As we consider
the fourth woe directed against the Babylonians by Almighty God an image
springs into my mind. It is of a heart-broken
woman. She is in distress because of the
insensitive cruelty of her former boyfriend who has recently left her for
another woman. She feels betrayed,
embarrassed, worthless, and angry. In
her fury she takes every picture of this man for whom hatred is rapidly
replacing love. Some pictures she
slashes with a kitchen knife, gleefully ripping apart the face of her
enemy. Others she burns with a lighter,
obtaining the greatest satisfaction in watching the image of his face blacken,
bubble, crisp and finally be consumed entirely by the flames. Over the course of several hours the scorned
systematically destroys every vestige she can find of the one who spurned her.
With this
depiction I don’t mean to imply that women are helpless creatures being
victimized by their freewheeling and irresponsible men. The same situation could easily be applied in
reverse, with a man expressing intense vehemence toward a woman. The issue is not which sex is being
victimized here. In truth it has nothing
to do with gender at all. The point is
the willful and cruel destruction of a human being, either literally or
figuratively. Way back in chapter 1 we
looked at the practice of human sacrifice that was common among the pagan
Canaanite religions of Habakkuk’s day.
As was pointed out then, one of the most significant problems with this
idolatrous worship was the utter disregard for the sanctity of human life. Adam, Eve, and every generation of their
descendants has been crafted Imago Dei,
or “in the image of God”. As such, we,
although not God, carry His likeness within us.
We represent our creator just as a portrait or a sculpture symbolizes a
person. And just as when a portrait is
burned or a sculpture is smashed does it destroy an image of said person, when human
life is destroyed such an act impugns God Himself by corrupting that which
symbolizes His own nature.
Now we will see
the full measure of God’s wrath which is directed at the perpetrators of such
heinous crimes. Additionally, as it
pertains to this fourth woe in Habakkuk 2:15-17, we perceive that it is not
only the loss of human life that tarnishes the image of God. Any act which has a goal of bringing shame to
another human being is a form of that same principal sin. Observe verse 15:
“Woe to you who make your neighbors drink,
Who
mix in your venom even to make them drunk
So
as to look on their nakedness!
We have to note
an interesting translation oddity in this verse because it frames the intent of
everything that follows. This curiosity is
best displayed by listing parallel translations of the same phrase, as follows:
- Mix in your venom – NASB (above)
- Pouring it from the wineskin – NIV
- Pour out your wrath – ESV
- Puttest thy bottle – KJV
As you can see,
these treatments of the original language seem to vary widely. What is the explanation for this and what
does it indicate as far as how we should understand this verse? The difficulty stems from attempting to
translate 3,000 year old Hebrew, which has all the nuances, idioms, figures of
speech, and variations of word meaning as a modern day language does. Consider the word ‘Internet’. 30 years ago that word had no meaning but now
it is so common as to see virtually every day use, even in languages other than
English. Alternatively, think about the
word ‘cool’. Prior to somewhere around
the middle of the 20th century that word exclusively meant cold or
chilled. Nowadays it is more typically
used to indicate that something or someone is excellent or special in some
way. The only way to accurately
determine the meaning is to examine the context that ‘cool’ is being used
in.
In the same
way, this Hebrew phrase can be rendered into modern English as either “puttest
thy bottle” or “pourest out thy wrath” depending on how one depicts the
original Hebrew vowel points. Of the
two, “pourest out thy wrath” is the preferred treatment. Firstly, it must be stated that the point of
this verse is not the literal drunkenness of either the Chaldeans or the
nations and peoples they are oppressing.
With all of these taunt songs, figurative language and metaphor is used
frequently to express ideas and make points.
In this case, making your neighbors drink is symbolizing coercion and
manipulation into sinful idolatry and debauchery.
It is true that
the Babylonians were notorious for their drunken revelries and orgies. An example is Belshazzar’s party, recorded in
Daniel 5, which ultimately resulted in the loss of their empire to the
Medo-Persians. Central to their methods
of conquest were to indoctrinate the cultures they were assimilating into this
same mode of godless living. This is
exactly why the Babylonian army took many young Jewish nobles such as Daniel
and his friends into captivity back in Babylon and worked extensively to coach
them in proper Chaldean culture and customs, including the unrestrained consumption
of alcohol.
So at this
point it might indeed seem that “puttest thy bottle” is the best contextual
translation. But the remainder of the
verse tells another tale. The true aim
of Babylon in this was not to make friends and cozy up with their subjects. Instead, their real purpose was to deceive
the captured nations into humiliation and shame. The objective was to “look on their
nakedness”, which was probably a reference to the custom that ancient
conquering empires practiced of parading their captives naked through the city
streets. Again though, just as with
drinking, while nakedness may bear reference to an actual specific act, the
greater meaning is seen as a metaphor.
In this case, the comparison is not public nakedness itself, but the
painful embarrassment and degrading shame that would come from such an
experience. What God is describing here
is that the oppressors of His people don’t just conquer a land and kill or
enslave its people. They go far beyond
the bounds of normality and decency to purposely and wantonly deride and
dishonor their captives. We will see
these elements expanded upon shortly with verse 17.
A further
argument for “pourest out thy wrath” as the preferable translation is the
symmetry that it makes with the next verse.
We will examine the full text momentarily, but for now focus on the
phrase “the cup in the Lord’s right hand
will come around to you” in 2:16.
The scriptures are filled with references to a cup in association with a
certain characteristic of God. Jeremiah
25:15 puts it this way: For thus the
Lord, the God of Israel, says to me, “Take this cup of the wine of wrath from
My hand and cause all the nations to whom I send you to drink it.” Revelation 14:9-10 reveals the following: “If anyone worships the beast and his
image, and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink
of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of
His anger”. Jesus referenced this
same idea in Matthew 26:39 when He said the famous line: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I
will, but as You will.” All of these
passages and more clearly indicate the idea that a cup being associated with
God is meant to symbolize His wrath and indignation. The prophecy to Jeremiah and the angelic
proclamation in Revelation bluntly speak of wrath and anger. And Christ was not referring to a cup of the
physical torment He was about to endure when He prayed in the Garden of
Gethsemane. Rather He was reluctant to
partake of the cup of His Father’s righteous anger over sin. It was by far the greater torture.
So in the
context of our passage in Habakkuk, if we interpret 2:15 as “pourest out thy
wrath” it dovetails very neatly with the next verse. A variation of this theme can be seen in the
Latin translation by Jerome in the 5th century A.D., “mittens fel suum”,
which means “adding thy poison thereto”.
Here then is the key which unlocks the whole taunt song. It’s not just that the Babylonians were
engaged in coercion and duplicity. It
wasn’t only that they were intentionally shaming people. The clinching element in their depravity was
that they were brutally, angrily, and selfishly afflicting humanity with the
full force of their penchant for evil.
As with the image of a woman destroying pictures of her former love, the
Chaldeans were white hot with voracious rage and unquenchable blood thirst
which they attempted to satisfy by crushing their opponents needlessly and
recklessly far beyond what was necessary for victory. This then is their great sin; the systematic
debasement of image bearers of God and thus the implied disparagement of the
Most Holy One Himself.
For this crime
God proceeds to reveal in verse 16 the full measure of recompense that will be
meted out to pay for these sins:
“You will be filled with disgrace rather
than honor.
Now
you yourself drink and expose your own nakedness.
The
cup in the Lord’s right hand will come around to you,
And
utter disgrace will come upon your glory.
Do you see the
word “filled” in the verse above? The
same word is found in Genesis 41 in the account of Joseph. Pharaoh had a dream which disturbed him
greatly. Through God’s enablement Joseph
interprets the dream beginning in verse 29: “Behold, seven years of great abundance are coming in all the land of
Egypt; and after them seven years of famine will come, and all the abundance
will be forgotten in the land of Egypt, and the famine will ravage the land. The word “abundance” in Genesis is the same
word rendered as “filled” in Habakkuk.
The point being made is that the Babylonians will have a profusion and
an excess of disgrace. We aren’t just
talking about a little embarrassment here.
It won’t be some mild irritation.
They will be sated with degradation to the point that their “stomachs”
are filled to bursting, just as the Egyptian storehouses were piled high with
grain during the seven years of plenty.
The next line
of verse 16 contains the word “nakedness” in the NASB translation. This is actually not a very good rendering of
the Hebrew. By using the same word here
as in verse 15 it conveys the idea to English readers that both verses are
talking about nudity. But that misses
the mark by a large margin. More
accurate would be “uncircumcised”. To
the Israelite mindset to call someone uncircumcised was far worse than
referring to any shame associated with their nakedness. Uncircumcised meant that you were
profane. You were unclean. You were not a part of the chosen people of
God. You were quite literally a second
class citizen of the human race. For a
Jew to call another Jew uncircumcised was a grievous insult. This is why it was so hateful to the Jews
when Stephen referred to them exactly that way in Acts 7:51: "You men who are stiff-necked and
uncircumcised in heart and ears are always resisting the Holy Spirit; you are
doing just as your fathers did.” The
offense was so great that it contributed to the mob mentality that resulted in
his being stoned to death immediately afterward. Thus the epithet being directed against the
Chaldeans by God left no doubt to His Hebrew audience exactly the level of
rebuke being assigned to them.
As already
mentioned, the third line of verse 16 carries the idea of the Lord’s fury over
sin represented metaphorically as a cup or a wineskin. This container is filled up completely with
the enormity of God’s righteous anger. And He then proceeds to pour the contents out
on His enemies; those who are opposed to His statues and precepts. What is the result of this divine wrath being
poured out on the Babylonians? The
fourth line of the verse tells the tale.
Glory was aimed at by the pagans.
Ezekiel 1:28 paints a beautiful portrait of this idea of splendor: As the appearance of the rainbow in the
clouds on a rainy day, so was the appearance of the surrounding radiance. Such was the appearance of the likeness of
the glory of the LORD. But in the face
of God’s judgment this grandeur will be replaced with utter disgrace. This ignominy is so severe that it hearkens
to the plight of our old friend Job in chapter 10 verse 15 of the book that
bears his name: If I am wicked, woe to
me! And if I am righteous, I dare not
lift up my head. I am sated with
disgrace and conscious of my misery.
Again we see the idea of being filled to the rim or stuffed to bursting
with the degradation that accompanies the anger of God Almighty.
This is no mild
rebuke that the Lord is foretelling. He
fully intends to meet out discipline in proportion to the scale of the offense
that has been committed. And perhaps to
be sure we are perfectly clear as to what He is upset about He fleshes out the infraction
in even more detail in the next verse:
“For the violence done to Lebanon will overwhelm
you,
And
the devastation of its beasts by which you terrified them,
Because
of human bloodshed and violence done to the land,
To
the town and all its inhabitants.
There is a
principle of warfare called “scorched earth”.
It involves destroying everything in a region that might be of use to an
enemy army. This would include food
sources, transportation, communications, industrial resources, or even
population. In history this tactic has
been used both defensively, to deny said assets to an invader, or offensively,
to demoralize an opponent by laying waste to their homeland. An example of this from recent American
history is the “March to the Sea” conducted by Union general William Tecumseh
Sherman in the Civil War. From November
15th to December 21st, 1864 Sherman’s army marched from
Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia. Along the
way they wrecked 300 miles of rail lines, numerous bridges and many miles of
telegraph lines. They also seized 5,000
horses, 4,000 mules, and 13,000 head of cattle along with 9.5 million pounds of
corn and 10.5 million pounds of fodder while destroying uncounted cotton gins
and mills. To state it bluntly, General
Sherman’s campaign completely wrecked the economy of the Confederacy and its ability
to wage war.
These scorched
earth tactics, although that term did not exist at the time, were apparently
utilized by the army of Babylon in their invasion of Palestine and eventual
subjugation of Judah. The “violence done to Lebanon” most likely
refers to deforestation employed by the invaders. At that time Lebanon was famous for its
mighty cedar and cypress trees. Such was
their fame and their infrastructural value that in 1st Kings 5 Solomon
arranged a deal with King Hiram of Tyre whereby Israel would be provided with
timber for the construction of the temple.
So when the Lord cites violence done to Lebanon He is most likely
referring to the trees. He further
mentions “devastation of its beasts by
which you terrified them”. The
implication is that the Babylonian army slaughtered the animals of the region
so as to demoralize their opponents by destroying a major source of food. Remember that the whole theme of this woe is
that of unnecessary and wanton humiliation and degradation being heaped up
against people. Therefore a safe
assumption can be made that this destruction of natural resources and
elimination of food sources in the form of livestock was an ancient form of
scorched earth warfare. This form of
wholesale viciousness is summed up by the last line of the verse with the
themes of “human bloodshed” and “violence done to the land, to the town, and
all its inhabitants”. The Chaldeans
were so intent on unscrupulously crushing the Hebrews and grinding them under
their boot heels that they cared little for the methods necessary to accomplish
this objective. God unequivocally condemns
them for this behavior. He holds their
choices and their unchecked avarice as well as blood thirst against them. And He promises retribution of the same or
worse to come against them because of it.
With this
framework in place the full meaning of this passage rises into view. As we have seen in the previous taunt songs,
with each crime being condemned there is a deeper level at which the condemnation
operates. A more foundational axis upon which
the associated wrongdoing and punishment revolves. In every case so far this profounder understanding
of reality has been inextricably linked with the character and nature of God
and how in various ways He is impugned by the actions of sinful mankind. This woe is no different in that respect. Underneath the destruction of trees and
animals, the bloodshed and violence done, the willful pursuit of shame and malevolent
intent to tear down mankind over and above what is necessary to conquer them,
is the wickedness that was mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. It is the evil ruination of God’s image
through the debasement and humiliation of His greatest creations, men. It is this distortion of His handiwork and
the accompanying loss of divine glory that incites the Lord to a flaming fury
of anger and a promise of judgment and punishment to come. Nahum 1:2-3 masterfully paints us a picture
of this aspect of God’s character: A
jealous and avenging God is the Lord; the Lord is avenging and wrathful. The Lord takes vengeance on His adversaries,
and He reserves wrath for His enemies.
The Lord is slow to anger and great in power, and the Lord will by no
means leave the guilty unpunished. In
whirlwind and storm is His way, and clouds are the dust beneath His feet.
We have, with
each woe, examined the ramifications of how it is contrary to God’s nature. Equally necessary and profitable is also an
examination of the alternative as seen in the person and work of Christ. In this case the crime on display is the
damaging of God’s image. Therefore the
opposing principle is alignment with His image.
No other person in all of history represents this better than
Jesus. Again, “He is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15) and “the exact representation of His nature”
(Heb. 1:3). This means that when we look
upon the life of Jesus, recorded for us in the gospel accounts, we are
literally seeing the mannerisms, the attitudes, the preferences, the
temperament, the choices, and the actions of God Himself. This is exactly what Jesus meant when He said
to Philip “He who has seen Me has seen
the Father” (John 14:9). So it goes
without saying that it is a profitable venture to carefully and exhaustively
study how He lived and died and lived again.
But beyond the high
level truth that Jesus is a perfect likeness of God there is another avenue of
Christ’s work that is in direct contrast to the evil depicted here in this
fourth woe against the Babylonians.
Consider the purpose of His incarnation.
He said to Pilate in John 14:37: “You
say correctly that I am a king. For this
I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the
truth.” What is that truth? Once again Jesus gives us the answer, this time
in John 14:6, just a few verses before His statement to Philip above: “I am the way, and the truth,
and the life”. Truth is just not a
philosophical principle. It is not only a
moral code. It is more than a list of rights
and wrongs, dos and don’ts. It is all of
these but only in as much as they are bound up in the nature of God because it
is His essence which defines truth.
Therefore, if Jesus perfectly embodied the nature of His Father then He
is literally the embodiment of truth itself.
So we might say that that Jesus came to testify to the truth about who
God is. And in a sense, all image
bearers of God, on some level within themselves, also testify to the truth of
who God is, albeit imperfectly or as Paul put it “in a mirror dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12).
Thus when we malign, shame, injure, or destroy another person we are doing
damage to truth.
Now then, if we
continue the theme of Christ as the model which stands against this defamation
of divine character, a facet of His ministry begins to emerge. Jesus was sent into the world to rescue
images of God from eternal destruction and damnation. He was sent to graciously make a way for
mankind, alienated from and hostile to the Lord, to be adopted into the family
of God, freed from bondage to sin, forgiven for their trespasses, and
ultimately transformed into a perfect likeness of God just as Christ is. In this way, the incarnation of the Son of
God is the ultimate restoration of God’s image through the salvation of His
damaged image bearers. Paul describes
this process in Ephesians 1:5-7: In love He predestined
us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to
the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His
grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In Him we
have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our
trespasses, according to the riches of His grace. God established this plan only incidentally
for our benefit. The primary objective
is not our salvation but the “praise of
the glory of His grace”. He desires
to be exalted greatly. Part of that
exultation may come from acts of worship done by those He has saved. But
I contend that what Paul is teaching here is that the act of saving is itself a
magnification and amplification of His glory in the fact that those created in
His image are made perfect sculptures of Him as they were originally designed
to be. In this way His likeness will be
on display even more frequently and incessantly, every time a Christian is encountered.
If this is true
then a tremendous onus of responsibility lies on those of us who have professed
faith in Christ to make ourselves available as instruments through which God
might carry out this plan of exalting the glory of His grace. In other words, evangelism. Every time we have the honor and pleasure of
helping someone repent of their sins and place their saving faith in Jesus
Christ we are in effect assisting in the reversal of damage to God’s image that
the Babylonians were guilty of perpetrating with their barbarism and
cruelty. If that is true then the
opposite must also be true. Namely, if
we refrain from taking part in the salvation of lost sinners then we are aiding
and abetting through inaction the shameful loss of glory that God experiences
every time one of His image bearers dies in their sins. Make no mistake. God is sovereign and will rescue who He
chooses. Jesus said in John 6:37: “All that the Father gives Me will
come to Me”. It is purely and
exclusively according to the Father’s design that people come to Christ. The Father has given them to the Son. But at the same time, in some mysterious way
that we don’t fully understand, He will also hold us fully accountable for our part
in this work, our action or inaction, our obedience or disobedience. Jesus told the founders of the church in Acts
1:8: “you shall be My witnesses
both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part
of the earth.” He was not
asking. He was telling them and us what
we are commanded to be and to do. Woe to
us if we disregard our responsibility.
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