One thing must
be acknowledged at this point. Habakkuk
has definitely had his say. He has had
more than ample opportunity to express his opinions and concerns. God has been exceedingly gracious and patient
in permitting His prophet to express himself.
It is nothing less than divine forbearance any time a human is allowed
to pour their heart out to the Lord.
When we consider how high and holy God is and how low and profane we are
it is incumbent upon us to admit that by all rights it should not be acceptable
for us to even converse with the Almighty.
Psalm 8:3-5 brings this point out very well: When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and
the stars, which You have ordained; what is man that You take thought of him,
and the son of man that You care for Him?
Yet You have made him a little lower than God, and You crown him with
glory and majesty! So the fact that
He has allowed Habakkuk to ramble on for half a chapter like this is nothing
short of miraculous.
Furthermore, as
we now begin to look at God’s response we will notice that something is
conspicuously absent from His words. At
the end of chapter six we saw that Job received a withering rebuke from the
Lord after his arrogant demands that completely overstepped his authority. But here in Habakkuk 2:2-5, as the Lord opens
this next portion of the conversation, there is no evidence of any sort of
condemnation. In fact, He responds very
specifically and directly to the prophet’s questions. In a sense, He permits Habakkuk to guide the
conversation and positions Himself in a posture of response. There is no sense of admonishment, no hint of
discipline, and no sign of the chastening that Job got. This is a very convincing further evidence of
the correctness of Habakkuk’s approach.
If the man had been in the wrong here, would God really have remained
silent about it? I think not. In fact, quite often in scripture He responds
with immediacy when mankind dishonors Him.
Acts 12:21-23 records an incident in which Herod Antipas was cultivating
his self-styled image as god and king, following in the footsteps of his father
Herod the Great. Scripture says that as
a result he was immediately struck by an angel of the Lord, eaten by worms, and
died. God does not always act so quickly
to correct the arrogance of His creations.
But I find it to be non-credible to suppose that if Habakkuk had been in
the wrong with what he said, that God, in the midst of a back and forth
personal conversation with him, would have let it slide without comment.
Now then, what
exactly is the content of this answer from God?
This passage divides itself neatly into four parts, one per verse from
2:2 to 2:5. All four of these components
carry a unifying theme which undergirds them and serves to communicate the
over-arching message that God is trying to open our eyes to. He begins in verse 2:
Then the Lord answered me and said,
“Record
the vision
And
inscribe it on tablets,
That
the one who reads it may run.
The concepts to
note in this verse are permanency and clarity.
It is interesting that God orders Habakkuk to write His response on
tablets. The Hebrew is very specific; it
means a board, slab, or plank. This
stipulation seems odd because the Jews would have been using papyrus or
parchment style scrolls for centuries.
The Egyptians developed papyrus technology around 3,000 B.C. With the
notable exception of Mount Sinai and the stone tablets that God wrote on,
scrolls and ink were the predominant medium of the written word at the time of
Habakkuk. So what is God getting at
here? Is He being literal with this
requirement or does He have a hidden agenda and this is a symbolic instruction
to make a point?
There are two
possibilities. One is that the Lord is
calling to mind those aforementioned stone tablets originally given to
Moses. Why would He do that? The original Ten Commandments were sacred to
the Israelites. They were one of the
items placed inside the Ark of the Covenant for safe keeping. They were a most holy relic of the history of
God’s interaction with His people. But
by this point at the end of the sixth century B.C. the word, or oracles, of God
had been relegated to dusty back storerooms of the temple. We discussed this back in chapter one. The reverence and respect due God’s words had
largely been lost. Although Josiah had
temporarily lifted their significance one again, with his death and the
subsequent descent back into idolatry under Jehoiakim, this notoriety would
have been fading quickly. And this would
have been right in line with Habakkuk’s original complaint about the Law being
ignored. So with this instruction of
writing upon a tablet God may have been calling to remembrance just how
important a thing it was when He chose to speak.
Another
possibility can be found in the final line of the verse, which is at first
glance rather perplexing. What in the
world does running have to do with anything?
Consider this. Typically, we in
the western world, the United States in particular, tend to think of tablets as
huge and heavy blocks as long as a man’s arm, being lugged around by Charlton
Heston in the film from the 1950s, The Ten Commandments. Or perhaps we’ve seen photographs of the Code
of Hammurabi, the eight foot tall record made of diorite stone, of one of the
first known system of laws in the world.
But often the clay tablets that ancient peoples made use of were much
smaller, sometimes even as small as a modern day “tablet” computer (there is a
reason they chose that moniker when designing these things). As such, they could be surprisingly portable
and convenient. So expedient in fact
that a runner carrying messages from one city to another could have read the
message as he was running. This may have
been what was on God’s mind.
So it seems
that the order of the day here is permanency and clarity. God wants His message to not be lost. He wants it to be inscribed on human hearts
and branded on human minds. Deuteronomy
11:18 says “You shall therefore impress
these words of mine on your heart and on your soul; and you shall bind them as
a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontals on your forehead.” The Lord also wants His missive to be clear
and unmistakable. Psalm 12:6 draws this
illustration: The words of the Lord are
pure words; as silver tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times. As opposed to a base metal still waiting to
be refined, God’s words are undefiled.
They are free from deceit or falsehood.
As such they are worthy to be viewed with undimmed eyes and unquenched
spirit.
The next
segment of God’s answer is as follows:
“For the vision is yet for the appointed
time;
It
hastens toward the goal and it will not fail.
Though
it tarries, wait for it;
For
it will certainly come, it will not delay.
There are a
couple of items to note here. The first
is that God has decreed a time. He has
fixed a moment. He has established the
parameters for His plans to come to fruition.
And the information contained in the message He is giving Habakkuk has
been designated for that fixed instant.
As such, the Lord says that “it”, meaning the vision, “will not
fail”. Let’s stop and think about that
for a minute. Consider the level of
control that must be exerted over something in order to make the claim that it
will not fail. And it’s not only a level
of control over the specific item in question.
That same degree of oversight must be in place for every single
potential extraneous influence that might come into play during the course of
the resolution of the event(s) in question.
What we are talking about, in the interest of just making this one
statement, is a mastery that is so complete and so final that it is incapable
of being questioned.
Much is made in
modern Christendom over the question of God’s sovereignty. Some camps of theologians argue for a God who
is sovereign but in such a way that He permits the world to essentially run
itself. He began the work of creation
and still oversees it, but not in a minute and finely detailed fashion. They do not find it conceivable that God
could really be specifically ordering each individual drop of water that falls,
every plant that grows, all of the atmospheric disturbances that turn into
storms, and the thoughts and intentions of every human heart. Yet is that not exactly what would have to
happen for God to be able to say that anything “will not fail”. How can He be so sure? What if someone six months from now makes a
decision that is outside the scope of what God has decreed? Does it throw His whole game plan off and He
has to resort to plan B? In the last
chapter we looked at just the tip of the iceberg of God’s fiery condemnation of
Job’s arrogance. Look at some of what
the Lord says in those four chapters:
- Job 38:12-13 – God says that He has command of the morning and the dawn, in other words time.
- Job 38:34-35 – God says that He commands the clouds to give an abundance of water and sends forth lightning.
- Job 38:39-41 – God says that He provides prey for lions and prepares food for ravens.
- Job 39:13-18 – God says that the ostrich treats her young casually and cruelly, forgetting them and their needs of safety. He says she acts like this because He has made her forget wisdom.
Through these
and many more examples, the Lord describes a control of His creation that is
both vast and fine, broad and narrow, extravagant and subtle. He demonstrates mastery over such disparate
elements as the boundaries of the oceans and the birthing of mountain
goats. And God’s rule over creation
extends to mankind as well. In Exodus
33:19 He told Moses: “I will be gracious
to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show
compassion.” He had already
demonstrated this to Moses in Exodus 14:4 when He said: “Thus I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will chase after them; and
I will be honored through Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know
that I am the Lord.” This God that
Habakkuk served was and is fully in command of events on earth. He, by His own whim and no others, caused
Pharaoh to chase after the Israelites to re-capture them, knowing full well
that this would result in the destruction of the entire Egyptian army. This is a hard lesson but it is who God has
revealed Himself to be, whether we understand it or not. And most especially whether our cultured,
modern, refined tastes like it or not.
It is precisely
because of this absolute sovereignty which God exercises that He tells Habakkuk
to wait for the vision to come to pass.
Although it may seem to be taking an exorbitant amount of time to come
to fruition, the prophet is instructed to wait patiently for it with the full
assurance and confirmation that his wait will not be in vain. There is an astonishing perspective shift hidden
within this command. Usually, if God is
yet to act in a situation, our tendency is to approach it mentally from a
standpoint of waiting. We wait for the
circumstance to resolve itself. We wait
for God to intervene. We even wait for
the patience to continue waiting with patience.
In all of this waiting we are naturally inclined to view God’s
involvement as taking a long time to develop.
The more desperately we want something the more it seems that He is
taking forever to bring it to pass. But
this is a fallacy of human perception and thinking. All events, being decreed by God, occur at
precisely the moment He has chosen for them.
Observe the wisdom of the preacher in Ecclesiastes 3:11: He has made everything appropriate in its
time. All of His decrees, decisions,
stratagems, and devices are appointed.
They will certainly come to pass.
That means if something that we want to happen is not happening yet it
is specifically because God does not wish it to happen yet. Even the yearning for the thing and the
longing we feel, oftentimes without satisfaction, has been placed there by
God. The remainder of Ecclesiastes 3:11
says: He has also set eternity in their
heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the
beginning even to the end. There is
no facet of life that God has not ordered according to His desires.
Following this
revelation of sovereignty, God then proceeds to give Habakkuk a picture of the
very soul of mankind.
“Behold, as for the proud one,
His
soul is not right within him;
But
the righteous will live by his faith.
Notice what is
being communicated here. A contrast is
being drawn between two opposites. God
is indicating that a person who is prideful is distorted or twisted. The Hebrew literally means to be swelled up
or heedless or show presumption. Over
against those who evidence such behavior are presented those, called “the
righteous”, who live by their faith.
What is the contrast here? Why
are the proud compared with the faithful?
Having faith is intrinsically a demonstration of humility. To place one’s trust in something or someone
outside of you is to place yourself into a position of dependence. If you are not the primary driver behind the
wheel of the car then you have to submit your safety and well-being to the
skills and abilities of the one doing the driving. This is what it means to live by faith. And God is saying that if we refuse to do
that, then not only are we proud but our very souls are not right within
us. They are corrupted. To put it another way, to live without faith
is to be an aberration of nature.
Why would this
be? Why does a lack of faith qualify one
as an anomaly? Because God designed us
to live in and by faith. He designed
humans to be in communion with Him. And
to be in communion with God is to automatically be placed into a position of
being less than the one you are in harmony with. Thus being in accord with the Lord is to be
inherently in a position of faith and trust and that is how He designed us to
operate. To function in any other way is
to miss the mark.
To further
emphasize this point God now presents His own word picture, in contrast with
Habakkuk’s fish and fishermen illustration, to both respond to His prophet’s
concerns and continue to build His own case:
“Furthermore, wine betrays the haughty man,
So
that he does not stay at home.
He
enlarges his appetite like Sheol,
And
he is like death, never satisfied.
He
also gathers to himself all nations
And
collects to himself all peoples.
The Babylonians
are likened to a drunk man. This drunk
is betrayed by the alcohol he so desperately craves. He is never at rest, never peaceful, always
on the move. And although that may seem
appealing on the surface, in reality it is a curse that stems from
discontent. We are often dissatisfied
with the normality of our lives. We long
to be out from under the burden of responsibilities, commitments, and pressures. In our minds we fantasize about how wonderful
it would be to fly free, unhindered by the trappings of civilization which hold
us in bondage. Have you ever wondered by
vacations are so appealing to people?
It’s because they offer us a temporary reprieve from the mundane. An escape from the humdrum. They give us a teasing glimpse of this
mythical land of freedom that we so desperately long for.
But the grim
reality is that this idea of freedom and escape is a myth. It is an illusion fostered upon our
consciousness by the sin that consumes us.
And like death, this constant thirst for more freedom, more
entertainment, more scratching of our psychological itches, will never be
satisfied with the material. In His word
picture God likens our craving unto death itself, who is never satisfied with
the harvest it has reaped so far. There
is always the drive to keep going, just over the next hill, to find the next
fix. And so we gather to us that which
we think will satisfy us in an endless cycle of self-indulgence and
materialism.
The Lord
finishes His picture by explicitly referring back to Habakkuk’s concerns about
the Babylonians with the description of our drunk gathering to himself all
nations and collecting to himself all peoples, just like death. This mirrors the prophet’s characterization
of the Babylonians as fishermen who continually sacrifice to their nets and
repeat the cycle of gathering up human fish, without end. In the same way death is inexorable. It respects neither class or training, age or
intelligence, health or money. It is the
great equalizer that comes to us all in the end.
This portion of
the Lord’s answer and the four parts that it is comprised of can be seen on two
levels. On one, which He will develop
further with the rest of the chapter, He is specifically addressing the
Chaldeans. He is assuring Habakkuk that
ultimately they will come to naught. In
the end, God has decreed what will happen.
It is completely outside the sphere of influence of either Habakkuk or
the pagans. And His words, although they
may seem a long time in coming to pass, will happen at exactly the time that He
has ordained for them to occur. Further,
the Chaldeans, in their quest for material wealth and power, will ultimately
bear the curse of their idolatry in their own flesh. Their very souls are corrupted and
twisted. They are not upright within
themselves. So even though they may
appear on the surface to be content, prosperous, and powerful they will ultimately
be left empty, devoid of meaning to their existence, and in the due course of
time victims to the specter of death.
This response
may seem unpalatable to us. God is
essentially saying, “Don’t worry about the Chaldeans. It doesn’t matter what they
do now because in the end they’ll get what’s coming to them.” Hardly re-assuring perhaps for a Jewish
prophet who will be watching his country burn in a few short years. And probably not very comforting for we in
our modern day, dealing with cancer, bankruptcy, apostatizing children, lost
jobs, broken homes, flat tires, high blood pressure, and a country that seems
hell bent on going to hell. What we most
want is for God to solve the problems we bring to Him with immediacy and
finality. We don’t want to be told that
God doesn’t necessarily have any intention of relieving the day to day stresses
and pressures we face.
But that is
exactly the point. And it is the second
level on which God’s reply operates; as an address not just to Habakkuk about
the Babylonians, but to all of humanity about the reality of their lives. The beauty of this is that it both condemns
and exhorts, warns and encourages, promises alternatively frustration and
exhaustion or bliss and contentment. The
key differentiator is which side of the “trusting God” fence you come down on.
If you regard
lightly and frivolously the words of God then you face His wrath. Be not in spirit like Jehoiakim, king of
Judah, was in deed when he burned the scroll of Jeremiah as it was read to
him. In Jeremiah 36:29-31 the Lord gave
this foolish king the following response: And
concerning Jehoiakim king of Judah you shall say, ‘Thus says the Lord, “You
have burned this scroll, saying, ‘Why have you written on it that the king of
Babylon will certainly come and destroy this land, and will make man and beast
to cease from it?’” Therefore thus says
the Lord concerning Jehoiakim king of Judah, “He shall have no one to sit on
the throne of David, and his dead body shall be cast out to the heat of the day
and the frost of the night. I will also
punish him and his descendants and his servants for their iniquity, and I will
bring on them and the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the men of Judah all the
calamity that I have declared to them – but they did not listen.”’” But on the other hand, if you regard with
reverence and devotion the words of God then what Jesus spoke in John 5:24 will
be spoken of you: “Truly, truly, I say
to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life,
and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.”
And if you
refuse to wait for God to act in His own time but instead try to manufacture
events to your satisfaction then you will place yourself outside of the will of
God Almighty and run the risk of being trampled by that divine will, which is
guaranteed to accomplish its purposes.
Be not like King Saul, who disobeyed the Lord in the destruction of the
Amalekites in an attempt to manufacture his own riches and comfort. And then exacerbated his crimes by going to a
medium or spiritist, which the Lord had expressly forbidden. As a result Saul became the adversary of
God. In 1 Samuel 28:16-19 Saul received
the following condemnation: Samuel said,
“Why then do you ask me, since the Lord has departed from you and has
become your adversary? The Lord has
done accordingly as He spoke through me; for the Lord has
torn the kingdom out of your hand and given it to your neighbor, to David. As you did not obey
the Lord and did not execute His fierce wrath on Amalek, so the Lord has
done this thing to you this day. Moreover the Lord will also give over Israel
along with you into the hands of the Philistines, therefore tomorrow you
and your sons will be with me. Indeed the Lord will give over the
army of Israel into the hands of the Philistines!” Instead of acting like Saul, rest on the
promises of God, such as the one found in Isaiah 64:4: For from days of old they have not heard or perceived by ear, nor has
the eye seen a God besides You, who acts in behalf of the one who waits for
Him.
And do not
become a twisted mockery of what God created you to be by being a proud person
of no faith. Do not be foolish like
Christ’s disciples in Luke 8:22-25: Now
on one of those days Jesus and His disciples got into a boat,
and He said to them, “Let us go over to the other side of the lake.” So
they launched out. But as they were sailing along He fell asleep; and a
fierce gale of wind descended on the lake, and they began to
be swamped and to be in danger. They came to Jesus and woke Him up,
saying, “Master, Master, we are perishing!” And He got up and rebuked the
wind and the surging waves, and they stopped, and it became calm. And
He said to them, “Where is your faith?” They were fearful and amazed,
saying to one another, “Who then is this, that He commands even the winds and
the water, and they obey Him?”
Rather, be like the centurion who, in Matthew 8:8-10, in spite of his
pagan Gentile heritage displayed greater faith than the Israelite children of
promise: But the centurion said, “Lord,
I am not worthy for You to come under my roof, but just say the word, and
my servant will be healed. For I also am a man under authority, with
soldiers under me; and I say to this one, ‘Go!’ and he goes, and to another,
‘Come!’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this!’ and he does it.” Now
when Jesus heard this, He marveled and said to those who were
following, “Truly I say to you, I have not found such great faith with
anyone in Israel.
Finally, do not
be consumed by the pleasures of this world and ultimately, whether in this life
or the next, become destitute as the prodigal son was in Luke 15:14: Now when he had spent everything, a severe
famine occurred in that country, and he began to be impoverished. Rather, follow the example of Jesus in
John 4:34 by making obedience to the Father your food and drink: Jesus said to them, “My food is to do
the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work.
In all four of
these areas there is a duality of application.
You can give heed to the words of the Lord and experience peace, joy,
contentment, and security. Or you can
ignore His instructions and experience conflict, despair, suffering, and
chaos. Ultimately, it comes down to a
single question. Will you trust
God?
Each of the
four segments of the beginning of His response to Habakkuk revolves on the
fulcrum of that most important of all issues.
The Lord instructed Habakkuk to record His words in such a way that they
were securely stored and easily accessible because the foundation upon which
trusting God is built is a reverence and adherence to His revelation. He advised Habakkuk to wait for the prescribed
and ordained fulfillment of the vision, regardless of how long in human terms
it took to be accomplished, because it is critical for us to realize that a
sovereign God’s timetable is not ours.
He does not order and orchestrate events in such a way as to appease our
impatience. And it requires trust on our
part to hold fast to that truth in the midst of the storms of life. God described those who are prideful and
lacking faith as distorted and corrupted because He created us as beings of
faith who depend on Him for everything.
To be and act in a manner contrary to this design is to be a pale and
shallow reflection of our original blueprint.
And God painted a bleak word picture of addiction and ultimately doom to
describe those who pursue profane rather than sacred solutions to their
appetites because placing our faith and trust in things of this earth where
moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal will guarantee us lives of
dissatisfaction, never achieving the lasting bliss we long for, which will eventually
result in an eternity of the same empty existence.
Will you humble
yourself and trust the Lord or will you insist on placing your own wisdom on a
pedestal that drives you to be heedless of the wisdom of God? This is essentially the question He posed to
Habakkuk and it echoes across the expanse of time to us today as well.
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