Habakkuk 1:13-2:4 The Way Out Through the Shadows

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

So as you said, my name is Mike Biancolana. I'm an elder here at Recast, one of, we have many. We have some really good elders here. And it is a pleasure to be here and open God's word with you this morning.

The Bible, this here is the capital T, Truth, that is part of the Recast name. It's an acronym, the T is Truth. And this is our starting place and our final authority for what we do here. And it is just, it's great to be here and sharing from here the word today.

Habakkuk’s Complaint and the Coming Babylonian Judgment

So this morning, I will be continuing where I left off. If you were around last time I was up here, last time I preached in the book of Habakkuk. We're back there again today. And if you remember, historically, this is occurring during the reign of the second to last king of the kingdom of Judah prior to the Babylonian exile.

What has happened so far in the book is that Habakkuk has brought a complaint to the Lord. That's how he started out. And he's complaining about the injustice, the violence and the wickedness that seems to go unchecked in Jerusalem at the time.

The whole scene that he's seeing here does not square with what he knows of God's character. So where is God's justice in this? Why is all this just permitted to go on? And what about God's heart for the poor who are being trampled upon?

And as another prophet said, being eaten up like bread. God answered Habakkuk with a response that was both unexpected and unwanted. The Lord had been raising up the Chaldean people and they were coming in a wave of destruction across the whole earth.

It was going to sweep over Jerusalem and Judea. Things are about to get unimaginably worse for Habakkuk. And so when we last saw Habakkuk, we ended at verse 12 of chapter one, he was holding on to God's character.

That was his hope. He's trusting in who God is. But that does not mean that Habakkuk is no longer troubled by the situation. His immediate situation is not really any better. And now everything he knows and loves has a fast approaching expiration date.

As we will see, Habakkuk is still unsettled about this and he has some more questions. And it's right here with this approaching expiration date that I think we can relate to Habakkuk. So think about this.

Is there anything in your world that seems to cast a deep shadow that you can't get out from under? Maybe you think of geopolitical things going on like Russia or China or North Korea or Iran, you know, like that stuff.

Or some kind of a huge natural disaster. Do you think of things closer to home? Who's in charge here in the United States? Or maybe just our state. Or what about the national debt? Or all this immigration that we are having that we keep hearing about, what's coming of that?

Or maybe the thing that troubles you is technology that seems to be advancing way, way faster than anybody can keep up with it. Things like robots or AI that I used to make a bunch of these pictures. Maybe you think about things like the disintegration of the family or the celebration of immorality or the increasingly negative view in our culture of Christian practice and belief and what that means for you.

Other things are more personal, like a relationship that can't keep going on the way it is. It just can't. The brokenness within a family or a grim medical program. Or a diagnosis. Or how about death itself, which affects all of us?

What can we do about things like these when we have to face them squarely? How can we endure? And is God just going to stand by while terrible things happen? These are the kinds of things that Habakkuk is wrestling with and being under these shadows, there is suffering.

And when we think of biblical examples of suffering and enduring under it, we usually think of Job. And we have good reasons for that. That guy suffered a lot and his friends had a terrible bedside manner.

But this that we're looking at and considering here is a different kind of suffering and you might call it anguish. It comes from seeing that something terrible and unavoidable is going to happen and we're just left waiting for it.

That is where Habakkuk is and what he's dealing with. So let's read the passage here and see as Habakkuk continues talking to God about this. So we're in Habakkuk 1 .13 -2 .4. If you are looking to find Habakkuk and you weren't here last time, it's five books back from Matthew.

It's the tail end of the Old Testament. There's a bunch of small books, the minor prophets there. Just turn in your Bibles or devices. Starting at verse 13. You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?

You make mankind like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler. He brings all of them up with a hook. He drags them out with his net. He gathers them in his dragnet. So he rejoices and is glad.

Therefore he sacrifices to his net and makes offerings to his dragnet, for by them he lives in luxury and his food is rich. Is he then to keep on emptying his net and mercilessly killing nations forever?

I will take my stand at my watch post and station myself on the tower and look out to see what he will say to me and what I will answer concerning my complaint. And the Lord answered me, write the vision, make it plain on tablets so he may run who reads it, for still the vision awaits its appointed time.

It hastens to the end. It will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it. It will surely come. It will not delay. Behold, his soul is puffed up. It is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by his faith.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for your word here. And thank you for being with us even when we're confused and don't know what's going on. And we have a lot of questions. Thank you that you are good and we can hold on to who you are and faith in you as we wrestle through these things and just end up wondering what's going on.

Lord, you are good and we praise you and trust you and thank you for just giving us encouragement through your word. And I just pray that your word would work in our hearts this morning. Show us your truth.

Give us hope and instruct us. Show us what we should do with what you have told us.

Amen.

Thank you, Mark and Dave and the band leading us in worship. Yeah, so as we get going here, if you wanna get up and get some more donuts, coffee, juice, donut holes, whatever, that's fine. And if you need to use the restroom, it is out the double doors.

Take a right and it's just down the hallway. So settle in as we get a little uncomfortable looking at the impending, inescapable, large-scale destruction of God's people that's being processed here by Habakkuk.

Prayer in Turmoil: Wrestling with God’s Justice

As we're going along through this passage, we're gonna look at two main things here. The first is what the text is saying and the second is what the prophet is doing. The meaning of the text is a message that's applicable to us as well as to the original hearers.

And as far as what he's doing, we benefit from guides who have walked the same paths ahead of us. Our perfect guide is Christ Jesus and we ignore his example only at our own peril. We have also, however, been given lesser guides, past and present, who imperfectly point us to Christ from many situations, some of which we might find much closer to where we are in life than others.

And Habakkuk may be one of those closer guides for some of us this morning. To give you the lay of the land, here is an outline for what follows. It's very simple, it's two points. First, prayer in turmoil.

Chapter one, verse 13, through chapter two, verse one. Second, the way out to life. Chapter two, verses two through four. Habakkuk, after hearing that God's solution to the wickedness in Jerusalem is to hand them over to a violent and merciless nation, begins with what amounts to the same complaint he had at the beginning of chapter one, it's just with a bigger situation.

If you look at verse three in chapter one, it's a lot of the same wording that you find in verse 13. In verse 13, he starts with what he knows about God, which is that God is just, and he cannot be just and let evil and wrongdoing stand.

God is holy and pure, he abhors evil. That is what Habakkuk knows about God, and that's the anchor that he secures himself to here. Then he starts grappling with the living God. And he really comes out hot.

You should see this here. You and I ought to be a little more than a bit uncomfortable reading or hearing the second part of verse 13, where he says, why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?

That is quite a charge to lay at God's feet. The word traitors here has more of the meaning of treacherous than traitors. The Chaldeans aren't going back on their word, they're just treacherous. Habakkuk is saying, in effect, God, why are you allowing even more wickedness?

You can't approve of what the Chaldeans are doing, but you let these idolaters devour your people, the good and the bad. Habakkuk is getting closer to blasphemy than we might be comfortable with if we fear the Lord.

But I think at the same time, we can feel where he's coming from. Look at this situation. And he expands on his point in verses 14, 15, and 16. He is saying there that God is lowering people who are made in God's image and likeness to the level of fish or lizards or bugs.

Creepy, crawly things. So crawling things in this passage, it means pretty much what it sounds like. It's bugs, crustaceans, crabs, spiders, centipedes, salamanders, those kinds of things. They just do what they do, right?

And we don't care. Anything they can get their hands or their mandibles on, they put in their mouth and eat, and we just, we don't care. There's bugs eating bugs. When fish eat other fish, no one cares.

It's just, that's what fish do. When we spray wasps, like we spray a wasp nest, we don't really worry about it. In fact, we worry less. There's fewer wasps to worry about. We destroy an anthill, and we're just like, okay, whatever, it's not something you even think about.

For instance, there is a guy who makes aluminum castings of ant colonies. He goes out in the middle of the night with a big crucible of molten aluminum and finds an ant colony when they're all dormant and just doing nothing in the anthill, and he pours it all in the top, and the aluminum fills in all the tunnels, and it cools in the shape of all the tunnels, and lots of ants are vaporized in this process.

And it looks really cool. I mean, check that out. That's a fire ant in a hill. Habakkuk is saying that God is treating people like those ants. Then he sticks with the idea of fish for a bit. The Babylonians, he says, are like a man pulling up fish out of the water, fish that are just there to be caught and eaten.

He's going from fishing line to a net that is cast to a drag net, more and more and more fish. But people should not be treated this way. Yet, that seems to be the plan. In case there was any doubt about the object of the fishing metaphor, Habakkuk plainly asks in verse 17, is he then to keep on emptying his net and mercilessly killing nations forever?

The he in these verses is referring to the Chaldeans who are hauling in a big catch of people from all the nations and just loving it. They rejoice in all the wealth they're getting from this fishing and all the really nice food they enjoy as a result.

Habakkuk wants to know, is this really how it's going to be? I mean, like, they're just gonna keep doing this.

Is that it?

Even worse in this fishing metaphor, the Chaldeans are worshiping their nets. And that was mentioned before in verse 11, where it was said, their own might is their God. The instrument of their success is being given credit for the success.

This is ridiculous. Imagine if I had a particularly trusty screwdriver, right? It doesn't strip the heads out of screws. It feels good in the hand. It's just great. I could say, this screwdriver does a really good job.

That'd be fine. And we'd all understand that it really doesn't do anything on its own. It's because I am turning it. It depends in how good it is and how it works, depends on it being used by a person.

So it would be silly to make offerings to such a screwdriver because it was so great. But that's basically what the Chaldeans are doing. And beyond just being silly, this is robbing God of his glory because the Chaldeans have risen up only because of God's providence.

So is God going to stand for all this? Another way to phrase this question is, do the Chaldeans get a pass on their wickedness because God is using them for his good purposes? To answer yes to this question would have serious and terrible implications.

That would mean that sin is okay as long as you're doing God's work. Yikes, that's not good. So hold on to this question here. Do the wicked get a pass for being used by God? Because most of chapter two in Habakkuk is God's answer to this.

And I'll just give you a little spoiler here. The answer is no, they don't get a pass. All of that is Habakkuk's complaint in the first section of this chapter. Is this really how it's gonna be, God? I know you aren't like this.

So God's character and the situation still seem at odds with each other. This was the problem Habakkuk had in the beginning of the first chapter. It's still the problem he has with the new situation. The wicked and violent rulers of Judea and all the people along with them are going to be punished by the devouring horde of an even more powerful wicked and violent Babylon.

So looking at a situation like this, that's overwhelmingly bad, where good is really hard to find, where's the good in this? What is your reaction to a situation like that? What do you do? Do you get angry with the way things are going?

Maybe attack the problem head on. You just roll up your sleeves and tackle it. Maybe you conclude God isn't there or he isn't paying any attention. Or maybe he knows and just doesn't care or can't do anything about it.

I know I have a real tendency, just personally, to kind of hunker down and just kind of hope it blows over. Maybe it'll just go away. Is that you too? But what is Habakkuk doing here? What is the prophet doing?

First of all, he acknowledges that God is not only aware of the situation, but also he is behind it all. He directly says, God is causing this. God's doing it. He doesn't have room in his thinking for a world where God is not at the top and involved.

Habakkuk is also, as we saw, going back to what he knows for sure about God, that God is just, that he hates wickedness and is pure and blameless. Habakkuk is engaging with the situation and with God.

He is not hopeless. He's just very unsettled and confused. As I was reading commentaries on this passage, I really liked what Thomas Rennes said about this. So I'm going to read it for you here. He says, when God seems absent, even absent-minded, some turn their back on God.

Habakkuk does what all those who pray the Psalms have done throughout the ages, namely turn to God with renewed vigor. Those who turn away from God may do so accommodating themselves to a situation they feel powerless to change, or they may do so rebelling against the status quo without the help of God.

Similarly, those who turn to God may do so fatalistically. Just, kay, sa-rah, sa-rah, I guess this is how it is. And Christians have sometimes misused prayer as a substitute for campaign and action.

But as long as people truly turn to God in complaint, they will not easily give in to resignation and accommodate themselves to an unjust status quo. Habakkuk not only turns to God, but his prayer seeks to turn God to the situation at hand.

Such prayer will not allow the person praying to avert their eyes from injustice and evil. Naming evil is an important first step in opposing it. So Habakkuk is engaging the situation directly by engaging God directly.

Waiting for God’s Answer

There's one more thing that Habakkuk is doing besides going back to what he knows about God and engaging with God directly in prayer. And that is shown in the beginning of chapter two. In verse one, he waits for an answer.

Now we know from the beginning of chapter one that Habakkuk is a man of persistent prayer. He has been going to God with his hard questions and not giving up easily. In chapter two, verse one, he waits and watches, not for news or signs of the destroyer coming up over the horizon, but for a response from God.

Can you picture this watchman metaphor in your mind? The solitude, the vigilance, the long waiting through nothing going on and other kinds of things like that? If that picture is in your mind, then you're following the poetry here very well.

He is waiting. He's on the alert. He's like a watchman waiting for God's answer. Habakkuk is expecting God to answer. He's not just forgetting about it while he goes and does other things. He is watching, paying attention, actively waiting.

That's how he's praying. He's expecting this answer. So here's a gut check for us though. Do we wait expectantly for God to answer our prayers? Is it enough for us that we just unburden ourselves to God in prayer, and then we get to hop off the therapist's couch having said our peace and feel much better about ourselves?

We serve the living God, a God who hears and answers prayer. We should act like it. Are God's answers to our questions and longings and struggles important to us? Our praying should be in a way that's not just trapped inside our own heads, but realizing that prayer affects things, that it gets a response.

So we should get down to the details when praying.

Name the issue.

It's what Habakkuk does here. And we should do it knowing that God hears and he is working. He might be working on your situation, or he might be working on you, or maybe both. And I need this reminder as much as anybody.

And we have even more encouragement than Habakkuk and more reason to pray and expect to be heard than he did. He knew from his personal history and the history of the Jewish people that God does hear and answer prayer.

You can look through, there's some verses in the Psalms here, some Psalms of David. These are just like a sampling of places where Habakkuk could turn to and say, yes, God does answer prayer. I call upon you for you will answer me, O God, incline your ear to me, hear my words.

Psalm 17, six. And there's more. But we who are in the new covenant have much greater assurances than these. We have assurances that our sins, which separated us from the God who cannot look at wrong, our sins were forgiven, set aside and nailed to the cross of Christ.

What's more, because Jesus also rose and went as a forerunner to the holy presence of the Father, he always lives to make intercession for us, being our perfect high priest. So let's boldly pray and listen expectantly.

Habakkuk sets an example for us here. And God does answer Habakkuk. We will look at the first part of his answer today and save the rest, which is verse five through the end of chapter two for another time.

The Vision, the Proud, and the Righteous Who Live by Faith

So what does God say here? He starts by giving an intro and instructions for how to handle his answer. God says, write the vision. This message is not a private one for Habakkuk. It's for all of God's people.

When God tells him to make it plain on tablets so he may run who reads it, he's talking about writing this in large, clear letters, very easy to read at a glance. Even if someone were running on their way to somewhere, this is like a public placard, very clear letters.

It's as if I were to rent out a bunch of billboards on I -94, like in a row with a big message for people that was really important so they could see it as they were going down the road. Or maybe like a display in the park on Front Street for Matawan, like everybody in Matawan driving by there, the main intersection, could see it.

The idea is to get lots of eyeballs on this. This really needs to go out to everybody. People need to hear it. So that's how to handle it. What about the vision? We are told more about this vision. It's coming at an appointed time.

It is not happening right now, but it's waiting for the time to be just right. And it really is coming fast. It's hastening to the end. A way to think about this is, you know, you see airplanes in the sky, and they're traveling at about 550 miles per hour when they're cruising, but they seem to just kind of crawl across the sky, right?

They're really going pretty fast. Or how about the sun? Relative to you on the ground, the sun is traveling about 24 ,468 ,000 miles per hour. It doesn't seem to move too quickly, but it's going fast.

But man, it takes all day for that thing to get across the sky. This vision is like that. It's hurrying along, but you won't notice it easily. It might seem like it's taking too long, but be patient. This is also a sure thing.

It will not be delayed. The vision that follows is all true. It will not lie. And there is no putting it off. And in verse four, we get to the introduction of the vision. It is a summary statement for all that will follow to the rest of the chapter here.

It says, behold, his soul is puffed up. It is not upright within him, but the righteous will live by his faith. And this applies to the Chaldeans and to the Judeans, but not just those. It also applies much more broadly than that.

This verse sets up a contrast with two parallel points. The first part is talking about the wicked. He's proud. His soul is not right. His desires are not upright, but the righteous shall live by his faith.

Okay, so the righteous lives. What about that first guy? Well, not life. That's not what's happening there. This is a contrast. The wicked will perish. Do you remember the question from before that I told you to hold on to?

Whether the wicked will get a pass? God's answer to that question is no. There will be a reckoning of all that evil to the wicked's account. When we get to the rest of this vision, we will see just how emphatically the answer is no.

The rest of chapter two has things like, woe to him who gets evil gain for his house, who sets his nest on high to be safe from the reach of harm. You have devised shame for your house by cutting off many peoples.

You have forfeited your life. Things will not turn out okay for the wicked, even though God has used them to accomplish his good purposes. They do not get a pass. In contrast, the righteous shall live by his faith.

This is comforting for Habakkuk and for the faithful Jews with him. It does not make their situation any different, but it does give them hope. Hope that has been described in the first parts of this, the first preceding verses, as hastening to the end.

This hope will not lie. It will surely come and it will not delay. Those descriptors apply as much to this good news for the godly as it does to the bad news for the wicked. So life is found in continuing in faith under the inescapable shadows.

This is how we can endure when facing things that put us in deep shadow. The way out through the shadow that looms over you and troubles us is not to ignore it. It's not to despair. It's not duck and cover.

It's to start with faith in God. Hold on to that above all else, pray and act from there. It is faithfulness to the sovereign God who is working all things for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

He will hold on to you and you will live. This verse has a promise that you should memorize. Just hold on to it and keep it close to your heart. The righteous shall live by faith. This is not some empty reassurance to lift your spirits with fuzzy good feelings.

This is solid hope with implications that stretch out far, far beyond what we can see right now. Let me show you just how this verse may be applied. This verse Habakkuk 2 .4 is quoted three times in the New Testament.

You might've recognized it from there. Paul uses it in Romans 1 .17 as part of the pivot into the body of his letter to tell us that the gospel is the power of salvation for all. And in it, we have life.

Romans 1 .16 -17 says, for I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, for as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.

So that living is bound up with the salvation proclaimed in the gospel. If you are in a deep shadow or you are not sure whether things will turn out all right, rest in the promise that by faith in Christ, we have his righteousness and we shall live, not just now, but live eternally.

Again, in Galatians 3 .11, Paul uses this verse to remind us that relying on our own ability to do the right things means that we are under a curse, but the way out is faith. He says there, now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for the righteous shall live by faith.

So maybe the looming disaster that you see is the future date when your strength gives out under the load of having to shoulder perfection, lest you not measure up. You won't be able to keep that up. And if you think you're doing it now, you're fooling yourself.

Trust in Christ, in his work, not yours, and live. The third time that this is quoted in the New Testament is in Hebrews 10, verse 38. There, all of verse four is quoted. It says, for yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay.

But my righteous one shall live by faith. And if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. Now, you might notice that looks a little different than what we had been reading, and there's a reason for that.

The reason is it's quoted directly from the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which was extraordinarily prevalent. That was the main Old Testament that people were reading in the first century when this was penned.

Greek was the language that everybody spoke, including the Jews. Many of them couldn't actually read Hebrew. They might have some Aramaic. The scholars, the scribes, they did the Hebrew. Most people, they had Greek.

So they used the Greek translation of the Old Testament. So many New Testament quotations of the Old Testament are taken directly from the Greek translation of the Old Testament. So, and I wanna back up a little bit and give you a little bit of surrounding context to this quotation from Hebrews, because it really brings out the principles that we have been looking at in Habakkuk.

Here it is, starting at verse 35, going through verse 39. Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what is promised for yet a little while, and the coming one will not delay.

Will come and will not delay. But my righteous one shall live by faith. And if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.

Christians, we do not shrink back. We dare not. We press on in faith, engaging our situation, engaging with God. We have confidence and hope because nothing, not even death, can separate us from Christ, who is our life, and we shall rise as he did.

The shadows will pass, and with them, those who recoil from God. But the righteous shall live by faith. We declare this faith in our God and Savior, Jesus Christ, when we take communion every week. We remember that Christ went through the deep shadows into the grave and came out triumphant.

And those who through faith share in a death like his shall surely share in a life like his. The shadows have no hold on us. So if you belong to Christ and are at peace with your brothers and sisters here, make your way, in a moment, to the tables set up in the back and in the front corners.

Take the cracker and juice, and when you're ready, take them together with the rest of the body gathered here. And if you don't belong to Christ, or you just are wondering about this hope, how you can have that, stay put, and you can come and talk to me after the service, or Mark, the elder on duty, or Dave, anybody who's up here, we'd be happy to tell you more.

Closing Prayer and Communion Exhortation

So let's pray. Lord, thank you for the great assurances that you have given us, that by faith we belong to you, and that we will live by that faith. Thank you for giving us that faith and the hope that goes with it.

And just thank you for showing us in your word how even way back, thousands of years, that people who had faith in you faced down really dark circumstances, and they trusted in you, and they set an example for us.

It's good to have those examples and those reminders from you and your word, and just the sure reminder. Please help us to understand that hope and to know that you're with us, and go with us this week.

Amen.