Sermon Tone Analysis
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Trusting God Puts our Anxiety to Rest
A Quick Recap:
Habakkuk complains to God “How Long?”
God’s Answer: I am going to punish the evil of my chosen people.
I am sending the Chaldeans to wreak havoc in order to deal with Israel’s sin
Habakkuk’s second complaint: The Chaldeans are so evil, how can they be your instrument of destruction on your people?
They are even eviler than us
God’s answer: But my wrath will also come on them.
Your punishment is in order to turn you back to me.
The punishment of the Chaldeans will be to vindicate my holiness and righteousness.
The Chaldean’s soul is puffed up and not upright, but the righteous shall live by his faith
Now, Habakkuk’s response: The text says a prayer.
It is like a Psalm, a song, meant to be set to music.
“according to the shigionoth” This term is only found in Psalm 7 in the Bible.
It is likely a musical term, perhaps it is the melody the song would be sung to.
The prayer or psalm of Habakkuk is followed by a final instruction, it is to the choirmaster: with stringed instruments.
This Psalm may remind you of Miriam’s Song, after the Egyptians were destroyed in the Red Sea.
Or maybe it reminds you of one of David’s Psalms, where he appealed to God to save him from enemies, and then declared his complete trust that God would deliver him.
Parts of it remind us of Job, who declared that even if God slayed him, he would still trust in God.
Trusting God Puts our Anxiety to Rest
So we have talked about it for a few weeks now.
We sympathized with Habakkuk, we realized his complain is something relevant to our world today.
Where is punishment for sin?
How can God allow people to continue the way they are?
And then, why does God allow his own people to be tormented by evil unbelievers?
Where is the justice?
Where is the reign of righteousness God has promised?
The prophet’s complaints were swallowed up by confidence.
His fear turned to faith.
Habakkuk was transformed from a sour, jittery prophet weighed down with burdens to a secure, joyous preacher bouyed up with blessing.
The just, the upright, the happy, the contented, the victorious live by their faith.
Yes, faith is the victory that overcomes the world!
(1 John 5:4)
The Sovereign Lord gives triumph over circumstances to those who trust Him.
The way to get out from under the load is to get right under the Lord.
To be under the Lord is to be over the circumstances.
That lesson is worth the price of the book, especially when the world seems like a cesspool of quicksand.
Most Christians are familiar with the phrase, “the just (or righteous) shall live by his faith”, although most do not connect it with Habakkuk.
As we learned a couple weeks ago, the phrase, used by Paul in two of his letters, and used by the writer to the Hebrews, is a quote from this prophet.
And really it is the answer to everything.
How can we understand what God is allowing or not allowing to happen in the world?
If the wisdom of men is foolishness to God, how will we ever understand it?
If our logic chip looks at the world and says it doesn’t compute, how do the wicked get by with their wickedness?, then how will we ever feel safe, or secure, or at peace?
There is only one way: through faith.
You see, in the end, we need to trust God.
We need to trust that what we can’t make sense of, he has in perfect control.
He knows exactly what he is doing.
He knows the end result of it.
He is orchestrating events for his ultimate glory.
And we can question God like Habakkuk, or like Job, and we can cry out to him, “why?” or “how long?”, but like those men, in the end, we must simply settle on one thing: Putting our trust and our faith in the God who knows.
If you were to do a googles search of bible verses about the God who knows, you could spend all day and then some studying them.
God knows whats going on, he knows what has already happening, He knows what will happen, and He chooses what part of that knowledge we need.
And the reality is, he hasn’t given us all of knowledge.
He keeps back for himself some of his secrets.
We don’t have secrets from God, he knows out every secret.
But He has secrets from us.
He has every right, no matter what we might demand, no matter how much we insist on answers to these questions we have, but He has revealed enough to help us put our faith in him.
What he reveals to us is ours to know, ours to study, ours to contemplate, ours to encourage one another with, but the secret things belong to him.
He is the creator and we are the creatures.
The creator is not compelled to explain himself to the creatures.
So instead of focusing so heavily on what we are not given, we must focus instead heavily on what we are given.
God’s Word contains all we need.
So Habakkuk begins this prayer or psalm to stand back, after all his complaints, and after he has consider the answer of the Lord, now he realizes he must rest in his faith.
How can we be righteous?
The righteous one lives by his faith.
So Habakkuk realizes that to be righteous he must live by his faith.
And so we also, if we desire to be righteous, must live by our faith as well.
What report has Habakkuk heard?
Well, he knows the history of God’s interactions with Israel, and in fact, he is going to recount some of them.
And just as we in the church often remember what is recorded in the gospels and in the acts, we hope for the same to happen to us.
“Do it again, Lord!”.
Do it here, in our church, do it here in my heart!
And so Habakkuk has a desire to see God do mighty acts like he did for the people of Israel in times past.
I’ve heard the report of you and your work; revive it, make it known, and when your wrath must be satisfied, remember mercy!
Here Habakkuk recalls some of God’s deeds.
I won’t get into these right now, but you may see in your footnotes or in a cross reference this refers to 1Chr1.45 and Deut33.2
This is from Moses recalling the works of God for Israel
We all began when we were children and trying to do our art, and some of us were better at this than others, but how would we draw the sun?
A circle with little lines coming out, or little triangles.
What does this represent?
The radiance of the Sun.
Rays flashed from his hand.
And there he veiled his power.
Now, we don’t worship the Sun, but some people do.
Think about this.
The Sun is absolutely necessary to our physical life.
If we did not receive its warmth, we would not live.
If our plants did not receive its rays, we would have no food.
The Sun is absolutely necessary for our life.
And yet, the Sun is terrible.
It is massive.
Maybe you have seen a visual depiction of the earth’s size in comparison to that ball of fire we call the sun.
The Sun could entirely consume the earth.
At the same time, the Sun is necessary to us, and unapproachable by us.
So it is with the holiness of God.
Because of his holiness we can trust him in what he says, we have faith he will see it through.
And yet, if we, as fallen people, as people born into sin, were to approach this holiness we would be consumed.
This why Isaiah had fear when he witnessed the presence of God:
This is why a man who touched the ark of God was instantly killed.
It is why Aaron’s sons were instantly killed when they dared to attempt worship of God in a way other than the way he prescribed.
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