is actually no

pronouncement to the people from the prophet.

So the three short chapters of Habakkuk are just conversation

between the prophet and God. There is no thus saith the Lord

to the people. There is no command, there is no

charge brought against the people.

It's the prophet sort of trying to sort out what is this

confusing evil world that we live in and how can I make sense

of it in light of a God who I'm told is faithful and good and

kind. Have you ever found yourself

asking that question? I would have to think that more

than one of us have have looked out at the world and thought,

how can this possibly be? And so this entire book, it's

it's sort of a lament in the passage that Jared read to us,

we hear the prophet demanding, you know, God answer, answer my

question. Help me make sense of this.

Habakkuk looks around at his own society.

And in ancient Israel, the Torah is paralyzed.

People are not following the the good law that God has given

them. Justice never seems to win the

day. Corrupt leadership is running

the show and he's not being dramatic.

This isn't for effect. He's grieving.

He's a heartbroken prophet who is reluctant to accept the way

that things are. And he does something remarkably

faithful in this book that I think we would do well to learn

from. He brings his complaint to God

and and it is has the audacity to demand that God act on behalf

of his people and God answers him, but maybe not in the way

that he would expect. God says I am doing something

and then the next part is troubling.

Babylon is rising and Babylon will invade Israel.

Not exactly the hopeful answer that I think Habakkuk had in

mind. And so he pushes back and he

says, in effect, how can you, a holy God, use a corrupt nation

as your instrument? How can you use a people even

more violent than us to judge us?

How does that make any sense? And in fact, the passage in

Habakkuk that's worth camping out on for just a moment in the

1st chapter, it, it's, it's really interesting because it's

one that gets referenced a lot out of context.

There's a line in Habakkuk that that usually gets quoted by

itself in isolation. And Habakkuk says to God, your

eyes are too pure to behold evil and you cannot look on

wrongdoing. And that half verse is often

used to support the idea that God is so holy that he literally

can't bear to look at sin, that God sort of turns his face away,

and that this holiness of God is primarily defined by distance.

It sounds a little bit when you read that half verse by itself,

like the prophets talking about God's fragile ego.

But that's not what Habakkuk is doing.

He's not offering a statement about God's fragile ego.

He is arguing with what seems to be God's persistent tolerance of

human sin. Because the verse continues.

So why do you look on the treacherous and are silent when

the wicked swallow those more righteous than they?

So the prophets not saying, oh God, you're, you're, you're too

holy to to look at sin and human evil.

You hold us at a distance. You don't participate in our

struggles. What he's saying is God, you are

so holy. I know this about your goodness

and your kindness. So why is it that you look on

while evil continues to unravel in the world around us?

And So what unsettles Habakkuk isn't God's distance.

It's it's this divine patience that's troubling to Habakkuk

because he looks at the world around him and he says, I can

barely tolerate this. How can you?

And you know, this isn't theoretical for us.

I mean, over the years, I've watched leaders in my own life

who have trusted fall away in ways that hurt people deeply.

I felt the disorientation of that kind of thing.

And in in those moments, you don't just question maybe people

you've once trusted. You question systems.

You question people's callings, even your own judgement.

And the biblical story assumes time and time again that God

looks directly at human rebellion and continues to

engage with us, continues to call, continues to wait.

Habakkuk is is wrestling with why God's judgement seems so

slow. It's a very different problem,

and it's one that's a lot closer to our real experience of life.

This is a prophet who's wrestling with history and with

geopolitics and with the moral confusion of watching evil

compound on itself. But he's saying something to us

who have experienced betrayal and hurt very close to our own

personal lives as well. God, how long can this go on?

And so God responds by giving Habakkuk a vision.

He tells him that the proud will collapse under their own

idolatry, but the righteous will live by faith.

And I don't know about you, but that phrase the righteous will

live by faith is one that I've heard lots of times over the

years, almost to the point that it's begun to lose its meaning a

little bit. It's it's one that, you know,

sort of becomes so abstract that we we sort of think, well, this

could apply to almost anything or almost nothing.

But what's happening here is the violence of the nation's their

economies that exploit their slave labor, they're intoxicated

and immoral leaders. Their worship of money, their

worship of military strength creates a cycle of revenge and

oppression that cannot sustain itself forever.

I don't remember where I heard it for the first time, but I've

been thinking a lot about this, this statement.

You can't. You can.

You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bomb the

world to peace. The good news is that the loving

God who made the world and seeks after every human bearer of the

divine image also promises us that the meek will inherit the

earth, that the vulnerable will be vindicated, that the poor in

spirit will be blessed, and that Babylon, time and again will be

held accountable for the ways that people are taken advantage

of and harmed. But how long do we have to wait?

Habakkuk is asking the question that people in every generation

will eventually ask. If this cycle keeps repeating

itself, will it ever end? And the prophet sees a vision of

God confronting evil in a way that echoes the Exodus.

God crushing the head of the evil house, judging what

destroys human life, and at the same time saving his people.

And the Exodus becomes this pattern.

In the Hebrew Bible, the defeat of Babylon becomes part of a

larger promise that God gives to the people.

Evil will not have the last word.

If there's one thing that the long arc of the story of the

Scriptures teaches us, it's that evil will not have the last

word. And the compassion and the

kindness and the justice of Jesus will prevail in the end.

So the line the righteous shall live by faith keeps echoing

through the Scriptures. The apostle Paul repeats it.

We've often misunderstood it, but in its original setting, it

wasn't some kind of a slogan about private spirituality.

This is a a, a survival word. It's something that that's

intended to give people a handle to hold on to in a confusing and

disorienting world. Babylon in this story represents

more than one empire. It represents a pattern, a

system that runs on pride and domination and intoxication with

its own power. A nation that worships money and

military strength and national security.

A society convinced that survival justifies injustice is

the thing that the prophet is speaking against here.

And the sobering truth is that this is not unique in human

history. We see this repeated time and

time again. God tells Habakkuk that Babylon

will not have the last word. The promise of the prophet is

that he will hold oppressive nations accountable for unjust

economies, for slave labor, for corrupt leadership, for

idolatry. And that cycle of violence and

revenge will not go on forever. But if we're honest, it feels

persistent. It continues.

Babylon falls and another Babylon rises.

Empires shift, but the pattern of oppression remains.

So what is it that God is actually promising?

Because when we look at this, it feels a little bit

contradictory. Babylon will be held

accountable, but Babylon's come and go, and people continue to

struggle. And maybe the closest picture

that I can think of to help us sort of wrap our minds around

this a little bit. You know, the table in Cambodia

is 1. But there's a scene from The

Shawshank Redemption that I've been thinking about as I've been

reading this text. There's this this moment where

Andy locks himself in the warden's office and plays Mozart

over the loud speakers. Do you guys remember that one?

And for a few minutes, the entire prison yard goes

completely still as they hear this music.

Nothing structural about the way that the prison operates has

changed. Nothing about any of these

people's circumstances has demonstrably changed.

The men are still incarcerated, but they remember, even briefly,

that they are more than prisoners.

They are human beings, and something beautiful touches the

depths of who they are. It's sort of accesses this, you

know what I would say is the the Spirit of God poured out on all

flesh, testifying to the value, the tremendous value and beauty

of human life. That's Habakkuk.

Babylon is still rising. This cycle of pain has not

ended, but he dares to say something like the righteous

shall live by faith, knowing of an impending judgement on the

nation that he's living in, knowing of struggle and pain all

around him. It's not a denial of that

suffering. There is a persistent refusal to

allow these circumstances to define the way that he

understands his relationship to God.

Unless you think that I am only talking about geopolitics.

This is what it's like to be human.

This is our everyday life. Christ promises to build his

church and churches fracture and leaders fail.

We live in a world that's entangled with all kinds of

relational brokenness on a one to one level, probably even

people in this room who have something against a brother or

sister. Chronic loneliness, persistent

illness, depression, loss of purpose, these are the things

that surround us. And yet the prophet's word to

people surrounded by this kind of struggle is that the

righteous shall live by faith. The righteous believe a

different story about the future when the present is unchanged.

And friends, that's the hope that I want to call our church

to that I that I want to call, you know, my friends to the

people that I spend time with in my day-to-day life.

This idea that there is a different story that we're

invited to believe when the present circumstances around us

remain unchanged. Scripture promises that the

kingdoms of this world will become the Kingdom of our Lord,

and the headlines feel cyclical at the same time.

But we have a choice to make. We have a choice to make about

where we put our hope and where we look for joy as we live in a

world that seems dominated by that kind of cycle.

The gap between this promise of restoration and lived reality is

where the prophet is standing and and it's hopefully where we

stand as a church. To live by faith is to refuse to

let Babylon determine the shape of your soul.

It's to remain loyal to God's covenant hope when this the

resolution of all of these problems in front of us feel

delayed. And that's why the early

Christians clung to this line from Habakkuk.

That's why the Apostle Paul quotes that righteous shall live

by faith because he he isn't writing from a comfortable

place. The early church understood the

struggles of the prophets who were writing these words because

they were writing from inside of another empire.

Rome looked pretty permanent to the Apostle Paul.

Rome had roads and legions and aqueducts and architecture and,

and, you know, a sort of infrastructure that dominated

the landscape of his day. Rome looked inevitable and

unbeatable. And when Jesus was crucified, it

looked an awful lot like another victory for Babylon in the long

course of history where empires continue to get the best of the

good guys. And if you're standing at

Golgotha on Friday, it would not look like the Kingdom had come.

It would look like the cycle had continued again.

It would look like we've circled back to the beginning.

Another righteous man swallowed by power.

And that's the moment where either cynicism or joy and hope

can be born. The great writer Fyodor

Dostoyevsky understood that instinct.

And on the plane on the way to Cambodia, I I was reading notes

from underground again, just a short little Dostoyevsky.

If anybody knows that one. No, it's it's a bummer.

It's a massive bummer. So, you know, if you're thinking

about reading it, maybe don't. This is the underground man.

So, you know, he looks like a real joy to be around.

But in this in this short work, the narrator looks at the world

and sees it full of corruption and self-interest.

And he decides that hope is naive.

He basically says, you know, from from where I sit underneath

the ground, all of this is bunk. And anybody who's hopeful really

in any way, shape or form has got it wrong.

And he chooses this life of resentment over a life of trust

in anybody but himself. He thinks of himself as

intelligent and sophisticated because it feels a lot safer

than being vulnerable with his fellow humans.

And when his disappointment builds over time, he sort of

sees that you can. You can try to cling to a

promise that feels delayed or might not ever come, or you can

just withdraw and protect yourself with sarcasm and irony

and contempt. And friends, listen, I've been

there, and I suspect that maybe a few of you have too.

You know, to have sort of a cynical, negative, ironic view

of the world might actually feel a lot safer than this business

of investing in some kind of hope or joy that feels like it's

so far down the line that you're not sure how you could ever

access it. The cross could have produced

that kind of underground faith, bitter and sarcastic and waiting

for revenge. But resurrection happens.

And so, you know, as we're in Lent and sort of journeying

toward the Easter story and journeying toward the cross, I'm

thinking about the ways that resurrection is God's

declaration that the promise is deeper than the moment that

we're living in. The promise of hope to come

permeates the fabric of creation in a way that negativity and

disappointment and cynicism cannot.

And so the difference between the underground man and Jesus is

not intelligence. It's where their allegiance

lies. What view of the world will they

be faithful to? One says that we'll respond to a

broken world by retreating into resentment.

The other says the righteous will live by faith and trusting

himself to the Father, remaining open and generous and faithful

to the people around him in spite of the kind of violence

that Jesus takes on first hand. And so, friends, as I read

Habakkuk, as I read the prophet, this is my, this is my prayer

for us. This is my hope is that over

time, we would be formed into a community that becomes

increasingly open and generous and faithful in the way of

Jesus. And so by the time we reach the

end of the book, Habakkuk hasn't received any kind of a timeline

from God about, you know, when will this all resolve?

When will life get better? When will we sort of get past

this rough patch? He's not been told exactly when

Babylon will fall. What he receives is a vision of

God's character and a promise that evil will not ultimately

prevail. And so he prays.

Lord, renew your work in our day.

I have time. I'll just read it to you.

Oh Lord, I have heard of your renown.

And I stand in awe, Oh Lord, of your work in our own time.

Revive it in our own time. Make it known in wrath that you

may remember mercy. And so he recalls the Exodus.

He recalls the story, the original story of God saving his

people from Egypt and God confronting evil.

And the Exodus becomes this, this archetype that God will

once again deal with the head of the evil house as he writes, and

he'll judge what destroys human life.

God won't ignore injustice. And then comes just this

remarkable confession at the end of the book.

Though the fig tree does not blossom and no fruit is on the

vines, though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield

no food, though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is

no herd in the stalls yet. I will rejoice in the Lord.

I will exalt in the God of my salvation.

I think it's easy for us in a cynical age to hear a prayer

like that and go, that's just denial, you know, that's

spiritual bypassing. That's that's a back at just

sort of accessing something that he's drummed up inside of

himself. But I really think the truth is

this, this kind of an outlook is a gift.

And it's one that, you know, when I think about abundant

tables shared with our Cambodian friends, I think about this kind

of joy. When I think about the beautiful

work that's happening all over our city to serve the dignity of

people, to lift people out of adverse situations, I think

about the fact that this kind of hope, this kind of joy is

present in the midst of incredibly difficult

circumstances. It's not naive.

It's not forgetful. It's a quality of joy that's

passed through suffering. And friends, if you've ever

celebrated with people, if you've ever shared celebratory

meals or celebratory occasions with people who have experienced

real suffering, you've, you've touched this.

You've understood just a little bit about what it looks like

when real hope and real joy breakthrough sort of the the

layer of despair and cynicism that sometimes just sits over

our, our view of the world. So Habakkuk gives us a

direction. The righteous live by faith.

And so I hope by just unpacking this a little bit more this

morning, that line feels a little more meaningful to a few

of you. Is that the case for anyone?

Because I know, you know, before I read this and, and sort of

studied in detail over the last couple of weeks, I, I felt like

that was the passage that I'd talk about.

And I was also kind of dreading it because I was like, I don't

know if I have anything to say about that.

It feels a little, a little thin, but it feels less than to

me. So even even if the cycle of

difficulty, of sickness, of relational disrepair, of

disappointment, of discomfort feels long for you, or you look

out in the world and you just feel this God, how long?

How long will this go on? Our task is to become more like

Jesus in the meantime, remaining open and generous and faithful.

And we'll invite the worship team back up.

But my hope is that if you're here in the room and you feel

tired in some way, like some of these things feel real to you,

they feel just right at your fingertips.

There's something in your life that feels oppressive, that

feels difficult. Relationship, a job, whatever it

might be that makes it difficult for you to hear those words.

The righteous shall live by. Faith makes it difficult for you

to imagine joy and hope peeking through difficult circumstances.

We we'd love to pray for you this morning.