The Lord’s Answer (Hab. 2:1-20)

This sermon was preached on 27/12/2012

Habakkuk has been called to serve God in a difficult day. A new power has risen to threaten the world, including Judah. Babylon has conquered Assyria, the empire that the Lord used to punish Israel, the ten tribes that separated from Judah, and lead them into captivity. Now Babylon is threatening Judah, not only because Babylon wanted to expand its rule, but because the Lord was bringing them against his people.

The prophet’s anticipation

The second chapter opens with the prophet waiting for information from the Lord. In the previous chapter he had expressed his concern about how the Lord could use an evil people like the Babylonians to chastise his covenant people. Habakkuk did not object to his people getting chastised because he knew that their repeated departures from God deserved divine corrections. But he could not understand why the Lord would allow such strong punishment as the Babylonians were likely to hand out – they were not known for showing mercy.

So the prophet located himself in a place where the Lord could speak to him. This was a very wise decision because if we want to hear from God it is usually very difficult to do so in the middle of bustle and noise. The voice of God can be drowned out by the noise of other things. There are times when it is appropriate to be alone with God, but we have to take steps to ensure that nothing will interrupt the occasion.

There are two lessons for us from the way the prophet responds to the Lord’s word. First, when we have a similar problem as Habakkuk had, we can turn to his experience and see the answer that the Lord gave him, and it is quite a lengthy explanation. Habakkuk could have decided to try and find the answer within his own reasoning processes or he could have considered the opinions of others. But he did neither, probably because he knew that only the Lord could help him. So he waited on the Lord and received his answer, and we also have his answer, recorded now in God’s Word, to guide us because it contains permanent principles that we can apply to our own troubling circumstances. That is one reason why such passages are recorded in the Bible. So if we have a problem understanding how the Lord can use sinful people in working out his purpose we can turn to what God told Habakkuk when they were alone together.

The second lesson concerns how we should respond to the Lord’s providential dealings. Habakkuk expected the Lord to come in a theophany (a common Old Testament description of God humbling himself and temporarily taking on a form by which humans could speak to him in a personal manner), and indeed he appears in such a way in chapter three. This expectation reveals that Habakkuk anticipated that the Lord would show his grace by stooping so low as to speak with him and explain what was happening. No matter how majestic the theophany might be in comparison to earthly majesty, it was still an expression of the Lord humbling himself in order to appear in a form through which he and his servant could interact with one another.

Of course, we live in the days when the Lord no longer has to use theophanies and other temporary means in order to communicate with his people. Because of the incarnation of Jesus we know that the Second Person of the Trinity has taken into union with himself a human nature and he and us can have communion, and also through him we can have communion with the Father. Yet we should have the same degree of desire for communion with God through Jesus that Habakkuk had to meet with God in a temporary form. And we will experience divine gentleness as Jesus teaches us (Matt. 11:28-30).

Yet although it would be a gracious visit from God, at the same Habakkuk knows he will have to respond to what the Lord says to him. God will come to him as the Explainer, which is grace in action, but he will also come to deal as the Judge of Habakkuk because of the ferocity of his complaint. We are familiar that the Lord will come to us as the Searcher of hearts, and we should welcome his probing because it will be for our spiritual good.

The question that comes to us is whether or not we are willing to have God deal with us in both ways. I am sure we would all like God to explain to us what he is doing, but would we like him to give his assessment of what we have said or done? Whether we like it or not, he usually does both. He does not do so through a theophany anymore. Instead he speaks through his Word. In it we will discover both explanations and corrections. Both are blessings from heaven.

The Lord’s Answer

Eventually the Lord appears and commands his servant to write the divine answer on a tablet (v. 2).  This requirement informs us that Habakkuk was an educated man who could read and write. There seems to be a reminder in this method of how God gave his law and other matters to Israel centuries before at Mount Sinai, which would be a reminder that the Lord had not changed. Whether or not that is the case, it is still a mark of wisdom for us to have the unchangeableness of God in our minds when we are puzzled or confused about some of his providential dealings. The Lord still adheres to the righteous requirements he delivered to his people when he made a covenant with them. Because he is consistent, always with the same outlook towards us, we can depend upon him.

Habakkuk was to write it clearly so that a messenger, who was assigned to go somewhere with the message, would not have to stop and study it because it was difficult to decipher. I suppose we have here an illustration of how careful the Lord’s servants should be in making clear what the Lord has said. The answer that Habakkuk would receive was not designed only for his personal benefit, but was also intended for the benefit of other believers. And there is a sense in which we should share discoveries from God’s Word with other believers.

The message states several important doctrines which the Lord wanted his servant to absorb and then pass on to others. First, Habakkuk receives a reminder about the sovereignty of God. There is an appointed time (v. 3), even if its fulfilment seems slow. If the Lord is referring to the appointed time of Babylon, then the fulfilment would not occur until the end of the seventy years’ captivity in Babylon. Nevertheless the Lord’s timing would be followed, no matter what the plans of the Babylonian rulers were.

Second, Habakkuk is reminded about the Lord’s knowledge of the heart of his enemy. God is fully aware that the soul of the Babylonian leader is proud and sinful, and that he is marked by unrighteousness (v. 4). Later in the chapter God will spell out his knowledge of the Babylonian leader to Habakkuk. At least, this means that God’s intention to use Nebuchadnezzar was not based on ignorance of his character.

What were the sins that God was aware of? In addition to his pride, Nebuchadnezzar is a greedy man who plans conquests of other countries while he is indulging in wine. Yet he does not realise that those conquered countries don’t belong to him, and that eventually these conquered peoples will get their revenge. There is a message of hope here for Israel because they will be among the conquered people who will be delivered from the grasp of Babylon (vv. 5-8).

The second woe is also connected to Nebuchadnezzar’s policy of worldwide power (vv. 9-11). Its central feature was the ‘cutting off many peoples’, that is, they destroyed national identities by forced migration of whole nations from their homelands. Yet eventually the policy would collapse like a house that is creaking. No matter how determined, no man can build a house that will last for ever.

The third woe is pronounced on Babylon because of its use of forced labour (vv. 12-14). Conquered people were compelled to work to the point of exhaustion, with no reward. This would happen to Judah as well. Yet this woe closes with a wonderful promise of the expansion of the kingdom of God: ‘For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.’

This promise could point to two things. First, when the Lord delivers his people from the clutches of Babylon, it will be done in such a way that the whole world will realise the greatness of the God of Israel. In a sense, we can see realisation in the words of those who observed the exiles returning home (Ps. 126). Second, it could be a prophecy of the spread of the gospel which will literally take the message of God’s glory to the whole earth. Both meanings enable us to get comfort from the strategy of the Lord regarding Babylon, which is that eventually through his use of that ungodly people his glory will be recognised throughout the world.

The fourth woe is related to the practice of Babylon to demean the peoples that they conquered, including the people of Lebanon (vv. 15-18). In God’s providence, Babylon would eventually be brought to disgrace. Just as they gave cups of wine to taunt the conquered, even so the Lord would reward them with a cup of wrath because of the cruel behaviour.

The fifth woe is connected to the Babylonian practice of idolatry (vv. 18-19). They gave credit for their success to the idols they had made themselves, which is the highest act of folly, no matter how much precious metal he wastes on making it look good. The fact of the matter is that it cannot live. Empires built on false gods will disappear.

What has this to do with Habakkuk’s concern about the intention of God to use an evil power to chastise his people? Several answers are given to the prophet’s question. The first is that God will punish Babylon for its worldview, even if he allows that Babylonian worldview to affect his people in an adverse way for a time. That worldview was concerned about worldwide domination of its ideas, and Judah along with others suffered under its rule. Any enemy of God’s people always has a worldview which is very different from God’s requirements.

The second is that God uses the current worldview to chastise his church and hopefully bring it to a situation in which it will repent of its sin. This is obvious; although God had used the Assyrian empire to punish Israel several decades ago, he could not now use the Assyrian empire to punish Judah because the Assyrian empire had been conquered by Babylon and was no longer in existence. When I was converted in the early 1970s, the big enemy of the Christian church was communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. There were numerous books and tapes dealing with how it would overrun the world. The church did suffer badly under communism in Eastern Europe, but today in the main the big threat to the church is not communism, although it is in some parts of the world. But we have other threats which have replaced it and which may be more powerful and more lethal. Only time will tell.

The third is that the church will survive under God’s chastisement. Would it have been better for Judah if God had just left them alone? The answer is no, because they would still have been conquered by Babylon as the rest of the area was. It is better to be conquered because of divine chastisement than to be merely allowed to be conquered in God’s general providence for one’s sin. Because the Lord was engaged in chastisement, it was a reminder of his faithful commitment to his people, and they could deduce from it that he would restore them eventually.

A fourth lesson is that political changes are often connected to God’s purpose for his church. Babylon was raised up by him to chastise his people and then Cyrus of Persia was raised up by him to set his people free. Both Babylon and Persia did many other things, but they are remembered in God’s Word for their contact, for good or ill, with God’s kingdom. The fact that the Lord can use even his enemies for the good of his kingdom should be a great comfort. After all, as Paul says in Ephesians 1:22, Jesus is head over all things for the benefit of the church.

The Lord’s Advice

How are the upright to live during such days? The Lord answers this question in verse 4 when he tells Habakkuk that ‘the righteous shall live by his faith’. This verse is quoted three time in the New Testament (Rom. 1:17; Gal. 3:11; Heb. 10:38). Often we use this phrase to describe how a person is converted and we can see that Paul uses it this way in Romans and Galatians, in the latter saying that we cannot be saved by lawkeeping. Yet the clause also describes how a converted person lives, and the author of Hebrews uses the clause to describe loyalty to Jesus in difficult times. In the darkest of times, he remains loyal to God, knowing that however dark things may become, the Lord is working out his own purpose.

What is faith? It is looking to the Lord to keep his promises, whether these promises are individual, corporate (for the church), or cosmic (heaven at death and the new universe at the resurrection. Yet faith is more. It is looking with love to the Lord to keep his promises because, after all, faith works by love. As Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 13, it is impossible to live the Christian life without love. And it is impossible to have a true faith in God that does not love him. So in difficult days, we should watch the temperature of our faith.