Monday, November 19, 2018

Faith is the way to go in the face of a whole lot of woe (Habakkuk 2:2-20, Romans 1:16-17)


It was cliff hanger.

Last week weleft Habakkuk the prophet, standing on the ramparts, looking out from city wall, like a sentry on guard. Over the horizon the imminent invasion of the Babylonian empire, their vast unstoppable like a desert wind. Picking everything up before it and sweeping it away.


Habakkuk had cried out to God about the injustice and wrongdoing, violence and destruction, conflict and strife in Judah, in the face of which the courts seemed paralysed, or worse were perverted to support the cause of the unjust. “How long, God, will you let this go on, when will you act.”


God’s answer was to point Habakkuk to the meteoric rise of the Babylonian empire, the rising world super power, in the seventh century BC. The answer was that God was going to use the Babylonians to discipline Judah, and take them into exile.


Habakkuk accepts that for a righteous God injustice means judgement, but he again complains, how could a righteous God use such a violent and arrogant people, like the Babylonians. Is this greater evil really going to triumph?


That’s where we had left Habakkuk… on the rampart… Taking watch, but his eyes were not scanning the horizon for the enemy’s advance, rather he looked to God for God’s answer and God’s action. That is the cliff hanger…


In the reading we had today, God answers Habakkuk’s complaint. God tells Habakkuk to write down a lament, a funeral dirge, in our culture it maybe something we equate with the bagpipes or a kuia’s cry at a tangi. This one is a series of five woes. But in this lament is the seedbed of hope. God says to Habakkuk… ‘the righteous will live by his faithfulness’ trusting in God who keep his promises… Faith is the way to go in the face of a whole lot of woe.


Now the Babylonians would have been used to hearing laments as they broke into cities and violently subdued and abused its peoples. The book of Lamentations in the bible is a collection of laments about the fall of Jerusalem. What makes the lament in Habakkuk so different is that it is a lament for the Babylonian empire. It’s a lament for the captive people to sing, in verse five we read that it is a taunt, full of ridicule and scron. It is biting political satire. It’s powerfully subversive, and turns Babylon’s victims into hopeful survivors. 


The passage starts with the Lord replying to Habakkuk. What had been a personal dialogue Habakkuk is told to make public. He is being given a revelation that will come to pass at the appointed time. Habakkuk is told to write it on tablets, so it can be taken by a herald to all the peoples under Babylon’s heel. Writing on tablets was the Babylonian way of communicating their decrees and royal commands, but right off the bat we see that Israel’s God is letting people know who is sovereign and in charge of history. It is his decree that will come to pass in his timing.

God then liken the Babylonian emperor to a drunk. Puffed up and full of themselves. Maybe you’ve been accosted some time by someone who had had a little to much to drink and it emboldens them, they get a bit aggressive…in fact Babylon is likened to an alcoholic who is addicted to power and military conquest and just can’t seem to get enough. Bu they are not in control and we all know that will lead to their downfall.

But says God in contrast to that My righteous ones, will live by my faithfulness. The righteous will live by faith.  A humble trusting in God ,trust that God’s is faithful to his promises. It is the same way that Paul says we should live In Romans 1:17, not puffed up and dependant on our keeping of the law or our own righteousness but by faith in Jesus Christ. That his life and death on the cross has paid the price for all we have done wrong and made it possible for us to be forgiven and be bought back into relationship with God as our loving Father and his resurrection has given us new life as citizens of God’s Kingdom.  That forms the basis of our lives and how we live that faith out  faithully.

The funeral dirge contains a series of five woes…

The first woe is economic, that the Babylonians in fact all empires or institutions who acquire wealth unjustly by force or threat may feel they are building their wealth but what is really happening is that they are building debt. Eventually the creditors, those ripped off who have had it stripped away from them will wake up and there will be a reckoning. “fair Go” on a grand scale. Economic oppression breeds rebellion and revolt, hardship and financial suffering brings down governments.


The second woe is to those who would build their houses by injustice and blood shed. A house here could mean a fortress in which they feel safe or a dynasty, but if that is what you build with well even the stones with which you build will cry out against you. More than just graffiti appearing on the walls…  Violence and bloodshed can never be the basis for a just and lasting country. Those injustices will always come back till they are addressed properly.


The third woe, is that Babylon had tried to build their city and empire on conquest and bloodshed, they had a vision of violent conquest of the whole world, to impose their will with military strength and might. But in the end human plans come to nothing, they are like something that you would tear down and throw on the fire, the constant waring will simply wear the nation out. Which seems so relevant in a week where we marked the end of the first world war, where it seemed to be a race of who would run out of resources and exhaust their of men for the meat grinder of trench warfare first.

But here right in the middle of this dirge, at its heart which is often the case of Jewish poetry we are presented with God’s alternative vision for the earth. The central and important thing is at the centre of the poem. Here is the seedbed of hope beginning to sprout. The whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Glory of God as the waters cover the seas. Gods plans and purposes are at work amidst the rise and fall of empire, the swirl and blur of human political philosophy’s and policies. Below the wind swept storms on the surface of time is a deeper current, God’s plans and purposes in God’s timing. This is where the current of time is ultimately heading. Habakkuk’s contemporary picks up the same imagery in Isaiah 11:9 at the end of a vision of a peace filled Jerusalem with the coming of the messianic king, the root of Jesse. Ultimately God’s answer to the woes of human injustice is the establishment of his kingdom. Not a kingdom by political or military might, but through its kings gracious sacrifice. A kingdom you and are citizens of as we  come to put our faith and hope in Jesus Christ, that we are called to be ambassadors of in how we live out our faith. In generosity in the face of greed, loving enemies in the face of conflict and strife, seeking peace and justice in the face of conflict and injustice. Proclaiming the gospel in the face of the destructive chains of sin and death, that hold people captive. It’s subversive and counter culture but it’s God’s alternative vision for this world.

The fourth woe picks up Babylon’s wine culture again, it’s drinking culture which lead it to not only conquer their people but to force them to join in their drunken debauchery. Stripping them of their dignity, dehumanising them.  There is a sense here of sexual abuse as well. But the woe is that God is about to turn the tables and instead of them doing this to others as a way of asserting their total dominance, they themselves will be shamed. God would pour out his wrath on them. It’s interesting that in Daniel 5 we have an account of the end of the Babylonians in a druken party where they had shown their total arrogance by bringing out the temple implements from Jerusalem to use as common drinking cups, a finger writes on the wall that they have been weighted and found wanting and that night Cyrus 2nd emperor of Persia over takes the city.


But this woe also goes on to talk of the Babylonians bringing destruction to nature, stripping bear Lebanon of the cedar trees to build their city, and the wholesale slaughter of animals. Denuding the land of life, in shameful grab for indulgence. God loves and cares about creation and this passage speaks to our western civilization as well where our consumption and wealth and comfort has been at the expense of both other people and creation around us. We see the truth of God’s words as we look and discover that we too may just become exposed and shamed by that excess. It is why creation care is part of the Presbyterian churches five faces of mission. The whole earth, the whole of creation is to be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD.



The last woe concerns where Babylon puts its hope. It talks of the futility in building and worshipping idols. Worshipping the things we have made. The woe focuses on words of human activity, carved, made, covered to whom we say “wake up!” but they do not speak they do not wake up. While it is hard for us in the twenty first century to think of worshipping an idol which we have made, to worship means to base our life around upon. Do we base them on material things, status and career, family, there is a tendency to think that technology can save us...


While we started this passage with a cliff hanger. Habakkuk waiting looking out and waiting for God. It does not finish as a cliff hanger, we are left in no doubt to the way forward and where the real power and real sovereignty is. We are left with a concrete bridge across what will be seventy years of turmoil and sorrow for the people of Judah. The LORD is in his Holy Temple; let all the earth be silent before him”. Unlike the idols God is real, even though the temple in Jerusalem will be destroyed by the Babylonians, God is still in his temple on his throne in the heavens, seated above the storm as it says in Psalm 29… The phenetic behaviour of the idol worshippers to create a God who will speak is in juxaposition with the call for the earth to be silent as God has already spoken. God’s plans and purposes are still being worked out.

We started with a cliff hanger we finish with a concrete hope. The power of Babylon is exposed and seen for what it is. The seed for its destruction are already sown in its foundation of injustice and violence and while it prospers now like all such empires and institutions it too will fall. All who are puffed up and drunk on their own power significance, need to take note. Because Habakkuk’s faith in a sovereign and righteous and just God are sure and right.

While we have not yet come to Habakkuk’s response… we are not left with a cliff hanger, because we know that the righteous will live by faith. Not dependant on our own resources our own power our own strength but trusting only in God and God’s faithfulness. Trust that it it Christ’s work on the cross not our labour that puts us right with God. But the fact that God gives the oppressed people, his righteous this funeral dirge to sing, shows us that living by faith is not simple passive acceptance, rather it is a call to resistance and a subversive lifestyle of living out that faith. Speaking truth to power, proclaiming the gospel when it just seems so out of kilter with the world today. Living it out; generosity not greed, love not hate, a commitment to  real love not just the hollow resignation of tolerance… This week I was really challenged by one of Jesus truly radical disciples, for whom living by faith meant raising an army in the face of the injustice and pain and want, both spiritual and physical, of the industrial revolution in Europe.

An army like no other whose weapons were love and prayer, joyful music and care… general William Booth of the Salvation Army…

 “while women weep as they do now, I’ll fight

While little children go hungry as they do now I’ll fight

While men go to prison, in and out, in and out, I’ll fight

While there is a poor little girl upon the street, I’ll fight

While there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight

I’ll fight to the very end”…

Faith is the way to go in the face of a whole lot of woe is both subversive and revolutionary and our hope is God's alternative vision...
"That the whole earth would be filled with the knowledge of the Glory of the LORD.”

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