Sermon Four: The Old Testament Prophets & The World of 2005
Habakkuk 1-3
Lord, I was just Wondering...
In his happy book Farewell to God, Charles Templeton, former crony and companion of Billy Graham, details his reasons for rejecting the Christian faith. In one particularly enlightening chapter, The Patience of Job, Templeton turns his disillusionment with God towards the story of Job. He writes:
YHWH makes a wager with his adversary, Satan, that Satan cannot shatter Job’s faith. To back this assertion, he gives Satan free hand to do his worst without troubling to notify Job that he is to be the pawn in the game. To make his point, YHWH has Job’s livestock stolen, his servants murdered, his house burned, and his children killed in a fire. Then, for emphasis, he afflicts Job with a loathsome and agonizing disease. When, finally, Job does complain, YHWH mounts a braggadocio defence and concludes by asking Job a pointed question: Is he willing to put YHWH in the wrong in his wager with Satan so that he, Job, may be justified?
At this, Job repents of his complaining and YHWH wins the wager. Job returns to a life of luxury and all’s right with the world although one cannot but ask: if God had killed your children simply to make a point in an argument, would the granting to you of other children make up for the horrible deaths and the loss of the first?
It is an immoral story and it portrays and immoral God. And it does nothing to answer the problem it sets out to deal with namely, the problem of evil. Moreover, there was no need to do so; the biblical answer had already been given. In the Genesis story of the Creation we are told that suffering is God’s punishment for sin. Because of the first man’s disobedience in the garden, all his descendants must suffer sorrow, sickness, pain and death.
Let the reader put the question: Is this the truth at the heart of life? And is it possible to believe this and continue to believe that God is Love? (Templeton, Farewell to God)
________________________
If you think about the Bible in its entirety, you come to the conclusion, I think fairly quickly and fairly fairly, that the people who wrote the Bible spent a considerable amount of time simply complaining to God about one thing or another. The Book of Job is one big complaint. Many of the Psalms are mere complaints about one thing or another. Many of the Prophets complain. The book of Numbers would not exist if the Israelites did not complain so much in the desert. And then there is Habakkuk.
How long, O LORD, must I call for help,
but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, "Violence!"
but you do not save?
Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
there is strife, and conflict abounds.
Therefore the law is paralyzed,
and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous,
so that justice is perverted.
Let me make this a little more modern for you.
Lord, I have just been wondering: What is going on in this world? Where are you? God if you are so powerful, if you are so mighty, if you are so amazing and if you are a God of love, then why did all those people die yesterday at a funeral no less at the hands of another bomber? Lord allow me to be honest there is so much hatred and violence in this world that I don’t even feel like reciting it any longer. There is war, violence, hatred, aggression. There are children killing children; children killing parents; parents killing children.
Lord, I have just been wondering: What is going on in this world?
But that’s just me. I am one small person amidst all those who also cry out and say, Lord, what is going on in this world? People like Charles Templeton. I’m sorry, but in a sense I am Charles Templeton. I have the same questions, the same fears, the same angst, the same trepidation and the same solicitude. What am I supposed to feel or think? Salmon Rushdie said somewhere, "The Barbarians were not only at our gates, but within our skins." And I think what he means is that I am just as capable of the violence I call out to God to condemn.
I’m like anyone else in this world: I want God to swoop down on his White Horse and wave his magic wand and make it all go away. I want some peace, some tranquility, a place to raise my sons without all the attendant fears that come along with raising sons and I don’t mean the broken bones and childhood illnesses. I mean the violence perpetrated against the suspecting and unsuspecting, against the children and by the children, by the violent and the peaceful. I cry out, "Lord, I’ve just been wondering." I wonder out loud, "Lord, how many more criminals are going to get away? How much more injustice will be perpetuated? Lord, how many more sixteen year olds who are accused of killing seventeen people will escape from their prison confines?" I cry out with those beheaded ones under the altar, "How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood? How long Lord will we be told to wait a little longer?"
______________________
And then there is Habakkuk:
O LORD, are you not from everlasting?
My God, my Holy One, we will not die.
O LORD, you have appointed them to execute judgment;
O Rock, you have ordained them to punish.
Your eyes are too pure to look on evil;
you cannot tolerate wrong.
Why then do you tolerate the treacherous?
Why are you silent while the wicked
swallow up those more righteous than themselves?
You have made men like fish in the sea,
like sea creatures that have no ruler.
The wicked foe pulls all of them up with hooks,
he catches them in his net,
he gathers them up in his dragnet;
and so he rejoices and is glad.
Therefore he sacrifices to his net
and burns incense to his dragnet,
for by his net he lives in luxury
and enjoys the choicest food.
Is he to keep on emptying his net,
destroying nations without mercy?
will stand at my watch
and station myself on the ramparts;
I will look to see what he will say to me,
and what answer I am to give to this complaint.
I have browsed many of the pages in Templeton’s book. I cannot say that I agree with anything in the book. But he does have a knack for bringing to the surface those questions that you and I might be too afraid to ask. Templeton asks near the end of his book:
*If there is an omnipotent and loving God, why does he permit earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts, and other natural disasters to kill indiscriminately tens of thousands of men, women and children? (193)
*How could a loving God originate as part of his creation such horrible illnesses as encephalitis, cerebral palsy, the various cancers, leprosy, Alzheimer’s and other incurable diseases, and permit them indiscriminately to afflict tens of thousands of men, women and children? (193)
*How could a loving God create and endless hell and consign the majority of the world’s population to it, year after year, century after century, simply because they do not worship him? (193)
Let me put this into a common tongue for you: Jesus does not love the little children. I don’t think that Habakkuk’s questions are, at their root, much different from Templeton’s.
"Lord, I have been wondering. You are God! I mean, you are everlasting, you are life, you are eternity, you are hope and peace and you hate violence and wickedness." You have admire Habakkuk’s courage, "I will stand watch, I will wait to see what I will receive for my complaint." So the ant shakes his fist at the elephant and says, "I demand answers."
I don’t know what to say to you this morning. Did you come here expecting answers to all of life’s problems? Unfortunately for all the preachers in the world who are out there preaching 7 Steps to the prosperous christian life are light years ahead of me and you should, evidently, consult them. They have answers I cannot begin to imagine. For me, as much as I want life to be plain as day, black and white, right and wrong for me there are too many grey areas that I cannot explain. I cannot explain the irrational behavior of homicide bombers in the Middle East who are simply, slowly eradicating their own religious adherents. I cannot understand unscrupulous adults who prey on children for pleasure and perversity. I cannot understand the inhuman ideology that permits millions of human around the world to be systematically, legally slaughtered each minute, day, week, month, and year.
And I’ll say this, if God is guilty for not preventing hurricanes, for not preventing disease, then how much more guilty are humans for the day by day abomination we call the Right to Choose? If God is guilty for allowing the Satan to starve people to death with no rain or with too much rain then how much more guilty are you and I for building multi-million dollar buildings while the beggars sit at the gate to the Beautiful Gate day after day begging alms? And if God is guilty for the death of every child on this planet then how much more guilty are we who protect child pornography with our hallowed constitution? Who has perpetrated evil and blamed God? Who has dismissed God with a wave of their highbrow self-righteousness and God does not weep for them? But if God is guilty for condemning people to hell for their lack of righteousness, then how much more guilty are we who allow the guilty to sit in prisons day after day awaiting nothing more than death?
"Lord, I was just wondering: Where are You? Oh, God, where are you? Where are you? Lord, when I am stupid and weak and mean and hateful and abusive where are you?"
_______________________
You don’t know how badly I wish I could deliver up to you this morning, on a silver platter, all the answers you need and ask. You don’t know how badly I wish, at times with great fear and trepidation, that the Lord Himself would just answer our prayers and our cries. You don’t know how badly I wish I could say something more to you, some word from the Lord, some prophetic utterance, some tongue, some "Thus Sayeth the Lord" or how badly I wish you could say it to me because I have fears too. I wonder if Habakkuk wished he’d got a little more. The Lord says a lot of things to Habakkuk when he asked and yet when the New Testament writers scanned through Habakkuk’s oracle they clung to one verse in particular, and even then only a part chapter 2:4: "The righteous will live by his faith."
_____________________
The fact of the matter is that there are times when we will see a world or a situation run amok and it will seem that God is visibly absent, or noticeably inconspicuous, and conspicuously unnoticeable. And what shall we do? The Righteous will live by faith and why? Because there is simply no other way to live. The righteous lives by the only thing that makes sense: God. Faith is the righteous confidence that things make sense to God even when they make no apparent sense to us. As the Scripture says, "We live by faith not by sight." Of course our eyes are quite adept at noticing all the things that we are convinced God has missed, as if He sleeps and slumbers, as if His eyes are not roaming to and fro, as if He never weeps, as if he delights in the punishment and damnation of the wicked. Why are we so convinced that God does not notice? Because He has not done anything about it? Or has he? The righteous will live by Faith if for no other reason than because living by sight would be shear madness. Who among us has the nerve to live by sight, by what we can see and touch?
Brother Lawrence said, "It is not necessary to have either a keen intellect or great knowledge of God, but simply a heart resolved to apply itself to Him and for Him, and to Love Him only."
I think we should be like Charles Templeton and Habakkuk and work our way through our frustrations with God. But I will add one caveat: the conclusions we come to are very important. Templeton resigns himself to a life of futility and despair and ultimately rejects Christ. Habakkuk resolves, even in the midst of hopelessness to persevere and ultimately resolves that he will respond in Jobian like faith. The same Job who said, "Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised." That is how Habakkuk responded.
Notice the third chapter of Habakkuk’s prophecy seems to fit in nowhere. Why? It is not an oracle. It is not a "Thus sayeth the Lord," it is not an answer to his questions. In fact, it is none of these; in fact, it is a Psalm. Psalms are Hebrew songs, poetry they are offerings of worship. Habakkuk, when he looked around and saw despair he delighted in God, when he saw hatred he offered hallelujahs, when he saw rage he offered rejoicing, when he saw war he offered a Woo-Hoo!, and when he saw revenge he offered reverence, when he saw greed he offered glory, when he saw pillaging he offered praise, when he saw loathing he offered love, when he was frustrated he responded in faith. Habakkuk’s response is quite contrary to Templeton’s: He offers adulation, praise, rejoicing, and offering. Even our faith is an offering back to God.
But how else can faith respond? To respond without worship¡Kto respond with rejection is to live in despair and unbelievable hopelessness. But to respond with worship, now there is an act of faith! If the righteous will live by faith we show it by responding to every situation in which we find ourselves with worship. There is nothing that can happen to us that will cause us to say, "Here is why I reject God." And I believe that amidst the tiresome and struggling life we must find reason to put our faith in God and worship. And so said Habakkuk:
With his own spear you pierced his head
when his warriors stormed out to scatter us,
gloating as though about to devour
the wretched who were in hiding.
You trampled the sea with your horses,
churning the great waters.
I heard and my heart pounded,
my lips quivered at the sound;
decay crept into my bones,
and my legs trembled.
Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity
to come on the nation invading us.
Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
The Sovereign LORD is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to go on the heights.
For the director of music. On my stringed instruments.
I think the question we must ask ourselves, through every ordeal, through every hurricane, through every minute of suffering is this: Is my faith in God still in God? Has this caused me to love God less or more? Do we believe that there is nothing that will separate us from the Love of God that is in Christ Jesus? And does this sureness of God’s love transcend the moments of flesh when our eyes will tell us something that our flesh confirms? Nothing shook Job. Nothing shook Habakkuk. Will anything shake you?
Or will you worship?
