April 22, 2018 PM Meet The Babylonians by Pastor Josh Sheldon

Habakkuk’s Complaint and God’s Answer Through Babylon

We'll turn, please, once again to the book of Habakkuk, and we'll look this morning at chapter 1 and verses 5 through 11. I've titled this message, Meet the Babylonians, which they were about to, and this afternoon, in the pages of scripture, Lord willing, we will.

So, beginning of verse 5, 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 might is their own God. Now, this, of course, comes as God's answer to the prophet's opening question, where he said, O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear, or cry to you violence, and you will not save?

In other words, Habakkuk's cry, his plea, the violence he saw, the iniquity that was before his eyes, was from where? It was from Judah, and most especially from the rulers, the ruling class of Judah.

So, he calls out to God, O Lord, how long? And here, in these verses I just read to you, is God's answer. God had shown him the iniquity in Judah, and he, the prophet, had faithfully cried out against it, and in his eyes, to no avail.

Injustice, greed, idolatry, all continued unrestrained. If the question was, Lord, why do you wait? This answer might have made the prophet long once again for God's previous patience. Judah's sins, you see, had not escaped the Lord's notice, nor had the judgment that they so richly deserved been forgotten.

In fact, in this answer, what do we see? What did the prophet see? But the judgment was well on its way, and it would be more terrible than anything the prophet could have imagined. You see, sin will be met with punishment, and that punishment will be commensurate with the wrong done.

The horror that the Babylonians would bring, described here in excruciating detail, as awful as that would be, it's really only a hint of the depth of our offenses against a holy God. So this afternoon, as we continue in this prophet's short prophecy, let's meet the Chaldeans.

The Chaldeans as God’s Instrument of Judgment

Let us meet God's chosen instrument of judgment. Who are the Chaldeans? Chaldeans is synonymous. It's really the same as Babylonians. By the time Habakkuk received his commission, this nation, these Babylonians, the Chaldeans, had already destroyed Assyria, and that was in 612 BC.

And they were to be God's chosen instrument of judgment next. Now Assyria had been God's instrument of judgment against the northern kingdom, against what we call Israel, and now Babylon against the remaining kingdom, Judah.

And the prophet Habakkuk, he is aghast at this prospect. His answer to God's answer will be our text for next week. When he answers back, how can this be? But for now, for this afternoon, let's note simply this.

The punishment will fit the crime. Matter of fact, what's more than that, the punishment will be, point by point, exactly what God had warned of centuries before this. We go through this very quickly.

You'll get the sense of it. In verse 6, it says that they seize dwellings not their own. If you think all the way back to chapter 6 verse 12 of Deuteronomy, as Israel's getting ready to take the promised land, Israel is told that God is going to let them live in cities and houses that they didn't build.

Others built them. And God's going to drive them out and give them to his people. God will displace what was theirs and going to give it to Israel. But then in Deuteronomy 28 verse 30, as the curses for disobedience are detailed, it says quite the opposite.

You, Israel, you will build a house but others will live in it. This is the people who's coming upon them. The Babylonians, who in general seized places that they didn't make, other people's property, and they dwell there.

And this is the turnabout that Israel's about to experience from Babylon. Verse 7, their dignity, their justice and dignity go out from themselves. What does that mean? It means they make their own standards.

They live by their own rules. They carried not one wit what God had to say. What they said, if by force we can impose it upon you, then might makes right. Israel had once been told, keep my statutes and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who when they hear these, all these statutes will say, surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.

But having refused to go forth with God's justice and God's dignity before them, they're going to be conquered by a nation whose own justice, whose own dignity, things that they've put together by their own standards, their own thinking, their own desires, and because of their military might, can impose upon others.

And what was their wisdom? What was their justice? What was their dignity? Well in Babylon, the application today is obvious, and we don't have to spend a lot of time detailing it. They make their own rules.

They decide for themselves what is right. As long as they're stronger than anybody who might be able to pose a different standard on them, as long as they can hold them at bay or even conquer them, they are in that sense right, and nobody's going to change them.

Who is Babylon? How do we understand Babylon? Do you remember a boxer named Mike Tyson? He was the heavyweight boxing champ in the late 1980s. He might have been the fiercest man to ever enter the ring, and I saw him on TV when he was fighting the European boxing champ, a man named Frank Bruno, and Tyson won the fight during the referee's instructions before the opening bell, because you could tell by the way Tyson was staring at him and the way Bruno was looking back that Bruno was terrified.

He lost the fight before the bell, and you know the referee saying, well I want a clean fight, no hitting below the belt and all that, but it was over before it began. Officially ended in the fifth round, but Tyson won it long before that.

Why do I bring in a boxer as an example in a message about the gospel? You see Assyria, the nation that we spoke about in the previous series in Nahum, Nahum who prophesied Assyria's fall, Assyria had been the Mike Tyson of the ancient Near East.

Only a fool would not have been terrified of Assyria, but now guess who's coming to dinner? The guy who took out Tyson with a single punch. That's who Babylon was. Now where would Israel go? What will Israel do when they hear this?

They had a long, centuries long, a lifelong habit of going to Egypt for help. Could they go to Egypt for help? No. Very near this time at a battle called Carchemish, after the place where it took place, Babylon destroyed Egypt militarily.

Egypt was no threat to Babylon and no help to anyone else. So by the time they hear this prophecy from Habakkuk, their options are virtually nil. And we can look at this, we can say, well you know the Lord does have a way of taking away our refuges, places where we're going to turn in times of distress, perhaps times of providential distress, chastisement we would call it, that the Lord has given us.

And he takes away those refuges, those Egypts, until we're left with only him. In times of trouble, times of turmoil, too often our first instinct is to do something. To do something. Assess the situation, gather up our options, and then we analyze the options for pluses and minuses.

And maybe we plug them into a spreadsheet which we've programmed that will perform a statistical analysis and give us the probable outcomes. And we choose what looks most beneficial to us. And all the while we never stop to ask, why has God sent me here?

Why are my options dwindling away? Why every time I turn this way or that way, it's always been there. This Egypt, this Assyria who's been my ally before and it's gone. They're not there for me. Good time to stop and ask the Lord, why has this providence, why is this chastisement upon me?

Israel, by the time they hear this, they had nowhere left to turn. And when I think of the history, we don't have that particular battle in the Bible, but we know from archaeological and historical evidence that it took place.

So about the time of this prophecy, Israel had nowhere to go. All these places they used to run for cover. They couldn't. There was only Babylon coming. There was only the Lord's decree that they would judge Israel for its, or I should say Judah, for its long, long rebellion with which the Lord had suffered long.

He sends judgment against Judah, piece by piece removing options so that what is left, only Him. Turn to Him. As we go through these minor prophets, one of the real shining characteristics of what we call the minor prophets is this constant call to repent.

Repent. And as Malachi says, perhaps the Lord will leave behind a blessing. Who knows, says Joel, if He will forgive your sins. Jesus wept over this kind of obstinacy. In Luke's gospel, when He drew near and saw the city, that's Jerusalem, He wept over it saying, Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes.

You see, the Lord takes no pleasure in bringing death and destruction, but He ever offers Himself, faithful to His own word, if only we will see, if only we will hear, if only we will obey, if only we will pray and ask God, why is this providence upon me?

Why is your chastising hand heavy upon me? Oh Lord, hear my repentance and put me back on your path of righteousness. If only we at the start of the trial would stop and pray, ask God to open the eyes of our heart that He might reveal the sin that so easily ensnared us or entangles us in the cords of desperation.

As we go on and on, trying to find alternatives, options, spreadsheets that give us probable outcomes from statistical analyses, and yet what does the Lord say? Again and again, open your eyes. If you're a child of God, His love is upon you and therefore He chastises, therefore He drives you to Himself by taking away every option that we possibly could have thought, we could have possibly thought of, and forcing us where we need to go at the beginning.

And the only place where we must end up, which is in His arms. How awful is sin? I mean really, how awful is sin? It's so awful in God's eyes that a Babylonian horde is only a hint of what is actually deserved.

The Principle of Lex Talionis

Should His anger issue into unrestrained justice, the Babylonians would be, as we say, a walk in the park. As a principle to this, we have in the scripture, the Apostle Paul says to the Galatians, God is not mocked for whatever one sows that he will also reap.

Sometimes called the principle of what we call Lexus Talianus, Lexus Talianus, the punishment fits the crime. Israel sowed their own seeds of disobedience and so were given the harvest not only deserved but clearly warned of.

A lot of examples of this in the scripture, of God or His representatives bringing out punishment that fits the crime exactly. David's assault on the Ammonites after their prince mistreated his emissaries was Lexus Talianus.

Gehazi tasted that when he was made a leper for having extorted the money from Naaman, Naaman who was so recently cured of that same disease. Think of the madman Balaam, justly executed for even entering into a transaction that involved a curse in opposition to God's will.

Many more examples of this. Just one more though for now. At the end of the model prayer, do you remember what the Lord Jesus said? For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses, Lexus Talianus. So Babylon is coming to bring that, bring God's Lexus Talianus. But again, who is Babylon?

Babylon as the Anti-God Power Opposed to the Kingdom of Christ

This is my point this afternoon really is to introduce to you, meet the Babylonians. They lived in the heart of Mesopotamia. They are the Chaldeans. That was Abraham's homeland because he left Ur of the Chaldeans.

Their history for centuries was an oscillation from obscurity to ascendancy. It was a Babylonian envoy that so impressed King Hezekiah that he showed them all his wealth in the temple. It seems he took credit for it.

He bragged about what he had done and so incited the Lord's anger and brought forth the judgment that was so near to its final conflagration in Habakkuk's time. This is what's coming. Do you remember the end of chapter 39 of Isaiah?

When the prophet says, because you showed those Babylonians all the wealth, peren, not in the Bible, my peren, and took credit for it and boasted about as though you had done it, therefore these same Babylonians are going to carry your sons away captive.

And Hezekiah says, the word of the Lord is good. And then parenthetically, in the scripture parenthetically, for at least there will be peace and justice in my time. These are those Babylonians. When they came as an envoy to Hezekiah, Babylon was a known power but they weren't the power.

Now they are. Now God's word is coming true. God is fulfilling the word he warned of back in Deuteronomy when Israel was still on the eastern side of the Jordan before they had crossed on the dry land into the promised land.

That promise. And then again Hezekiah becomes, good king Hezekiah, one of the greatest of all the Davidic kings, becomes the catalyst for bringing judgment again. And here it is. Meet the Babylonians again.

If this is a boxing match, this is the guy who took out the fiercest, best fighter in a single punch. That's who's coming to you. Babylon though, in the Bible, is more than a place and more than a people.

What does Babylon ultimately stand for? Now they were literally a people and these battles literally in time and space in history took place. But Babylon in the Bible is much more than that. Babylon stands for everything that is opposed to God.

It's sort of like what Paul says in Ephesians about the ruler, the prince of the air, who rules over all things, whose influence the world is following, the reason everything is askance out there, away from God, opposed to God, hating God.

Why? Because of this ruler, because of the spirit that infuses everything. Well Babylon is, in the Bible, that spirit. Now they're not the enemy. The enemy is a singular and literal and real spiritual being.

We call him the adversary. We call him the devil. He's real literal. Babylon though still stands for what he stands for, opposition to God. In Revelation chapter 14 and verse 8, and here's the way we have to read our Bibles, from the Revelation in the New Testament back to the Old Testament, we understand the Old Testament by the revelation of Christ in the New.

So Revelation 14, 8, I think is the ultimate, if not the final, definition of who Babylon is or was. Another angel, a second, followed saying, fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality.

If you just do a word study in the book of Revelation, put in Babylon, and you can get quite a bit more on this. Long time before Revelation was written, Babylon had actually fallen. The literal, physical Babylon had fallen to Persia, and Persia then fell to Greece, and Greece then fell to Rome.

But it was Babylon's king, this paradigm of all that it means to be anti-God, against his people, haters of his son. Long before, their king Nebuchadnezzar, do you remember when he famously looked out the window, saw his kingdom, and said, look what I have done.

Look at all the nations I have taken. The whole world bows down to me. They all worship me. Do you remember that? Now I haven't quoted, I've paraphrased it. And immediately, God having heard him, sent him into the wilds to crawl on all fours, eating and lowing like the beast that he was, and his nation actually was.

Babylon is the very image of man's insane desire to aggrandize the self, rather than God. Babylon stands for the entire anti-God sentiment, so prevalent then as today. Look and see, said the Lord to the prophet.

Look and see. Look at what's happening, but then look deeper. You look and then want you to see, really see. Ponder what your eyes tell you and consider it carefully. I don't mean a cost-benefit analysis.

I mean look and see, and see it, and ponder, and meditate until you see it from God's viewpoint, from a scriptural perspective. Paul quoted Habakkuk 1 .5, look among the nations and see, wonder and be astounded, for I'm doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told.

Paul quoted that, well I didn't write down where he quoted it. I can't remember right now. Give me a second. He'll come to me later. I'll interrupt myself and tell you. Oh, it's right in front of me. He quoted that when he preached at the synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia.

He quoted Habakkuk 1 .5. When the gospel was rejected by those people who heard him, Paul having bathed his proclamation of the death and the burial and the resurrection of Jesus in the Old Testament prophecies that proved every word he said, he said to them in Acts chapter 14 verse 30, beware then, lest what is said in the prophets should come about.

And here it is. Look you scoffers, be astounded and perish, for I'm doing a work in your days, a work that you would not believe even if one tells it to you. Even if it were laid out to you in detail as it was for our or as Paul had just done in Antioch of Pisidia.

But Paul pointed to a work that God had done, not a work that God was going to do, but to a work that God had done. Habakkuk pointing to the coming Babylonians, Paul looking back to the cross, looking to what God did when he raised his son Jesus from the dead.

That's what the whole point of that sermon that he preached to them there was about. And so the way the apostle understands Habakkuk 1 .5 becomes for us its ultimate purpose as the New Testament stands over the old as the interpretive scheme.

A work that you won't believe. It's astounding. And Paul substitutes scoffers for nations and he adds the word perish. Now in Habakkuk's day or after Habakkuk's day when Babylonians came, the Jews in that doomed city did perish.

Many died of starvation. Many survived the siege only to be put to the sword once the walls came down. Some survived the sword but then were exiled into Babylonian captivity. But Paul's pointing to the finished work of Christ when he preached in Antioch.

And there on Christ's cross is the ultimate Lexus Talianus. The ultimate punishment fitting the crime. There at the cross at Golgotha in Christ Jesus the promised judgment, full recompense for all sin was finally and fully meted out.

You can read at the end of the second chronicles how awful the Babylonian siege and destruction of Jerusalem actually was. But that wasn't all of God's judgment. That wasn't all of his fury. All of his judgment, all of his fury waited for the cross, waited for Christ Jesus.

Babylon was only a hint. And we know that because the same people were again given over to God's wrath in 70 AD when the temple was destroyed by Rome, which made the Babylonian experience just an inkling of what was yet to come after that.

So here's the idea. Look and see. Observe and think carefully. Think deeply about these things. Here's a work that I can tell you. There's too much to believe. If the prophet said, look among the nations and see, wonder and be astounded, I'm doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told.

And Paul changes it just a little bit and says, look you scoffers and see and wonder and perish, he says. Perish, which is the Lexus Talianus for not believing this incredible work. What work am I speaking of?

The cross and all judgment such that Rome in 70 AD which made the Babylonian disaster look like almost a walk in the park. Those were not the ultimate expression of God's wrath. Where was that? On the cross poured out upon Jesus Christ.

This is a work that's too much to believe. Would you believe that? That God took the only innocent man who ever lived and put him on the cross and there as he hung helplessly punished him? I said last week.

Punished him as though he were the only man who would ever sin. As though because he was tempted in all points as we are yet without sin and punished as though he were. Would you believe that? Is it Lexus Talianus?

Well Jesus didn't deserve that. Jesus never sinned and yet when he became sin for us, sin was rightly punished in him. Think carefully about that. He punished it all on him in exact compliance with his own word.

The Cross as the Ultimate Judgment and Mercy

Romans 3 23 for the wages of sin is death. He judged Jesus who never sinned. So I say to you look and wonder. Wonder and be astounded. He bore our sins in his own body. He hung on the tree and there suffered God's wrath.

Be astounded because the only innocent man who ever lived was treated as though he were the only one who had ever been guilty. And to quote Habakkuk 1 5 the way Paul did in Acts chapter 14, perish if you will not believe that the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all.

You know there's no judgment to come after this. In Deuteronomy God promised judgment against Israel if they should rebel against him. In Assyria and in Babylon God brought that judgment and he brought it again with Rome.

He brought it again with the Diaspora which to this day Jews are still all over the world not largely in their homeland. After the cross Christ came once for sin. He died once for all time. When he said it is finished it was all finished.

There is no other chance. There's no waiting for another judgment to see if that one maybe wasn't the end. It was the end. The cross finished it all. The author to the Hebrews says but as it is Jesus has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.

Here's the salvation that draws us to this table. This is why Paul preaching to the Jews at the synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia quoted Habakkuk 1 5. As we look again on these symbols of the Lord's anger at our sin and his justice in punishing it to be astounded that in wrath God remembered mercy and put his wrath on his son and his mercy on who?

On you or on me on we whose faith is in Jesus Christ. Faith being a gift of God. Be astounded. Look and see. Look and see the broken bread. Look and see the fruit of the vine. His body broken for you.

His blood poured out for you. Look upon that and be astounded at the mercy and the goodness and the kindness of God. To do such a thing as what we remember here in a few moments for the sinners such as me and you who deserved a wrath that the Babylonians would never be able to bring upon us as cruel as they were.

These are the Babylonians and Babylon being that spirit of the age of any age. I believe from that time going back before that time and going ahead from our time until the Lord's return, the spirit of the age, the spirit of rebellion against God, the spirit of everything that stands for what Christ did not stand for.

And yet it does come forward very cleanly to this table does it not? If as I said we look upon the cross and do as the prophet beckoned us, do as Paul when he preached this in Antioch said, look and see.

Examine yourselves church. Think about these elements. The body and blood of the Lord given for you. Think about the sacrifice of Jesus Christ who never sinned. Taking upon himself the full unmetered fury of God at everything that you and I and every other soul ever predestined to come to Christ ever did all on him.

This is a work that even we who believe, if we think upon it, can you believe that? Can you look upon Jesus in agony on the cross, in his humanity suffering everything that nails and a cross would bring upon any other person?

Can you look upon that and say he did this for me and just believe it? Well we do believe it. By faith we believe it. By faith that's part of the Christian faith, the cardinal truth of the faith that he died in my place, that he took upon himself what I deserve.

But folks, can you believe that? Is that not incredible? Does that not tell us why at the end of the table we sing a hymn to God's glory? Why at the table while we remember the Lord's death we rejoice that he died because God sent him to die for me?

Brethren, can you believe that? I would suggest we can look and see. I would suggest we examine ourselves before we partake. And while we do believe this, and you understand the way I say this when I keep repeating it, do you really believe it?

Is that incredible? Is that a work that God has done that if it's told to you? Well let's close there. I think I've made the point enough. I think the transition from Habakkuk 1 -5 and the prophecy of their coming to the table and what this all really means to us has been clear enough.