BREAKING THE SILENCE – 2: 1 - 11

Good morning Life Fellowship. Last night I led my family in our devotional through Romans Chapter 2. And then, as I prayed for my family, my heart’s prayer last night was that we as a family would be ready to hear whatever it is the Lord wants to do in our lives. I didn’t grow up in the church and so it wasn’t just like this thing I was used to, but I realized as you just kind of grow up in this, and you go to church all the time, you find that you get yourself in a little bit of a rut if you are not careful. And this can happen to me, even as a minister.

And so I hope that you will just be thinking this morning about what it is that God has you doing. Are you here just out of religion, out of routine, or are you here because you really want to know God more. You want to know what His word has to say to you. You want to feel closer to Him. Because there are just enough games going on right now, isn’t there? And we don’t want to play Christian games. We really want to know our God, so that we can love Him and engage Him.

So I am going to ask you if you will to bow your heads and I want us to be prepared as I pray. Father, we get busy, we get crowded, we lose perspective and I just pray, God, that you would sort us out this morning so that we can experience your glory, your power, your word and your truth in a new and fresh way. Help us to be receptive to what the Holy Spirit wants to do in our lives. I pray for those that don’t know you that they will today, that they feel the wooing of your touch in their innermost being and desire you to be the Saviour of their life. In ’ name. Amen.

Well, this week we are going to hear about this a lot. And I am sure you have already seen quite a bit of stuff on John F. Kennedy who was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, fifty years ago. Another person who died on that day, and his death was overlooked because of the significance of JFK’s death, was C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis was the great professor at Oxford and Cambridge. He wrote the ‘Chronicles of Narnia Series, Mere ’ and a plethora of other books. And if you know anything about C.S. Lewis’ life, you know that he was a gifted writer.

What makes him extra unique is he was a literary scholar, and he was this great genius in ancient literature and medieval literature. And he could read about all these stories in just amazing ways that brought to bear as he would write as a Christian apologist. But he started off as an Atheist and then he began to believe in God and then he became a Christian. And you have heard me share with you his story of becoming a Christian before. He was on his way to a zoo sitting in a sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle. And he said, “When I got in the sidecar of the motorcycle, I was not a Christian. When I showed up at the zoo, I was a Christian.” Quite a conversion story, right? Great things can happen on motorcycles.

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And so C.S. Lewis gets saved and his life is awesomely changed. But as a layman in the Anglican Church, C.S. Lewis was such a scholar that he would rise up to be considered the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century. And apologetics was basically his hobby as a layman. That is how bright he was. He had a photographic memory. He was a first rate erudite. He was brilliant. He was sharp as a tack. He could read a book and he could remember it.

Now, C.S. Lewis wrote a book by the name, ‘Surprised by Joy.’ It was a partial autobiography on his life. And then a few years after the book was published, he would end up marrying a lady by the name of Joy. Now, talk about irony in this, he writes ‘Surprised by Joy’ because he was blown away by the joy that the Christian worldview provided. As a person who wondered how do you get joy in your life, he found that joy truly is found in knowing Jesus Christ. So he writes ‘Surprised by Joy,’ and then he would meet Joy and they would fall in love. And he would go into a marriage with her knowing that she had limited time to live because she was dying of cancer. He married her at an elderly age. They never had children. In fact, he found children a bit annoying.

Isn’t that interesting? He writes ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ and kids love him, but he found them to be a bit pesty. So he falls in love with Joy and they have this amazing relationship. She was a very bright lady and they were into idea swapping. And they would talk about grandiose ideas, and she loved the way that C.S. Lewis wrote. She was just intrigued by his writing style. So here they are, they fell in love, and they would listen to music together, read poetry together, read and discuss ideas together, love God together, go to church together, worship together and take walks together.

But the hourglass was emptying and Joy would soon pass away. And C.S. Lewis would feel a void that was so gaping that he would wonder if he could ever recover from such a thing. To lose Joy felt like a part of him had been amputated. And as he wrestled in the midst of his despair, he would write in a book that I read this week on his grief.

This is what he wrote, “Meanwhile where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him; so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption. If you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be, or so it feels, welcomed with open arms.

But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. Then after that - silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.

There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this

Page 2 of 13 pages 11/17/2013 BREAKING THE SILENCE – Habakkuk 2: 1 - 11 mean? Why is He so present, a commander in our time of prosperity, and so very absent of help in times of trouble.” C.S. Lewis, from ‘A Grief Observed.’

What an honest approach. Now I think to balance it out some would say, man, it is in my pain and affliction where I feel closer to God. So I think we can’t impose one situation upon another. But many have known what it is like to enter the dark hour of the night, and feel as though they are pounding on the floors of Heaven when it seems as though God is taking a respite. God, are you taking a siesta? Are you sleeping? Are you checked out?

And in another quote from C.S. Lewis’ book, he would write, “Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell,” speaking of his wife, “if it is now doomed to crawl back, to be sucked back into it.” That is writing right there. Wrestling in his pain, writhing in his emptiness, and he wonders, God, where are you?

We have all raised our questions and our complaints as we go through difficult times only to be met with silence. You cry out, God, fix my marriage. God, give me employment. God, please help cure this disease of my loved one. God, please help me in my pain. Calm my nerves. And nada, nil, nothing but silence. This is what God can feel like at times. And God doesn’t need to test us in order to see the measure of our so that He can discover that. No, it is often in the test that we discover who we really are.

In many ways it is the emotional tortures of life that reveal to us whether or not we believe Jesus Christ as the way, the truth and the life. It is not until we have been inflicted. It is not until we have endured the dark night of the soul that we really know if we really believe. It is not that God needs to put us through a trial to discover it; it is we discover the depth of our faith in the midst of our pain. See, it is easy to follow Him when your marriage is rocking, when your finances are soaring, when you’re climbing up the corporate ladder, when you are living healthy and vibrant, and your feelings feel great. And when you are not racked with the emotional torture of anxiety, depression, fear and a whole host of other emotions that we are all familiar with.

Many of us feel great about God until that baby miscarries. Many of us feel great about God as long as we get what we want, like that job promotion. As long as He constantly comes and heeds at our every beck and call, we will faithfully serve Him. But once the Panthers lose, or we have these other inflictions in life, our faith begins to be tested.

You see it is when our attachments are toyed with that our complaints are raised. It turns out that we are fickle little creatures, demanding and pestering and begging. But when we don’t get what we want, we cry southward in our pain. Some even blame God for the injustices, like Senator Ernie Chambers of Nebraska. You will remember when he wanted to put God on trial. He basically wanted to deal with God for all of the injustices,

Page 3 of 13 pages 11/17/2013 BREAKING THE SILENCE – Habakkuk 2: 1 - 11 all of the pain. Now I wonder how God would feel about knowing that He had a court date coming? If I was God, I would have just messed with the court. I would have just started flipping things over and creating a big scene. But God doesn’t play our petty little games. No, He doesn’t.

Well, as we have been making our way through a tour of Habakkuk, we come to this little book again situated in the . It is three chapters where we see Habakkuk who is going to have this shift of perspective moving from feeling God forsaken to God enthralled. And we are on the journey toward being a God enthralled kind of people. But the reality is we often feel more God forsaken than God enthralled in the midst of our pain.

And we saw that Habakkuk is a prophet that we know very little about. It is one of the minor prophet books, and the book was written about 600 years before Christ. And Habakkuk was living in a time as a prophet in Judea where his people were living in utter and complete depravity. And they were committing horrific atrocities amongst one another. And Habakkuk cried out to God; God, do something about these people. They are bringing a disgrace to your name here in Judea. And God seemed to be so patient.

It is funny the way it works. If God judges too quickly, we blame Him for that. If He doesn’t come to our rescue quickly enough then we blame Him for that. It is as if God can’t win with us. And here God in His mercy and His patience is waiting on Judea to repent. They don’t and so what will happen to Judea is He is going to raise up the Babylonians, and they are going to come in under the leadership of Nebuchadnezzar, and take them into captivity. And the first deportation is going to start around 605 BC and in 586 BC basically God’s holy land is sitting empty. This place that is supposed to be a light to the nations, because they wanted to be like the other nations, their nation was emptied. And now they are off in Babylon.

And God gives Habakkuk the warning that Judea is going to be dealt with. And they are going to be dealt with by the Babylonians. They are going to be taken away into captivity. And so Habakkuk felt the silence of God. It was agonizing for him. But then God speaks and now Habakkuk is ever more perplexed. ‘What do you mean; you are going to use an even more wicked nation, Babylon, to chastise Judea? Can’t you just deal with Judea and then deal with Babylon separately?’

And so Habakkuk is wrestling in this book to understand God. I think this may be your story today. Maybe you are sitting in this service and there is something you are going through in your life, and you are trying to reconcile what you have been taught with God with your current situation. And you are trying to figure out how to move forward in faith.

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Well, here we are in the which is a great little book that deals with the problem of evil. This is also known as Theodicy. And in this book right here we need to remember though we don’t hear about Satan he is behind the scenes of Habakkuk. And we need to realize that Satan is always at work. Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers as the teaches us in Ephesians Chapter 6.

So we come to Habakkuk Chapter 2 today. And in the latter part of Chapter 1 Habakkuk raises his second complaint against God. And we are going to see today that God is about to speak again. God has been silent and now God is going to speak again. Habakkuk raises his second complaint and it is God, are you going to deal with these Babylonians, this wicked nation? I mean he understood that God was going to use them to chastise Judea, but what about them?

And in Chapter 2 and verse 1 after Habakkuk has raised his complaint he says, “I will take my stand at my watch post 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.” He is saying he is going to wait. He has lifted up his questions, he has raised his complaint, and now he is going to wait and see what God is going to say to him. But it is like he is all ready to think about what he is going to say in return.

But God welcomes it and that is what is great about God. God allows us to raise our questions. And if you have been taught to keep your questions to yourself, you have been taught wrong. God welcomes our doubts. He welcomes our questions because He will meet us in those. Maybe not on our time table, but He will teach us something.

Now, verse 2, “And the Lord answered me.” Now before we feel too refreshed, let’s remember when the Lord answered him after his first complaint, we talked about sometimes God’s silence is better than what He has to say. It is like we will go to God and ask Him to speak. And then He speaks and we think well, on the other hand, God. Maybe you want to just stop Him because you don’t want to hear what He is saying. We beg Him to show us what His will is for our lives but we are just hoping He is going to say, yes, I want you to go be the CEO of this great organization. And then He speaks and no, He wants you to go to Bangladesh and be a missionary. Confusion. And you want to take it back.

Maybe you are struggling in your marriage and you want to throw in the towel and you are thinking now I have my way out finally. You are just fed up. And then you go and speak to a pastor or someone who offers you wisdom and what you really sense is God is now giving you advice to love unconditionally, to forgive. And that is not what you wanted to hear from God.

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Habakkuk hears from God and fortunately the news this time improves in verse 2. “God says write the vision. Make it plain on tablet.” Now these tablets could be like stone or metal or clay, and God wants Habakkuk to be very specific. He says to write it down and make it plain. In other words you wouldn’t need a PhD to understand this set of words right here. This is pretty simple. And it is going to be a message that basically says Babylon, you are hosed. You are in trouble. Judgment is about to fall soon upon you. And God makes it very clear.

“Make it plain on tablet so that he may run who reads it.” So here is Habakkuk, he is waiting at the watch tower and he is listening and God says, okay, get out your pen. So Habakkuk gets out his Bic pen and his memo pad, and he begins to write as you are going to see. And it says, “so that he may run who reads it,” implying that Habakkuk is going to write this message down, and he is the so called prophet, but it seems like there is going to be another carrier of this judgment message.

Now, I don’t know about you, but you can just kind of read past that phrase “so that he may run who reads it,” and think what is the big deal here? But it is a really big deal. So let’s just kind of put things into perspective. It would be like someone being given a message from God, and then handing it off to you, and then you are the lucky messenger. You are God’s mail person. And you are going to go to some freak like Saddam Hussein or a Mussolini or some of these other leaders throughout history and you are going to deliver a little message. It is a real simple message but basically it says God is fed up with you and you are about to be punished.

Now that takes some guts because that is the message to be delivered. And it is going to take a lot of faith to do that. We live in a time where it is hard enough for some of us in our culture, which is a tolerance based culture, but we are still scared to share the gospel because we don’t want people to think we are weird. And a lot of times people gut the gospel of sin, and judgment, and hell, and repentance and they just want to talk about all the warm fuzzy stuff. And they share a lopsided gospel. Well, guess what? Here was the non-gospel, or the no-good news, that this person had to carry as the mail person.

And so judgment is coming. And there will be a delivery person. In Chapter 1 and verse 17, Habakkuk raises the question, “is he then to keep on emptying his net and unmercifully killing nations forever?” He is speaking about the Babylonians. Are they going to keep on spreading their dominion in unjust ways? And God is about to say; no.

Verse 3, “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.” Now, I want to just pause for a moment because when it comes to reading our Bible we have to interpret Scripture in light of Scripture. We have to be careful that we don’t go and take

Page 6 of 13 pages 11/17/2013 BREAKING THE SILENCE – Habakkuk 2: 1 - 11 verses out of context and apply them to our lives. When I was a new Christian I was listening to a pastor teach, and he used this verse from the Living Bible as this verse that God is going to fulfil His great promises in our lives. And I want to read you this in the Living Bible in Habakkuk Chapter 2 and verse 3. Now remember, just looking at it like this imagine me up here going hey, do you know what, God has a great plan for your life. He is going to use you. I want you to hold on, stay tight and believe in the Lord. And then I go to my Living Bible that is going to fit good for what I want to say and now I read you this and you have no idea about Habakkuk.

And now here I am and I read this verse to you from the Living Bible. “But these things I plan won’t happen right away, slowly steadily, surely. The time approaches when the vision will be fulfilled. If it seems slow, do not despair for these things will surely come to pass. Just be patient. They will not be overdue a single day.” And I was hearing that and I begin to hold on to that promise. I thought great, God, you have great plans for my life. And then I would later get familiarized with the book of Habakkuk, and I would know I can’t hold this verse as a promise over my life. Right?

Because in context this is a verse about what? Judgment. You ever heard the verse in Psalms Chapter 46 and verse 10, “Be still and know that I am God.” Well, are you sure you want to be still? Go read Psalms 46. Be still all right because God is about to whip us into shape. He is about to mete out some justice.

So here is Habakkuk Chapter 2 and verse 3 and Psalms Chapter 46 and verse 10 and people have used these verses out of context. Sure we are to be still and know that God is God, that is not a problem. But don’t use Psalms 46 and verse 10 because here God is saying to be still and watch because He is going to whip up on those that want to continually chastise Him.

And here in this verse God tells Habakkuk that the vision awaits, that the Babylonians will not continue spreading injustice. Now I shared with you last week how atrocious the Babylonians were in their wickedness. And God is just to deal with it because so many people were experiencing brutality. His timing in all of this doesn’t always make sense, but he says, “Still the vision awaits its appointed time.” God knows the time. So one of the lessons for us is we need to focus on God’s promises to do the right thing in His time.

He says, “It hastens to the end; it will not lie.” He is a promise keeper. You can count on it. If it seems slow, we have to wait for it. In other words it is probably going to seem slow. Who likes being on God’s waiting list? Waiting for your driver’s license, waiting to get the braces off of your teeth, waiting to find out if you got accepted into the college you are hoping to attend. Waiting for the opening program of your favourite TV show after they just ended it with a finale that you wonder how in the world can I

Page 7 of 13 pages 11/17/2013 BREAKING THE SILENCE – Habakkuk 2: 1 - 11 possibly wait several months for this to kick back off? Waiting for the Arkansas Razorbacks to get their team back in order for their Hog fans. So waiting can be hard. Nobody like the waiting room and it is in the waiting room when we often feel most forsaken.

God had given Abraham a promise as well. And he was to wait for this promise that God was going to bless him and Sarah with a child through whom many people would be blessed and many nations would be blessed. And Abraham, it turns out, the father of our faith, struggled with his own faith. And it is in the waiting period where doubts can begin to kick in and we feel forsaken. And so it is in that moment where we decide sometimes to just take life into our own hands. We think, you know what, God, I don’t like your timetable, I don’t like the waiting room, and I am going to go ahead and do things my way.

And this is what Abraham did. Sarah gave him Hagar, and as a result Abraham lay with Hagar and Ismael was born. And Ismael was not the promised child. And those of you that remember the Genesis series know that because Abraham didn’t wait and Ismael was born, now you have an entire world religion that traces their heritage back to Ismael, and it is named Islam. Not waiting on God can be costly. There would have been no 911 had Abraham waited on God. Let that sink it. That’s powerful. Why is judgment at the end the ripple effect? Our lives and the consequences of our sins go beyond us. And we need to make sure that we live rightly aligned with God.

It is critical that we realize that God’s timing is perfect. He says in verse 3 that if it seems slow to wait for it. “It will surely come, it will not delay.” In other words God’s timetable is perfect. He sees things that we cannot see. He has a perspective that we do not have. It is kind of like you getting in an argument with your kids, and your kids insisting that it is right for them to have something. But because you know them better than they know themselves, and because you have a wisdom and an experience that they do not have, you just let them resist you and get angry, but you just hold your ground. And it is a battle for them to trust you even when you know the good. And in the same way can we trust God like that? Can we believe in Him in that kind of way, waiting on Him?

We come to verse 4 and this verse is a verse of contrast. It is an interesting little verse, rich and loaded and encapsulated. It is just filled with lots of things. And it is a contrast between the Babylonians and those who walk in righteousness. It is a contrast between the just and the unjust, those who please God and those who don’t, the righteous and the unrighteous.

So let’s just ease our way into this verse and peel it apart very slowly. It says, “Behold,” speaking of the unjust, the unrighteous, “his soul is puffed up; it is not

Page 8 of 13 pages 11/17/2013 BREAKING THE SILENCE – Habakkuk 2: 1 - 11 upright within him.” So this unrighteous person is full of pride. They are stiff necked, they are swollen headed and unbending. I don’t know if you remember in 1986 when the two ships crashed into each other in the Black Sea off of the coast of Russia. And after they did their inspection, because hundreds of passengers died, they were horrified to find out the cause. It wasn’t because the fog was thick. It wasn’t because the temperature room was messed up, or maybe the satellites were off, or the gauges weren’t working. No, it was because the captains of both ships were stubborn hearted men, unflappable, unbending, and stiff necked. And these two ships came toward one another, and they both saw each other, but neither was willing to bend. And when they could have gone out of the way, it was too late, and they crashed into each other in the name of pride and ego. And hundreds of passengers sunk to their death in that cold Black Sea, all in the name of stubbornness.

“His soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him.” One person said, “you can have no greater sign of confirmed pride than when you think you are humble enough.” Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography said, “There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases; it is still alive. Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.”

Impenetrable, blinded by their sin were the Babylonians. They were like the Pharaoh in the Old Testament who had warning after warning after warning after warning. Stiff necked, wouldn’t bend, unflappable. In the book of Revelations, we see the same thing. Rob Bell wrote a book called ‘Love Wins,’ and he talks about how God’s love melts all hearts, and in the end time pretty much everybody will be saved. Now, he was falsely labelled as a Universalist, and I said he is almost a Universalist; he is what I would describe as a post-mortem, nuance, purgatorial, inclusivist. You can read a chapter on it in my rebuttal, ‘What Happens When People Die.’ Now, Rob Bell’s belief that God’s love will melt all hearts for the most part that is not what you see in Revelations. When the bowl judgments are being poured out, are those who are being judged repenting? No, they are seething with a sense of justice and anger towards God. They are stiff necked.

But now to come to the part of the verse that is like an oasis in the midst of a desert. We come to the part of the verse that is like drinking a glass of water after running a marathon. We come to the part of the verse that is like slipping into warm covers on a cold night, or allowing your body to go into a nice hot shower after you are freezing cold. This is a verse of hope. This is a verse that warms the heart. And we see in verse 4, “Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by faith.” Aha, the righteous shall live by faith.

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In other words, Habakkuk hears these words for him. Live by faith. There are three words in the Hebrew here – righteous – live – faith. And this verse is a very popular verse. In fact it is sort of the gospel of the Old Testament. It is seen in the on three different occasions, in Romans Chapter 1 and verse 17, in Galatians Chapter 3 and verse 11, and in Hebrews Chapter 10 and verse 38. This verse, as used in Romans, stunned the heart of Martin Luther in the Sixteenth Century as the great Protestant Reformer. He was struggling deeply. He was a person who meticulously saw himself as keeping the law. He was punctilious in the way that he followed God’s ways. And he comes to this verse and it was like the sun breaking through the clouds and clearing away the fog in his heart. It was like the gospel gave him a warming and there he found himself ultra-satisfied, revelling in the grace of God. And Luther, through this verse, “The righteous shall live by faith,” his heart would be changed and he realized that this was the gospel message.

In fact John Wesley at Aldersgate in London heard the prefaces of Martin Luther’s commentary on the book of Romans being read, and it was there that John Wesley, who one of the great evangelists in the First Great Awakening, said, “there I felt my heart strangely warmed.” I bet Habakkuk was the first one to feel his heart ‘strangely warmed’ as he heard this message from the waiting tower as God said, “the righteous shall live by his faith.”

The Bible tells us in Hebrews Chapter 11 and verse 6, “it is impossible to please God without faith.” Now in Habakkuk’s verses we need to understand that it is talking about faithfulness in daily living in the temporal life. “The righteous shall live by faith.” But the New Testament authors kind of pull this out and they build on it. And when you look at their verses contextually, what you see is now it is getting this secondary application where it is really about a saving faith, an everlasting faith, a spiritual faith; that the righteous shall live by his faith.

I am going to come back to this idea, but what I want to do is I want to call on a couple of authorities, and have them meet us in this moment, so if G. Campbell Morgan could please step up to the gate, he says, “the key verse, Habakkuk Chapter 2 and verse 4, is similar to the constricted part of an hourglass. Now in this verse we are looking at, he is going to talk about what comes before, and what comes after, how this is the pivotal key verse of the book of Habakkuk. Everything that precedes it leads up to it, and everything that follows it results from it. It is like a doorway through which everything in the book passes. This verse contains two contrasting viewpoints on all of life.

First, we have a swollen, proud, conceited person. Second, we have a person who is full of faith. The first is full of himself or herself. And the second is full of God. The difference is an attitude of the great confidence in themselves, or in God. In both cases we have something hidden, and something manifest. In the case of the proud, his soul or

Page 10 of 13 pages 11/17/2013 BREAKING THE SILENCE – Habakkuk 2: 1 - 11 inner man is not straight or right within him. It is not upright or level, but crooked or twisted. His is an unnatural condition while his inner hidden condition is crookedness of soul. His outer manifest condition is conceit or pride. He is wrapped up in himself, and being wrapped up in himself, he is wrapped up in a ball, so to speak, all twisted up on the inside.” G. Campbell Morgan.

On deck next is Tom Constable and he now comes up to the plate and he says this: “In the case of the righteous, his soul is right within him, his inner hidden condition is straight. His outward manifestation of that condition is trust in God. It is interesting in passing that there is only one straightness, but there are many kinds of crookedness and perversity. If I asked a group of people to imagine a straight stick, everyone would visualize a stick that is free of any bends or curves. But if I asked them to imagine a crooked stick, everyone would visualize a different shape, everyone would visualize a different shape of crookedness. A crooked stick may be crooked in a hundred different ways, but there is only one way a straight stick can be straight.

Goodness is basically simple, but evil is exceedingly complex. Goodness looks only one way, but evil can take many different forms and shapes. The central affirmation of Habakkuk is the last part of Chapter 2 and verse 4, ‘The righteous will live by his faith.’ There are three key words in this affirmation – righteous – live - faith.

It is interesting that in the three places where this verse is quoted in the New Testament; in each case a different word receives the emphasis. In Romans Chapter 1 and verse 17 the emphasis is on ‘righteous.’ Paul’s concern in Romans was with the righteousness of God and how people can obtain it. In Hebrews Chapter 10 and verse 38 the emphasis is on ‘live.’ The writer to the Hebrews stressed the importance of living by faith as a way of life, and not turning back to and living by the Law. And in Galatians Chapter 3 and verse 11 the emphasis is on ‘faith.’ Paul contrasted salvation by works and salvation by faith in Galatians.

Thus we can see that this statement is packed with meaning. In fact many people believe that this verse expresses the central theme of the Bible. It is then called the John 3:16 of the Old Testament.”

So there you have it. Slipping down further into the covers, we wrap up this pericope, this section of Scripture in verse 5, as we learn a little bit more about the crooked stick, namely Babylon. “Moreover wine is a traitor, an arrogant man who is never at rest. His greed is as wide as hell; like death he has never enough. He gathers for himself all nations and collects all his own peoples; going in atrociously, bringing others into the nation of Babylon in an unjust way.”

Well, how about a little wrap up. Some tips for navigating the night. Some tips for navigating the dark night of the soul. The first tip is this: Refuse to allow your

Page 11 of 13 pages 11/17/2013 BREAKING THE SILENCE – Habakkuk 2: 1 - 11 physical sight to dim your spiritual sight. This is an important challenge because you will see things like watching the television set, and may the Lord be with those in the Philippines. You will see what they go through and be tempted to doubt God’s goodness. But refuse to allow your physical sight to dim your spiritual sight. Thankfully Habakkuk, even though he saw all kinds of stuff going on, he raised his questions but then God’s answer raised him even more.

Secondly: Refuse to morally collapse in the midst of your confusion by continuing to live righteously. Our culture is in a state of confusion like never before. Fifteen states now have gone ahead and made it legal for homosexual marriages. And here is what I want to say. There is no comfort in numbers, folks. Christians, we need to be careful that we don’t look at the polls for our morality. Your temptation will be to see everybody else is believing it, so now I am going to believe it too. And when it comes to the morality in our culture, you need to realize, and I need to realize, that things are shifting.

But let us not hide behind the safety of numbers. There is a time that I can remember in the Old Testament in Genesis Chapter 6 where I am thankful that Noah didn’t look at the polls for how to live. Where it seemed as though the minority were in the right and the multitude – well, you know how the story goes. “The righteous shall live by faith.” In God we keep our faith and we don’t shift in our principles or in our virtues. We don’t look to find out what would placate culture and what would feel right. We stand strong in the word of God and we carry it out and we live it out in a humble broken way.

Donald Gowan, in his commentary, had this to say, “The righteous are they who remain faithful to their God precisely during those times described by Habakkuk in his first chapter, times when faith doesn’t make sense. When it does not seem reasonable to believe in a good God, and when God’s justice and mercy are not evident to all, when the righteous do not get rewarded for goodness, precisely then as at no other time, do they prove their righteousness by continuing to be faithful.”

Third: Remember the righteous live by faith, not by having all the answers. Faith has been defined before in an acrostic format: Forward Action Inspired Through Him. We keep on keeping on. Faith fills in the grace space, but God breaks the silence. And when He does it is not always clear.

Thomas Aquinas, the great Thirteenth Century philosopher, said, “To one who has faith no explanation is necessary. To one without faith no explanation is possible.” Blaise Pascal, a philosopher, had this to say, “In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadow to blind those who don’t.” And my favourite,

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Oswald Chambers, had this to say, “Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God, whose ways you may not understand at the time.”

Fourth and final: Determine to trust God to deal with the apparent injustices in His own time. When you are frustrated by the evil around you forget not to be frustrated by the evil within you. When you ask God to deal with the injustices around you, when you ask God to punish injustices, just remember what you are asking. He may start with you first, because we all are sinful. We all have a desperate need for a Saviour. We all are separated and detached from God apart from the gospel. And therefore we all need Jesus Christ.

And how do the righteous live by faith today? They believe that Jesus Christ is their substitute. Jesus Christ on the cross died the death we should have died. Have you ever heard the word imputation? It means to be placed to your account. When Jesus was on the cross our sins was credited to Him though He lived sinless. And when you believe in Him by faith, His righteousness is applied to you. And so righteousness is the gift of God to the person who places their faith in God’s provision – Jesus Christ.

Have you done that? Have you looked to Jesus as the substitute for your sins, because all of us are wicked at the core of our heart? And our failure to understand that is the part of our heart that should be crying and weeping why don’t we see how miserable we are? How sinful we are? Many of the things that you look at in your life, the good deeds, are oftentimes done just because you want to be perceived a certain way. And you want people to look at you a certain way. So even our motives are mixed. We are a mixed up bunch and we desperately need Jesus Christ.

Adam got us off course. It has been said before, putting on a shirt and starting to button it and starting with the wrong button, that is Adam. And button by button by button the shirt is off track. Jesus Christ came to die on the cross for our sins to re-align us to God. The silence was broken on the cross when Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” Let’s pray.

Father, thank you for the Scriptures today working in and through our lives. Would you please use your word to change us? Would you please help anyone in this room that doesn’t know you to say something like this: Jesus, I don’t understand everything, but by faith I believe you died on a cross for my sins, rose from the grave, and I am going to walk with you from this point forward for evermore. 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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