Thank you, Corey. It's great to be with you and to have September. I'll be
preaching here in September Sunday evenings through the book of Habakkuk.
So if you have your Bible there, please keep it open at Habakkuk chapter 1. It
was the best of times, it was the worst of times. That line will probably be
familiar to a lot of you. For some of you, you might not know where you've heard
it, but it sounds familiar. For some of you, you'll know, oh yeah, that's
Dickens. Some of you might even know it's the opening line to one of his books.
It's a tale of two cities. Some of you might even know the story, the context,
why this opening line is so perfect and therefore so memorable, why it spreads
out, why it's gone viral as a line. It's the story of a French doctor who lives in
the context of, well, the French Revolution is coming, the reign of terror is
coming. All around there's hunger, there's instability, there's death and
murder. The main character spends 18 years in prison and when you know the
story, you know why this line is so perfect as a way to encapsulate the
whole book. I think if you took that line, it was the best of times, it was
the worst of times and tried to rework it a little bit to fit the book of
Habakkuk, which is this really short little book in the minor prophets, only
three chapters long. Chapters one and two would be the, it was the worst of times
section and chapter three would be the best of times. Now Habakkuk is extremely
short. You know, if you're flicking through a print Bible to try and find it,
if you blink, you'll miss it because it's so short. But, and you could go to
church for years and probably not hear it preached on or preached through. And
there's so much that we don't even know about Habakkuk himself. He's mysterious.
We know that he's a prophet. We know that he's literate. At one point he's told to
write something down on a clay tablet. So there's a tiny hint about his level of
education. But apart from that, we know almost nothing about him. We don't even
know how to say his name. People, you might have heard Habakkuk, Habakkuk. We
don't even know which language his name was in. So the kind of scholars who get
into this kind of thing debate, is it a Hebrew name that means embrace? Is it an
Akkadian name that's the name of a plant? We don't know. Okay, so he's ultra
mysterious. But his book is extremely important. Maybe disproportionately so
when we think of how little we engage with Habakkuk as a book. To stick with
where I started with this line, it was the best of times, it was the worst of
times. Everyone knows that line. It's metaphorical everyone. It's extremely
well known. It's such a well-known line that there's a parody version of it
that stand-up comedians sometimes use to begin their show. And it's a parody
based on a rapper called Buster Rhymes. Probably the first time and also
probably the last time. He's ever been mentioned in a sermon in St. C's. But the
parody is, it was the Buster Rhymes. It was the Worcester Rhymes. Perfect opening
line. And people will laugh at that if they have never heard of Dickens. They
still get that it's a reference to something that they've heard of. That
there's a great line out there somewhere even if they don't know about the
French Revolution or the reign of terror or 18 years in prison. Habakkuk is kind
of like that in a strange kind of way. So stick with me here. Habakkuk has a
perfect line that encapsulates what the whole book is about. A line that has gone
viral throughout the Bible. A line that's quoted three times in the New
Testament. A line that probably if you're a Christian you will know. And it is
this. The just shall live by faith. If you're a Christian do you recognize
that verse? Absolutely. Every hand goes up. If you're not a Christian have you
heard that verse? If you studied the Protestant Reformation at school and
Martin Luther you probably heard the verse, right? It's extremely well known.
Where is it from? The Bible. Where in the Bible? Oh I know. It's in
Romans. Bonus points. It's in Galatians. It's in Hebrews in the New
Testament. Okay. And where are they quoting from? Okay and this is
where if you know the book of Habakkuk you know they're quoting
Habakkuk. Okay what happens in Habakkuk? What's the back story? What's the
context of the line that the just shall live by faith in Habakkuk? What did
Habakkuk live through? What's the story of this book? And then when you get into
that story and you realize the kind of context that he's living in and when you
find out who said this line in the book of Habakkuk. Was it Habakkuk himself?
So we're gonna see as we go through the book it's something that God says to
Habakkuk to describe to him the kind of life that he wants Habakkuk to have in
a particular context where he feels like he's living in the worst of times. Okay
so the more we get into it the more we start to see that Habakkuk is really
important and that actually knowing the book of Habakkuk will change what might
be really familiar words to you, the just shall live by faith. But Habakkuk is
also extremely important because it's it's such a timely book, it's so
particularly acutely relevant to our own day in our own context. It's set in a
place where people didn't say it was the best of times and paradoxically it also
felt like the worst of times. It was set in a place where people just felt like
no it's just the worst of times. So Habakkuk was written in the 7th century
BC. Okay so in the time before Christ and in the world around Habakkuk there are
three huge national political military powers that have all been vying for
position of world domination. So you have the Egyptians led by their Pharaoh, you
have the Assyrians and you also have the Babylonians and the geopolitics
of this in the background to Habakkuk's life is that the Babylonians are
getting extremely powerful, so powerful that their enemies have to unite to try
and stop them from dominating. So the Assyrians and Egyptians team up and the
Babylonians utterly destroy them. Okay so you can read about this in Jeremiah
46. There was a battle, the battle of Kar-Khimish happened in 605 BC and
Jeremiah writes about it when the Assyrians and Egyptians teamed up to
fight the Babylonians and the Babylonians completely destroyed them. If you
want to, if you're in London and you go to the British Museum you can see a clay
tablet there, it's called the Nebuchadnezzar Chronicle and it talks about
this battle as well and the Chronicle tells you that some of the Egyptian
soldiers tried to flee when they saw they were losing and they tried to get
home to Egypt and the Babylonians were such an efficient military machine that
they got there ahead of them and killed every single one of them, they're not a
single Egyptian soldier made at home. Okay so this is a world-changing event
that's there in the background and what it means is that some of the world's
biggest armies have just been wiped out and now there is one big army in the
world and if you want to oppose them and it's literally a question of what yeah
but you and whose army, okay they can now do what they want in the world and
they are the Babylonians and this is and this means that they now have no rivals
they have their plan for world domination and the strategy is well if you
destroy all the military opposition then it's a soft takeover after that
because nobody has any power to oppose you and that is Habakkuk's problem. This
is why it feels like the worst of times for him because he can see that the
Babylonians are coming and humanly speaking there is nothing that can be
done to stop them. They have the right, okay in terms of might is right, they have
the right to come and take the best of what your land produces and if you don't
give them that well they'll take your sons away turn them into eunuchs in the
court of their king, they want you to live by their values, they want you to
speak their language, to worship their gods above all their supreme God Marduk
and they want you to see their city Babylon as the center of the world, as
the pinnacle of everything that you would want. It's the city of Babylon and
this might seem kind of abstract and ancient history to you, okay if you wanted
to come a bit more alive and again if you happen to be in London and you go to
the British Museum and you go to their Mesopotamia section you can see
artifacts of the Babylonian Empire and just how impressive it was. If you go to
Berlin and go to the city museum their Babylonian display will absolutely
blow you away in terms of the might and the grandeur and the resources that they
had. So this is all coming and if you're Habakkuk it's like a tsunami of
oppression is there in the distance and it's getting closer and closer and it
feels like humanly there's just nothing that you can do to stop this. So these
aren't the best and the worst of times, they just feel like the worst of times.
The world he's in was not the world as he wanted it to be and why do I say that
that's timely in 2024 in Edinburgh? Well that is how a lot of people in our
culture and our city see the world as well. So I grew up in the way back in
other ancient history the 1980s and 1990s which were in British culture were
decades of excess. Cheap credit, materialist values, living to consume, a
culture of you know spend and then show that you've spent, a culture of let the
good times roll and don't judge me way more than a culture of feeling sort of
guilty for the consequences of our actions or talking about justice across
society. But that feels like they didn't in the distant past and nowadays the
culture around us is very different. If you ask people to describe this as feel
like the best of times or the worst of times the long list of things that will
roll. Not so much letting the good times roll but the long list will be well the
cost of living crisis, the war in Ukraine, the culture war in our newspapers
and our schools, the situation in Israel and Gaza, the struggling education
system, the struggling NHS, the sense of politics being futile and unstable and
everyone hating each other and you could just go on and on. People feel deep
anxiety about all of these things and it's not surprising nowadays when you
meet young adults who don't really see a future of flourishing opening up for
them. It's hard to find housing, it's hard to find jobs, it's hard to imagine
having a family one day and you sometimes meet young people who will say
even if I could what I want to, would I want to bring children into this world.
If you lived in Habakkuk's day, one of the slogans, an export slogan,
aspirational living for the Babylonians and a sort of persuasion attempt to make
you become one of them was, may the enemy not flourish. So if you went to Babylon
itself, the city, there was a big street that you walked down when you came in,
180 meters long, really grand, display of power as you enter the city and the city
was called, may the enemy not flourish. Street is kind of implied.
So that's the message that you hear when you come into the city and that's to
tell you get on site. If you're not, you will not flourish and that's a message
to Habakkuk, people like him. But nowadays I think a lot of people around us feel
like this world that we live in is not a place of flourishing and that's why
Habakkuk is so timely. It's a book that makes us ask, how do you live as a
person of flourishing? Is that even possible if it feels like you live in
the worst of times? Or if people around you see that as the kind of age that you
live in? And what does it look to live by faith in those times? So this week and
then over the next four Sunday nights we're going to go through these these
three chapters and tonight we're starting in chapter one verses one to eleven
where we get introduced to Habakkuk and we have this first interaction with God
in that context. And that on its own is something to notice. It's actually really
important. You shouldn't just gloss it over. When you think of prophets in the
Bible, if that's a thing you think about, you tend to think of someone, probably,
who hears the voice of God to the people and then who comes and who's like a
megaphone for God. What do prophets say? Thus is the Lord, right? But Habakkuk is
different. He's a prophet, really clear in verse one, but rather than talking from
God to the people, Habakkuk is a prophet who talks to God. So in that sense he is
different. He's really unique among the prophets. So tonight we're focusing on
these eleven verses. We're going to do that briefly in three parts. Thinking
about what Habakkuk saw, because verse one tells us that he saw something, and
then we're going to look at what he did, or what he said, and thirdly we'll
look at how God responded to him. So verse one, the oracle that Habakkuk, the
prophet, saw. And sometimes in the Old Testament, when you have oracles, oracles
are messages that a prophet hears, or the oracle will be a kind of supernatural
vision that a prophet sees. Okay, so something somewhere else that a prophet
sees, some revelation of supernatural reality. But the oracle that Habakkuk
sees also is not like that. His oracle is actually a vision, or a different way
of seeing the world around him that everyone else is looking at as well.
It's not a vision of something else, it's actually the world as it really is
around him, which we're going to see as we go through these verses. And there's
something else really important again to notice here, that this is obviously an
English translation, the book of Habakkuk written extremely long time ago in
Hebrew. And in the Old Testament in Hebrew, there's a word that sometimes you
have to translate into English as oracle, something like that a
prophet hears or a prophet sees. But sometimes the same word elsewhere in
the Old Testament is something that you need to translate as burden, as a heavy
load to bear. And in those passages, it's not really talking about someone
who sees something, it's just a burden that a person bears. But sometimes it's
very clearly a vision or something that a prophet sees or hears. And so the word
has these two distinct meanings, you see translated differently in different
parts of the Old Testament. But with Habakkuk, I think those two meanings come
really close together to the point that almost that they overlap or that it's a
double meaning, both a burden and a vision. Did he see a vision? Yes. Did he bear
a burden? Yes. So for example, some of you will have grown up reading the King
James Bible. And if you read Habakkuk in the King James Bible,
begins the burden that the prophet Habakkuk did see. And that's not a wrong
translation, just like it's not a wrong translation in the ESV here, the oracle
that he did see. So when we think about what he saw, his oracle, his vision, his
burden, we have to start off seeing him as someone who is put in a very
particular position by God. He has been convinced of some things by God. He has
been compelled to see the world in a certain way by God. And Habakkuk can't
undo that. He can't unsee what he has seen. He can't unbelieve what he has been
compelled to believe. But none of that, none of the way that God has convinced
him to see the world makes his life easier. In fact, it's a burden. Makes his
life harder. It's an oracle and it's a burden. So what was it that he saw? Well,
he saw violence. How long, oh Lord, how long shall I cry for help? And will you
not hear or cry to your violence and you will not save? Why do you make me see
iniquity? Why do you look idly at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me.
Strife and contention arise. So the law is paralyzed and justice never goes
forth. For the wicked surround the righteous, so justice goes forth perverted.
Now, there's violence. I've already said that in the background there's this, there's
been this huge sort of World War in effect in the background and a huge
battle, catastrophic, terrifying. If you wonder what's going to come next for us
in our small town, in our village, that's there. There's iniquity wherever he looks,
his eyes cannot unsee the evil that is there. There's destruction, there's
strife, there's contention. The world around him is falling apart. It's being
destroyed and if you read down through this to what God says in his answer to
Habakkuk, you start to see that it's being destroyed not through neglect. You
know, our houses are falling apart just because we don't look after them and
they've kind of fallen to dust. It's falling apart through being
plundered and pillaged. Our world is being destroyed because somebody is taking
all the bits and anything of any value to them and we can't do anything to stop
them. The Babylonians can come and do what they want. Now, that's the kind of
world that you're in if you're Habakkuk. Think about it like this. So there was,
I read an article in the BBC website this week and it was about shoplifting,
which is now a really endemic problem in a lot of places across the UK. There's
really little that's out there that's a strong deterrent to shoplifters and a
lot of them steal to maintain drug addictions. And if you're a shop owner,
shoplifting is a really big problem. It's a threat to your livelihood. And
what shop owners who feel like this say in the article is, well, at the end of
the day, I just have to raise prices for the people who do pay for what they
leave my shop with. And they're the ones who pay for what's been stolen in
effect. So they get punished and other people steal and I can't do anything
about it to stop them. And also in the article, there are some shoplifters who
are willing to buy stolen things from other shops because they can resell
them at a profit as well. And who aren't really that bothered and who work with
the shoplifters. Now, in that kind of a scenario where the were for petty
crimes, feels like the law is paralyzed. What would you expect to find for the
people who live in that? That's their immediate reality. You would expect to
find what you can see in that article strife and contention. People respond to
lawlessness differently. It sets people against each other in all kinds of ways.
And Habakook, when he looks around himself and sees, okay, the law is
paralyzed and really bad times are coming. Habakook sees that happening. But
for Habakook, it's not just, I'm a shopkeeper and I sell grain and
someone came and lifted a bag of grain and I couldn't do anything to stop it.
And Habakook state, we're talking about the background to something like the
book of Daniel. It's our children who are shoplifted. It's that the
Babylonians will come along and say, okay, these look like your most talented,
healthy, young people with the brightest futures where you're from. They are now
ours. We're taking them to Babylon, new names, new language, new religion, new
education. We are going to turn them into, your future is us and you can't do
anything about it. Okay. And the law is paralyzed. That's what it feels like for
Habakook. And so Habakook has an interconnected world with international
warfare and an empire that's about to take over his home and his people and a
society that's falling apart where God's law is paralyzed, where justice wasn't
done anymore and Habakook doesn't want to go along with it. Okay. And the message
from the Babylonians is, well, here's your solution. Join us. Resistance is
futile. We are the Babylonians and that would have been the easy option by far
for Habakook in the immediate, but he doesn't want to do that. So that's what
he saw. What did he do? Well, he cries out to God, oh Lord, how long shall I cry
to you for help? Okay. So what he saw around him was terrible. It looked
hopeless and bleak, not the best of times and a cheery way alongside the worst of
times. And what you can see in this verse is that Habakook prays about it and he
prays about it a lot. Okay. You don't say, how long will I cry to you if you've
only done that once? Okay. This is repeated. This is his posture towards God,
not a one-off. This is the stuff of his prayers over and over. Now one thing to,
I'm just going to zoom out for a second to give you the big picture of the small
book of three chapters. Okay. Habakook begins like a Sam, okay, song from the
Old Testament and it ends like a Sam as well in chapter three. And in the middle,
there's something else. God speaks. But why does it begin like a Sam? Okay. Well,
think about, for example, Sam 13. How long Lord will you forget me forever? How
long will you hide your face from me? Sam 89. How long Lord will you hide yourself
forever? Okay. So it begins like a Sam and also ends like a Sam in the chapter three
is Habakook Sam. It's a song that's set to music, but for the best of times. But at
this point, we're still in the worst of times and the Sam for the worst of times
is lament. It's a call to God of where are you? Why are you doing nothing? What are
you doing? So he asks God, where are you in all of this? But there's something else
that he does here that's really important, which is that he points out to God,
that God is the reason that he doesn't want the world to be like this, that he
can't just become a Babylonian. Okay. He says, you cause me to see this. You cause
me to see this as the as evil, not as good. You are the reason that I'm that I'm
like a stick out like a sore thumb here. And what are you doing? You're making my
life more complicated. Now that thing to you cause me to see iniquity. Why do you
do this? It might sound like a strange thing to say. Okay. In first glance,
literally, you know, is are his eyes being held open so that he has to look at
these things? Is that what it means? Why do you cause me to see it? But that's not
what it means. I think that this is what he means when he says this. Something
words to these effect. It's because of you. It's because I believe in you. It's
because I believe you because I'm convinced by you, convinced of you that I
cannot be happy with how things are in the world. These aren't your standards.
This is not a reflection of your character. And I want a world that is a
reflection of your character, a world where your standards are a flourishing set.
How we flourish. It's like he's saying, you Lord are the reason to me that this
looks wrong. And if you weren't there, I wouldn't measure things by your standard.
If I didn't follow you, I would have less reason to feel lament about this.
And maybe then I could just see the world like a Babylonian and my life would
feel a lot easier. But I can't do that because you are there. Because I am
convinced of you, compelled by you. And that's why I don't want to assimilate
into Babylonian culture. I don't want to live by their values and worship their
gods. But as long as you sit by and do nothing, it's like you're making me see
the world as it shouldn't be for you. And yet what are you doing? You just leave
me here to stew in it. How long, oh Lord? Now, if you were a Christian in
Edinburgh, 2024, maybe this is a point where you start to think, I can have a
cook feels what I feel. I can relate to him. Maybe there are times where you
thought, what I believe and what the city of Edinburgh at large wants me to
believe and to do to long for, they're not easily reconcilable on many points.
And some other points, you know, in this context, my faith doesn't make being here
difficult. But another point that really does. But I can't unbelieve what I believe.
How long, oh Lord? My life would get a whole lot easier. My career would progress
faster or whatever. My immediate social circle would accept me more easily. If I
could just stop believing, if I weren't a Christian, if I just assimilated, if I
weren't an awkward person for my culture to accommodate. If you feel like that,
Habakkuk is your guy. He's your minor prophet who gives you permission
biblically to say, how long, oh Lord, do you see me, oh Lord? You've given me this
burden. So that's what he does. Lastly, and further briefly, how God responded.
And we're looking here at verses 5 to 11. So this is God's answer to him. Now, God's
answer begins, look among the nations and see. Wonder and be astounded. For I am
doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. So imagine that
you're Habakkuk and God starts to respond with, I am going to do something
that you would not believe if I told you. And I guess maybe for a lot of us, if
you're a Christian, you immediately think, I know what's coming next, it's
going to be really good. This is like in the New Testament, you know, the promise
of heaven that God has prepared something so wonderful for those who love
him that they couldn't even imagine until they get there. But here's the plot
twist. That is not what God says. What God says to Habakkuk is, you're not going to,
you wouldn't believe what I'm going to do even if I told you. I am raising up the
Chaldeans, which is another word for the Babylonians. I'm raising them up, the
people you are terrified of. They're bitter. They're hasty. That means they
bear grudges and they're in a hurry to get revenge. They plunder and they
pillage. They want to spread all over the world. They want to take all of your
homes. Everyone dreads them. Everyone fears them. They don't believe in justice.
They don't believe in dignity. The reason that they, out of all of their
different gods, they say that Marduk is the greatest, this is because Marduk is
the best warrior. His weapons are the best that's slaying his enemies. He's the
least forgiving and the most vengeful and they want to make everyone,
everywhere, into people who think that he is great. They're the ultimate
colonizers, the ultimate empire and they're also, God tells Habakkuk, they're
armed to the teeth and they love violence. They're like the opposite of the
way that God presents himself in the Old Testament. You know, they see all of
these people just as sand to be oppressed, whereas God, if you think of that
image in the Old Testament, wants to bless the whole world through Abraham.
There's a numerous of sand on the shore. So in every way, they're like the opposite
of God and God says, you won't believe what I'm doing. These are the people I'm
sending to you. Okay? Salvation from violence, more violence is coming.
Salvation from injustice, more injustice is coming. And there's a stunning piece
of, there's a stunning verse at the end there. When God finishes off describing
the people who are coming to Habakkuk in verse 11, they are guilty men whose own
might is their God. When God describes them in effect, God says that their
religion, their worship of the God Marduk, it's all a sham. It's not really the
worship of Marduk. Marduk is just a projection of the violence in their own
hearts and the power that they're addicted to where they're taking over the
world. And behold, God says to Habakkuk, I am raising these people up and I'm
sending them to you. And then God's answer stops. And you have to imagine
Habakkuk at this point thinking, what? Because God's response to him basically
is, I will fight injustice with injustice. I will fight violence with violence. And
because it's so counterintuitive to Habakkuk, so hard to understand, that's
why God begins everything by saying, you are not going to believe what I'm about
to tell you. This, the first place will make no sense to you. Now, what we're
going to see over the next few Sunday nights is that this isn't the end of
Habakkuk's interaction with God. As God is revealing the gospel to
Habakkuk, it's the beginning. But what I want to stop with tonight is saying this,
that ultimately the meaning of Habakkuk is found in the life and the death and
the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And that makes this book direct and important
to you, actually whether tonight you're a Christian or not. If you're a Christian,
what you will see through the book of Habakkuk is that Jesus is the true and
the better Habakkuk. He was someone, Habakkuk was someone you'll see who could
wrestle faithfully with God, even in surrounded by darkness and the worst of
times. Jesus did that but to perfection, to a degree that Habakkuk never did. In
his worst of times, Habakkuk can cry out, how long, oh Lord, until you do
something about this. But in Jesus' worst of times, the thing that he has to cry
out is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Habakkuk, listen to God, talk
about ending the violence and the injustice of the Babylonians through
more injustice and violence. But Habakkuk is probably standing there thinking,
what? You know, as a gut reaction, we're going to see next week what he goes on to
articulate. But Jesus entered that world of violence and ended violence and
injustice by submitting himself to it, to the violence, to the injustice of a
Roman crucifixion. He destroyed it from the inside. He defeats death by dying
because it's not possible for death to hold him. So if you're a Christian,
Habakkuk, it's like Old Testament backdrop to Jesus that helps us understand
him in really profound ways. But if you're not a Christian, finish by saying this,
that if you're starting to think about Christianity, the Christian Gospel,
and tonight you're wrestling with it through Habakkuk, what Habakkuk will
help you think through is that the Gospel is a message that will necessarily
confound you. Its claims will defy whatever expectations you begin with
about what God should be like, what God should do. And I want to say this to you
did you know that the Bible actually realizes that about you and that it
assumes that about you regardless of where you come from? Okay, let's give you
the Gospel in a couple of sentences. God is perfectly righteous and He judges you
by His perfect moral standards, but you can't meet that through your moral
performance, your religious performance. So before God, you are actually justly
condemned. It's your status before Him. But God is also gracious beyond your
wildest imagination. And in Jesus, 100% because of Jesus perfection, God offers
you unconditional acceptance, gratuitous forgiveness because He loves you and
He's your Father and He wants you to be His child. And that forgiveness then can
become the new motivation you have for how to live a different life. I want you
to imagine two people, neither of them believes this message, but who hear it.
They're both from here, but they've grown up in different generations. One is
someone from my generation in the 80s and 90s, a geriatric millennial like me.
My generation back then, our icon was you know, Noel Gallagher, you know, let the
good times roll, nobody can judge me. Someone from that generation will hear
that Gospel message and have a particular stumbling block. And it is, don't judge
me. I should be accepted, yeah, but I have a really big problem with a God who
would say, I am your Lord and I tell you to be different. Imagine person number
two is Gen Z, is like 12 to 18 years old in a Scottish high school with all of
the values that go along with that generational package. And that person's
icon is not Noel Gallagher, that person's icon is Greta Thunberg, that person is
supremely moralistic. There's all kinds of evil. How can you not live with the
consequences of your action and call other people out for them? That person
has different stumbling blocks and it's not sin being called out or the idea
that there are perfect standards and we should be held to account for them.
Well, that person will find much harder and more counterintuitive will be love
your enemies, forgive gratuitously. Don't accept people because of some of their
good deeds, love people in spite of their bad deeds. So even within two
generations in the same city you could have very different stumbling blocks.
And that's even not even beginning to think about what would it be like if you
heard this and didn't believe it and you grew up in Saudi Arabia or in Cambodia.
People have all kinds of different stumbling block reactions to the
gospel that are not the same and the Bible assumes that about you. If you
want to see this read the book of 1 Corinthians in the New Testament because
it begins with this and that when Paul in that book presents the gospel he begins
by saying that different people have different reactions to it. They find it
problematic in different ways. Jews who ask for a sign think that it's the
gospel as a stumbling block and Greeks who seek wisdom think that it's just
moronic, that it's foolishness. So what I'm trying to make here just to finish off is
that when you find Jesus you will find some of what you were looking for,
absolutely, but what you also discover is that there's a whole lot that you weren't
looking for and you realize that you should have been and there are a lot of
things that you were looking for and they're very so much depending on your
generation and where you come from in the world and where you were just not
looking for the right things at all. And whether you're reading the Bible in the
Old Testament in a minor prophet like Habakkuk where God begins to present the
gospel to him with a you wouldn't you won't believe this even when I tell you
or whether you're reading the New Testament and it's Paul in 1 Corinthians 1
saying pay attention to where you're from and how you hear the gospel. The
gospel begins with this kind of prefix to you that you will not believe this
when you are told and this is how God begins to present the gospel through
Habakkuk. So we're going to pick that up next Sunday night as we go through his
second complaint to God, but we'll finish with that for tonight. Let's pray.
Lord our God, our Father in heaven, we thank you for the light of the gospel,
for the hope that it shines into our world even when it feels like Habakkuk
felt like he was in the worst of times. Lord we thank you that the gospel is
yours, that it is your message, that it is your plan, that your Son has come into
our world in ways that confound all of our expectations and we thank you that
your spirit wrestles with us to convince us, to compel us, to bring us to Christ
from all of our different starting points. So Lord we pray that you would
encourage us, that you would build us up in faith through the time that we have
this month Sunday nights reading through Habakkuk together. We pray this in Jesus
name. Amen.