May 13, 2018 A Lament Of Faith by Pastor Josh Sheldon

Well, this afternoon, with God's help and blessing, we will finish chapter 2 of Habakkuk, which we've been in for some time now.

And we will begin at verse 6 and read to the end of the chapter. So Habakkuk 2, verses 6 through 20.

Shall not all these take up their taunt against him, with scoffing and riddles for him, and say,

Woe to him who heaps up what is not his own? For how long? And loads himself with pledges?

Will not your debtors suddenly arise, and those awake who will make you tremble? Then you will be spoiled for them.

Because you have plundered many nations, all the remnant of the people shall plunder you. For the blood of man and violence to the earth, to cities and all who dwell in them.

Woe to him who gets evil gain for his house, to set 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.

For the stone will cry out from the wall, and the beam from the woodwork respond. Woe to him who builds a town with blood and founds a city on iniquity.

Behold, is it not from the Lord of hosts that people labor merely for fire and nations weary themselves for nothing?

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Woe to him who makes his neighbors drunk or drink. You pour out your wrath and make them drunk in order to gaze at their nakedness.

You will have your fill of shame instead of glory. Drink yourself and show your uncircumcision. The cup in the

Lord's right hand will come around to you, and utter shame will come upon your glory. The violence done to Lebanon will overwhelm you, as will the destruction of the beasts that terrified them.

For the blood of man and violence to the earth, to cities and all who dwell in them. What prophet is an idol when its maker has shaped it?

A metal image, a teacher of lies. For its maker trusts in his own creation when he makes speechless idols.

Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, awake to a silent stone, arise. Can this teach?

Behold, it is overlaid with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all in it.

But the Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before him.

That's the word of the Lord for us this morning. What we have before us is called a lament.

A lament is a song of sorrow. Now in the Psalms, laments are fairly common.

There is what we call the individual lament. The individual heart calling out to God, such as Psalm chapter 10 verse 1.

Why, O Lord, do you stand afar off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? And then there are corporate laments, where the people together bring their lament to God, like Psalm 137 verse 1.

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. What they do, what a lament does, is give voice to grief.

What a lament is, is the heartfelt groan of the inner man whose sorrow cannot find any answer, whose hope is ebbed away like a receding tide, and whose self -reliance is no longer there.

And laments are, I think, in some respect, a special concern of the Holy Spirit of God, the one who intercedes for us with those inexpressible groanings of chapter 8 of Romans, translating our, oh, or our, ah,

Lord, please, I know not what to say, much less to do. And I can't give words to this.

All I can do is exhale and say, ah, help. And he translates that into the will of God, that lament, if you will, into the will of God.

You know, before I go on any further, I'm seeing fans. I know the air conditioner works.

Would somebody check the switch here behind the sound booth? Should be switched over to air and a nice cool temperature.

And then, Joseph, check the one in the hallway out there, because that's the main switch, actually. And check that, make sure that one's on cool and down nice and low, and we should get cooled off here pretty soon.

I'm not saying we deserve air conditioning, but we did pay for it. So here in Habakkuk 2, 6 -20, lament has a slightly different flavor than the individual or the corporate laments that I mentioned a moment ago.

You recall at the beginning of this chapter, he said, I will stand at my watch post and station myself on the tower and look out to see what he, meaning

God, will say to me and what I will answer concerning my complaint.

So he's there watching. He's there listening. He wants to see what God's answer is going to be to all the things that we went through over the last few weeks.

And what had he heard from God but that this frightful judgment is coming to Judah in the form of Babylon's terrifying invasion?

And I don't want to read, but this one part of Habakkuk's recoil from the

Lord's word to him and just how horrible it sounded to him. He said, you who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and are silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?

And so he gets this answer. The answer to that, he's at the watch post looking out to see what the

Lord will answer him. What will the Lord say? This is the answer, this lament.

And the upshot is given in five distinct what we call woes, and we call them woes because the first word is woe.

And it's actually in the Hebrew, it's a word, hoy, is the best way to pronounce it, hoy. And it's the beginning of chapter 55 of Isaiah where he says, come to the waters, and before that is hoy, a beckoning sort of word.

Come to me, I have what you need. And here is the same kind of word, but with that more deep, lamenting, sorrowful kind of passion.

So we have these five distinct woes, and what they say is that the Babylonians themselves are going to face

God's wrath. The ones who bring and execute upon Judah the wrath of God will themselves have to face that same thing.

He who is of two pure eyes, he who seemingly winked at Judah's sins or perhaps was unaware of their faithlessness, he whose perfection defies description, how can such a

God use such a people as that? And God says essentially to him, write it down and proclaim it all.

It is sure, it is certain, the word I've given you is coming quickly, and so you need to proclaim it plainly.

And that word is in a coming, and yet coming even more.

Babylon coming very soon, around the corner, at the door, they're right there, and the rest of the word is

Babylon to face the same sort of judgment that they in God's sovereignty and decree are bringing upon Judah.

So what do the faithful in Israel do? The faithful remnant, the believing portion of Israel, those who looked at the promises of God and longed for that coming one who they pointed towards.

Remember at this point in redemptive history, Israel has heard from Elijah, Elisha.

Israel has heard from Hosea. Judah has heard from Isaiah. What do the faithful do?

The faithful of Israel, they hear this, and like a choir in an opera, they sing their part.

They take up this taunt, this lament against the soon -coming antagonist.

Now it's called a taunt, but let's not even start to think that this like na -na -na -na -na, which is a child's taunt in the play yard.

This is different than that. The controlling idea is that of the lament.

It is a lament. Verse 6 introduces it with Yahweh saying, shall not these, these are the ones who suffer under Babylon's cruelty, take up this taunt.

So the five wolves that follow are this taunting lament.

Shall not these take it up? It is these are the ones, the Judah citizens, the citizens of that nation, that that city which is

Jerusalem, which is going to take the brunt of this. These are the ones who will take up this taunt, this lament.

And notice here that God gives them this word against their adversary. The ones who hear it and then take it up are the righteous, the ones meant in chapter 2 verse 4.

The righteous shall live by his faith. They live because by faith they believe

God is sending judgment. Submission to their coming conquerors is in reality submission to God.

But living by faith is more than following God and having your life spared. The righteous, by faith, repeat the taunting words of this lament.

They take it up up on their lips and they take up on their lips the words of their God, which is something, of course, that the faithful always do.

What would you and I do if, for example, we'd just been told something like this from a man who was acknowledged to be a prophet, a spokesman for God, just imagine that, and he said something to us like this.

He said, you know, the Lord is angry with your fathers and has had his fill of the murder for hire called choice.

Therefore drug lords from the south are going to come and conquer you and run amok in your streets.

God is sending violent unjust murderers to judge the violent murderers that he has seen here. What would we say?

What would we do if we heard a message like that? We might call for a week of prayer and fasting to see if our repentance and sorrow might move

God to a different course. We might live by faith by skedaddling out of town the way

Harold Camping's followers did when they sold their homes because his timetable said Christ's return was near, just around the corner.

We might do something like that. What God gave

Israel to do through Habakkuk goes against the grain. They are given words of lament to be recited to the coming victors.

They are taunting the ones who will soon vanquish them, and it seems that these words would actually fit as they're being vanquished and even shortly thereafter.

So imagine with me for a moment the faith that the ones who take this up would have.

The Babylonian columns are marching through town, and they're followed by the

Babylonians' awesome cavalry. Archers there have quivers full of arrows, the same ones which killed so many of Judah.

The soldiers are looking at our wives and children with these evil menacing grins. What do the faithful do?

What would we do in that position? Would we take up this lament, this taunt that God gave us when in the face of all reality it would be almost absurd?

There they are. They have won. They have control of the city. They're taking any house they want.

They're doing whatever they please. They've broken down the wall, and we the faithful are giving them this sorrowful lament, not our sorrow, their coming sorrow.

Imagine the faith to sing a lament like that to a people, to an army that had just defeated us.

These are more than a lament in that sense. They're prophetic words. The righteous would take them up as absolute facts.

Habakkuk gave them to Israel. He gave them this lament, these woes that they're going to pronounce on the coming

Babylonians before it had happened. Remember a week or so ago

I said, you know, faith looks out and says the Babylonians are coming, and the unfaithful one looks out and says, I don't see any dust rising in the horizon.

He says, you don't have to see the dust. God said they're coming. I can see them with my eyes of faith.

Even with the triumphant parade in progress, they're able to taunt with this lament. And they do this the same way we do, really, as when we end our day with, as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you or we do what?

Proclaim the Lord's death till he comes. The eyes of faith, as it were, can look up to heaven and say,

I see him coming. Well, we don't mean literally. I can see Jesus coming on the clouds because all the world will know, but by faith we believe he will come.

And any moment we look up and see a cloud by faith, we would not be so shocked as to see

Jesus standing on it and coming back at that moment. That's the eye of faith I'm speaking of here.

And so it's faith that takes these up even before the Babylonians are there.

It's faith that will recite these to the Babylonians even after they've won the victory.

It's faith that takes God's word and says, this, though I don't see it yet, is a fact.

We'll just go through the woes very quickly. They speak very well for themselves. Woe number one is about, excuse me, about extortion.

Woe to him who heaves up what is not his own for how long and loads himself with pleasures. Will not your debtors suddenly rise and those awake who will make you tremble?

Then you will be spoil for them. In our first message on, or second message, excuse me, on Habakkuk, we talked about talionic justice.

And that means simply that the punishment fits the crime. That God knows all things. He knows everything that happened.

He knows the motive behind what happened perfectly, of course. And the justice he meets out against the crime exactly fits the crime and exactly fits the facts because God knows all.

The woe number one here is against Babylon's extortion. Much of their wealth came through this ancient extortion racket that would have been the envy of a modern mafiosa.

The old style gangsters start out by asking for money from shop owners for protection against vandalism and robbery.

And the shop owner might say, well no, there's been no trouble here, but things just the same. And the gangster guy is going to say, well no, you don't understand.

I'm the one who's going to break your windows and rob your cash register unless you pay up. This is sort of the

Babylonian and before them really the Assyrian way of doing things. It's like we need some tribute and if you don't give us the tribute we're going to bust you up pretty good, which of course they did.

You know, in 2 Chronicles before the final devastation we read, quote,

Nebuchadnezzar, that's the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar also carried part of the vessels of the house of the Lord to Babylon and placed them in his palace in Babylon.

So how did he get these? By sheer force. He forced, he intimidated, he extorted the king of Judah to give them to him.

He takes verse 10 of that same chapter, says, the precious vessels the same way.

While Jerusalem is being ransacked and his wealth carried away, here's what the righteous living by faith say.

Woe to him who heaps up what is not his own. For how long? And loads himself with pledges, with pledges.

So the soldiers are carrying the buckets of wealth out of the temple, out of the city. What must they have thought to see these righteous ones, these faithful ones on the street, both sides of them, not cheering, not crying, calling out woes against them.

It might seem ridiculous to say that while you're helpless and defeated, to say something like that when you're helpless and defeated, but that's only to the natural eye, the eye of faith.

Again, that eye of faith, what does it see? You've done us harm, the prophets said you were coming, we deserve this, but woe to you when

God gets his hands on you. That's the first woe. The second is verses 9 through 11.

Woe to him who gets evil game for his house and to to set his nest on high to be safe from the reach of harm.

You've devised shame for your house. And then verse 11, for the stone will cry out from the wall and the beam from the woodwork respond.

What is this about? It's about their system of justice, which was no justice at all. You recall chapter 1 verse 7 says that their system of justice was of their own devising, meaning it had nothing to do with God's ways.

And verse 2 11, let me repeat it one more time, the stone will cry out from the wall and the beam from the woodwork responds.

So what do we read? What do we know? What do we understand here? God knows. God knows what they've done.

He's aware of every miscarriage, of every widow turned away without pity or without mercy, of every right cause where the complainant had no chance.

Stone and woodwork are the buildings where all this happened. It's as if they recorded it all like some mega smart smartphone.

Their judgments against others will be played back against them in the presence of the judge of all the earth.

The third woe, 12 through 14, is really in some ways the most chilling of them all.

Woe to him who builds a town with blood and founds a city on iniquity. Behold, is it not from the Lord of hosts that people labor merely for fire and nations weary themselves for nothing?

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

The whole earth will one day be filled with the glory of God and everybody will know and acknowledge this glory.

This glory which is the attribute that he seems to guard most jealously and my glory I will not give another.

In Exodus chapter 40 verse 34 the glory of God, the Shekinah glory as we call it, falls upon the tabernacle and the people saw it and they were struck with awe and the priests had to leave the tabernacle.

They're unable to be so close to God while he's revealing himself like this. In Isaiah chapter 6 verse 3

Isaiah sees God's glory and he's ruined just by the sight of it. That glory, that is the glory that will one day fill all the earth.

The knowledge of it will fill everywhere and he says woe, woe, woe to him whose violence that glory exposes.

The rocks and the walls are going to remember but the images of that will finally be wiped away as the all -encompassing glory of God is acknowledged by all.

Verses 15 through 17. The fourth woe, excuse me, woe to him who makes his neighbors drink.

You pour out your wrath and make them drunk in order to gaze at their nakedness. You will have your fill of shame instead of glory.

Drink yourself and show your uncircumcision. The cup of the Lord, the cup in the

Lord's right hand will come around to you and utter shame will come upon your glory. The violence done to Lebanon will overwhelm you and as will the destruction of the beasts that terrified them.

For the blood of man and violence to the earth to cities and all who dwell in them.

It's a bit uncertain what they actually did here in this making people drink and become drunk but it seems to imply there was there was some practice maybe even some ritual where people were forced into inebriation, a degrading condition to be in and then made to engage in degrading acts for the

Babylonians' entertainment. All humans, everyone born of woman carries the imago dea, the image of God, that mysterious work of God's spirit that distinguishes us from all else in creation.

What's saying here is woe, woe to those who will stand before God having taken pleasure in another person's dishonor or degradation.

Today we might say woe to those who force themselves on the helpless. Woe, woe to those who dispensed or used the date rape drugs.

You remember the old rocker Stephen Wolfe? I know nothing about his spirituality but he got it right with his old hit song.

I think it was way back in the 60s, maybe the early 70s, but he got it right. He said, God damn the pusher man,

God condemn this one whose wares that he pushes on people, forces them into addictions that they otherwise not might not have gotten into, degrades them, makes them helpless.

God take note of him and may we pronounce woes upon him.

He brings people into hell on earth with the drugs that addict and just suck the soul out of you. Woe to the pusher, woe to the meth labs, and woe to whoever is behind what they're calling today this opioid epidemic.

Those who destroy lives for their own gain, those who destroy the image of God in man with an impunity.

I think this relates very strongly to this today as the Babylonians as a show of their force, as a show of their dominance for their own depraved entertainment, force people into something like that.

You will have your fill of shame instead of glory. Drink yourself and show your uncircumcision.

The cup in the Lord's right hand will come upon you and utter shame will come upon your glory.

The cup is what? The cup is what we read of in Jeremiah 25, the cup of God's wrath, the cup that holds those deeds within it.

Each degrading act, each use of force, each dominance over the helpless.

They're going to drink it down and they're going to be shamed as they shamed others. It's the cry of those in Revelation who were beheaded for their testimony of Jesus.

They say, O sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?

Then they're each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who are to be killed as they themselves had been.

As Jesus said, and will not God give justice to his elect who cry out to him day and night?

He will, he certainly will, and he will return on the heads of them who caused us to cry out the just recompense for their sins.

It is mine to avenge, says the Lord, I will repay. And Babylon's told here in this sorrowful woe, they're not cheering as they preach, as they sing this to them.

Babylon is going to have upon them what they have imposed upon others because God takes note of it all.

And finally verses 18 to 20 taunt the idolater.

The irony is like most of the prophets have when they preach against idols.

It's like the psalmist says, those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them. Now why do they become like them?

They become like them because they, the men, the fashioners of the thing, they tell that thing what it is allowed to tell them.

Why do I love my idol? I love my idol because it always tells me I'm right. How so?

Because I made it. There's an interesting background

I found on this idea of idols speaking. The Babylonians had this whole ritual for opening an idol's mouth.

And what they did or what they thought to do was transform the thing that was made into the physical embodiment of whichever

God was in view. And the priests had a special incantation. They would say something like, from this time forth you shall go before your father or whatever the thing that they had made that day.

And then they paraded it around like an Easter ceremony at the Vatican. And finally there was an evening of sacrifices and the priest would wave a wand before it and the

God, little g, in quotes, the God was enthroned and dressed with the insignia of his office.

And we could look upon that with that same ironic twist of, whoa, to you who would tell this piece of wood or metal to speak.

But that's literally what they did. Whoa, whoa, oh, whoa to them, cry out the righteous.

How the faithful against all reason and common sense trust God that his word overcomes all. These are the eyes of faith.

These are looking at an army that defeated them and sorrowfully taunting them with these sad oracles of judgment.

When you stand against abortion because God's word calls it murder, you stand on God's word in the face of an enemy who, for now, holds sway.

Beyond the activism of opposing the murderer mills, that same faith calls out whoa to them.

Faith takes up this taunt, not na -na -na -na, but a sorrowful lament, more like a dirge.

Oh, whoa to you. Do you know who's watching? Do you know what his word says?

Do you know what it says? He's an angry God. We have our bibles.

They're full of words of ultimate destruction for the ungodly, for those who refuse to obey the gospel and repent.

Too many churches seek to force the unbeliever into a decision by terrifying them with the horrors of hell. By the same token, too many rely simply on explaining the gospel as though an appeal to the mind is all that it takes.

I fear sometimes that in our Reformed tradition we rely too heavily on logic and too little on tears and broken hearts.

The lament here is a taunt but that doesn't mean teasing, it doesn't mean rubbing it in, it's a sad note sung to their victorious enemy.

It's as though they wept as they believed the fate that awaited them. We have this example in our

Lord Himself. Luke chapter 19 verses 41 to 44 says,

This is a lament, this is exactly what we have in Habakkuk 2, but even more so because it's

Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Word become flesh. He was saying that but notice he says it with tears.

Is it not this woe or like these woes that we're reading in Habakkuk 2? Is it not a sorrowful taunt and lament against them?

That visitation he spoke of came soon. Right after saying this he cleansed the temple, and soon after that he cleansed us.

He went to the cross where he suffered and died in our place. And while on that tree on the cross he heard what?

He heard men's taunts. Not the sad dirge -like lament of Habakkuk, but the taunt as we usually think of it.

If you are the Son of God, come down off that cross and the like. He declined.

He would not. Praise God, he did not. He stayed on that cross and suffered all of God's wrath.

He turned the lament that might have applied to us into songs of joy. As Paul says,

I've been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life

I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

I quoted Jesus' words about God avenging his elect. You know, there is and there must be vengeance for sin.

God's very nature demands it. His word affirms it. But we who today gather at this table, let us rejoice that Jesus took the taunts upon himself, that Jesus stayed upon that cross.

For we who today gather at this table, let us rejoice that justice for our sins was in fact meted out in exact proportion with perfect justice, perfect holiness, and perfect righteousness.

And how was that? That was on Jesus. My cup of wrath, the same one that Habakkuk says is in the

Lord's right hand, he's going to place in Babylon's end, the same one if you read Jeremiah 25 when you get home, you'll see there's a cup of the

Lord's fury. And the nations say, we will not drink, say to the nations, you will surely drink of it. Jesus drank that cup for us.

This is the cross. This is my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

This is the Son of God who gave himself for me, who took my cup, your cup, and satisfied

God's wrath by taking it all in himself. And a cup is experience, is it not? A cup is to experience what the content of it, and if it's filled with God's wrath.

I tell you now as we think of going to this table, as we consider these laments, these woes, these taunts of Habakkuk 2, 6 through 20, that if Jesus drank your cup, if you by faith know this, if you know this by faith, that God's fury,

God's anger, God's righteous and just judgment against you, against me, passed over you, because Jesus Christ took it all.

Then the table's for you. That's how I would gather together around this. This is why we look at the

Word of God and we see these connections. They're not contrived, it's not some sophisticated thing that we do to go from Habakkuk to the table, because as we look at God's righteous wrath and these taunts against Babylon coming, and we look at the price for sin, and God's view of even his chosen instrument of judgment against his people, we see how he views these things.

We get a glimpse, we start to get the perspective of what Christ actually did on the cross.

Not just die a horrible death. Anyone who died on a cross died a horrible death, did they not?

But to die on the cross as the only innocent man who ever lived. For he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.

He knew no sin. Tempted at all points as we are, yet without sin, that we might become in him the very righteousness of God.

Read these woes again sometime this afternoon, sometime in your meditation, your prayer time.

Consider how they may have before we were converted to Christ related to you, to me.

And then get a larger picture, a bigger view of what

Christ actually took upon himself for us. God has avenged his elect just as he promises, just as Jesus said, will not

God act speedily to avenge his elect? I would simply close by having us remember that he avenged all our insults against him, all our sins against him, all our disobediences, our rebellions, he did avenge them completely in Christ.

That's why we're able to come to this table, that's why we're able to gather around as believers, as saints, as brothers and sisters together in the

Lord because of what Christ Jesus has done for us. Amen? If you would take...