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Sermon Text: Habakkuk 1:1-3; 2:1-4
How long, Lord, until you…
1) hear me, 2) deal with the world, 3) and save me?
Maybe you’ve never considered yourself an inventor, but did you know that we as Americans invented a new term about 5 years ago? What term? Doomscrolling! You know, the endless scroll of bad news, doom and gloom stories across whatever social media venue dominates the phone in your pocket. Or maybe long before smartphones, you found yourself doomscrolling through a newspaper or as you watched the morning, noon, evening, and nightly news.
It really is an endless stream of bad news, and not just from the people you actually know, but news from the whole country and the whole world accessible right at your fingertips. I’m not sure we were made to handle all that! Everyday there’s breaking news about wars and conflicts, mass shootings, assassinations, shutdowns, scandals, cover-ups, conspiracies, all of which bombards us to the point where we feel like crying out, “Aren’t you watching this, Lord? Why aren’t you doing anything about all this? How long, Lord, are you going to tolerate this? Why does a good and holy God allow us to live in the midst of a world so full of evil and bad news?”
If you’ve asked any or all of those questions, you may have more in common with the prophet Habakkuk than you ever knew! Yes, you heard right, Habakkuk, one of God’s prophets, whose name is hard to spell and whose prophecy typically doesn’t get a lot of attention at the end of the Old Testament. That really is a shame, because Habakkuk asks a ton of honest, personal, and relevant questions about the believer’s experience in this world of sin. In fact, you could probably just repeat his words from 2600 years ago after a day of doomscrolling, and it would fit perfectly.
“How long, LORD, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds. Therefore, the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous so that justice is perverted.” (1:2-4)
If we took that stream of emotion and questions pouring out of Habakkuk’s heart and mind and boiled it down to one sentence to use for our theme question today, we could put it like this, “How long, Lord, until you 1) hear me, 2) deal with the world, 3) and save me?”
Habakkuk’s prophecy comes later on in the Old Testament during the string of Judah’s wicked kings, where violence and wickedness had seemingly taken over the society of God’s people. Often when evil, and conflict, and wickedness increase, we are tempted to expect that none of it should ever touch us or be part of our experience, especially if God indeed loves us. So we ask the Lord some of those hard questions, but then we start to form our own conclusions like Habakkuk did, based on our perspective and our feelings.
“How long, LORD, must I call for help, but you do not listen? The 1) first false conclusion we make is, “I’m calling for help, but he’s not listening. He must not be there, maybe he’s not real, or if he is there, he’s too far away to listen or care about me.” In a situation like this, silence is anything but golden to us. We want an answer, we want something, proof of life that he’s out there. And do you know what is so cool and maybe unknown about the book of Habakkuk? God answers back. This whole book is a conversation between a hurting man and his God. Habakkuk cries out and God shows up and answers. “Then the Lord replied; ‘Write down the revelation. And make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it.’” (2:2)
Here’s the kicker though. God answers and do you know who doesn’t bother to read or listen to the answer? Me! And probably you, too! I found out as I sat down to study for the sermon this week that I had apparently never read the book of Habakkuk carefully enough to remember anything about what was in it. I’ll bet you’re with me on that, but the number of hours I spend doomscrolling on my phone adds up to an embarrassing amount. So the real question is, “Who’s really the one not listening, God or us?” When we realize it’s us, then our heavenly Father invites us back onto his lap, like a father with his child, to calm our hurting cries and tell us the story of his love.
Let’s turn now to a 2) second conclusion we come to. We look out all the violence and corruption, conflict and strife, and like Habakkuk we might ask, “How long, Lord, until you deal with the world?” Two seconds later, we conclude, “Lord, it seems like you’re not doing anything about this? You should be stopping it and smiting the wicked right now!”
Actually, in Habakkuk’s day, God did pour out a limited measure of justice, not on the whole world, but on the wickedness and corruption of his own people. To the question, “Are you going do something?” God gave an answer, “I am raising up the Babylonians, that ruthless and impetuous people, who sweep across the whole earth to seize dwellings not their own.” (1:6). God was going to use an even more wicked nation to destroy Judah and Jerusalem and take them as captives. That’s how men like Daniel, and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego wound up in Babylon. And now, as you might guess for Habakkuk, suddenly the thought of God using Babylon to dole out swift justice was far less appealing when it was aimed at his people.
So it is good for us to remember that we also benefit from the fact that God does not come immediately with swift and vengeful justice and punish all wrongdoing and sin in real time, because we would not escape from that. God’s patience, which allows for our time of grace here on earth, is for our good and for the sake the elect being gathered in throughout time. We must dispense with the thought that if God is not doing something about evil right now, then he’s never going to do anything about it at all.
When God gives his actual answer, which is basically, “Not yet,” he is calling us to wait until it is fully revealed, which is not something we like to do. Waiting and suffering in pain is the worst kind of waiting. I recognize here that there are people sitting before me in these pews who have lived and suffered through terrible things, and this is not something to be dismissed or treated lightly. This is the kind of thing that people can lose their faith over. Pain and anger can drive a wedge between you and God that lasts a lifetime. It reminds of the pain a woman told me about that was still with her from a childhood made miserable by a father who was supposed to love her. And where was God to do something about it? Where was God to save?
It’s at a time like that when God’s answer—to wait, to wait for him to act—seems to us to be totally lacking, in no way sufficient, and yet, dear Christian, you must believe that his word and promise is the only thing in all of life that will ever prove to be sufficient and true. Hear the words of the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End saying to us, “The revelation awaits an appointed time; it speaks of the end and will not prove false. Though it linger, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay.” (2:2,3) God guarantees that he will act, but in his time, according to his plan.
Even now, 2600 years later, some of that revelation is still lingering, awaiting it’s appointed time. What’s the part that has come? Yes, Babylon came with God’s judgment and cut the kingdom of Judah down like a tree, and then Babylon faced its reckoning too and was later cut down. That was all kind of intermediate fulfillment, but from the stump of Jesse grew a little sprout, a remnant of life that God preserved. And soon, God finally brought the main part his answer to the question, 3) “How long, Lord, until you save me?”
“When the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under the law.” (Galatians 4:4). This Son was God’s answer to everything the prophets prophesied. He was the answer for everyone who had been waiting so long, waiting with their whole being, like watchmen waiting for the morning. God had told his people to put their hope in his unfailing love and his full redemption, and Jesus Christ, was the one born to redeem us from all of our sins.
The Answer is in the One who lived righteously and trusted God completely, and yet he was given into the hands of violent men. The Answer is the One who cried out to God on the cross and was abandoned and forsaken because God was busy redeeming us. The Father’s ears were attentive to our cry instead of his own Son’s, who was put to death, but God did not abandon him forever, nor did he let his Holy One see decay! He raised him up from the dead on the third day. Jesus was God’s answer for it all, the Righteous One punished for the wicked, to justify many and fulfill all God’s promises.
Yet even now, with sins paid for and salvation won, Jesus has asked us to wait for our final redemption to draw near, the day when he will come and serve us the wedding banquet of salvation. His promise in the Scripture causes so much anticipation for us. “Look I am coming soon! (Rev 22:7) He’s coming soon to make all things new, to deliver God’s judgment on the wicked once and for all and to take us home to be with him forever.
“Soon!” He says! A fairly relative word for the God of all eternity. But since Jesus already answered the question, “How long ‘til God saves me?” with his death on the cross, now the question has been transformed to something more like this, “How do I endure when life is full of conflict and Jesus hasn’t come back yet?” God gives us that answer too, through the prophet Habakkuk, “the righteous person will live by his faith.” (Hab 2:4)
The believer knows and trusts that God will be faithful to all his promises. By that faith, God preserves us, and in faithfulness we endure! We may suffer grief and all kinds of trials, maybe a 21st century lion’s den or fiery furnace, and all the while, we live by faith, knowing that God will either preserve us here on earth or deliver us safely to his heavenly kingdom. Living by faith in God’s promises is how we endure.
Habakkuk started his prophecy voicing the complaint of his people to the Lord. Then he got to hear God’s answer straight from his mouth, which we don’t typically get to do, but Habakkuk wrote it down for us. Then, as he took the answer to heart, he wrote a song, much like the ones in the book of Psalms. Faith often expresses itself in song, and it’s how we’ll close today, with the last verses of Habakkuk’s song, “Though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign LORD is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to tread on the heights.” (3:18-19). That’s how we endure until he comes again. Amen!