GOD FORSAKEN – 1: 1 - 11

God forsaken. It is a phrase that many people would use if they could express how they feel about the plight of our world. It is phrase that many non-believers would use to describe the world we live in. And it is also a phrase that some even within the ranks of the church would resonate. God forsaken.

How many of you by a show of hands have heard of Bart Ehrman? Every single one of you needs to know this name. How many of you have heard of Mark McGwire? Okay, most of you have. When it comes to Bart Ehrman, he grew up, he became an evangelical Christian and he went off to Moody Institute, which was a very evangelistic, evangelical Christian college in Chicago. He also went to Wheaton and then he went to Princeton Theological Seminary where he would study under the late Bruce Metzger, a well renowned Greek scholar. And Bart Ehrman’s faith slowly started whittling away. And there were a number of questions that disturbed him, but none more than the problem of evil, or what is referred to by philosophers as Theodicy, this reconciling this good God with all this evil in the world and how do we do that?

Well, Bart Ehrman is today a distinguished professor at UNC Chapel Hill. He is a New York Times bestselling author of the book, ‘God’s Problem.’ But he is really a New Testament Greek scholar who has also written ‘Jesus Interrupted’ and other books that maybe some of you have read.

And here is what Ehrman had to say, “How can one explain all the pain and misery of the world if God the creator and redeemer of all is sovereign over it, exercising His will both in the grand scheme and in the daily workings of our lives? Why I ask is there such rampant starvation in the world? Why are there droughts, epidemics, hurricanes, and earthquakes? If God answers prayer, why didn’t He answer the prayers of the faithful Jews during the Holocaust? Or of the faithful Christians who also suffered torment and death at the hands of the Nazis?

If God is concerned to answer my little prayers about my daily life, why didn’t he answer my and others big prayers when millions were being slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or when a mudslide killed thirty thousand Columbians in their sleep in a matter of minutes? When disasters of all kinds caused by humans and by nature happened in the world – why?

We live in a world in which a child dies every five seconds of starvation. Every minute there are twenty-five people who die because they do not have clean water. Every hour seven hundred people die of Malaria. Where is God in all of this?”

See, I read from a different lens and think, where are those who will be generous to give and to help those needs?

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“We live in a world in which earthquakes in the Himalayas killed fifty thousand people and leave three million without shelter in the face of oncoming winter. We live in a world where a hurricane destroys New Orleans, where a tsunami kills three hundred thousand people in one fell swoop, where millions of children are born with horrible birth defects. And where is God?

To say that He eventually will make right all that is wrong seems to me to be pure wishful thinking.”

Bart Ehrman. Here is what he is shouting out, “You and I are God forsaken.” And let’s face it, we do see these earthquakes and these tsunamis and these hurricanes and these tornados and all these other natural disasters that are cataclysmic in effect. And we sit there and we see these catastrophes and we go – why – inside the church and outside the church.

Perhaps you feel God forsaken today in your own life wondering, God, why in the world have I been married to this person for forty years and I am left totally miserably undone. God, why won’t you change this son of mine or this daughter of mine? God, why do you allow my bank account to sit on empty when I was so diligent all those years? Why do you let me sit in my home with no place to go to work? Why am I wracked with this disease, God? And we have these questions. Questions where we feel forsaken, left out by God.

But are you left out? Now, we need to realize there are these different types of evil. I guess you could say different faces of evil. You have natural evils and you have moral evils. Natural evils would be things like tidal waves, tsunamis, hurricanes and so on and so forth. Moral evils are things that we do as humans that are sinful through and through. And we step back and we know that God in His mercy and God in His grace warned that if we rebel against Him in the Garden of Eden that this world was going to fall into a mess. And the day you eat of the forbidden fruit you will die. And we see that there was a spiritual death, and then ultimately there was a physical death. And we are born with this fallen nature. We are no longer in this Edenic world. We are no longer in this paradise. We live outside the realms of a perfect nature. We have this fallen nature called a sinful nature.

And we know that all of us are haunted by it on a daily basis, that there is something broken within us. And God also talked about how the ground would be cursed, that is that this world was going to be messed up. There was going to be a shadow of darkness cast over it. And so in a world where we see lots of good, we also see a face of darkness, the face of evil.

And so there is evil because there is free will. God created us freely. And we wanted our own way and that is exactly what we got. We have chosen to not follow His

Page 2 of 10 pages 11/3/2013 GOD FORSAKEN – Habakkuk 1: 1 - 11 ways. And we see these things happening. But what is amazing in that God in His mercy, God in His grace warned us early on not to do this. And He warns us often of coming disasters in the Bible. But we do our own things and then we turn around and we blame Him for doing them.

But what exactly is evil? Is it an it? Is it a substance? Is it a thing? Well, on the One Minute Apologist I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Norman Giesler, author of eighty plus books, and one of the greatest Christian apologists to ever live. And here is what he said to my question. “Evil is not a thing. You have heard that people argue that God is the author of everything, evil is something; therefore God is the author of evil. But it doesn’t follow, because evil is not a thing. Good is a thing. Evil is a parasite. Evil is depravation. Evil is a corruption of a good thing.

For example, evil is like rot to a tree. You have to have a tree to have the rot in it. Evil is like rust to a car. You have to have iron to have rust in it. Evil is a privation or a lack in a good thing. God made only good things. We, by our free will brought evil into the world; we brought privation and corruption in the world. And evil is that lack of good in a good thing that God has made.

For example, nothing is totally evil, because if it was totally evil it wouldn’t exist. What would a totally rusted car be? It would be a brown spot on the pavement. What would a totally moth eaten garment be? It would be a hanger, with nothing there. What is a totally rotten tree? Top soil. Evil doesn’t exist in itself; it exists only in a good thing God made. God made only good things and we brought the evil or corruption into those good things.”

Pretty good answer, right? It is the depravation of good. And Norman Geisler gives a good, articulate answer to evil. And all you have to do is look or listen to the morning news and you will see it. When I clicked on USA Today, I saw four things that just jumped right off the front page. A ten year old girl was found in a garbage can. Someone was shot at an NC state school. I saw that there was a mayor in Georgia whose house was robbed and he is now in critical condition. I saw about the LAX shootings that took place. Evils, they are all around us. And how are we to live in a world with the problem known as evil?

Well, there once lived in a land far, far away a man by the name of Habakkuk. A person in whom very little is known about. We hear about him in the New Testament but not about him personally, just the verse in Habakkuk Chapter 2 and verse 4, “The just shall live by faith.” It is a verse in Habakkuk and we see it repeated again in the book of Romans and we will talk about that when we come to it.

But Habakkuk is a person who is living in Judah and we know he is a prophet and he sees evil all around him. And he feels God forsaken. But something happens between

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Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. He goes from feeling God forsaken to being God enthralled. It is a book that shows you and me how our perspective can shift from feeling God forsaken to God enthralled. And we are going to go on this journey with this ancient pre-exilic prophet. By pre-exilic you had the prophets before the exile that took place in 5 AD – 6 BC when Nebuchadnezzar sent his Babylon troops in to Judah to take them into captivity. And they would go into seventy years of captivity.

Now we know that after Solomon passed away that the United Kingdom divided and became split between the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern . The Northern Kingdom of Israel was taken into captivity several years prior, to be exact in 722 BC by the Assyrians. But now Judah is still left and Habakkuk is this prophet to this dying nation. They are experiencing moral decay and debauchery and Habakkuk is a prophet in this time. And soon the Babylonians are going to take the people of Judah away into captivity. And he sees this going on before his very eyes.

Now a whole lot is not known about Habakkuk. We know he is a prophet and we know that he is a poet. And we can see it by looking at the book. In Chapter 3 it is psalmic literature. In Chapters 1 and 2, it is prophetic literature. This has led liberal scholars to say you have pre-exilic authorship and post-exilic authorship. So you have the pre-exilic prophets that are warning of the judgment to come like Isaiah, Jeremiah and Habakkuk. Then you have the exile and you have the exilic prophets and there are two of them, Ezekiel and Daniel. And then you have the post-exilic prophets that we see in the Scriptures like Malachi.

Now understand that you have major prophets and minor prophets. Habakkuk is a minor prophet. That just means that his content is short. Where with the major prophets it means their content is long, like Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel with many chapters. So you have major prophets and minor prophets. And then you have pre-exilic and post- exilic prophets as well.

Now here liberal scholars will say because the content in Chapter 3 is solemn and Chapters 1 and 2 are prophetic, it has different authors. They don’t think we have a unified author for Habakkuk. But it is important for us to realize that we do have a unified author. What is going on here is Chapter 3 just completes Chapters 1 and 2 because in Chapters 1 and 2 he stares in the face of evil and Chapter 3 he learns to stare in the face of evil with faith. And it completes Chapters 1 and 2.

So that is a little bit of detail for those of you who kind of have the C profile on your personality and like detail. For those of you who are really relational you are probably going to sleep by now. Now let me just entertain my detailed personality a little bit more by introducing you to ‘Bel and the Dragon’ and then we will move into Habakkuk. ‘Bel and the Dragon’ is a book that if you are familiar with the Apocrypha,

Page 4 of 10 pages 11/3/2013 GOD FORSAKEN – Habakkuk 1: 1 - 11 in the longer edition of the book of Daniel, it is added as Chapter 14 in the book of Daniel. And we don’t have a lot on Habakkuk, as I said, but in this particular book of Daniel that is in the Apocrypha in Daniel Chapter 14, or in ‘Bel and the Dragon’ Chapter 1, we see these verses about Habakkuk.

And it says this, “Habakkuk said, Lord, I have never seen Babylon, and I am not familiar with that pit. So the Lord’s angel lifted Habakkuk by his hair and brought him in a rush of wind to Babylon. Right above the pit Habakkuk yelled, Daniel, Daniel, take the lunch that God has sent to you.” So isn’t that a sweet little story? Like God got concerned for Daniel who was in the den and He wanted to make sure that he had some lunch. So Habakkuk got to get pulled by the hair and was brought over to Babylon to make sure that Daniel was fed.

Well, this is a mythical passage. This has nothing to do with the . But I just wanted you to be aware in case you go to work this week and tell someone you are going through the book of Habakkuk and someone might say, oh yeah, in ‘Bel and the Dragon,’ and so on. No, you are probably not going to have that happen, right?

So now when we think about this book and what happened in Habakkuk’s life and shifting from this place of feeling God forsaken to God enthralled, that is what God wants for you. So we are going to look at a couple of points as we move through these verses at a pretty good pace here. And the first point is this: When you feel God forsaken, take your questions to God in prayer. This is what we see at the outset of this book.

It says in verse 1, “The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw.” When you see ‘the oracle’ you can’t help but think of ‘The Matrix.’ But don’t think of the matrix. This is the oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw. So we learn a couple of things here. There is an oracle which is some sort of a dream or a vision that Habakkuk the prophet saw. And we get a little bit of understanding of it. We learn his name, which sort of sounds like a back disease or a disease of the back. And then we learn what his role is, that he is a prophet. And then it shifts.

And what you are going to see is he is going to raise four questions followed by a rant. So here we go. Let’s look at the questions beginning in verse 2, “Oh Lord.” Whenever you see the word ‘oh’ it is meant as a form of desperation or a form of just being in awe. Like, oh, great and awesome God. Or oh man, we are hosed. So here it is the latter. “Oh Lord, how long shall I cry for help and you will not hear? Or cry to you violence and you will not save?” So obviously we learn something right here at the outset and it is this. That he has been persevering in prayer for a long time, yet it seems as though God is not engaging him. God is not answering him.

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So maybe that is you. You feel like you are pounding on the floors of Heaven to no avail. That is Habakkuk’s heart. And he is saying, you will not hear. Are you deaf, God? Do you have ears to hear, God? Why do I cry to you violence and you will not save? Look at verse 3, “Why do you make me see inequity?” He is saying I thought you were a G-rated God. What is the deal now? I am looking at X-rated material here. Cover my eyes, God, this is daunting.

Not only that but he goes on and says, “And why do you idly look at wrong?” You seem like you are the passive God. You don’t seem engaged, you don’t seem to care. You seem indifferent and complacent and detached, God. What is going on here? Now these questions are being raised and now Habakkuk is going to go into a little bit of a rant. “Destruction and violence are before me. Strife and contention arise. So the law is paralyzed. Your word is not active.” It is stuck. It is experiencing paralysis.

And then Habakkuk says this, “And justice never goes forth.” Notice what happens when you are in pain. We so quickly can lose a sense of objectivity. Justice never goes forth? We use extreme language when we are in pain, don’t we? And we need to kind of hone it down. We need to have a more realistic look. And that is Habakkuk when he says, “And justice never goes forth.”

So here is what Habakkuk is wrestling with. He is a prophet who believes in God but what he is really wondering is God, are you good? Are you just? And he goes on to say, “For the wicked surround the righteous,” (here in Judah). It is supposed to be the righteous surrounding the wicked. So justice goes forth perverted, twisted and crooked.

Maybe you feel ignored by God. I think Habakkuk is adopting solemn prayers. We see in the book of Psalms in Chapter 13 and verse 1, this cry, “How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” And we see in Psalms Chapter 89 and verse 46, “How long O Lord, will you hide yourself forever?” And in Psalms Chapter 88 and verse 13, “But I, O Lord, cry to you in the morning. My prayer comes before you. O Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me?”

George Adam Smith had this to say about Habakkuk, “Habakkuk’s task is God Himself, the effort to find what He means by permitting tyranny and wrong.” So he goes to God. And here is what I want to say. Set your questions to prayer, because what you see here as vulnerable and authentic, let’s face it, they are fair questions. If you had a friend that could do something about evil taking place and you were pestering that friend and there was nothing being done, wouldn’t you wonder if that was a good friend after all? And so here is God. And Habakkuk has been pestering Him, asking Him, begging Him and it is silent. The only answer Habakkuk has gotten through his prayers to God is silence. It is quiet.

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I felt this when I looked at a Facebook post recently by one of these guys that follows my apologetics ministry. And he was talking about barbarism and how this guy or girl (some say guy and some say girl) that was literally being stoned on a street. They were brought out, completely naked, and as cars were driving by with no one doing anything, these people are kicking this person. And then they take cinder blocks and drop them down on this person’s body. They take stones and throw them against this person’s face. And I thought how could this happen? And I felt this little question, God, where are you right here?

And we can feel those questions sometimes. And more so in our culture of prosperity than in the cultures where there is much evil and lots of stuff going on. And because God is all they have they hang on so desperately, and so tight. In cultures that are experiencing prosperity they think well, seems I can create a pretty comfortable life for myself here and if this kind of atrocity is going on here then I will just kind of remove God from the equation. But when God is all you have, in the cultures that don’t have materialism, they realize that they still find a way to trust and move forward.

Well, here are a couple of observations from these first few verses of Habakkuk. Number one is this: Habakkuk is not spiritually indifferent. He cries out, “How long will you not hear my cry?” He is a saint but he is not a saint with dry eyes. He feels. He is burdened. He is disturbed. He is broken over what is going on. And isn’t that exactly how God would want us to be in a world filled with such atrocities?

Another observation would be: He takes his questions to the right source. He goes to God. It would have been real easy to set up a campaign and go out on tour and start talking about why God is not good. But instead of that kind of a tour, he just wants perspective. He is a prophet who is being wracked by doubts. Imagine that. And imagine that God is using this prophet who struggles to understand this God who he is supposed to be a messenger for.

And Habakkuk is so authentic. We need to learn to pray with an authenticity like Habakkuk, or like the Psalmist, and to be real. What we often do is we have this fake relationship. But what if some of the pains we experience in life were designed to teach us to be real and authentic with God? In other words, what if when you are going through a job loss or a struggle in your family, what if God wants you to honestly bear all before Him, so that you can become more dependent. And soHis power can meet you in the midst of your weakness, or in the midst of your despair?

So Habakkuk is not questioning whether God can, but whether God will. He is questioning whether God is just. Epicurus was a third century BC Greek philosopher. And he is kind of the one who really is popular for kind of posing this idea that I am about to read to you on whether or not this God is good. He says, “God either wishes to

Page 7 of 10 pages 11/3/2013 GOD FORSAKEN – Habakkuk 1: 1 - 11 take away evils, and is unable, or He is able and unwilling, or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and unable, He is feeble which does not agree with the character of God. If He is able and unwilling, He is malicious which is equally at odds with God. If He is neither willing nor able, He is both malicious and feeble and therefore not God.” But here is the conclusion and don’t miss this. “If He is both willing and able which is alone suitable to God, from what source then come evils? And why does He not remove them? ”In other words that is our conclusion as Christians. We believe He is willing and He is able but evil still resides.

And so let me step back for those of you that would have maybe read that statement and thought, unpack that a little bit for me. What you have going on here is you will have some Atheists who will say if God is good He would get rid of evil; if God is all powerful, He can get rid of all evil; evil still exists, therefore there is no God. You see that? Premise one, premise two, premise three followed by a conclusion. And that is an argument from evil against God.

However, as a Christian I would want to say that if God is good He can get rid of evil. If God is all good He is willing to get rid of evil. If God is all powerful He can get rid of evil. So I would want to say God is all powerful, God is all good, therefore God exists and can get rid of evil. The question is not about can God get rid of it or does he want to, the question is about timing on His part and trust on our part. And in between there is a perspective that can become very, very hard for us to move forward at times in our lives.

And so some will say that God can get rid of evil but He won’t and they will say that He is a malicious God and they hate Him for it. Others, like the Rabbi Kushner who I think had lost a son, wrote that very popular book ‘When Bad Things Happen to Good People,’ who would say that God is good, but He can’t get rid of evil because He is not all powerful. So he limits his view of God and it is a way to kind of keep God there but He is just a smaller God, He is not all powerful. But he presents Him as a loving God, a comforting God.

But what I want to say as Christians, and what we are going to meet in this book of Habakkuk, is a God who can get rid of evil, and wants to get rid of it. He is a good God and He is all powerful, but we have to trust Him in those tensions. I hope that makes sense to you as I just shared those points.

You know everyone is trying to figure out what to do with evil. If you are a Christian, we can explain it the way I am talking about it right now. If you are an Atheist you are going to say it is deterministic the way that we operate, and maybe there really is no such thing as evil, that evil is an illusion. Like Buddhists would believe that evil is an illusion, it is just all an illusion, but I would want to say let’s talk about the delusion

Page 8 of 10 pages 11/3/2013 GOD FORSAKEN – Habakkuk 1: 1 - 11 behind the idea that it is an illusion, right? So here we are with all this going on and we take our questions to God in prayer.

Secondly, in verses 5 to 11 you are going to see that it turns out that sometimes God’s words are a lot harder to digest than His silence. Pick up with me if you will in verse 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. For behold I am raising up the Chaldeans, (who are the Babylonians) that bitter and hasty nation who marched 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. Their horses are swifter than leopards, more fierce than the evening wolves. Their horsemen press proudly on; their horsemen come from afar. They fly like an eagle swift to devour. They all come for violence; all their faces forward. They gather captives like sand. At kings they scoff and at rulers they laugh; they laugh at every fortress. They pile up earth and take it; then they sweep by the wind and go on. Guilty men whose own might is their god.”

So in a nutshell this is a description of the Babylonians who are cruel, oppressive and are militarily very, very powerful. And God is saying He is going to raise this nation up to come and take Judah into captivity. And now Habakkuk is going to shift in and we will see next week that he has a bigger question. How does God use a nation that is even more evil than this nation to chastise this nation? This doesn’t make sense. And Habakkuk has question marks.

So it turns out that sometimes God’s words are a lot harder to digest than His silence. Maybe Habakkuk would have preferred God staying quiet or mute rather than hearing these words that are so utterly and completely hard to digest. God says behold it is going to happen. In other words, buckle your seatbelts.

So here are some thoughts for you to ponder in light of this passage. The first thought is this: When it comes to this passage, be encouraged knowing that God can handle our questions. Habakkuk took his questions to God. He didn’t get the answers he wanted and we are going to deal with that next week as he begins to go in and ask more questions.

Second: As finite creatures, we would do well to remember that our Heavenly perspective is greatly limited. We are finite. Thirdly: Though God appears to take His sweet old time, justice eventually visits us all. Judah is going to experience punishment for rejecting God and living in sin, and the Babylonians are going to take them into captivity, but they too are going to have their day. And we as well will all stand and give an account at some point.

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Next: If you are arguing against God’s existence based on injustice, ask yourself where have I got this idea of just and unjust to begin with? If there is no God, then there are no moral standards, so there is really no such thing as unjust. In the animal kingdom it is not unjust when a zebra is killed by a lion; it is just natural selection and doing what it does. And evolution doing what it does.

C.S. Lewis said it like this, “When I was an Atheist I thought this way. My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust, but how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe to or with when I called it unjust? If there is something unjust, then there must be something just. If there is something immoral, there must be moral. If there is wrong, then there is right. If there is wrong and there is right, then that is a law. If there is a law there is a lawgiver. If there is a lawgiver there is God.”

And then finally: In the midst of feeling God forsaken, determine to turn your questions into opportunities, to learn a deeper sense of trust. Habakkuk is going to go from God forsaken to God enthralled. I would say as I wrap up this message that we need to remember that God shares with us in our sufferings and in injustice. As God becomes flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, He will go to the cross and He sounds like Habakkuk when He says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus felt God forsaken. But then, like Habakkuk, He learned to have faith in the face of evil. And saying He learned would not be philosophically correct. Jesus just did have faith in the face of evil when He said right before He died, “Into your hands, I commit my spirit in sovereign trust.”

Let’s pray. Father, thank you for your word. I pray, God, that you would use your Scriptures in a powerful way to touch and change lives. I pray for everyone here that does not know you that you would help them to come to know you.

If you don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus, and you want to become a follower of Christ, I just want to encourage you to say with me: Jesus, I want to follow you. Thank you for dying on a cross and experiencing this world of evil and ultimately dealing with it on my behalf and on the world’s behalf. Forgive me for my sins. Forgive me for my evil. Be my Lord and my Saviour. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

The preceding transcript was completed using raw audio recordings. As much as possible, it includes the actual words of the message with minor grammatical changes and editorial clarifications to provide context. Hebrew and Greek words are spelled using Google Translator and the actual spelling may be different in some cases.

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