Habakkuk: the Prophet who Questioned God (Habakkuk 1:12-2:5)

In time, space, history, this is the day that the Lord has made and so we just thank you for that opportunity that we have.

We pray, Father, that as we study your word this morning, you would be our teacher through your spirit, that you would accomplish every purpose that you have for it, that you would use it to edify us, to challenge us, and to change us, that we might become more like our

Lord and Savior Jesus Christ through it. And we just praise you in his mighty name, Amen.

Well, I thought since it's been a couple weeks since we were in Habakkuk, we might just take a minute or two to do a little bit of a review and just remind ourselves of what we looked at last time in the first 11 verses of this prophecy of Habakkuk.

And we saw in the very first verse that it is called the oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw.

An oracle, also in some translations, it's called a burden because it is a heavy message.

That's what an oracle is. It's a heavy message. And he is called the prophet, the prophet

Habakkuk. And he is somewhat of a different prophet or prophecy than others.

For example, if you look at Isaiah, Jeremiah, and some of the other prophets, what you find is that God is through them issuing a message for the people.

In other words, they have a message to proclaim. Habakkuk has a problem to solve.

And what he does is carry on this dialogue with God or a series of questions and answers as we saw last time.

We looked at the first question last time. And so he is a believer in Yahweh.

That's part of what creates his problem because he knows what God is like. And as he looks around him in the southern kingdom of Judah and at Jerusalem, he sees the degradation of their relationship with Yahweh because they had abandoned the word of God.

And as we're going to see, this is always where it starts. It starts with a marginalization or an abandonment of the word of God.

This is what caused the fall in the garden, did it not? God had said, you know, warned them about what they could eat and couldn't eat.

And they disregarded and abandoned and disobeyed the word of God. So he's prophesying to the southern kingdom.

The northern kingdom had been taken captive by the Assyrians in 722

BC. And here we are in Jerusalem and the southern kingdom of Judah under some evil kings, particularly

Manasseh and some others, had just abandoned God's word. And so the worship of Yahweh had degraded.

And that, of course, led to the worship of the degradation of the culture and everything associated with it.

And it's during the latter part of the reign of King Josiah. And he was a relatively good king who tried to bring about some reforms in Jerusalem.

They were temporary and sort of superficial. So they really didn't last, as we're going to see.

But it was a time where it was a time of relative prosperity in Jerusalem.

But at the same time, a period of degradation morally, spiritually, and culturally as well.

And it would probably be a good idea if you were to spend a little time.

There we go. And you want to learn some more of the background of Habakkuk to look at these passages.

2 Kings chapters 21 through 25 give you quite a bit of detail about what's going on here.

And also 2 Chronicles 33 through 36 do the same thing.

2 Kings being the pre -exilic history of what was going on there. And then, of course, the post -exilic history of Chronicles, 1 and 2

Chronicles. And so you're going to see some parallels there. But they're going to give you a lot of detail as to what's going on at the time

Habakkuk prophesied. And, of course, also the prophecy of Jeremiah is a great place to go look.

Because he's a contemporary with Habakkuk. While Habakkuk is looking at what's going on and questioning

God and dialoguing with God, Jeremiah is in Jerusalem. And he's just hammering away with the prophecies that God is giving him to tell the people, to confront them in their sin, to call them to repentance, but also to prophesy the impending judgment that's going to come through, like Habakkuk says, the

Chaldeans or the Babylonians. And he even prophesies, as you well know, the length of the captivity that's going to happen, the 70 -year captivity.

And all of this, of course, is predicated on the Torah, the Old Testament, the first five books.

And so Deuteronomy 28 -30 is also an excellent place to look for the underlying law that is being violated.

And remember that Habakkuk mentioned the Torah in the first several verses there.

The Torah is being violated. And so he was a man who understood what the law was all about.

And so all of that is predicated on Deuteronomy 28 -30, which is predicated on Leviticus chapter 26.

Leviticus at Sinai is where God gave the law, detailed the law.

And of course, 40 years later, when they're right on the edge of the promised land, getting ready to go in,

Moses repeats the law, Deuteronoma. So the second law is given. So that's given 40 years later.

And so chapter 28 of Deuteronomy is actually a commentary on Leviticus chapter 26.

And Leviticus chapter 26 is that chapter where God promises the

Israelites and during the course of giving the law that they will have blessing for obedience, but cursing for their disobedience.

But that is also predicated on Genesis 12, 1 through 3, which is where God gave the covenant to Abraham, the unconditional, unilateral, transgenerational covenant that all the rest of this is predicated on.

And it's in that very covenant that he promises them that they will not be annihilated as a people, even though the law is going to require that if they violate the law, they're going to be chastened.

And we're going to be looking at that a little bit. But this is just a critical background for what Habakkuk is going to be dealing with.

And so that would be well worth your time to read through this and get some background for what we're talking about here.

But what we saw last time, and we're going to see this time, that he's got a problem with what he's seeing.

He sees the degradation of Jerusalem, and he keeps looking at it.

And since he knows the law and he knows Yahweh and Yahweh's righteousness and holiness, he asks that question,

Oh, Lord, how long will I cry for help? And you will not hear or cry to you violence.

Okay, we mentioned last time, this occurs six times in Habakkuk's prophecy. So violence is a very important part of this.

It's a sub -theme of what he's going to see. And so three times in this first section, he talks about the violence.

And we said the Hebrew word Hamas is the word for violence here. We're going to see the next three times he mentions it are going to come in chapter two.

But he's concerned about what he's seeing. And so he questions God about how can this go on?

How can you being a holy, omnipotent God allow this kind of violence and degradation?

And he details some of the sins that he sees in these first four verses, the violence.

And then he talks about the wickedness that's there, the trouble that he sees. And each one of these words is kind of an aspect of the sin that these people are committing in Jerusalem.

And then the strife, and he uses this Hebrew word ribh. In English, it looks like rib,

R -I -B, but it's actually ribh. It's a forensic or a legal term that pictures legal strife, like lawsuits back and forth and that type of thing.

And then conflict, he says. And the conclusion that he comes to, the conclusion that he comes to in verse four, so the law is paralyzed, the law is frozen, the law is not being applied properly.

And he uses the word Torah, the Torah that back at Leviticus at the Mount Sinai, God had given to them and who had promised,

I will give you blessing if you obey it, but there will be cursing if you disobey it.

And he says, Torah is paralyzed and justice is akal, the

Hebrew word. It means bent or twisted or out of shape or crooked, okay?

Crooked justice. And so the background of what he's seeing here, and he's probably writing toward the end of King Josiah's reign, and Josiah was trying to institute the reforms to what had happened before.

And so here we have an artist's rendition of Josiah being presented with the

Torah or the law that was found in the temple.

And in fact, 2 Kings 22 records this event. It's very interesting.

2 Kings 22, eight through 13 says, then Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the scribe, and this is the scribe here presenting the scrolls,

I have found the book of the law in the house of Yahweh. And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan and he read it.

Then Shaphan the scribe came to the king and responded to the king with a word and said, your servants have poured out the money that was found in the house and have given it into the hand of those who do the work, who have the oversight of the house of Yahweh.

They were going to clean out the temple and rebuild the temple. And Josiah ordered that the money be taken from the people in the temple and given to the craftsmen because they were reliable, he says.

And so he's getting these reforms started. And they happened to find the word of God there.

In verse 10, moreover, Shaphan the scribe told the king saying, Hilkiah the priest has given me a book.

And Shaphan read it in the presence of the king. Now it happened that when the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes.

Then the king commanded Hilkiah the priest, Ahakim the son of Shaphan, Akbor the son of Micaiah, Shaphan the scribe and Isaiah the king's servant saying,

Go inquire of Yahweh for me and the people and all Judah concerning the words of this book that has been found.

For great is the wrath of Yahweh, which has set a flame against us because our fathers have not listened to the words of this book to do according to all that is written concerning us.

When he probably was hearing Leviticus 26 and maybe even

Deuteronomy 28, the promise of blessing for obedience, but cursing for disobedience.

He was really, really disturbed. And so he began to implement all of the reforms and to clean up the worship and clean up the temple and so on.

Those things are recorded in those passages. And it would be good to take a look at those.

But just to sort of summarize what some of the reforms were after the reign of Manasseh, which is recorded in 2

Chronicles 33. The reforms of Josiah are recorded in 2 Kings 23.

Now this is just a synopsis, just a basic of what he found.

And you'll see the details of these. He cleansed the temple of idols. They had taken idols and brought them into the temple of Yahweh, which was reserved for the worship of Yahweh alone.

You remember, God had instituted the worship and made a provision for the worship of him at Sinai, right?

And during the law when he established the tabernacle in the wilderness. That was the place where sinful man could meet with the holy

God under those conditions of the sacrifice and the shed blood and all that, and have a means to commune with and worship a holy

God. He did that by his grace. That tent was then portable, and they were able to move that along as they moved through the wilderness.

And then the establishment of the temple in Jerusalem made a permanent place. That was the specific place that God had ordained for them to worship him, to come into his presence and worship him.

No other place. But what did they do? They defiled it by bringing in idols into the temple.

And not only that, what else was in the temple? And we know that because he cleansed the temple of male prostitutes.

Imagine that, male prostitutes within the temple as an object of worship within the temple of God.

Can you imagine that? Elevating sexual perversion, not just tolerating it, but actually promoting it and elevating it to a place of worship in a culture?

That's amazing. But that's what they did, and he cleansed it. And then he cleansed the high places. They not only perverted the worship of God in the temple, they went outside the temple, which was the specific place to worship

God, and they created other places of worship, high places where they set up idols.

And not only did they set up idols to worship, he stopped the burning of their infants to Moloch.

They were murdering their own children as a form of worship. So these are the details that you're going to get when you see in these other works.

And then he restored the Passover. He cleansed the temple and he restored the Passover of God, the right, kosher way to worship

God. Now we know that, we're going to see that when we get to the end of chapter three, because chapter three is actually a prayer or a psalm that is used in the worship of Yahweh in the temple.

So we know that it had been established at that point in time. Well, the paganism that was in the temple and in the community and all that went along with it, was what

Habakkuk was looking at, that grieved him so much and led him to ask that first question, how long, oh

Lord? And it's almost as if he's asking God, don't you see this? Why are you delaying?

Why don't you react against this sin? And then he gets that first answer, that God is going to judge the sin of Judah.

He's going to, and he's going to use the Chaldeans to do it. Now I looked around to try to find an example in ancient artwork and stuff of pagan worship, where people are actually worshipping false gods and false idols and so forth.

And I found a few things, but I wasn't really too happy with it. So I had to settle on a more contemporary example of godless people in pagan worship, okay?

And there's an example right there. These people are worshiping, they're on their knees publicly worshipping a dead man, okay?

A man who died with enough fentanyl and narcotics in his bloodstream to kill a horse.

And they're on their knees worshipping that man. This is an example of contemporary pagan godless worship.

God calls the worship of dead people necromancy and it's a violation of his law and he condemns it and will judge it as he did in the past.

Well, the sins of Judah. So if you look at that first, that whole section of those passages, it talks about Manasseh and then it talks about in chapter 23, there are reforms that Josiah tried to implement.

But then later on in chapter, in 2 Kings 21, it says, or 24, it says this.

This is after the description of Josiah and the reforms. Surely at the command of Yahweh, it came upon Judah to remove them from his presence because of the sins of Manasseh, according to all that he had done and also for the innocent blood which he shed, for he filled

Jerusalem with innocent blood and Yahweh was not willing to pardon.

This is what Habakkuk was looking at. Filled it with innocent blood and certainly that would have included just routine murders and that type of thing and the violence, but also the slaughter of innocent children as a form of worship.

That's what he was looking at. That's what he saw and that's what led him to that first question that he asked.

How long, oh Lord? And he got the answer from God. Wasn't an answer that he expected, but what we saw last time,

God is going to judge the sins of Judah and he's going to use an unexpected means to do it. He's going to use the

Chaldeans and that was week one and page one in those notes and he describes the

Chaldeans. Remember, at this point in time, Assyria had taken over that whole area of the world and in the process, they had defeated the early

Chaldean or Babylonian empire in order to do that. They are not in the picture right now.

They are not even a power and so it's shocking to Habakkuk that God is going to use them and God says yes and when they are raised back up to power, they are going to be self -ruled, okay?

In other words, they're going to not have any authority other than their own authority. They're going to be autonomous, self -lawed, okay?

And they are swift in battle. Verse nine of chapter one, they are going to be very successful and they're also going to be scoffers.

They're going to laugh at any defenses, you know? People are going to come to a city and if that city has some walls or something, they're just going to laugh at it.

They're going to build siege mounds up against it and swarm over and take them over and they're going to be also sacrilegious.

This is important. We're going to see this throughout our study. They are going to be idolatrous people and as we came to the end of that section last time and we looked at verse 11 of chapter one of Habakkuk, they will sweep through like the wind and pass on but they will be held guilty.

They whose power is their God. They did not worship anything but their own power and they turned their own military ability into an idol.

Remember last time I gave you a quote from Dr. Charles Feinberg that was written in 1951.

In that same commentary, he has another little short statement that I really like and it's so pertinent.

For one to make his own strength his God is to commit suicide of the soul.

This is what the Chaldeans did. One of their great downfalls was that they worshiped their own military ability.

By the way, again, that was written in 1951. So, before we move on into this next section, do you have any questions or thoughts or comments about what we saw last time in these first 11 verses?

Pretty grim picture, isn't it? Well, let's look this morning at verse 12 of chapter one and we're going to be looking at this whole section and this is the second question that he asks and what he first does is to focus his heart and mind on Yahweh, who he is and what he is like.

To answer this second question, how can God use the wicked

Chaldeans? And we're going to see, you know, he's troubled by the fact that God, a holy

God, is going to use an unholy people to judge the Israelites, but he is.

So, in this first part, he says, Are you not from everlasting,

O Yahweh, my God, my holy one? When you have a question about what's going on in your culture, with the degradation that you see, or even another question, a question about a problem that you're having personally, first thing we should do, we should look to our

God. We should go back to meditate on who he is and what he is like and that's exactly what

Habakkuk does here too. First thing he says is that you are the eternal one.

Are you not from everlasting? Answer, of course he is. And then he refers to him, O Yahweh, that is the covenant name of God, the name that God gave at the burning bush.

Moses said, Who shall I say is sending me? And God said from the burning bush, I am that I am.

This is the one who is the eternal one. This is a statement of the technical jargon term, aseity of God.

He is the everlasting one who has no cause. He is the one who is not reliant or dependent on anything or anyone for his existence because he's the eternal one.

He's the self -existing God. And then he uses the word to describe

God that is a description of his power. It's a word that's used in the first verse of the Bible. In the beginning,

God created. This is the creator God who is so powerful he can create the whole universe from nothing.

He is Yahweh. He is God. And he's also the Holy One. This is from a

Hebrew word which means separated. God is separated. And this also is a very important theological concept, probably one of the foundational understandings of scripture right out of the starting blocks in Genesis 1 .1.

The separation between the creator and his creation. The creator -creation separation.

That is such a critical concept and it's also constantly under attack. Pagan religious systems and all kinds of false teachings want to diminish that distance between God the creator and his creation.

And they do that through a variety of means. They often, even in Eastern mysticism, you hear a lot about oneness.

All is one. Well, if all is one, off of that monism, you get pantheism.

If all is one, then all is God. And if all is God, then I'm God.

So from that, you get the deification of man. And so the creature -creator separation is a critical concept in scripture.

And this is one thing he goes back to recite. And notice also the personal aspect of this.

Oh, Yahweh, my God, my Holy One. He's in a personal faith relationship with Yahweh.

Just like Abraham was. Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

And so he says then, are you not from everlasting? Yes. Oh, Yahweh, my

God, my Holy One, we will not die. And he understands that because he understands the

Abrahamic covenant. The Abrahamic covenant, which unilaterally promised the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the perpetuity of their lives.

And then he affirms that to Isaac and then to Jacob and then now through the rest of the scripture.

To you and your descendants forever, he said. And so this is an ongoing relationship that cannot be broken because it was unilateral and then it's unconditional.

Oh, yes, God is going to judge the Jews for their disobedience. He always has going clear back in history and he is even today.

But they will survive as a people. And one of the reasons they survive is because there's always a believing remnant within that group.

It may be a small remnant or it may be fairly large. There's always a remnant of believers within that group of people.

So he goes back to who God is and what he is like. His conclusion, number one, we shall not die because of his eternal promises that he made to them.

Chastened, but not annihilated. And then conclusion number two, Yahweh is in control.

You, oh Yahweh, have placed them to judge. You're going to do this.

You're sovereign over even a godless pagan nation to use them to judge us.

And you, oh rock, there's another name for God, have established them to reprove.

They're not going to annihilate the Jewish people, but they will be used by God to reprove them.

So the sovereignty of God is in view here. Yahweh placed, ordained, put, appointed the

Chaldeans to judge the Jews. It's an amazing thing to think that God ordains people to use against other people.

Go back and read, background again, Isaiah 44, 28 through 45.

170 years before he was born, Isaiah actually names

Cyrus the Great of Persia who will be used by God along with the

Medo -Persian coalition to judge the Babylonians after they come to power.

He names him by name and he calls him my servant, but you do not know me. That's amazing to me.

Way before he's born, fulfilled prophecy is a powerful, powerful, potent apologetic for the veracity of the word of God.

And then he says, Yahweh the rock established, destined, and appointed them.

Yahweh the rock, a reference to God's solid person and character, the hiding place, the rock we can hide behind.

And then again, verse 13, your eyes are too pure to see evil or iniquity and you cannot look on trouble.

Why do you look on those who deal treacherously? Why are you silent when the wicked swallow up those more righteous than they?

Yes, the Jews in Jerusalem were horrific in their sin, but the Chaldeans were worse, he says.

Now when he says that, do you detect maybe a little bit of a flaw in his theological understanding there or his understanding of, let's say, his anthropology or his sinfulness of man?

See, there might be something there that he's misunderstanding a little bit. Anybody have any thoughts on that?

They're more sinful than we are. Do we do that sometimes?

Sin is sin, and God can use whoever he wants. And clearly he's using sinful people to judge his own people in that way.

Well, since Yahweh is holy and omniscient and knows who the most wicked are, how can he not react against them?

Verse 13, he's going to. And the Chaldeans, he says, are like fishermen who capture nations like fish.

Verse 14, and you have made men like the fish of the sea, like creeping things without a ruler over them.

Again, they're self -ruled. They have no authority other than themselves. The Chaldeans bring all of them up with a hook, drag them away with their net, and gather them together in their fishing net.

Probably the best way to see that in the Hebrew text is a dragnet. So individually with a hook, with a smaller net like a throw net, you know, and then with a massive dragnet, they just capture people and nations like that.

Therefore, they are glad and rejoice. Probably a metaphorical way of looking at the way the

Chaldeans just swarm over nations and capture people by the thousands like a fisherman hauling in a dragnet full of fish.

But also, and then ancient historians tell us that the Chaldeans and others, particularly the

Chaldeans, were known for when they captured people, put a hook in their jaw and lead them off into captivity.

So there is some historic reality behind this. But they are cruel. They are massively successful in what they do.

And he's seeing all of this. And one of the things also that they do, they're glad and rejoice.

And in verse 16, therefore, they offer a sacrifice to their net and burn incense to their fishing net because through these things, their portion is rich and their food is fat.

Again, they're idolatrous. They not only worship and make an idol of their own power, they worship their own tools of destruction.

Even ancient historians have written about how these pagan nations, and it wasn't just the Chaldeans, when they were victorious in battle, they would take their bows and their spears and the tools that they used and they would make sacrifices to them.

And they would worship the tools that they used to take these captives. And this is what the

Chaldeans do. They are idolatrous and they are people who then will be judged by God.

And it seems like they're going to be undefeated. It seems like they're going to go on and on forever.

Verse 17, will they therefore empty their net and continually kill nations without sparing?

Certainly it looks like it. It looks like they're so successful and they're so powerful and they're so massively successful in what they do.

Will this ever end? Well, he's at a place where he needs to just stop and think about this a little bit.

And so chapter two, verse one, it forms a little bit of a hinge point in the text, but also it's kind of an interval.

And what does he say there in chapter two, verse one? I will stand on my guard post and station myself on the fortification and I will keep watch to see what he will speak to me and how

I may respond when I am reproved. This is probably not a reference to a wall where a watchman would sit watching for foreign troops on a guard wall, that type of thing.

But what they had in the Middle East, and they still have them today, when the harvest would stand in the fields, they would oftentimes go out and set up a little stand out in the middle of their field.

And it's very simple structure, maybe three legs, maybe four with a little platform on top. And they would climb up on there and watch the crop while the harvest stood and that somebody would not come in and steal part of the crop.

They would be out there alone. It still goes on today. You can see fields in the Middle East that still do this.

This is what Habakkuk says I'm going to do. I'm going to get alone. I'm going to watch and I'm going to wait to see what

God's answer is. Sometimes this is what we have to do. We don't get an immediate answer, not like we would want.

We think maybe God is delaying answering us. Maybe even we think, well, maybe you don't even realize what's going on down here.

Oh, no. He knows. He sees. He sees sin before we do. He is more sensitive to sin than we ever will be.

And so there are times when we just need to wait, watch and pray.

When we turn it over to God like he did, we just need to watch and wait.

And then we come to the second answer. Verse two. Then Yahweh answered me and said,

Write down the vision and write it on tablets distinctly, that the one who reads it may run.

He wants him to put it on tablets. So there's an objective, verifiable, repeatable statement of this prophecy that one who would read it would then run and tell other people about it.

That's what the intent of that is. In fact, this is exactly what the apostle Paul does in Acts chapter 13, verse 41.

Paul would be very familiar with Habakkuk and he would have been able and willing to use the

Old Testament in his ministry. He's in Antioch and he's Antioch in Pisidia, the other

Antioch up to the north. And he's in the synagogue and he's preaching Christ to the Jews.

And he uses Habakkuk 1 .5 that says,

See among the nations and look. Be also astonished. Be astounded because I am doing something in your days.

He was sensing that the Jews were resisting him and so he refers them back to Habakkuk.

That is a prophecy about God judging the Jews for their disobedience and their sin by raising up another nation to come in and to take them over.

So this is exactly how Paul uses this in Antioch centuries later. And he says, write it down, write it on tablets, that the one who reads it may run.

And it's for future generations to do that. Yahweh's judgment, it will happen.

It's going to happen. There's no question about whether or not it's going to happen, but it will happen in His time.

Verse three, For the vision is yet for the appointed time. It pants towards its end and it will not lie.

Though it tarries, wait for it, for it will certainly come. It will not delay.

From our perspective, maybe the judgment of God is slow, ponderous. We can't see what's going on, but it will happen.

And here we arrive at verse four. Verse four is the theme of this prophecy.

It's one of the most important statements in the entire Bible. He says, behold, as for the proud one, his soul is not right within him, but the righteous will live by his faith.

This is the theme of Habakkuk's prophecy. This little verse is so important.

It's really kind of ironic. It's sort of nestled in this little prophecy here. This is used by the apostle

Paul, again, in the New Testament. Twice he quotes it. It's also used by the writer of Habakkuk, I mean, to the

Hebrews. And Habakkuk did not get this on his own. This is his understanding through the inspiration of the

Holy Spirit of, again, the Abrahamic covenant and the covenant that God made with Abraham and that he is righteous.

The righteous will live by his faith because you remember in Genesis 15, verse six, after God had made the covenant, which promised the land to Abraham and his descendants,

Abraham asked the question, another question, how will I know? How will I know I'm going to get it?

Because he had no descendant at that point in time. And God then made that covenant and he put him in a trance and he did not actually participate in that covenant, which involved the cutting of the animals.

And so it was a unilateral covenant that was made. And Abraham, it says, believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

And so Habakkuk here is just picking up on that same thing. This is the answer to what he's seeing, the answer to both of these questions, the righteous or the just will live by his faith.

The Chaldeans will be judged because of their unbelief. Those are the ones who are the proud ones that he says right there.

And here throughout this, you see this dichotomy of people being created by Habakkuk.

They're idolatrous, they're proud, they're self -ruled. They're not righteous because they don't have faith in Yahweh, but the righteous will live by his faith.

And then in verse five, again, reference back to the Chaldeans. And indeed, wine betrays the haughty man or the proud man so that he does not stay at home.

He enlarges his appetite like Sheol and he is like death, never satisfied.

He also gathers to himself all nations and assembles to himself all people, the drunk, proud, greedy, never satisfied

Chaldeans will be judged. They will be judged. You can mark it down. It may be slower than what

Habakkuk wants to see, but God has a plan in place. He is, the wheels are in motion and they are going to be judged in the future.

What we're gonna see next time when we start this up again in verse six through verse 20, we're going to see a feature.

Now, he's already talked about it here, but next time we're going to see a feature of the Bible and it's a feature of this prophecy here.

It's just critical. It's called the eschatological reversal, eschatological reversal.

What you see now is not how it's going to end. Okay, this is classic scriptural teaching by the

Jews all the way through. Jesus taught this way. The last will be first and the first will be last.

Okay, we're gonna see that applied to the Chaldeans next time in five woes that he is going to detail their future judgment.

So before we look at some practical principles, do you have any questions or comments on this section of Habakkuk?

Okay, page four. Some practical principles. I think we can get through all of these. These are just some certainly if you read through this and pray about this, you could probably think of some more.

When we see the righteous suffering and the wicked prospering, we need to stop and meditate on who our

God is and what he is like. Remember Asaph? He saw that dilemma that you see throughout scripture.

And he was a godly man who knew Yahweh. He knew what he was like. He understood his attributes and he struggled with what he saw as well.

He saw the prosperity of the wicked on the one hand and yet he saw the suffering of the righteous and he had trouble putting that together with what he knew about Yahweh until Yahweh showed him the end, okay?

The eschatological reversal. Number two, because of the Abrahamic covenant which is unconditional, unilateral, irrevocable and transgenerational, the

Jewish people will survive any attempts to end their existence. They will come to faith in their Messiah and be restored as an earthly kingdom under King Jesus when he returns.

Number three, no matter how powerful and successful the wicked are, apart from their repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, they will suffer the judgment of God.

Number four, sin is always self -deceiving and self -destructing. The Chaldean, the new

Babylonian empire was massive and powerful. You remember that the city of Babylon was built into the seventh wonder of the world.

They had this massive wall around it. They were impregnable. They were self -contained.

The Euphrates River ran right under the wall through the middle of town. They had water. They could grow crops.

They had the hanging gardens of Babylon became very famous. Remember that night that Nebuchadnezzar went up on the roof of his castle and he looked around and he said, look what

I have done. I have, I have done, okay? That didn't last very long because there was an eschatological reversal.

Sin is always self -deceiving and self -destructing. Number five, there are times when we as believers are to watch and wait.

I don't know about you. That's hard for me to do. I'm a very impatient person. I want to see judgment, you know, but we have to sometimes just watch and wait.

Trust God. He has a perfect plan. He's working it out detail by detail, moment by moment, perfect timing.

Number six, no matter what our questions are, God's answers are always right on schedule. Perfect timing.

And number seven, our salvation is by faith alone in Christ alone. And our walk in the world is by faith alone in Christ alone.

And that's back to chapter two, verse four B, the righteous shall live by his faith.

We're going to talk about that more next time. So your homework is number eight. That's right.

Homework. Okay, so I want you to take number eight, work your way through this.

Look at these references in the New Testament. And next time we'll talk about these and we'll spend a little more time talking about this because this is such a significant concept in the

New Testament and in Habakkuk's work and the theology of Paul.

And later on, even in the Reformation, this little statement here is used by Paul in Romans 117.

And this is what led Martin Luther to salvation. So it's significant. We're going to talk about it more next time.

Okay, so eschatological reversal. We'll talk about that next time too from verses six through 20 of chapter two.

Let's pray together. Father, thank you for your word this morning. Thank you for our time in your word.

Pray, Father, that it would bear much fruit in our lives as we study it, meditate upon it, allow it to change our thinking and therefore our lives.

And so, Father, we know it is by your grace. And so we just give you all praise and glory and honor through it.

And we ask, Father, now, as we gather to fellowship and worship, that you would be with us in a very special way, that you would just give great encouragement and strength to those who will lead us in worship and in preaching this morning.

Help us to listen with hearts and minds that are attentive to your word and ready to obey you and to bring more glory and honor to our