(PROXIMATE) SENSE AND (ULTIMATE) SENSIBILITY

 

(preached December 31, 2023, in Taichung, Taiwan)

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I am sure that I don’t need to convince any of you that we live in unsettled and unsettling times:  Wars are raging in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East that have serious global implications, and the daily headlines, photos, and videos are horrific.

From the standpoint of cultural ideology, many of the ideas that have been generally accepted and normative in the West for millennia are being rejected as restrictive and unnecessary, at best.  To question the change causes you to be looked at as backwards-minded and bigoted.  Of course, similar ideological tides are affecting the Global East as well, in slightly different ways.

Politically, there seems to be splintering and polarization across the globe, to unprecedented extremes.  Of course, Taiwan has an election in two weeks, with the outcome somewhat unpredictable.  The world seems more interested in Taiwan politics than ever before, as both Taiwanese economic performance and cross-strait relations are topics of growing global importance.  America is also well into its election campaign season, and the circus of US politics has been disheartening to say the least for quite a while now.
 

Sociologically, the world was so deeply traumatized by the covid pandemic that we still don’t understand all the long-term impacts.  I’m not sure we even recognize all the countless details of life that are no longer the same as before the pandemic.
 

Spiritually, there are also troubling realities.  In Taiwan, we are surrounded by idolatry, with an alarmingly small percentage of the population having heard a clear presentation of the Gospel, despite the presence of Christianity on the island for four hundred years.  In America, approximately 40 million people have walked away from the Church in the last 25 years, creating the largest and fastest spiritual shift in the history of the country.
 

It's tempting to panic.  And, that’s before we even mention the conditions inside the Church.  Both in Taiwan and in the West, the Church is infected by a disgusting mixture of apathy, laziness, scriptural illiteracy, lack of Gospel clarity or focus, missional disorientation, prosperity teaching, apostasy, heresy, immorality, corruption, and abuse of countless varieties.  Everyone here has been affected by the sick Church.  Why do God’s people fail to live according to the pattern given to us by Christ and the Apostles?  Why isn’t the Holy Spirit intervening to powerfully awaken and strengthen his Church?
 

This brings us to our scripture.  We’re going to hold off on picking back up with Ephesians until Chris returns on January 14.  So, for the next couple weeks, we’re going to look in a very different location in the Bible: the book of Habakkuk.  When I first said I would fill in for these two weeks, I jokingly said I would preach from Habakkuk, because it’s a generally overlooked book — not too many kids are named Habakkuk these days.  But I started to realize that it would actually be a great way to spend these two weeks together!  Why?  Habakkuk looked at the condition of God’s people and found it at least as unsettling as what we see today.  Then, he complained directly to God about it.  Shockingly, God answered him.  Even more shockingly, Habakkuk then questioned God’s answer.  God then instructed him to write down the next answer for God’s people to learn it for future generations.  So, in this short book of three chapters, Habakkuk recorded a very personal conversation between a person and Almighty God, then set a heart-rending and soul-lifting prayer to music.  We find in Habakkuk one of the most revolutionary phrases in the whole Bible, though its truth is clear throughout both the Old and New Testaments.  We’ll look at that phrase in just a bit, as we look at chapters 1 and 2 today, then chapter 3 next week.
 

Before we jump in, I want to give you the main idea we’ll look at to take away from the first two chapters:
 

Main Idea: Questioning God is acceptable; trusting his answer is the key to a life of faith and hope.
 

Let’s jump right in at the beginning of the book, where we find Habakkuk’s initial complaint to God.  He gets right to business, not wasting any time giving us specifics about the exact time frame in which he is writing, or who is his daddy, like most of the other prophets do.
 

Habakkuk 1:1–4

The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw.
O LORD, how long shall I cry for help,
  and you will not hear?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
  and you will not save?
Why do you make me see iniquity,
  and why do you idly look at wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
  strife and contention arise.
So the law is paralyzed,
  and justice never goes forth.
For the wicked surround the righteous;
  so justice goes forth perverted.

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Here, it’s easy to think that Habakkuk is complaining about the world situation in general, but we should recognize that he his writing this in Ancient Judah, Israel’s southern kingdom.  He is talking about the condition of God’s people.  He sees that God’s people — that the LORD has specially chosen to be his covenant nation through which he would bless all nations — living as if they are any other nation, having apparently completely forgotten the God who called them according to his purpose and saved them out of slavery.  And, Habakkuk can’t understand why God doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it.  It is at this point that the complaining becomes a conversation, with God showing up with his shocking answer.  But, before we read that answer, I want to point out the first of three key points that undergird the main idea:
 

1. God is perfectly aware of the problems among his people (Habakkuk 1:1–5).
 

Habakkuk 1:5

“Look among the nations, and see;
  wonder and be astounded.
For I am doing a work in your days
  that you would not believe if told.”

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How do I reach this conclusion from the passage?  Because, if God is present to answer Habakkuk’s question, it means he is likewise present among his people and sees for himself the pitiful state that Habakkuk is describing.
 

It’s not hard for us to say that we know God sees the problems, but it will be extremely helpful for us to take that mental assent to this idea and move it down to our hearts.  We don’t have a God sitting up in his executive suite office, waiting for us to explain the issues to him.  The issues that bother us so much about his Church bother him a lot more.  But, he doesn’t just get bothered and blow steam like we do.  He gets involved.  He’s going to get involved in the specific situation that Habakkuk is describing, which we will see.  But, all of our hope in life is built on the fact that God has always been cosmically involved in both knowing and working through the fallen reality of mankind and specifically of his own people.  Before we even fell and created a horrible mess of life, God the Father covenanted together with God the Son and God the Holy Spirit to redeem us.  And, that covenant was always pointing to the incarnation of God the Son, who got so involved that he endured harsher abuse than we will ever experience, and more intense temptation than we will ever know, yet triumphed over that temptation and abuse with a perfectly sinless life that he always planned to give to save us out of our brokenness and out of the broken reality of our fallen world and the deeply imperfect state of his Church.  No other worldview has anything to say in response to our God being so audaciously aware of our struggles that he literally came to live through our pain alongside us.
 

God doesn’t reject Habakkuk’s questioning.  He doesn’t reject our questioning.  But, the questioning is not serving a purpose of informing him of a situation; rather it is an opportunity for our hearts to be aligned with the view he already has on the brokenness around us.  We may not sit in the role of a prophet who has a back-and-forth conversation with God, but when we do bring our complaints to him in prayer, he answers us through his Word, aligning us with his view of the situation and his sovereignty over it and victory through it, with the ultimate victory seen in the cross and the empty grave.
 

Okay, so how does God answer Habakkuk specifically?
 

Habakkuk 1:5–7

“Look among the nations, and see;
  wonder and be astounded.
For I am doing a work in your days
  that you would not believe if told.
For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans,
  that bitter and hasty nation,
who march through the breadth of the earth,
  to seize dwellings not their own.
They are dreaded and fearsome;
  their justice and dignity go forth from themselves.”

 

The answer continues, with God using powerful poetic imagery to describe the military might of the Chaldeans, which is the name of the ruling class of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.  This, incidentally, is how we understand the period in which this book is written: the decades just before the exile of Judah to Babylon.
 

So, it is not only shocking that God actually answers Habakkuk’s complaint.  The way he answers it is shocking.  God tells Habakkuk that the solution to the serious issues in the kingdom of Judah involves using the Babylonian army to wipe out Judah, and to bring the survivors out of the promised land into exile.
 

In hindsight to us, it seems that this answer shouldn’t shock Habakkuk.  After all, at the time Habakkuk is writing, the northern Kingdom of Israel has already been conquered and exiled by Assyria, which was a clear fulfillment of the curses of disobedience that God had established in his covenant with the nation in Deuteronomy.  If the northern kingdom had been exiled for walking away from obedience to the LORD, why would Habakkuk be surprised at the prospect of the same outcome for rebellious Judah?  In truth, Habakkuk may not have been surprised at the answer, but facing the definite near-term destruction of your nation is a tough pill to swallow.  So, what does Habakkuk say in response?
 

Habakkuk 1:12–16

Are you not from everlasting,
  O LORD my God, my Holy One?
  We shall not die.
O LORD, you have ordained them as a judgment,
  and you, O Rock, have established them for reproof.
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.

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In modern, non-poetic English, Habakkuk is saying, “what you talkin’ about?” to God.  Now, obviously, he has a sincerely reverent posture toward God, but his reverence doesn’t keep him from saying, “wait a minute!  That’s not what I was talking about.  Isn’t there some civilized way to handle this situation?  I mean, those people… those people, they’re worse than us!  Can’t you fix us without getting them involved?  How can you — a perfectly righteous and holy God — even stand the thought of involving yourself with those, those heathens?!?  Besides, God, you’re talking about a seriously bloody and destructive affair, with no end to those people’s violent expansionism in sight!  God, our rebellion against you is truly a bad situation, but those people literally idolize — I mean actually worship — their own military might.  How can you stomach the idea of working through them in your work to fix things around here?”
 

At the beginning of chapter 2, Habakkuk then goes on to say probably the brashest thing anyone in all of scripture says to God:
 

Habakkuk 2:1

I will take my stand at my watchpost
  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.

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He tells God, “I’ll stand up on the tower of the city wall with my arms folded and my toe tapping while I wait for your answer, God, because I can’t make any sense of what you just said.”
 

Before we move into God’s answer after Habakkuk takes his stand, I want to highlight the second of the three key points that help us understand the main idea of the passage:
 

2. God’s solutions are often hard to understand or accept, but they are purposeful (Habakkuk 1:5–17).
 

It is natural to think of the book of Job when we study Habakkuk, because Job is another book where the titular character questions God.  We should notice, though, the difference in the nature of Job’s questioning and Habakkuk’s:  Job busily maintains his innocence and asks God why he is suffering in spite of his innocence.  Habakkuk has no silly notion of innocence.  What’s bothering him is guilt:  He is upset because God’s Word promises that God will do something about human guilt, and God doesn’t seem to be maintaining the truth of his Word.  Habakkuk is actually asking for judgment.  But, when God breaks in with his reassurance that he actually is about to act out in faithfulness to his promise — exactly how he had promised in Deuteronomy 28 that he would act — Habakkuk gets more upset than he was in the first place.  Why?  Because he is allowing his nationalism to take precedence over his desire for divine justice.  He suddenly loses his clear view of Jewish failure as soon as another nation is brought up, at which point he only sees the failures of the other nation.  He confesses God as the rightful judge over Israel, but he has an incorrect view of God’s role as “rock”, or protector over Israel.  God never established Israel for the good of Israel.  He established Israel for the good of his work of redemption for all the earth.  And his judgment over Israel would be for the purpose of protecting and continuing that redemption.  While God does care about the near-term welfare and experience (the “proximate sense”) of each human life, his work is always progressing toward the long game (the “ultimate sensibility”).  So much of the text of both the Old and New Testaments is a description of the world that God is in the process of making.  That process inevitably involves refining and testing his raw materials, and shaping them in the fire.
 

Habakkuk couldn’t see the good that God would do through Babylon’s conquest and exile of Judah.  But, it would be leading into, during, and coming out of that period that some of the most important spiritual formation of God’s people would come about!  It was during that time when much of the Hebrew Bible — specifically the history books — would be completed and edited into their current form.  It was during that time when we would see some of the most triumphant examples of Godly character and leadership from a position of disadvantage rather than from a position of power — think Daniel and his friends, think Mordecai and Esther, think Nehemiah and Ezra — and some of the clearest prophecies of God’s redemptive work — again, think of Daniel, think of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and Haggai and Zechariah and Malachi.  The nation that would emerge out of the exile would be refocused, re-tuned.  Sure, they would again lose their focus, but not without God having first worked in them to draw nearer to his ultimate work of redemption (which would come during another period of foreign rule).

Habakkuk’s protests can be likened to much of the talk we hear from Christians today.  We’re bothered, to a certain extent, by the sad condition of the Church.  But we are tempted to be more bothered by the challenges of living in what is being called a “post-Christian” society in the West, where the Church no longer occupies the seat of power at the table that shapes cultural mores.  And, even though Taiwan has never been thought of as a “Christian society,” there was a period that has now passed during which many of the most influential leaders considered themselves Christians.

Let us recognize together that a period of “cultural exile” is part of God’s refining work in the Church, where leaders are less tempted to spend their time thinking about how to maintain power, and they are more purely challenged to put their efforts into considering how to influence culture from the margins — which has been the reality for the majority of Church history.  We are also tested to reconsider why we want to influence culture in the first place.  Are we trying to protect our comfort, or are we trying to make God known in his holiness and exalt Christ as Savior and King?  This is also a time in which God will purify his Church.  There is less temptation to be part of a church for purposes of social advantage when the Church itself is not sitting in a seat of social advantage.  The reason for a person to be in church is more likely to be for the purpose of encountering a sovereign and loving God who is faithfully at work through his Church to save men and women from their powerlessness against sin, which he paid for on the cross, and to raise them with Christ into his eternal inheritance.

When we are tempted to despair at the Church’s loss of status, let us instead recognize that God is sovereignly at work.  While the cultural centers of power are, like the Babylonians, in a state of extreme rebellion against God, he is just as much in control today, working through troubling shifts and events, as he was when he swept into Judah with a heathen army.  He is still working toward that ultimate redemptive purpose.  Just as he assured Habakkuk that his purposes would surely come, he reminds us in 2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”  He is patiently, methodically, meticulously working through different circumstances that he himself ordains, so that he can draw sinners to repentance and salvation in Christ.  He is not done with that work.
 

What a treasure we have as believers in Christ compared to the world around us:  When they look at troubling times, they can only throw up their hands in despair.  When we look at troubling times, we can throw up our hands in worship of a sovereign God who is faithfully working out his purposes.
 

So, let’s look now at the rest of chapter 2 to see the content of God’s answer to Habakkuk’s second complaint.
 

Habakkuk 2:2–5

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.
“Moreover, wine is a traitor,
  an arrogant man who is never at rest.
His greed is as wide as Sheol;
  like death he has never enough.
He gathers for himself all nations
  and collects as his own all peoples.”

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God assures Habakkuk that he recognizes that, just as Judah needs judgment, so does Babylon.  He wants to make sure his people realize he hasn’t lost sight of the need for justice in the world, so he commands Habakkuk to write down the message.  He promises Habakkuk that he is working toward ultimate justice, at which time every wrong will be punished and every right will be vindicated.  This is a component of God’s very nature.  And, he programmed us to recognize the reality of his justice.  The fact that human beings all have a conscience, and a desire for justice is a piece of what it means to have been made in his image.  The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that our sense of justice is actually the best way we can know that God exists, because we all recognize that justice is so necessary for life to have any meaning that we inherently know there must be a final judgment, and that only God can be our final judge.

In the second half of verse 4, Habakkuk writes the phrase I mentioned earlier that is one of the most revolutionary phrases in all of the Bible: “the righteous shall live by his faith.”  Why is this so revolutionary?  Isn’t it just a restatement of a truth that we see played out throughout scripture?  For instance, don’t we see in Genesis 15, that Abram’s righteousness was tied to his trusting in God’s promises?  Yes, in fact this phrase is a simple restatement of a central scriptural truth.  But it is such a truth that humans have an incredibly hard time accepting.  Righteousness is not connected to our own doing anything; it is connected to knowing that God is doing and will do everything he promised.  It’s important to understand that righteousness doesn’t cause faith, and faith doesn’t cause righteousness.  Rather, they both exist in God’s people, and they are mutual indicators of the other.  They reflect a reality of a life that has been revolutionized by God’s stamp on a person.  A person who is righteous by God’s sovereign work is a person who trusts that God’s work is purposeful and his promises are assured.  That is what faith is.  This phrase from verse 4 was quoted three times in the New Testament: in Romans 1:16, Galatians 3:11, and in Hebrews 10:38.  It is quoted in these places because this idea is essential to an understanding of God’s saving work through the Gospel.  In fact, it was through reflecting on this phrase while preparing a sermon on Romans 1 that Martin Luther came to a true saving faith in Christ, setting off the chain of events that would start the most important period of refinement the Church has ever experienced in the Sixteenth Century.
 

But, as we look at the rest of chapter 2, we see more clearly the reason that God told Habakkuk to write down his response.  I’m not going to read the entire chapter, but I encourage everyone to do so this week.  In fact, read the whole short book!
 

God says to Habakkuk, “you are certainly right; the Babylonians must be judged because of their unjust lives.  And I will list for you the reasons why they must be judged.”  This is where we come to the third key point that supports the main idea of the passage:
 

3. God’s long game is perfectly effectual; mankind’s is not (Habakkuk 2:6–19).
 

God lays out four basic reasons why the Babylonians deserve judgment: First, they have inequitable economic practices that favor those who are already wealthy and make life incredibly difficult for those who are at a disadvantage, such as the peoples that they conquer and those in the servant class.  Second, their civic and legal systems protect those in power and are built on the backs of laborers who have no voice.  Third, they are focused on pleasure and sex, with no interest in the welfare of their fellow man.  Finally, they are, as Habakkuk had complained, hopelessly idolatrous, specifically idolizing their own national strength.
 

Do these issues deserving of judgment sound familiar?  They should.  Because this is how all nations act once they reach any level of prosperity.  Babylon is used throughout the rest of scripture as a type, representative of the fallen human order.  Babylon is what all nations become because of our sinful nature.  In fact, it is what Judah had become.  God’s description on Babylon is strikingly similar to Habakkuk’s description of Judah at the beginning of the book.  And justice demands God’s righteous judgment of this reality.
 

In chapter 1, verses 14 through 17, we see Habakkuk saying to God, “isn’t there some civilized way to deal with this?”.  God responds to that saying, “civilized?  Babylon is exactly what civilized people become!  I, on the other hand, am perfectly righteous and just, and I am at work — even through troubling events — to make all things right.  Trust me.”
 

We are rightfully unsettled by our world.  We have legitimate questions for God.  He welcomes our questions, and then he gives us a simple pattern for living a life of hope through the challenges.  May our time of questioning God conclude the same way that Habakkuk concludes his:
 

Habakkuk 2:20

But the LORD is in his holy temple;
  let all the earth keep silence before him.
 

Amen.