Habakkuk: the Prophet who Questioned God (Habakkuk 1:1-4)

Good to see each one this morning. We're going to start a study this morning in the book of Habakkuk, so you can find your way to that Old Testament prophet. There are also some Sunday school outlines available, and there are some back on the back counter there, and also if you need one, you can raise your hand, raise your hand for a handout.

Habakkuk, the prophet who questioned God. Let's commit our time to our Lord this morning, ask his blessing on our study. Our Father, we thank you for this opportunity that we have, because of your grace, to gather together in fellowship through our Lord Jesus Christ, to worship together, to study your word, to edify one another.

And Father, now as we open your word to this great Old Testament prophet, we pray that you would be our teacher, that you would show us what you would have us learn from this study, accomplish every work that you have for it, and that your will would be done, and that you would be glorified through it.

And we thank you and praise you in Jesus' mighty name. Amen. Well, just to orient us a little bit to our study, I thought I would spend just a few minutes talking a little bit about the prophets in general, and what the scriptures have to say about it.

Typically, when you talk about prophets and prophecy, you might think of certain prophets that are more long-range, eschatological prophets, and there are those. But typically, the writing prophets, as they're called, there are 16 of them in Scripture, and they're essentially divided up into two categories.

They're divided up into the major prophets and the minor prophets, and the minor prophets, there are 12 of them, and the major prophets, of course, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and I included Lamentations there simply because Jeremiah also wrote that work.

The 12 minor prophets are called by the Jews in their Hebrew Bible, and they're categorized and collected all together as a single work. So they just simply call them the 12, the 12. So their Bible has fewer books than ours does, so we count all the 39, but they would just simply say they are the 12.

And they're referred to as the minor prophets based on their length and not on their significance. It's kind of a little bit of a misnomer there, but I guess it's better than calling them the longer or the shorter prophets, because somebody might make a mistake and think, well, you got little short prophets, you know?

And then you could talk about the short prophets, and of course, the Nephilim, the giants, but it simply has to do with the length of the prophecy. I did kind of a very non-scientific little study, just taking my Bible and counting through the number of pages occupied by each of these.

Isaiah occupied, just in my Bible, 101 pages. Jeremiah 96, Ezekiel 73, and Daniel 22. Now you come into the minor prophets and the largest minor prophets, Hosea 15 pages, Amos 12, and Zechariah 12, and they go down from that.

So you can see that just gives you an idea of the relative length of these prophecies. Habakkuk in this Bible only occupies about four and two-thirds pages, so it's relatively short compared to some of these other ones.

The other thing is the minor prophets tend to focus in as far as the issues that they deal with, more local issues. The major prophets do as well, but the minor prophets tend to talk about more local issues, whereas the major prophets, as we know, they deal with these far-reaching eschatological prophecies that they're very well noted for.

Another way you can organize them is in chronological order. This is done quite a bit, too. You can talk about where they are on a timeline, and there's all kinds of timelines available in charts. You can find these.

And basically, generally speaking, Obadiah will be the earliest minor prophet of all the prophets, and then, of course, ending up with Malachi. So they cover somewhere around 450 years total in their time span on a timeline.

But you can also talk about geographically, but on a timeline, they can be divided up into the pre-exilic prophets, such as the pre-Assyrian prophets, who would be Jonah, Amos, Hosea, Micah, and there's Isaiah, one of the larger prophecies.

And then Obadiah and Jonah. And you can see that the time reference on that, 734 to 722 BC. 722 is pretty much the date everybody agrees was when Assyria came down and they swarmed over and took captive the northern kingdom of Israel, which was comprised of the 10 tribes south, the southern kingdom of Judah, the tribe of Judah and Benjamin.

And you have then the pre-Babylonian prophets, from 722 then to 586, Nahum, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, and Jeremiah. 586 BC is pretty much agreed upon as the date that the Babylonians, who had already come down and taken captive much of that area, and there was a series of deportations back to Babylon.

Finally, the Jews rebelled at the final time, the Babylonians had had it, and they came in in 586 and destroyed the city, tore down the walls, and burned down the temple as well. You can also geographically talk about who the prophets prophesied to.

And now we're back talking about just the minor prophets. So to Israel, the northern kingdom, were two, Amos and Hosea. Amos was from Judah, but you remember he was sent up north to prophesy to the northern kingdom.

To the southern kingdom of Judah, six prophets were sent, Joel, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. To the Assyrian empire, Jonah, remember God sent him to Nineveh, and he said, I don't think I'm going to go to Nineveh, I think I'm going to go this way, and you remember the story.

One sent to the Assyrians in Nineveh. And then there are the post-exilic prophets, three of them sent to the Jews in Jerusalem during the time of the Restoration, Zechariah, Haggai, and Malachi, of course.

So they can be organized in various ways, and however you do that. Pre-exilic prophets, and then of course there are the exilic prophets, Daniel and Ezekiel. They were up in Babylon during that time period, Daniel being taken captive during one of the very early deportations, so he was there the entire 70-year period.

And then of course, once they came back down to Jerusalem to restore the temple, you have the post-exilic prophets, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. And so that's just a very basic run through how they're organized, and it's done in several different ways.

The themes of the minor prophets, they, and there is some overlap into what they actually dealt with, but essentially one of the things they did was they revealed basic spiritual truths about God and man.

In other words, they would go back through and remind the people they were talking to what God was like, concerning His attributes, and we're going to see some of that as we talk about, we work through Habakkuk.

But also, they talked about man, and revealed basic spiritual truths about man and his sin and the problems that he had. And that brings up another thing they did, confrontation and condemnation of sin.

This is very typical of a prophet, to confront people in their sin and call them to repentance. And also, doesn't get much notice or much press, but also the prophets very commonly then, when there was repentance and when there was restoration, they would give a message of comfort to the believing remnant.

And then of course, what they're mainly known for is prophesying future events. They would prophesy near prophecies, and also far prophecies. So this is pretty much what they did, and you can kind of, and of course there's variations on them, some of them did more of these things than others, but that's the basic idea of what they did.

Another issue was that the prophets did, there was three ancient enemies of God, God's covenant people. There were the Edomites, and remember the Edomites were the descendants of Esau, okay? The contemporary modern day Arabs are descendants of this people group right here.

And then there were the Assyrians, who were also enemies of God's covenant people, and then of course, as we're going to see, the Chaldeans, as they're called. Chaldean is just another name for the Babylonians.

Chaldeans was sort of the people group early on that eventually gave rise to this group of people called the Babylonians. But for all intents and purposes, when you see Chaldeans, think of the Babylonians, okay?

And another issue that's very important to remember is that Obadiah was sent to condemn the Edomites, which he did, and we're going to talk a little bit about that. And a prophet that went to the Assyrians to condemn them was Nahum.

You have a quote at the bottom of your, well, I gave you Joel and Obadiah there, Obadiah at the bottom of page one, but Nahum also condemned the Assyrians, and as we're going to see, here's our guy Habakkuk, who is prophesying the destruction of the Chaldeans.

So this is what they did, and how they did it, and where God sent them. Prophecy was very important because it validated God's Word. It also did some other important things, and when they prophesied near prophecies, this is very important.

Oftentimes, you know, we think of the prophets and these eschatological, far-reaching prophecies, but the near prophecies are very important because it validated them as a legitimate prophet. Remember that God's standard for a prophet is 100 accuracy, 100 accuracy in their predictions, and the penalty for that is death if they didn't get it right.

And so you could look at Deuteronomy chapter 13 and also Deuteronomy chapter 18 here to validate that. But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.

Now you may say in your heart, how will we know the words which Yahweh has not spoken? When a prophet speaks in the name of Yahweh, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which Yahweh has not spoken.

The prophet has spoken it presumptuously, you shall not be afraid of him. The standard for a prophet in the Old Testament is 100 accuracy, and if they failed, it was a capital crime. So it was really important that these guys have near prophecies, because if all they had was far-reaching prophecies way out into the future that may or may not come to pass when they're off the scene, they can't be held accountable.

But these near prophecies, they were watching and waiting and listening and making sure that they came true, and that certified that prophet as a true prophet of God if it came true, and that also would validate their prophecies that were farther off into the future.

So the biblical standard was and is 100 accuracy. People today who claim to be prophets, and you see this all the time, and of course this last pandemic issue, people were prophesying all kinds of things about the pandemic and all the rest, and you know, they're just very fortunate that they were not Old Testament prophets, because they had a very effective way of weeding out the fake from the real in those days.

So before we go any further, are there any thoughts or questions you might have on this? These standards and these basic issues with prophets and what they do and what they're all about? Prophet is someone who proclaims direct revelation from God.

Direct revelation from God. It's a very important part of the definition. Well, background, the time Habakkuk wrote this, the Assyrians were in power. They had been in power for quite some time, and they overran and took the northern kingdom of Israel in 722, and you can see the massive area that they covered in their empire.

I mean, just a massive amount of territory, a massive amount of cities and people groups and everything, and you kind of wonder what were these people thinking, you know? Because it's one thing to conquer it all, but now you've got to control it and hang on to it, right?

And as we're going to see, with these people that did this, and it's going to include the Babylonians, they had this lust for conquering nations, and that lust for conquering nations came back around and was something that also led to their own destruction.

And the Babylonians had been conquered by the Assyrians at this point in time, and so when Habakkuk wrote this prophecy, the Babylonians were not in power, but the Assyrians were. And it probably wrote this during the time of King Josiah.

King Josiah was a relatively good king. He instituted many reforms in Judah that unfortunately were only temporary, and so this prophecy was probably written somewhere between 630 and 622 during the later part of Josiah's reign.

The Babylonians conquered Assyria in 612, so that kind of gives you a little marker for what was going on. And in 609, Josiah died, and his son Jehoahaz took the throne, and only three months later, the Egyptian pharaoh came up and deposed Jehoahaz, and then installed his brother Jehoakim to the throne.

Jehoakim was ungodly, he was evil, he was rebellious, and it was shortly after Jehoakim came to power that Habakkuk wrote this lament, because he saw the degradation of his nation, and he's looking at Judah, the country of Judah.

All around him, he sees the decline, the degradation, the perversion, and of course, the greed, the violence, the lack of justice, and so on. And of course, this began a severe spiritual and practical cultural decline in his own nation.

So he's first looking internally to his own country. And eventually, again, the Babylonians came into power, and you can see the massive territory that they conquered. It's just amazing what they were able to do.

And then you see Media over there to the right, eventually, as you know, the Medo-Persian coalition came against Babylon and conquered them, Daniel chapter 5. Those were the Medo-Persians that conquered them.

So even though these people came to power, and they swept across the landscape, and they conquered all these people, eventually, God took them down as well. The Hebrew prophet, the Hebrew prophet Habakkuk, there again, Babylonian empire.

So Habakkuk, his name in Hebrew is actually pronounced Havakuk, Havakuk, okay? Easy way to remember that, every family Havakuk. The name actually means, the first part, so all the families that, they're all, no, never mind.

Won't ask for a show of hands. Havak, Havak means to embrace, means to embrace. And so with that name then, that last syllable is taken and duplicated at the end. And of course, there's this lengthening of the vowel from an ah to an ooh, so it's Havakuk.

And by duplicating that last consonant on the end of the name, it intensifies the word. So Havak means to embrace, and Havakuk means to firmly embrace. So that's the meaning of his name, okay? But since Kuk has a connotation in English that may not be fitting for a Hebrew Old Testament prophet, I'm just going to use the American version, and we'll just call him Habakkuk, okay?

Fair enough, we'll all know who we're talking about. His prophecy is different than the other prophets. One of the things that's very significant about him is that he does not receive a message from God.

Normally, you know, it's like God says, he commissions a prophet, and he says, take this message to those people, and they go do that. But Habakkuk has a conversation with God. He has a dialogue with God, and it comes in the form of questions, as we're going to see.

And so that makes it very different. Other prophets spoke to God's people with a word from God, Habakkuk dialogue, and it comes in the form of a series of questions, or some of your texts might even say complaints.

And it is, they are complaints when you boil it all down. They are complaints in the form of questions. You've heard these, something like, who taught you how to drive, right? That's a question, but it's also a complaint.

And you can think of all kinds of things like that. People ask questions in the form of a complaint. But this is what's going on here. He's looking around him at his own culture. He sees the degradation and the sin and the absolute decay all around him, and he just is struggling internally to figure this out.

I always think of Asaph in Psalm 73 when I read Habakkuk, because Asaph was also a godly man, right? And as he looked around him at his culture, he struggled with that age-old paradox. He saw the prosperity of the wicked, but he also saw the suffering of the righteous.

And he just had a lot of trouble putting that together. Why? Because he knew God. He knew what God was like. He knew that God was a holy God, a righteous God. And you can just walk through all of the attributes of God that he understood.

He's all-powerful. He's all-knowing. He sees everything. So certainly he sees what's going on. Well, then why doesn't he do something about it? And, of course, we know from Asaph, Psalm 73, what happened.

He said he struggled with this. He had all these issues internally, until I came to the sanctuary of God. And then he saw. God showed him. What did he show him? He showed him their end, their end. And it had been like Asaph was watching the parade of life through a knothole and a fence, right?

All he could see was what was passing right in front of him. But then is where God sort of took him up on the top of the hill. And he said, now survey the entire parade. You see, you see where they end.

And then it made sense to him. So he basically got the eternal perspective. Well, you're going to see some of this in Habakkuk, too. Habakkuk is struggling with what he knows about God. See, an unbeliever is not going to have this struggle, right?

They don't care. They see the prosperity of the wicked. And if they're wicked, they go, well, this is the way it should be, right? What's wrong with this? And who cares about the righteous anyway? If they're suffering, maybe that's the way it should be.

But a godly person, a person who knows God, who knows what God is like and who knows his history, what he has done in the past and what he says he's going to do in the future, struggles with this. And a lot of it is simply about timing, right?

Timing and schedule. My schedule is probably not exactly what God's is, but it's difficult to put all that together. And these men are troubled by what they see around them. Well, let's look at this. These first four verses, you can follow along on your outline there.

Today, we're going to look at 11 verses. We'll start out with the first four and we'll see what goes on here with Habakkuk. He's really having an internal struggle with what he sees here. From the LSB, these first four verses read this way.

In this translation, it's called an oracle. An oracle is also sometimes called a burden. It essentially is a heavy message, a heavy message that contains statements of judgment against both God's own people and the enemies of God's people.

And so that's part of what we see there in the superscription. It is a prediction of judgment on Judah, as we'll see, and on her enemies. And it calls him Habakkuk the prophet. Not every prophet is called a prophet, but they are prophets.

But here, Habakkuk is called Habakkuk the prophet. And it's what he saw or beheld. So a lot of what we're going to see later on in this is what he actually beheld or saw in a vision. So this is a vision, a prophetic vision that he has.

And then it says, how long? Here's his first question. How long, O Yahweh, will I call for help? So there's a history here. He's got a history of making these observations and then struggling with what he's seeing, this violence and this degradation within his own country.

And he asked this first question. Why doesn't God hear? In verse two. And then why doesn't God respond? Why doesn't God respond? And his conclusion is the law is paralyzed. That's the word there, an actual literal word, frozen.

The law is not having any effect. It's one thing if you see injustice, if you see violence, if you see crime and all that. But if there is law enforcement that deals with it, then you have a sense of justice, right?

But if there's no law enforcement in place, and he actually uses the word here Torah for the law, you know, the law of the Jewish nation given by God, then the frustration even doubles because he has seen the implementation of God's law in the past, but it's not happening now.

One thing very important to see here, a very important word. We're going to take a little time to look at it. And that's the word violence in verse two. I cry out to you, violence. This is a very important word.

He uses it again there in verse three. It's used a total of six times here in Habakkuk. And we need to take a little time and talk about this word. Here it is in the LSB. How long, O Yahweh, will I call for help, and you will not hear.

I cry out to you, violence, yet you do not save. This word occurs in the Old Testament, depending on what translation you use, about 68 times. But it occurs six times here in this little prophecy. Now, I did a little crude math here.

If you take away the number of times it occurs in Habakkuk from the total number of times it occurs in the Old Testament, count up the verses, it occurs in the rest of the Old Testament about one in 372 verses.

But here in Habakkuk, one in every 9 .3. So this is a prominent theme in Habakkuk. Violence, violence, violence, what he is seeing around him. Again, 68 times in the Old Testament total, six times in Habakkuk.

It occurs chapter 1, verse 2, 3, and 9. Chapter 2, verse 8, and twice in 17. And so this is a very important word here. It's well worth our time to take a look at it. It's actually this word right here in the Hebrew.

Hebrew word, Hebrew is built on what's called a tri-radical root. So three consonants, and initially all it had was consonants. There weren't any vowels. You say, well, how did they know what the sounds of the words were?

Well, as a child, you would hear your parents teach you the words, and so you would hear and learn the sounds of the words. And then maybe at some point in time, you might come to be taught to read them, if you ever had that opportunity.

And so then you would know that it would be read from right to left. And Hebrew is read from right to left. Seems a little strange, but if that's all you ever knew, it probably wouldn't be all that strange.

So this particular word, the first letter there on the right is chayit, chayit. The second letter, maim, and the third letter, samech, maim, noon, samech. And then you see those two little look like little Ts underneath.

Those were added later, centuries later. They were called vowel points. When the language fell out of usage over a period of time, people forgot what it sounded like, right? And so between about 200 and 900 AD, a group of scholarly Jews called the Masoretic Jews developed a vowel system, and they're called vowel points.

So they're either dots and series of dots and dashes and things like that. This particular one has an ah sound to it, okay? And you can see there's two of them there. There's one there under the first letter, so that would be a single syllable.

And then the second one there added to that second letter, the maim. So the maim and then that vowel and then the samech form the second syllable. So it's a two-syllable word in Hebrew. So the Hebrew word for violence, what is that word?

That word is hamas, hamas. Ring any bells? The Hebrew word for violence is hamas. Now, that is the name of the Arabic terrorist organization that you are hearing so much about. And if you go back and look at the origin of that particular organization, there is a word in Arabic that means zeal, okay?

But don't let anybody kid you that that's what they mean by that. If you look in a Hebrew dictionary, the dictionary would give you secondary definitions for hamas. One would be cruelty, and another one would be injustice.

But the word zeal is not found there, okay? The actual Arabic word is an acronym. And when you boil it all down, it means the Islamic resistance movement, okay? That's what it means. So it's no accident that they chose a word that in Hebrew means violence and violent destruction as well.

So I cry out to you, hamas, okay? That's the word. You also have down at the bottom of your page there two quotes, one from Joel 3 .19 and another one from Obadiah 10. Remember, these are condemnations of the nation of Edom.

Edom are the ancestors of modern-day Arabs, and they are the people that came from Esau, right? Remember Jacob and Esau and the conflict that was there? Well, here's Joel's prophecy. Egypt will become a desolation, and Edom will become a desolate wilderness because of the hamas done to the sons of Judah in whose land they have shed innocent blood.

And then Obadiah, because of hamas to your brother Jacob, you will be covered with shame, and you will be cut off forever. Prophecies in God's Word, built on and taken off of and because of the Abrahamic covenant, the covenant that promised to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and this is an unconditional covenant.

It is not dependent on their, remember, it's unilateral. It's not dependent on their obedience. It's all dependent on God and His faithfulness to carry it out. He promised them the land, a seed, a seed line which would culminate in Messiah, and also blessing.

He would use them through you, He said. He's going to bless the whole world. And that covenant is still in force. It was never abrogated. It was never abandoned, even because of their disobedience, which they have been disobedient through the centuries, and God has chastened them for it.

But wherever you find that covenant mentioned, that is a covenant that's repeated. It's a transgenerational covenant. And He says to you and to your descendants forever. It's still in force. It's still in force today.

So, very, very pertinent. Very, very important to understand the foundation of this. But Habakkuk's in turmoil. How can God disregard Judah's sin? And he gets his first answer in the next several verses, and it's an answer that is kind of shocking.

But basically his first question is he's just struggling to see what's going on in his own nation. I found a quote from a very excellent Old Testament scholar. He's now with the Lord. His 1909 to 1995 was his lifespan, Dr. Charles Feinberg.

You can tell by his name he's Jewish. Absolutely brilliant man. He trained to be a rabbi at an early age, and he was just an expert in the Old Testament, Old Testament, the Hebrew language. He wound up converting to Christ and being trained.

He graduated from Dallas Seminary and then went on to study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I believe, and earned another P. He had a Doctor of Theology degree, and then he earned a Ph .D. in Semitic Studies, and he was just a world-renowned scholar.

Spoke multiple languages. Very, very brilliant man. He went on to teach at Talbot Seminary where he met, mentored, and was a professor to a young seminary student named John MacArthur. If you hear Pastor MacArthur's testimony, he talks a lot about how Dr. Feinberg really influenced him a lot.

But in his commentary that includes Habakkuk, and bear in mind, this quote is 1951. The silence of God in human affairs, then as now, has ever been difficult to understand, but this does not mean there is not an answer, and that divine wisdom is incapable of coping with the situation.

All is under his seeing eye, and everything is under the control of his mighty hand. But in the meantime, now he's referring back to Habakkuk here, the law was slacked, literally chilled, rendered ineffective, paralyzed.

It came to be looked upon as being without force or authority. Because of unrighteous judges, the law was set at naught. Since the form of judgment were corrupted, both life and property were insecure.

Justice could not prevail because the wicked knew how to hem the righteous in on all sides, so that he could not receive his just due. Miscarriage of justice was the order of the day, and snaring the righteous by fraud, the ungodly perverted all right and honesty, because God did not punish sin immediately, men thought they could sin on with impunity.

He could have written that yesterday, okay? Well, let's look at the rest of this passage, verses 5, and Habakkuk now receives his first answer. You asked the question, here's the answer. God says this, see among the nations and look.

Be also astonished, be astounded, because I am doing something in your days you would not believe if it was recounted to you. For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation who walks on the breadth of the land, to possess dwelling places which are not theirs.

They are dreaded and feared. Their justice and exaltation come forth from themselves. Their horses are swifter than leopards and sharper than wolves in the evening. Their horsemen come galloping. Their horsemen come from afar.

They fly like an eagle swooping down to devour. All of them come for Hamas. Their horde of faces move forward, and they gather captives like sand, and they mock at kings, and rulers are a laughing matter to them.

They laugh at every fortress and heap up dirt and capture it. Then they will sweep through like the wind and pass on, but they will be held guilty. They whose power is their God.". First thing we see here in verse 5, God will respond to their sin.

God's not asleep. He knows everything. We don't need to inform God, right? Some people want to do that. Hey, Lord, you probably don't see what's going on down here. That's okay. Let me help you out with that.

You don't need to do that. He's omniscient. He knows about these things in greater depth and detail and a long time before we ever do. God will respond to the sin of Judah in verse 5, and God will use a surprising tool, a surprising tool in verse 6.

He's going to use these people called the Chaldeans. What's important to remember here, a little bit of the timing again, the Chaldeans, let's see if I can go backwards here. Nope, that's not working.

What did I do? Well, it doesn't matter. I was going to take you back to the map, but at that point in time that he wrote this, the Chaldeans had not come back. They had been defeated early on by the, there it is.

They had been defeated early on by the Assyrians, but they were just still down in Babylon and had not come back to power. That's why it's such a shock that God says, yeah, I'm going to raise them up and they're going to defeat these Assyrians, and Habakkuk's really struggling to figure that out.

And so in verses 7 through 11, he gives a description of what they're going to be like when they come rampaging across and take out the Assyrians. Verse 7, they're self-ruled. They are dreaded and feared.

Their justice and exaltation come from themselves. They have no authority but themselves. We might call this autonomous, right? Self-lawed, self-ruled. They don't answer to anybody. They're a power to their own self.

Also, verse 8, they are swift in battle. Their horses are swifter than leopards and sharper than wolves in the evening. Their horsemen come galloping. Their horsemen come from afar. They fly like an eagle swooping down to devour.

So they're very rapid in their ability to conquer nations. Very swift. They're self-ruled. They're swift in battle. Verse 9, they're successful. All of them come for Hamas. Their horde of faces moves forward and they gather captives like sand.

Whenever the Bible wants to talk about a group or a number that you can't measure, it usually uses something like sand, you know? They're very successful and they capture a lot of people and they capture a lot of land.

Verse 10, they're also scoffers. They mock at kings and rulers are a laughing matter to them. They laugh at every fortress and heap up dirt and capture it. Basically, when they came to a fortified city and it had a wall, they would just get busy and begin to heap up what they called a siege mound.

Eventually, they got up to the top of that wall and at some point in time, they'd just swarm over the wall and take people out. Very interesting to know that when Babylon came back into power and they rebuilt, they built the city of Babylon into that massive place, that the wall that they built was over 300 feet tall and thick enough that they patrolled the perimeter of that city by chariot on top of that wall.

It was wide enough on top that two chariots could pass through. So they patrolled on the top of that wall. They had a lot of confidence. They also had a water source because the Euphrates River ran through a gate in the wall and so they were self-contained, very self-confident.

Who's going to build a siege mound big enough to go over a 365 foot wall? Except when the Medo-Persians came, we know from historians, that's not what they did. That night, remember Daniel 5? They were having a drunken orgy with the vessels that they had robbed out of the temple and that was the night that the city fell.

The way the Medo-Persians did it, they went back upriver and they excavated the river down and they got ready to re-channel that river. At the proper moment, when the troops were surrounding that gate, that water gate, they gave the signal and they redirected that river and when the river fell down below that gate, the army just swarmed right up to the middle of town, up that river bed, and they took them from the inside out.

That's Daniel chapter 5. Remember the handwriting on the wall? That's how they did it. So their confidence in their own military prowess didn't help them at all. And they scoff at anybody who thinks they can be stopped.

And also, verse 11, they are sacrilegious. Then they will sweep through like the wind and pass on, but they will be held guilty. They whose power is their God. Their idolatry was their own strength, their own military power, their own prowess to defeat their enemies.

But that's also one of their major weaknesses, right? Because that sin of worshiping their own strength and their own power came back to bite them later on. That is always something that is self-defeating.

So there we have the first question and the first answer of Habakkuk. He asked that question. He struggled with it, and it did come in a bit of a form of a complaint to God. We're going to deal with that later on as well.

Any thoughts or questions you might have from what we've seen so far? Anything sound a little familiar to any of this? I read Habakkuk, and it's almost like he could have written this yesterday. He could have looked back at this just this past week in the United States of America, just tick off all of the issues that you see.

Very relevant, very relevant, very pertinent. How about some practical principles on page two? You could probably certainly think of some more, and I hope you spend some time and think about this passage and pray about these things.

God always hears our prayers when we cry out to him, always. Always hears our prayers. And number two, God sees every sin long before we do. You and I will never—well, I'll speak for myself. I will never become so sensitive to sin that I'll see it before God does.

He knows sin better than we do. He's an expert on it, and he sees it. He's more sensitive to it than we will ever be, and so we don't need to inform God about the sin we see around us. He sees it, and he knows.