I don’t know exactly when … it was about four or five years ago … I came across an interesting documentary while I was surfing the web. I wish I had written the title down … I probably did and lost it. Anyways, I don’t remember the title but I do remember the documentary. It was a fascinating series of interviews with scientists and experts of various kinds … biologists, ecologists, sociologists, psychologists, and others … who were all basically saying the same thing … that there was something wrong … that something wasn’t quite right in the world … that something was off in the universe. They all had a gut sense that something huge, something cataclysmic was heading our way. They weren’t sure what … it was just an unsettling feeling that they all shared. They didn’t know when it was going to happen but it seemed like it was looming larger and larger on the horizon and was about to burst upon the world.
Boom! Here we are. Racial tension at an all time high. Rioting … not just in our country but England, France, and Hong Kong. A world-wide pandemic. People shooting the police. Police shooting people. Republicans versus Democrats. Progressives and liberals against conservatives. Socialist and Marxist and Communist verses capitalists. Conservationists versus industrialists. A government divided. A country divided. A world divided … and it keeps getting more violent and crazier and upside-down by the week, amen?
According to the scientists and experts that I watched in the documentary, their sense of discord, their sense of growing unrest and tension wasn’t limited to this planet. They were talking about a sense that there might not only be something wrong with the world but with the whole universe. All of them spoke about a growing uneasiness in the universe … a growing tension that feels like it’s going to come to a head … soon … and explode … and bring this whole universe to a screeching halt. This wasn’t the opinion of some basement conspiracy theorists wearing tin-foil hats in their basements. These were top scientists and experts in their fields.
Now … here’s what caught my attention. Even though I’m not a top scientist or expert in any field … and, for the record, I’m not some conspiracy nut job wearing a pyramid for a hat … what got my attention is that I felt what they were talking about … in my gut … in my heart … in my bones … and I suspect that some of you know what I’m talking about and feel it too … can I get a witness?
Two thousand six hundred years ago, a prophet by the name of Habakkuk had the same feeling in his gut … in his heart … in his bones. “How long,” he cried out to God, “how long must I call for help and You do not listen? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife and conflicts abound. Therefore the law is paralyzed and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted” (Habakkuk 1:1-4).
Wow! Destruction … violence … strife … conflict … wrongdoing … lawlessness … injustice. Sounds like the nightly news or the internet, am I right?
Habakkuk was a contemporary of Jeremiah and Zephaniah who lived in Jerusalem somewhere around 600 bc. You can tell from his writings and prayers that he lived during time much like our own today, amen? The people of God had moved far, far away from the godly principles upon which their nation had been founded. He stood in the midst of increasing moral decay and cried out against the sin of his generation. His heart was broken by what he saw happening in and to his beloved people and his once great country. We can certainly relate to Habakkuk’s pain and concern today, can’t we?
Habakkuk pleads with God to help him understand. “How can You, O LORD, a holy God, look upon such evil among us, Your people, Your children, and do nothing? How can You watch what’s happening and stand idly by? This is crazy. This doesn’t make sense.”
Habakkuk cries out to God in his grief over what’s happening, and it seems to him that God is not listening. Things just keep rolling along. Wickedness … crime … deceit … injustice … and suffering seem to keep getting worse and worse … with no end in sight. “I tell you about the problem,” the prophet laments, “but You don’t appear to be listening. I know that You see what’s going on … that You know what’s happening to us, Your beloved children.”
The cause of all this wickedness, all this injustice, all this pain and suffering is not only the result of the people’s indifference to the laws of God but their open defiance of them. “Why,” cries Habakkuk, “do You look on the treacherous and are silent when the wicked swallow those more righteous than they? You have made people like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler” (Habakkuk 1:13b-14). Again, how much does that resonate with what we’re experiencing today, amen?
Worse than all of this, says Habakkuk … worse than all the wickedness … all the destruction … the violence … the strife … the conflict … the wrong doing … the lawlessness … the injustice … the moral decay … all the sin and suffering is God’s seeming indifference to his pleas … his prayers … and the prayers and the pleas of the few righteous people left.
Nothing stretches our faith more than the silence and supposed indifference of God, amen? The silence of God has given many an ungodly sinner an excuse to blaspheme God by declaring that is no god but themselves … making them free to run wild and do anything they want because they are only answerable to themselves. And God’s supposed indifference has tempted many a weary believer to abandon their faith. If God doesn’t care and isn’t going to do anything about it, why should we? Besides, even if we wanted to do something about it … which we do … there really is nothing we can do about it. What’s going on today is way, way beyond our ability to comprehend it … let alone fix it … so we quit … we give up … and we give in.
But …
But … as Habakkuk … and as we are about to find out … the truth is that God is neither silent nor indifferent, amen?
The Book of Habakkuk is a truly unique book among the prophetic books of the Old Testament. It is not a book full of messages and warning and instruction from God relayed to His people through one of his prophets. The Book of Habakkuk is, in fact, a dialogue between God and one of His prophets. Habakkuk gives us the rare opportunity to listen in as he unburdens his heart and soul to God. We get to stand with Habakkuk and he openly and honestly expresses not only his fears and concerns but his doubts. The Book of Habakkuk makes us privy to a conversation between God and one of His prophets …. a conversation that looks deeply into the prophet’s heart and spirit as he agonizes over issues and concerns that seem to have no logical solution. The fact that this is a “conversation” … a “dialog” … means that we not only get to hear what’s on Habakkuk’s heart and mind … we get to hear what’s on God’s heart and mind as well.
Their conversation begins with a question that Habakkuk feels has to be answered. The opening four verses of the Book of Habakkuk can be boiled down to one single question: “How can a holy God look upon such evil among His people and not do something about it?” And God comes back at him with an answer that only raises more questions. In verses 5 through 11, God says to Habakkuk: “All right, Habakkuk, I’ll do something! Look at the nations and see. Be astonished! Be astounded! For a work is being done in your days that you would not believe if you were told. For I am rousing the Chaldeans, that fierce and impetuous nation” (Habakkuk 1:5-6).
Don’t ask God a question and then demand an answer that you are not prepared to hear, amen? Habakkuk is absolutely astonished! Habakkuk is absolutely astounded. And he is absolutely terrified and dismayed. God has just said that his way of handling all the wickedness … all the destruction … all the violence … all the strife … all the conflict … all the wrong doing …all the lawlessness … all the injustice … all the moral decay … and all the sin in Judah is send the most vicious and feared army in the world at that time. They were known for their savagery and brutal cruelty. Soldiers would commit suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Chaldeans. This “dreadful and fearsome” army whose horses were “swifter than leopards” … this army whose leaders and soldiers were “more menacing than wolves at dusk (Habakkuk 1:8),”says God “will come for violence, with faces pressing forward; they [will] gather captives like sand … at kings they scoff, and of rulers they make sport. They laugh at every fortress, and heap up earth to take it. Then they sweep like the wind and become guilty; their own might is their god” (Habakkuk 1:8b-11). That deserves a double gulp and heart-stopping gasp, amen?
Have you ever cried out to God and when God finally answered you, you wish that you hadn’t asked? Well, quadruple that feeling and then double that and you get close to the terror and the fear that seized Habakkuk’s heart and soul when he heard how God was going to deal with all the evil and injustice in Judah. God’s answer was not only terrifying … it was extremely confusing. God was going to use a pagan people who were a thousand times more evil and did far worse things … including worshipping blood-thirsty gods … than the Judeans to punish them.
You see, the “Chaldeans” was another name for … “Babylonians” … and we know that God’s word to Habakkuk came to pass. The Babylonians did come for violence … with their faces pressing forward. They did surround the city of Jerusalem and heap earth up its walls until they could enter the city and sweep through it like a brutal, savage wind … destroying the Temple … leveling Jerusalem to the ground … leading off its leading citizens as slaves … and killing all the rest.
Imagine a similar scenario today. Like Habakkuk, we’ve been praying to God to rid us of all the wickedness, the destruction, the violence, the strife, the conflict, the wrongdoing, the lawlessness, the injustice, the moral decay and sin that is destroying our country and it doesn’t seem like God is listening or God doesn’t care until one day He says, “Guess what? I’m going to send a plague to wipe out all the wickedness, all the destruction, all the violence, all the strife, all the conflict, the wrongdoing, the lawlessness, the injustice, the moral decay and sin. COVID-19 will be my rod of judgment against America.” Please … I’m just posing this as a hypothetical … a possibility … I have now way of knowing if that is what God is actually doing. Here’s some more hypothetic thoughts for you to consider. Could it be that God is using these riots as a way to wake us up … to get our attention? Again, hypothetically speaking … not saying that’s what God is actually doing. It would not be the first time, however, that God has used the wickedness of another people to judge His people and get them to repent … to turn from the dangerous, destructive path that we’ve been following and turn back to following Him and His righteous laws, amen?
Here’s what I’m asking you to think about today. What do you do when you are caught in a swamp of imponderable things? What do you do when God is silent? What do you do when God answers you and you are more confused, more overwhelmed, perhaps even more frightened that you were before?
Well … the first thing that we do is to remember that God is God … and we are not … not even close, amen? Habakkuk may not have liked God’s answer but one thing about God’s answer was clear … God was indeed in control … in control to the point that even the Chaldeans danced to His tune and served His purposes.
Actually, when you think about it … it seems rather absurd … arrogant even … for us to demand answers from God, amen? I don’t know which is more arrogant and absurd … demanding answers from God or assuming that we would know what God was talking about when He deems to give us an answer. I mean, His ways are way, way, way to the millionth power higher than our ways and His thoughts, well, I think we are kidding ourselves if we believe that we have the ability to understand a single one of His thoughts … and we must believe that we can because we keep demanding answers from God … and, like Habakkuk, He sometimes indulges us and we wind up like Habakkuk … confused, terrified, crushed under an even heavier burden. Habakkuk’s burden in this is knowing what lies in store for him and for his Judean brothers and sisters … God is going to use their enemy to crush them and then rebuild them.
What do you do when God is silent? What do you do when you’re in the midst of a situation and you hear from God but it doesn’t make sense? You do what Habakkuk did! Your remember that God is God … and you are not. While there are many things that God can do or say that we’ll never understand, there are many things that God says or does that we do understand, amen? In the midst of our fear and our confusion, we do like Habakkuk and we cling to what we do know. “Are You not from old?” Habakkuk asks. “Are You not eternal, God? Are you not holy, God? Are You not pure? Are You not just? Is it not true that You hate sin and injustice and wrongdoing, God?”
I do not know the mind of God. I cannot know everything there is to know about God … but I can cling to what I do know about God, amen? I know that God is all-powerful. I know that God is eternal. I know that God is all-knowing. I know that there is nothing and no one stronger than God. I can cling to the love and justice of God. I cling to the mercy and grace of God. I can depend upon His long-suffering patience … I can know these things about God and I can cling to these things because I have experienced them in my own life again and again and again … and you no doubt have your own understanding and experiences of God that you can cling to, amen?
What do you do when you’re lost in a swamp? You look for higher ground so that you can see your way out of the swamp, right? When you find yourself bogged down in a swamp of doubts and confusion, look to the principles … the truths of God … that you know and cling to them. God is eternal … so put your hope there. God is all-powerful … so put your hope there. God is good … so put your faith there. Stick to the high ground … that’s the only way you’ll make it through. If you think … if you believe … that you can’t do anything or go anywhere until you have it all figured out, guess what? I am afraid that you’ll be stuck in that swamp for a very, very, very long time. Trust me … I’m speaking from personal experience here. The only way out of the swamp of fear and doubt and confusion is to trust what you know about God and walk on higher ground one step at a time until you get to the other side.
Sometimes God answers our prayers … not by giving us an explanation … but by holding up a mirror … and that, my brothers and sisters, can be a very painful and humbling experience … again, trust me. You see, God explains to Habakkuk that His judgment of the people was based on their judgment of Him. Let me say that again. God’s judgment of the people was based on their judgment of Him. Instead of turning to Him … Yahweh … instead of faithfully following God and keeping His laws … the people chose to follow the gods of their own making … and since they chose to trust in the gods they created and the idols that they made with their own hands, God left them to their fate. “What use is an idol once its maker has shaped it?” God asks (Habakkuk 2:18). “For its maker trusts in what has been made, though the product is only an idol that cannot speak as I am speaking to you now about things that you cannot understand. What does a piece of stone know? What can a piece of wood or metal tell you? You have judged these things that you have made with your own hands … that you have created out of your own limited imagination … as superior to me. Let’s see how these idols of wood and stone and metal that you created do against the Chaldeans, amen?” (paraphrasing of Habakkuk 2:18-19).
What makes Habakkuk’s dialogue with God so interesting and so beautiful and so powerful is the conclusion that he reaches. He goes from demanding an answer to being overwhelmed and confused when he gets an answer to accepting the truth that no matter what the answer is … whether he understands it or not … he can always put his trust and faith in the One … with a capital “O” … whom he’s praying to whether he gets an answer or not. All that he needs to know is that God is … and that God is there. Period! He doesn’t need to understand so long as God understands. He doesn’t need to be all-powerful because God is all-powerful. God had a plan and it didn’t matter whether Habakkuk understood it or not. All he needed to know was that God had a plan and that God had everything well in-hand. He may not have understood or even liked everything that God said and that was okay … … more than okay … because he implicitly trusted in the One … with a capital “O” … who gave him the answer. And that realization was so amazing and freeing and so empowering that he burst out in song and praise.
If you look toward the end of his book, in Chapter 3, say around verse 13, you see the word “Se’lah.” If you don’t know what the word “se’lah” means, don’t feel bad. It seems nobody … not even the experts … can agree on what it means. Lots and lots of folks have been trying to figure out what “se’lah” means for a very long time and about the only thing we know about it is that it is some kind of musical term … which is confirmed by the very last line of Habakkuk’s book: “To the leader: with stringed instruments” (Habakkuk 3:19).
By the end of Habakkuk’s discussion with God, he grabs his fiddle and begins singing and dancing with joy:
Though the fig tree does not blossom,
and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails,’
and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold,
and there is no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD;
I will exult in the God of my salvation.
God, the LORD, is my strength;
He makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
and makes me tread upon the heights.
What can make a man who has just been told by God that their most feared and dreaded enemy is on their way to destroy them and possibly lead them off into slavery … or worse … break into song and dance? Because … no matter what happens … Habakkuk and Israel can trust in the LORD … because they has faith in the LORD.
Even though the fruit of trust is not visible … even though the fig tree doesn’t blossom … even though there is no fruit on the vine … no flocks, no herds … Habakkuk will continue to put his trust in the LORD! And that goes for us. Even though we can’t see what God is doing … even if we don’t understand what we see or hear … we trust God, amen? When preaching on Habakkuk, John Wesley would advice his listeners to base their “judgments concerning good and evil, not with reference to visible and temporal things but to things invisible and eternal” (Sermon 119: “Walking By Sight and Walking By Faith”; para. 14; in The Essential Works of John Wesley; Barbour Press, Uhrichsville, OH; 2011).
When Habakkuk says “yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will exult in the God of my salvation,” what he is literally saying in the Hebrew is that “I will spin around” in the joy of my God! His faith and trust in the LORD has caused him so much joy that he can’t help but spin and dance and sing!
You see, Habakkuk’s praise was not dependent upon his circumstances … and neither should our praise be dependent upon our circumstances. Even if our whole world is coming unglued … we will praise and worship Almighty God … amen? Even if we lose everything … we will rejoice in the LORD and spin around in joy, amen?
Why?
I’ll give you three reasons. First of all, “when you think that God doesn’t hear you … He’s always near you.” Let me say that again: “when you think that God doesn’t hear you … He’s always near you.” Habakkuk thought that God had forgotten all about him and all about his problems. He was crying out to God because of the indifference of the people … and Heaven seemed silent … but it turns out that God had a plan … God already knew what He was going to do. Even when His prophet had thought that God had forgotten him or wasn’t listening to him … God heard … God was there … and was very much in control.
You may think that God doesn’t care about your problem or problems … but He does. Right now, He is aware of your problem or problems … and He is working on your problem or problems. Your prayers will draw you into His plans and help you understand what He is doing in due time … so never stop praying on the basis of your feelings. Your feelings will betray you every time. Our minds may try to tell us that God doesn’t hear but our hearts and our faith know that isn’t true … God is always near.
Here is my second reason to always praise God: “When you don’t know what to do … remember who you know.” Got that? “When you don’t know what to do … remember who you know.” Habakkuk’s conclusion about God is the key to his whole book. He knew God … and because He knew God, he was able to work his way through the circumstances that he didn’t understand. Habakkuk is trying to teach us a very important lesson: “You worship the one you trust and you trust the one you know” … amen?
Remember the video that I talked about earlier? The one where the scientists and experts were troubled by an impending sense of doom about our future? Well … the way you get through all of that uncertainty is to build a relationship with God so that when the things that you can see start falling apart … the things that you can’t see will hold you together … things like God’s power, God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s grace … to name but a few, amen?
So … even if our whole world is coming unglued … we will praise and worship Almighty God … even if we lose everything … we will rejoice in the LORD and spin around in joy because we remember God is always near us … we remember who we know … and third … “when you can’t see God in your problem, you’ll discover Him in your praise.” Again, let me repeat that: “When you can’t see God in your problem, you’ll discover Him in your praise.” In other words, when our world is coming unglued and we lose everything, we discover that He is near us, we remember who He is by praising Him.
What a wonderful sustaining truth this is, amen? Maybe the story of Samuel’s rooster will teach us a lesson about the importance of crowing God’s praises no matter what. Samuel and his family lived and worked on a farm in Arizona. One night a fierce storm came. Rain and hail and high winds blew up out of nowhere. Feeling sick and fearing what he might find, Samuel went out at daybreak to survey his losses and see what, if anything, was left of his farm. The hail had beaten his crops to the ground. The house lost part of its roof. The hen house had been blown away and dead chickens were scattered all over the place.
As Samuel stood there … dazed … wondering what he was going to do about the future, he heard a stirring in the lumber pile that was once the hen house. He watched as his rooster, Mr. Jack, climb out from under the debris. Samuel watched as Mr. Jack climbed up the wreckage … dripping wet … most of his feathers gone … but as the sun came up over the eastern horizon, Mr. Jack puffed up, filled his lungs with air, began flapping his naked wings, and proudly began to crow! That wet, beaten up, half-naked rooster was a mess … his world was a mess … but he could still crow when He saw the morning sun, amen?
We need to follow Mr. Jack’s example. When our world is falling apart … when it looks like we’ve lost everything … we pick ourselves up … we climb out of the rubble … we look to the light of God’s goodness to rise on the horizon … and then we burst into song and we spin with joy from the highest place … even if it’s a pile of rubble, amen?
Two thousand six hundred years ago, Habakkuk questioned God: “O Lord, how long shall I cry out for help and you will not listen?” Six hundred years later the nation of Israel would again cry out: “O Lord, how long will we have to cry out before You send us a deliverer?” They were looking for a messiah … a king … a leader … to rise up and take care of the nation … maybe not some Clinton or Trump … but at least an Abraham Lincoln or a Kennedy or Churchill … so when a carpenter from Nazareth threw his hat into the ring … well, let’s just say that He didn’t have the credentials that they were looking for and they really didn’t care for his campaign platform … nothing about lowering taxes … nothing about deporting the illegal army that had occupied their territory … no plans to secure the borders. He seemed to have his head in the clouds all of the time and openly expressed His distain for the establishment insiders and the religious powers that be … always going on about the Kingdom of God … endlessly spewing weird sound bites like: “The last shall be first and the first shall be last” or “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
Yeah … weird guy with poor polling numbers … so the ruling establishment decided to literally pull Him out of the race. They arrested Him under cover of darkness … brought Him before a kangaroo court … they dressed Him up like a clown king and they mocked Him and they beat Him in an attempt to break His spirit by breaking His body … [break bread] … [lift cup] … As His blood sank into the ground, they still challenged His claim to the throne: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross that we nailed you to … see who has all the power now!” But, my brothers and sisters … no power on earth and no power in hell could keep Him down, amen? He shook off death, He leapt out of the tomb, and He spun around for joy because our salvation was complete!
Jesus conducted and won the greatest campaign ever … not against Romans or taxes … but against sin … against death … against eternal damnation … and that’s something that should have us dancing and spinning and leaping and singing for joy … amen? No matter who lives in the White House … no matter who sits on the throne on Capitol Hill … no matter who occupies the seats of power in Washington, DC, guess what? My vote, my loyalty, my love, my heart and my soul will always belong to the Lamb who is seated on the throne in God’s eternal city, amen?
