It was cliff
hanger.
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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