Habakkuk 1:1-12 What Hope Do You Have?

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan.

Good morning.

Hey, you are all organized this morning. How are you today? Good, good, I like that. I am Mike Biancolana. I am one of the elders here at Recast. Oh, thank you. And it is a pleasure to open God's word with you this morning.

Habakkuk as a Prophetic Oracle and the Question of Hope

The book of Habakkuk, the prophet, is where I'm taking us today. It's one of the 12, the minor prophets of the Old Testament. We'll be looking at the first 12 verses this morning, and it's a short book overall.

It's a book of unexpected turns, and it presents us with kind of a bleak picture of what's going on there in Judah at the time, and a very bleak picture of what's about to happen in Judah. But in addition to that, it also presents us with rock solid, brilliant hope, anchored in the character of God in the midst of that bleakness.

And this will raise the question that I've titled the sermon with, what hope do you have? This is heavy content in God's word that we're headed for here. But I hope that in it, you meet the one who bears an incredible weight for us and offers us the lighter side of the yoke.

The structure of this book of Habakkuk is not what you might expect if you've read through other prophets in the Old Testament. You would probably, based on other reading, be looking for the word of the Lord coming to the prophet, maybe how the prophet was commissioned.

You would be expecting lots of vivid poetry, poetic language, things like that. And then maybe some narrative, a little bit of story, like this is what happened. The prophet's message, the content, would be denouncing sins, pronouncing judgment, and announcing the way back to God.

Also, the coming restoration brought by the Lord's grace, standard fare for prophets. In Habakkuk, we still have vivid poetry all throughout the book, so you won't be missing that. But the content feels very different here.

The book begins with Habakkuk starting a conversation with the Lord, complaining about all of the sin that he's seeing. This is instead of the Lord sending his prophet to the people who are sinning. After that, Habakkuk receives and then processes a rather startling response.

And that's just the first chapter. In the second chapter, it transitions to more naming sins and the attendant judgment, what you might expect from the prophets, but this isn't aimed at Israel. And then the third chapter of Habakkuk, and that's all there is, is a song, just like you would expect in the Psalms.

The long-range hope of restoration, new covenants, or the day of the Lord are scarce in this book. There is no direct call for repentance in the book of Habakkuk. Repentance is always good, but it's not in this book here, no call for it.

The hope that we see in this book is the hope of being held securely by God while everything all around catastrophically falls apart. That sounds like fun, let's keep going here. Now, before I start reading the text, I have a question.

It's not a trick question or anything, but the three-letter word, B-O-W, what word is that? Bow, is it like the front of a ship, or is it like bow, right? A bow, like a bow, yeah. So what is the deal with that word?

What's going on with that word, how do you know? You need context, you need to have other words around it so you can understand, okay, those three letters, that means part of a dog saying something. So you need context to understand a single word, you need context to understand a book.

It's really vital. So to understand what is going on with Habakkuk, I'm gonna take a quick, give us a quick look at the historical context of what's going on around there. It's gonna be really broad strokes, but it'll provide a backdrop so we can see what's going on in this text better.

From Creation to the Babylonian Exile

So first, God made all things visible and invisible. I don't know where you expect me to start with history, but the beginning seems good. God made man in his image, male and female. Man sinned, and now man is contrary to God, and God's earth is contrary to man.

People are hostile toward each other and evil. Man multiplied on the earth, and he carried his evil heart into everything he did. God flooded the earth, but saved one family. From there, the earth was repopulated.

Men were still sinful, and cities and nations were founded again. The cities weren't the sin, but sin was built into them. God called Abraham out of his father's house and made a covenant with him. Abraham was to be the start of God's chosen people who would bless all nations.

God also promised to give Abraham's descendants the land where Abraham was living as a sojourner. Later on, the Lord God rescues the descendants of Abraham from slavery in Egypt and promises to go with them.

He gives them the ground rules for separating the holy from the unholy because the Lord is holy. The people being holy is key to God being with them, and him being with them is vital to the success of this small nation of freed slaves.

God brought them into the land he promised Abraham. The people, being sinful, made a huge mess of everything. God sent his prophets to call them back. They eventually asked God for a king. He gave them one, Saul.

Then David, if you ignore Ish-bosheth. And then Solomon, who built the temple in the name of the Lord that stood in Jerusalem. Solomon, in his latter years, turned away from the Lord. And the kingdom divided under Solomon's son, Rehoboam, because God incited Rehoboam to be a supreme chucklehead and offend most of his subjects.

The split was Israel in the north, Judah in the south, under Rehoboam. So 14 kings and 328 years after Rehoboam's death began the reign of King Josiah, the last good king of Judah. In the meantime, the northern kingdom of Israel had been cast out of the land by God, conquered and taken into exile by the Assyrian Empire.

Josiah instituted massive reforms in Judah, working to undo the legacy of the previous two kings, which read like God's law inverted. After Josiah died, Judah was brought under Egypt's rule and made to serve their enemy, paying heavy tribute.

It's at that time, under the rule of Josiah's son, Jehoiakim, that Habakkuk is writing. So that's our context. So with that in mind, please open your Bibles or your devices to Habakkuk chapter one. If you're turning there in a physical Bible, you can go back five books from Matthew.

If you're coming from the other direction, it's gonna be past Psalms, Isaiah, Daniel, and it's right after Nahum, if that helps you at all. This is God's word for us this morning. The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw.

Oh Lord, how long 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? Destruction and violence are before me.

Strife and contention arise. So the law is paralyzed and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous, so justice goes forth perverted. Look among the nations and see, wonder and be astounded.

For I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation who marched through the breadth of the earth to seize dwellings not their own.

They are dreaded and fearsome. Their justice and dignity go forth from themselves. Their horses are swifter than leopards, more fierce than the evening wolves. Their horsemen press proudly on. Their horsemen come from afar.

They fly like an eagle swift to devour. They all come for violence, all their faces forward. They gather captives like sand. At kings, they scoff. And at rulers, they laugh. They laugh at every fortress, for they pile up earth and take it.

Then they sweep by like the wind and go on. Guilty men whose own might is their God. Are you not from everlasting, O Lord, my God, my Holy One? We shall not die. O Lord, you have ordained them as a judgment.

And you, O Rock, have established them for reproof. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing us here this morning to hear from your word and to worship you. Thank you for your word that confronts us and tells us things that maybe we don't wanna hear, but that we need to hear.

And thank you for who you are that is just so comforting and unchanging, but also unyielding, and you don't just give the nod to sin. And Lord, thank you for loving us. And I just pray that you would open our hearts now to worship you in gladness and to hear your word.

Pray this in your name, amen. All right, please reopen your Bibles, paper or digital, to Habakkuk. And if you need to use the restrooms at any time, they're through the double door, the barn doors there, take a right, look left, they're down the hall.

If you need to get any more coffee or donuts, they're in the back, help yourself at any time while supplies last. As I mentioned before, and as you saw when we were reading it together, Habakkuk's prophecy, like most prophecy in the Bible, is composed almost entirely of poetry.

You can see it conveniently typeset for you that way in a lot of translations. And accordingly, because it's poetry, I'm going to be going through it in strokes that are hopefully not too broad, but somewhat, rather than parsing it out word by word.

After all, poetry is a literary art form and has figurative language and flourishes and things like that. And those are supposed to leave a specific impression on our mind. Aesthetic creations are like that, and it can be easy to miss the point in there.

By examining it by inappropriate methods. To give an example of what I mean, if you dive into the technical details, if you have to dive in and explain to people why your joke is funny, it's not funny anymore, right?

Like, that doesn't work. If you pick apart a butterfly to see why it's beautiful, what makes it that way, it's no longer beautiful. You might learn some things about butterflies, but that butterfly is a mess right now.

So you really savor the beauty of a butterfly appropriately by leaving it alive and intact. It can fly, you can watch it. So I am not going to pick apart the poetry wrongly here, but I do want to give you something to help you understand Hebrew poetry.

So something very common in Hebrew poetry is called parallelism. It's the name that goes by to us. Parallelism is not unique to Hebrew poetry, but you will see it everywhere in the Bible. It can be doing various things.

For example, right out of the gates in the two verses of our passage, or sorry, in verse two of our passage, "'O Lord, how long shall I cry for help "'and you will not hear? "'Or cry to you, violence, and you will not save?'.

When you see two statements like this right next to each other, and they're saying very similar but not identical things, they are building up the same idea, but going over it slightly differently in order to fill it out more, so it's bigger.

We see that Habakkuk has been crying out for help. He's also crying out about violence. He wants to know why God doesn't seem to hear or save. It's all one. That's parallelism. You can see it again in verse four with justice not going forth and justice going forth perverted.

Well, which is it, Habakkuk? Well, it's both. He's adding more detail and facets by describing it twice. The justice is being perverted. It's also being prevented. It's two parts of a larger situation going on.

These things are usually not just real simple, so he's filling it out for us. This kind of parallelism continues throughout the entire book and anywhere ancient Hebrew poetry has been preserved for us.

One more quick note I want to give you at the outset about names. The text mentions the Chaldeans, but you might know them better as the Babylonians. The Bible uses both names for them, but Habakkuk in this book, it tends just to be Chaldeans.

I will be using both names interchangeably, so whether I'm talking about Babylonians or Chaldeans, I'm talking about the same group of people. Also, while I'm talking about names, about the name Habakkuk, you may have heard it pronounced differently.

Maybe it's Habakkuk or however. I don't really feel strongly about that. I am not a Hebrew scholar. I don't speak Hebrew. You may have heard somebody else, somebody smarter and better looking than me say it differently, and I'm fine with that.

So with biblical names, especially these in the Old Testament, I try to go with advice that I heard from an Old Testament professor once while we were visiting my wife's alma mater. He said, pick a pronunciation and say it confidently.

Habakkuk's Complaint and the Problem of Grumbling

So Habakkuk, that's it. For those who are taking notes, the outline of my sermon here, the first section is going to be the complaint, verses two through four, the complaint. Then God's response, verses five through 11, God's response to him.

And finally, Habakkuk's reply in verse 12. Habakkuk's reply. The first verse, which you may have noticed is not in that outline, is it stands for a title of the book, the oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw.

That's what this book is. It tells us directly that Habakkuk holds the office of prophet. He's God's messenger. And try not to get too bogged down on whether or not you think an oracle is the kind of thing a person sees.

It's enough to say that this is an official, authorized message from God given to Habakkuk to give to the people around him, and recorded at least in part for our benefit. So the complaint. In verses two through four, there are two main pieces that I want us to notice.

One is the situation that's being described. The other is Habakkuk himself. Those are the two pieces. As for the situation, there's a breakdown in the relationships of the everyday. There's strife and contention between rivals, where there should be peace among brothers.

Violence is used to get the desired results and then goes unpunished. The society is being destroyed and lives are being trampled upon. Justice is not being done. Taking an honest case to the dishonest courts is just asking for more trouble, and generally a bad idea.

The wicked are so numerous that they surround the righteous. An honest and upright person is hard to find. Imagine living in a place and time with a justice system that seems to arbitrarily apply the law, let criminals slide, and wickedness is reinforced by the courts responsible for condemning it.

Where decisions come down excessively hard on people just because they're disfavored by the judge. That's the very narrowest definition of prejudice, making judgment before evidence is presented. Where having enough money or the right connections gives immunity to the laws.

And honest people who have done nothing wrong feel that being noticed by the authorities would bring nothing but more trouble. It doesn't take any effort to see that this is not a good situation. And I want to be clear that this is talking about Judah under Jehoiakim, but it sounds an awful lot to me like what we see going on around us, does it not?

More than how this looks to us or how it makes us feel, these things are deeply offensive to God. This situation, this is where sin leads. This is the natural drift of any society or group of sinful people, which is everybody.

What is described here is not the absolute bottom, since God graciously prevents that, but this is a terrible situation that none of us would choose to be in. And please note, they did not get into this situation overnight.

Letting one part of God's law go unenforced, like the regulations for worship, little by little leads to the whole law being paralyzed. A little bit of sin leads to more sinning. We can't manage sin or keep it contained where we think we want it.

It warps our reasoning and our desires, and we like it that way. What is being described by Habakkuk is the fruit of sin. What you can find Paul describing in various places, such as Galatians 5, as the works of the flesh, which he says are evident.

They are obvious and familiar to us from experience. This is the situation that Habakkuk describes. Not good. So let's look at the other piece of the first section. Habakkuk himself, what's he doing? This will be instructive to us because we are also confronted by sin from others, external to us, as well as inside ourselves.

So what's Habakkuk doing in the midst of this situation? Well, first of all, we see in verse two that he's crying out to God. Says, how long must I cry to you? And we also see in there that this isn't the first time.

He's continually crying out to God. So he's persisting in this. And that means he has not made peace with sin. It's always detestable to him. It still bothers him. Habakkuk hasn't decided that, well, I guess this is just the way things will be.

I might as well get used to it. Settle in, this is going to be a long haul. And he is doing this because he knows and trusts in God's character, what God is like, God's name. That is where his confidence is.

He knows that the only one who can and will fix the problem of sin is God. So God's character is the anchor that Habakkuk is holding onto. And in all of this, something doesn't add up to Habakkuk. There's all this violence and injustice all around him.

And he wants to know why. Why he has to keep waking up every day confronted by the same evil situation. Why isn't God doing something about this? That's the big question that Habakkuk is pressing here.

He is trusting in God's character while the circumstances don't square with that. He wants the justice that God's character demands, but he isn't seeing it. So before we get to the next section, I want to draw out two points of application.

The first is check your grumbling. And I want to draw out, there's a distinction here. This complaint that Habakkuk is lodging is something different from grumbling. And it might help to see the difference if you compare what Habakkuk's complaint is to the grumbling that happens in Numbers chapter 14.

In the first four verses, where the people of Israel are not wanting to enter the promised land, and they grumble against God saying that they would be better off dead than following God into the promised land where the Lord was surely, they said, going to get them all killed, men, women, and children.

The grumbling of Israel gets an entire generation killed in the wilderness. In contrast, Habakkuk's complaint does not receive even a word of rebuke. Grumbling is a mask for disobedience, for dragging our feet or just doing our own thing.

When we grumble at God, we are believing God to be some combination of weak, apathetic, or evil, because he dares to allow our comfort to be jeopardized. This is more than just doubt. This is straight up blasphemy, believing lies about God's character.

We should not grumble. And this is a point that I need to have as much as anybody. We are told in scripture that this is sin. Instead of grumbling like Habakkuk, we should remind ourselves of God's character and rejoice in his works, his continual, steadfast faithfulness.

When we don't like our situation, keep bringing it to God and trust him with it like Habakkuk does. Remember the persistent widow in Jesus's parable. Keep praying. The second point of application that I wanna draw out here is this.

Do not make peace with sin. Sin is always destructive, and no, you and I cannot handle it. Shrugging it off will only increase the destruction. God will never be pleased with sin, but he is always pleased with his son.

So run to Jesus. If it is your sin that you're dealing with, acknowledge it as sin to God and repent quickly. If a brother or sister in the Lord has sinned, show them love by bringing it up to them. As in Matthew 18.

If it's an unbeliever, warn them, tell them of repentance and life in Jesus and pray that it would be granted to them so we cannot make peace with sin. So what's God's response? Verses five through 11 here.

God's Response: Judgment Through the Chaldeans

What is the Lord's response to all of this? How does he answer Habakkuk's question? God has an indirect way of answering questions sometimes that swallows up the initial question and poses a few more.

And that is certainly the case here. Here is God's answer. In effect, he says, look up, out beyond where the thing's troubling you are, Habakkuk, out there is a terrifying army that is unstoppable. They don't care about how great your king is or how thick the walls of your city are.

Their hordes are coming and they will gather their captives like sand. They will take your houses and live in them. Their cavalry is so deadly that you will think that they're a pack of ravenous, huge wolves coming down on you and attacking as fast as a bird of prey.

They're making a sweep through the entire known world and gathering all the nations into their empire. They worship their own military force, which secures their ability to do whatever they want. They know no justice other than getting their own way.

God is doing something about this. What he is doing though is unthinkable to Habakkuk and all the people of Judah. It is outside their categories. If they were told about it, and they are being told about it right here, they would not even believe it.

God's people, God's land, God's temple, taken by the unclean nations under Babylon, that seems impossible, but it shouldn't seem impossible. This is also because of God's character, because of his name.

The same character that offers such hope and consolation to Habakkuk brings judgment on those who have rejected God for their own way. It's two sides of the same character, and it must be that way. If God delivers the helpless poor who cry out to him because of wickedness and injustice, as he promised he would, then those who are being wicked and unjust will be dealt with.

This is also what God promised. An example of what I'm talking about can be found in Exodus chapter 22, verses 21 through 27, where the Lord says this, "'You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you are sojourners in the land of Egypt.

You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. If you do mistreat them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.

If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a money lender to him, and you shall not exact interest from him. If ever you take your neighbor's cloak and pledge, you shall return it to him before the sun goes down, for that is his only covering, and it is his cloak for his body.

In what else shall he sleep? And if he cries to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.'". So this is God's faithfulness that we are seeing. Hundreds of years earlier, just before the people entered the land, we have it written down for us in Deuteronomy 28.

God promised that if they did not keep his commandments or serve him joyfully because of all the many good things that he gave them, says, quote, "'The Lord will bring a nation against you from far away, from the end of the earth, swooping down like the eagle, a nation whose language you do not understand, a hard-faced nation who shall not respect the old or show mercy to the young.'".

That description there sounds very close to what Habakkuk was told, doesn't it? And that's Deuteronomy. This promise is repeated multiple times as well. For instance, in 2 Chronicles 7, verses 19 through 20, at the dedication of the temple by Solomon, the Lord says this, "'But if you turn aside and forsake my statutes and my commandments that I have set before you and go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will pluck you up from my land that I have given you.

And this house that I have consecrated for my name, I will cast out of my sight, and I will make it a proverb and a byword among all peoples.'". God promised to bring a nation in to violently remove Israel from the land if they disobeyed.

And it took a very long time to get to this point, more than 400 years. God is also merciful and slow to anger. He consistently sent his prophets to correct the people, and the people consistently over that time showed their overall preference for rejecting God to embrace sin.

Even though there were some periods during that time where they turned to the Lord, sometimes even when they were not in a terrible scrape with the nations around them. That was good. But there comes a day when sin will be judged.

The nearness of that day for the kingdom of Judah is being announced to Habakkuk. Do not bet against God's promises. And yes, the Holy God can use a wicked people as a tool for inflicting judgment. This is God's sovereign character on display.

The Babylonians were a nation that would have scoffed at the God of Israel. They had no idea they were working out his will. They were practically unknown not long prior to this, yet historically we know that they toppled all the powerful empires in the area at the time.

They conquered Assyria as well as Egypt. Those were both not lightweights. And God says here that he specifically raised them up to punish Judah and remove them from the land just as the Canaanites had been removed by Israel.

The justice that Habakkuk is crying out for is coming, but it's more than he bargained for, I think. It would seem that Habakkuk underestimates the scope and severity of sin, something I see in my own heart.

How about you? Do you find yourself like me thinking or hoping or wishing that, well, my sins aren't that bad and they're only in need of a little bit of fixing up and then I'll be fine. I often don't realize the severity of the solution required.

Habakkuk here, he wants national reforms and instead Jerusalem will lie in ruins. I want just to have some personal reforms and I'm appalled to see the son of God hanging on a cross outside that same city.

This is what sin brings. It brings judgment. It brings death. Every time, every sin, not just then, but always. Sin will take more from you and I than we ever thought we had to lose. The people in Jerusalem, they had no idea that they could even possibly lose God's temple.

They thought his presence was with them and there was nothing that could go ultimately too wrong. And just as God promised Israel that he would judge their sins, and we now see in Habakkuk that that day is coming up on them in some ways, unexpectedly to them.

God has promised to judge the sins of the whole world. Jesus talked about this and we see it also in the revelation given to John. It will catch people off guard and it will come. And when that day comes for us to give an account to the Holy One, there is only one way not to stand justly condemned and that is to be found in Jesus.

It was God's will that his son should take our sins and give us his righteousness to wear always. So on that day of judgment, we who have believed in the Lord Jesus and have been given life in his name will be looked on with pleasure by God because of his character.

So what hope do you have? Jesus will always welcome sinners if they will turn from their sins and come to him. So what is Habakkuk's reply to all of this? This terrible report that he could hardly even believe.

Habakkuk's Reply and the Hope of Being Held by God

The scope of his problems have just expanded like a hundredfold at least. He was worried about day-to-day stuff that was not good, but an entire army coming and leveling the city he's in and killing a bunch of people and carrying off the rest captive, that is on a whole other level.

I'm sure you'd agree. Habakkuk in the face of this terrible news continues to trust in God's character. His hope is still in the Lord on the basis of God's character. That's what he's leading with when he says, are you not from everlasting, my God, my holy one?

Habakkuk is confident that not everyone will die. He says, we shall not die. Now he knows full well that more than a few people will die. He's not thinking that the Chaldeans are gonna come in as government consultants for holy and righteous living so that all the bad things will be fixed and then Jerusalem will be amazing again.

No.

But Habakkuk knows God's character well enough to know that a remnant will be saved. And he knows that God has chosen the Chaldeans to be an instrument of judgment. He says directly that God has raised them up specifically for judgment and rebuke against his people who have turned away from him.

Habakkuk knows that God is eternally faithful, faithful both to judge those who insist on rejecting him and to save those who are reconciled to him and draw near to him by his grace. Grace that we see more clearly in the person of Christ Jesus.

So as a final point of application, where is your hope? Do you know God's character well enough for it to bear the weight of trust when everything in your world looks like it is being destroyed? There is no plan B in God's creation to jump to.

He's it and he's all we need. As Peter said when asked if you wanted to leave off following Jesus when things were hard to understand, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life and we have believed and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God.

You see, it's his character, his faithfulness. That's our anchor as well as Habakkuk's. So get better acquainted with God's character. Read and hear and ponder the word of God with the help of his spirit.

That is how we can know God's character well enough to trust him even to the end of the age. Now we have a chance to declare and celebrate with each other the hope that we have in Christ as we take communion.

As we do this, remember that if you are his, there is nothing, no calamity or scheme that can take you out of his hand or separate you from his love. So if you have submitted to Christ Jesus as Lord and are at peace with others here so far as it depends on you, go and get the elements in a moment here from one of the tables that are set up and take them with joy.

And if you have not submitted to Christ Jesus, I'd ask you to not go and get the elements, stay seated. Just consider the things that you've just heard. And if you have questions about that, then come and talk to me after.

I'd be happy to talk to you, Mark, the elder on duty, or Dave, who you saw up here. We'd love to tell you how you can be reconciled and have Christ cover your sins. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for who you are, for your steadfast character, that we can trust in you, that you don't change.

Thank you for dealing with sin and not shrugging it off. Please help us to trust in who you are, to know you better, to be deeply acquainted with you and your ways. And I just pray that if anybody is not reconciled to you here, that they would take to heart what they heard and that they would be reconciled, that you would grant them repentance.

Lord, you are good, and you are our anchor and our rock, no matter what's going on. And I just pray that you would help us to see that and to hold on to you as you are holding on to us. In your name, amen.