Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Waiting Is the Hardest Part (Habakkuk 2:2-20)
Date: November, 10 2024
I grew up in the age of Nintendo. The Atari, of course, changed the world by ushering us into the era of the universally accessible video game, but the Nintendo took things a giant leap forward. And the most famous and most enduring icon of the age of Nintendo (that can still earn over a billion dollars at the box office, almost 40 years after its release), is Mario. Do you remember playing the original Super Mario Brothers game on the original Nintendo? Man, I do. I played every level of that game more times than I can even begin to count. I mastered the infinite lives hack in world 3 level 1. I made speed runs where I saw just how fast I could get through the whole game. I think the fastest I ever did it was 15-20 minutes. That’s not completely terrible, but it’s also not very good when compared with the world record. And, yes, there’s actually an official Guinness World Records category for fastest original Super Mario Brothers completion time. The current world record is 4:54:63. Well, the Guinness Record is a fraction of a second slower than that, but the guy who set it later unofficially beat his own record. For comparison, the fastest time possible to finish the game period (and which has heretofore only been achieved by a computer) is 4:54:26. In other words, a human is on the cusp of achieving what we previously only know to be computer-enabled perfection.
Do you know how you do that? Timing. Really good timing. That and an absurd amount of time investing in perfecting a skill that has essentially zero real world value. Timing like that may not be everything, but there are some situations in which it really matters. For instance, if your wife asks you how she looks and you wait too long to answer, you might have the right answer (which is, of course, that she looks beautiful), but in having the wrong timing, you might as well have had the wrong answer. Timing makes a difference. This morning, I want to talk with you about timing, but perhaps not in the way you are thinking right now.
Today we are in the second part of our new teaching series, Asking God Hard Questions. This series is taking us through the work of the Old Testament prophet, Habakkuk. The big idea for this series is that there are times in life when we feel the need to ask God big and hard questions about what is going on in the world around us or in our own situations. These are questions without many quick or easy answers. In fact, if you find a quick and easy answer to one of these big and hard questions, it’s almost certainly not going to be a very good answer. Asking these kinds of questions of God can feel a bit awkward, but Habakkuk’s prophetic record gives us the confidence that we can ask them all the same and He’ll listen carefully.
The challenge here, though, is that the answers we get from God aren’t always the answers we want. This puts us in the difficult place of having to decide whether or not we have enough faith to trust that God will yet make things right. This is the uncomfortable position we found Habakkuk sitting in last time. He asked God hard questions, God answered his hard questions, but the answers God gave were so far outside of what Habakkuk wanted or expected that they did little more than to prompt yet another round of hard questions. God can take our hardest questions, but we may not like His answers. In the end then, Habakkuk found himself with little more to do than to sit and wait patiently for what else God was going to say in response to his challenges.
This last part is actually why we so often do not like God’s answers to our hardest questions. His answers give us the assurance we want, but not in the timeframe we were hoping for. That is, His timing seems off to us. In the next part of Habakkuk’s prophecy, we see God give a pretty good answer to the injustice that was bothering the prophet, but the timing of His response is not going to be when Habakkuk was expecting it. As a result, God gives Him some encouragement. If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, check this out with me starting in Habakkuk 2.
Fortunately for Habakkuk, it doesn’t appear that he had to wait too long before getting an answer from God regarding what He plans to do about the evil and injustice of Babylon after announcing He was going to use the vile nation as an instrument of judgment against Israel for their own sinfulness. And, as far as answers go, this one isn’t too bad. With the nation of Babylon pretty clearly in His crosshairs, God gives Habakkuk a series of five woe oracles. These are just statements of generic judgment against the actions that fall under the auspices of each woe. We find oracles like these in various places throughout the Scriptures. It is a form of judgment pronouncement that Jesus Himself would use. Let’s quickly talk through these.
The first one starts in the second half of v. 6: “Woe to him who amasses what is not his—how much longer?—and loads himself with goods taken in pledge. Won’t your creditors suddenly arise, and those who disturb you wake up? Then you will become spoil for them. Since you have plundered many nations, all the peoples who remain will plunder you—because of human bloodshed and violence against lands, cities, and all who live in them.” This is talking about people who use economic means to bring pain and suffering on the vulnerable, enriching themselves in the process. Greed lies at the root of this woe. God’s not a fan of that. At all. The judgment here is that the tables will eventually be turned around the other way. The person who lives by the economic sword, will die by the economic sword. Babylon as a nation took what wasn’t theirs from many different nations. Eventually, things were going to be turned around the other way and they were going to be the ones being plundered.
“Who to him who dishonestly makes wealth for his house to place his nest on high, to escape the grasp of disaster! You have planned shame for your house by wiping out many peoples and sinning against your own self. For the stones will cry out from the wall, and the rafters will answer them from the woodwork.” Here we see a condemnation of people who would place their trust in their wealth as a means of avoiding the travails of life in a broken world. These people worship their wealth. It becomes the means by which they make all of their decisions. Pursuing it has become more important than how they pursue it, the result of which is that they have shown themselves willing to lie, cheat, steal, and otherwise take advantage of the weak and vulnerable people around them in order to appease their god. The stones and rafters in the second part of the woe are not necessarily literal stones and rafters, but the voices of those they have trampled on in order to gain their gold. Another option here is that they represent wealth that had been taken from other lands in order to build up their own houses. Either way, God is not going to tolerate such practices for long.
The third woe zeroes in on the injustice through violence of the Babylonian empire. Stay with me now in v. 12: “Woe to him who builds a city with bloodshed and founds a town with injustice! Is it not from the Lord of Armies that the peoples labor only to fuel the fire and countries exhaust themselves for nothing? For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord’s glory as the water covers the sea.” All the efforts to build a kingdom with violence and bloodshed will come to ruin. Such efforts will eventually be proven to have been in vain. That’s what v. 13 is about. When you try to build a structure on a bad foundation, eventually that structure is going to crumble. God may allow the building, but only as a means of judgment against the builders by virtue of the futility of the effort. There is a day coming when everyone will know the Lord’s glory. That is, they will know who He is and what He expects of us. They will know it with glee or in terror, but they will know it. No one will be able to escape such knowledge. Already, even as the apostle Paul concludes, the only ones who don’t know it are those who refuse to acknowledge it because their minds are too clouded by their unbelief to see what is otherwise patently obvious.
The fourth woe seems to hit several different points at random until we realize that a theme of taking advantage of the vulnerable ties it all together. “Woe to him who gives his neighbors drink, pouring out your wrath and even making them drunk, in order to look at their nakedness! You will be filled with disgrace instead of glory. You also—drink, and expose your uncircumcision! The cup in the Lord’s right hand will come around to you, and utter disgrace will cover your glory. For your violence against Lebanon will overwhelm you; the destruction of animals will terrify you because of your human bloodshed and violence against lands, cities, and all who live in them.” Those who look to abuse and exploit others as if they are an autonomous instrument of God’s judgment will find themselves as the ones who are ashamed, exposed as the frauds that they are. The fruits of their terrible labors will come around to terrify them as they realize what they have done.
One last woe. This one focuses on the spiritual dimension behind everything else that has propelled Babylon to the position they now hold. “What use is a carved idol after its craftsman carves it? It is only a cast image, a teacher of lies. For the one who crafts its shape trusts in it and makes idols that cannot speak. Woe to him who says to wood: Wake up! or to mute stone: Come alive! Can it teach? Look! It may be plated with gold and silver, yet there is no breath in it at all.” God is the Lord and there is no other. This was an idea driven deeply into the hearts and minds of the Israelites. Theirs was a deeply spiritual worldview that embraced the existence of a variety of other spiritual and divine beings who were both a part of God’s retinue, but also which were opposed to Him and His plans for His creation. At the same time, the things people worshiped other than God all had no substance. There was no there there. They were nothing. And to worship something that is really a nothing is foolish in the extreme. It is ridiculous and absurd. There is no honor in it at all. God delights in pointing out the silliness of idolatry across the Scriptures as He does the idolatry of the Babylonians here.
So, there you have it. Five woes. Each one highlighting a different aspect of Babylon’s injustice and oppression and unrighteousness. He condemns their greed, their reliance on things other than God to supply their needs, their unjust violence, their willingness to exploit the vulnerable, and their idolatry. These are all things God stands against. He stands against them and will act to bring justice and judgment against them. This is good news, yes? It was good news for Habakkuk to hear. It is good news for us to hear still today because God’s character has not changed. And yet, as we look around, we still see so many of these things happening in the world around us. Even people claiming the name of Jesus but who obviously have no idea what that actually means have been justly accused of being perpetrators of such atrocities. Did we miss it? Was God wrong? Does He not actually care? Is He really just not powerful enough to make such pronouncements as these anything more than sound and fury?
Those are certainly easy conclusions to draw. And yet none of those are the conclusion that God invites Habakkuk into here. Those five woes may form the heart of our passage for this morning, but in starting and stopping with them we have clipped off the beginning and end of our passage. As we have talked about many times before, context matters if we are going to understand a passage properly. This one is no exception. And the context here points to something really important to our ability to make any positive sense out of what God declares He is against here. This thing that is so important here amounts to two words: be patient.
Listen to how the passage starts in Habakkuk 2:2: “The Lord answered me: Write down this vision; clearly inscribe it on tablets so one may easily read it.” In other words, God was giving Habakkuk a message that was intended to be shared with others. It was perhaps something that was to be posted in a public space where anyone who walked past could easily see it and know God’s position on all of these various matters of injustice and unrighteousness. God wanted everyone to know what He thought and what was coming next.
But…
They were going to have to be patient to receive it. God rarely operates at the speed we want Him to. This wasn’t going to be any exception to that. Look at the next verse: “For the vision is yet for the appointed time.” That was almost assuredly not what Habakkuk wanted to hear. He wanted to hear that God was going to solve all of his problems right then and there. He wanted instant solutions just like we do. He wanted for God to say that the villains who were abusing His people were going to get what was coming to them immediately. He wanted all of the injustice and unrighteousness he was being forced to look at dealt with now. Instead this: “For the vision is yet for the appointed time.”
Okay, but when was that going to be? “It testifies about the end and will not lie.” The end? How does that help? I want all of this nonsense dealt with now. “Though it delays, wait for it, since it will certainly come and not be late.” Not be late? But, like Veruca Salt, I want it now! I know. So do I. I wish we could have everything fixed the way we want when we want. But God doesn’t operate on our timeframe. He’s God, after all, and we’re not. God’s invitation is for us to trust in Him, but He will by no means force us into that posture. He created us with the ability to make meaningful and consequential choices, and He has no intention of going back on that because that gift gives us the ability to love like He does which is the greatest gift He could give us in our creation.
What God gives us instead is a choice. The first choice is to ignore His expressed desire to see us walk away from injustice and unrighteousness and to instead pursue His character, and to live like the delay means the judgment is never actually coming. We can arrogantly assume we know better than God, living as we please rather than staying within the boundaries of His character. This isn’t a good choice, but it is one we can freely make. In God’s response to Habakkuk, He tries to paint this about as badly as He can. “Look, his ego is inflated; he is without integrity…Moreover, wine betrays; an arrogant man is never at rest. He enlarges his appetite like Sheol, and like Death he is never satisfied. He gathers all the nations to himself; he collects all the peoples for himself.”
And if that sounds bad, listen to what the next verse reveals: “Won’t all of these take up a taunt against him, with mockery and riddles about him? They will say…” And then we find ourselves right back where we started. What we suddenly discover here is that the woes we talked through a few moments ago that give us God’s thoughts on the injustice and unrighteousness of those who reject Him as God are not imagined as being spoken by Him. They are the taunts of the righteous against those who have decided to define righteousness by their own character instead of God’s. The tone of those woes isn’t gloom and doom like we might have first assumed, but rather a taunting tone of, “Ha! You fools actually think you’re going to get by with all of this?!? Let me know how that works for you.”
The other choice—the better choice—is to place our trust in God and wait with righteous patience for the vision to come to pass. This idea as God expresses it to Habakkuk is something that gets picked up by the New Testament authors as a right and proper description of how the new life in Christ is obtained. Come back to the second half of v. 4 with me: “But the righteous one will live by his faith.” Paul and the author of Hebrews both pick up this idea. They each emphasize different aspects of the idea, one the “will live” part, and the other the “by faith” part, but both senses are contained within the whole. There is life to be found in waiting on the Lord, doing life His way until He acts to make things right. When our trust is in Him we will be willing to commit ourselves to His character as our guide even though the brokenness of the world is still resting thickly around us. It is this trust that God is inviting Habakkuk into, and through him, us.
This is what the final verse of the chapter commends to us as well. Jump down to Habakkuk 2:20 with me. After that grand and comical statement of woes, look where God lands: “But the Lord is in his holy temple; let the whole earth be silent in his presence.” What is this? This is a reminder for the faithful that God really is in charge. He is in His place of authority. His presence is among His people, the people who seek Him and are called by His name. He will demonstrate the full measure of His goodness for them as their God. And from that place of authority He will act to set all things right when the time is right. We simply have to be willing to trust that He is going to do that. If we want to experience the full goodness of God, we must be willing to wait for it.
Yeah, but what about?… I’ll bet you could come up with a few of those if I gave you a second to get started on a list. In fact, I’d be willing to bet you could come up with a whole bunch of examples that could be used to make a compelling argument that none of this is true. Clearly there is no God the way we describe Him to be because if there was, He would have long since done something about all of…this. In fact, I watched a video just the other day of a prominent skeptic making just this argument. Because of all the injustice and evil in the world, there obviously isn’t a God as we Christians believe there to be. Actually, it was a rather deceptive argument because while it was really intended to be mostly against Christianity, it kept using the abuses of religion generally as arguments against Christianity specifically. That’s like arguing that because some members of a particular group of people are bad, all of them must be. We don’t accept that kind of logic there. We shouldn’t accept it here.
Arguments like these are often incredibly intimidating for Christians to encounter because we don’t know what to do with them. The truth is that without the objective standard offered by God’s character, we wouldn’t be able to objectively declare all of the things we agree with him are examples of terrible evil and injustice to be such. We would be limited to saying that we don’t prefer them. That is, Christianity provides the means by which we know those kinds of things are wrong in the first place, so to use them as an argument against Christianity doesn’t make any sense.
There’s a bigger problem here, though. It is tempting to insist that because God does not operate on our timetable with regard to gross matters of injustice around the world and in our own lives that He must be either powerless or evil. This is a false choice. There is a third way: He has a reason to allow what He does. The dichotomy we are given assumes the one asking the questions knows better than God how to run the world. That’s a tempting delusion to fall into, but it is a delusion all the same. God in His perfect wisdom knows what He’s doing and has reasons for doing it. These reasons are all wrapped up in two things: love and justice. God’s justice will result in His one day putting an end to all evil and bringing about the end of this world. God’s love, however, delays that day’s arrival to allow for as many people to receive His grace and an entrance into His kingdom as possible. The apostle Peter made this perfectly clear in His second letter: “The Lord does not delay his promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance.” If we want to experience the full goodness of God, we must be willing to wait for it.
God allows us to make meaningful and consequential choices. As a part of that, He allows the consequences of our choices to play out naturally. If He didn’t, those choices wouldn’t be truly free. We can demand that He limit the freedom of certain people when their actions cause effects that we deem sufficiently bad as to warrant such intervention, but what about when our actions do that in the opinion of someone else? Should He then take away our freedom? And if He takes away a little bit of freedom to prevent a certain level of injustice and evil, then whatever is the next level down in our estimation will become the worst sort of injustice and evil. Soon, we will be clamoring for Him to limit the choices that lead to that. Then the next level. Then the next level. God will one day act to right all wrongs with justice and righteousness. But when that day comes, all sales will be final. God doesn’t want that day to come until everyone has had a chance to buy what He’s selling. So He delays. If we want to experience the full goodness of God, we must be willing to wait for it.
What God does instead is something different and, frankly, better. Instead of cutting short human freedom or unjustly leaving anyone separated from Him without the opportunity to hear the truth, God enters into the brokenness with us so that we don’t have to bear it alone. He redeems the brokenness from within by the application of His goodness—which is often mediated through His followers faithfully applying His character to their situations and the situations of the people around them—so that what was once broken is mended and made whole. He did this most exquisitely through the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus took on the full weight of human sin. He entered entirely into the brokenness of humanity. He experienced the worst of the world’s injustice. He embraced the world’s most terrifying symbol of death and violence in the cross. And He redeemed it. All of it. All of us. His light shone in the darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it.
If we want to experience the full goodness of God, we must be willing to wait for it, but it is not a hopeless waiting. In Christ, we can have a taste of the real thing here and now. In Christ, we can be a part of these tastes of the real thing being shared with the world around us, giving encouragement and hope to those who are struggling. We can be a part of the expansion of the goodness of His kingdom as we love our neighbors and care for the hurting in our midst. We can be a part of the explosion of God’s goodness into His world, driving back the darkness, when we work for justice for the oppressed, when we minister to the orphans and widows in our community, when we help young people better understand what’s true and the world as God made it, when we give care to those who are struggling under the weight of physical illness in some form or fashion, when we make sure that no one within our sphere of influence has to be hungry, when we commit to making disciples who make more disciples, when we create a community where anyone can connect to grow in Christ and reach out for God’s kingdom, when we commit to being the church God made us to be. If we want to experience the full goodness of God, we must be willing to wait for it. But in the meantime, we can remind the world that it’s coming by how we live. Then the waiting won’t be nearly so hard.