Word of Salvation – Vol.53 No.43 – November 2008
My God, My Holy One
Sermon by Rev John Zuidema
Sermon 2 of 6, on Habakkuk
Scripture Readings: Habakkuk 1:12 — 2:1; Romans 8:28-39
Suggested Singing: BoW 337; 112; 359; Rej 529
Beloved people of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I wonder whether you have ever thought about the fact that God is not just God of the many Christians in this world, he is also God over every non-Christian and every terrorist, and anyone else you would like to mention.
God’s power is not just limited to Christians but his power extends to the four corners of the universe! Many people may not acknowledge his power, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that God is God over them! This is something that Habakkuk needed to learn. God’s answer to Habakkuk’s first complaint is that God is not simply the Lord of Israel; he is the God of the nations. At this very moment in history, in Habakkuk’s day, God was in the process of raising up the Babylonians, and soon he’d be using them to punish his own people for their sin.
This shocking truth created another problem for Habakkuk. The cure seemed worse than the sickness. The evil of the Babylonians was much worse than the wickedness of the Jews and that brings us to Habakkuk’s second complaint.
Notice how the prophet begins. Even after all this bad news, he begins with a statement of confidence about his God. “O LORD, are you not from everlasting? My God, my Holy One, we will not die” (vs 12). Christians are often perplexed with the Lord’s strange dealings amongst the nations in history, even today — Iraq, the Middle East, Iran, Zimbabwe, Kenya, the Sudan. Sometimes we’re perplexed about what God is doing in our own lives and we ask, “Why does God allow this to happen” or “what have I done to deserve this?”
Now congregation, I am not suggesting that we should have pat answers to everything that comes our way, but I do suggest that when things occur that are beyond our immediate understanding, we endeavour to adopt a right approach.
Here Habakkuk is asking, but I wish to make it a statement. “Lord, I don’t know why you would raise up a more wicked nation to punish your own people, but this is what I do know, you are the eternal holy God and you work for your glory and the eternal benefit of your people, and therefore I know that you will continue to care for us no matter what happens’.”
Despite God’s terrible pronouncement of judgment, Habakkuk begins by affirming some fundamental convictions about the nature and character of his God. He reminds himself that God is God and that he knows what he is doing even when it is beyond man’s comprehension.
There is a danger congregation that we as Christians can have God so nicely packaged that when something happens that doesn’t fit into our packaging we immediately think that it cannot be from God, or that God wouldn’t do such a thing.
I am not speaking about God’s love or his faithfulness or his care for us, or his holiness, or those sorts of things which we know are from everlasting to everlasting. But sometimes God does the extraordinary, or he uses unconventional means, or the most unorthodox ways to fulfil his purposes.
And sometimes when he does so, people who have been Christians for years seem to drop the ball as far as their trust and faith goes. All the years of teaching about God’s love in Christ, all the promises contained in his Word that nothing in all creation can separate us from his love or allow us to fall out of his eternal hands seem to be forgotten, at least for a time.
I suggest this happens because we have the wrong approach. Yes, I know that it is a very human reaction to affirm that life is sweet and that it is a good gift from God. No one needs to remind us of that. But sometimes we also need to remind ourselves about the character of our eternal holy God, no matter what our immediate dilemma or crisis might be. So today, allow me to suggest an alternative approach if some crisis appears in history or your life.
Lord I don’t know why this event has happened or why you have taken my loved one.
Lord I don’t know why you have given me this sickness.
Lord I don’t know why my business has failed.
Lord I don’t know why I have to spend the rest of my days in a nursing home.
Lord I don’t know what will happen to my family because of these events.
But this is what I do know:
You are the everlasting, eternal holy God and you work for your glory and the eternal benefit of your people and therefore I know that you will continue to care for us no matter what happens. I know this because your Word reminds us what marvellous things you have done in the past, not least being the wonderful salvation we have in Christ, what marvellous things you do today and the sure and wonderful promises that you will still fulfil in the future, not least being that you will take us to our eternal home with you!
Congregation let’s remind ourselves and each other that our holy God is from everlasting to everlasting and he will not die! By all means pour out your heart to God, but begin with a right approach. Acknowledge His greatness and holiness for in this way we can give glory to God!
Of course we need to know God to call to him. Habakkuk cries out to God and calls him, “My God, My Holy One!” Many people, even in the church, call themselves Christian but they don’t really know God. God is little more than fire insurance. I say that because they don’t call on him when things are going well. They go about their daily life and business as though God doesn’t really exist. And yet these same people become very religious when something does go wrong in their lives, even blaming God for their misfortune. That is a wrong approach!
If you claim to be a Christian, then acknowledge that your God is the everlasting God and that he is your God and your Holy One even in days when we are blessed with health and wealth! Those days will not last forever! In fact this side of heaven they cannot last for ever.
Understand congregation, that what Habakkuk is doing is not simply good psychology’ but is a real faith expressing itself. He begins where we should all begin! Habakkuk doesn’t call on God because God needs to be reminded that he is holy and eternal or how cruel the Babylonian war machine was. It wasn’t even to change God’s purpose, for the Babylonians certainly were coming!
Habakkuk begins with God for it is from Him that he receives blessing. When we begin with our eternal holy God, then our mind comes off self and focuses on our Saviour God. Our minds start thinking about his love and his promises and the wonderful salvation from sin through his one and only Son, so that we may not just live our 60, 70 or 80 years or longer but that we may have eternal life in heaven. Even though we die, yet shall we live! Habakkuk begins by filling his mind with the wonderful vision of the eternity of God and what a blessing it is to know him. Habakkuk’s God, our God, is not a fly-by-night God. He is the eternal God, the everlasting God, from everlasting to everlasting.
As Martin Lloyd Jones reminds us, “There is nothing more consoling or reassuring when oppressed by the problems of history, and when wondering what is to happen in the world, than to remember that the God whom we worship is outside the flux of history. He has preceded history; He has created history. His throne is above the world and outside time. He reigns in eternity, the everlasting God.”
He is not like the gods whom men fashioned with their fingers, that cannot walk or speak (Hab 2:18). Nor is he like fleeting man. Our opponents rise in a day and by the end of that day they are nothing. Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein. These men were raised up in the morning; they reigned for a few hours in the afternoon, and by the evening they were dead and buried. That’s nothing like our God!
In eternity God purposed to call out a people to himself. He uses the most unconventional and unorthodox means. Through the seed of the woman — the seed of Abraham, he calls an obscure enslaved nation to be his people. He calls leaders who cannot speak well like Moses, others who commit adultery and murder like David, and evil nations like the Babylonians to fulfil his purposes. He uses a virtually unknown virgin to be the instrument to bring about the birth of his only Son, the Saviour of the world. He then permits the serpent to bruise the Saviour’s heel. However, through the Saviour’s death and resurrection from the dead he crushes the serpent’s head.
This is what the God who is from everlasting had determined and that is why we who trust in His Son will live forever, even though we die! In fact, before the foundations of the world were created, he was mindful of us, of me. Before one cancer cell in my body springs to life, he knows me and he knows my eternal end. That is our Saviour God!
But now Habakkuk has a problem, which he vents in his second complaint. Habakkuk not only claims God as his God, but acknowledges that he is the holy One. Habakkuk is utterly confident that whatever God will do proceeds from his holiness. All his decrees are holy. In fact Habakkuk’s complaint reminds God of his eternal qualities. “Lord you are eternal, you are holy, you cannot look at evil or tolerate wrong, so why allow this?”
It seemed to Habakkuk that God’s tolerance of Babylon was inconsistent with his holiness. Leviticus 5:1 says that one who witnesses a sin and remains silent partakes of the guilt of the sin. It seemed to Habakkuk that the Lord was allowing the more wicked to swallow up the lesser. How could God keep quiet as Nebuchadnezzar swallowed Jerusalem and marched righteous Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego and Ezekiel off into exile?
And the Babylonians are ruthless. Habakkuk portrays them as godless fishermen and God’s people as helpless fish who would be caught with hooks and dragnets and marched off into captivity. Such was their cruelty. The Babylonians worshipped false gods and yet they have this power over a multitude of nations as they relentlessly fished’ for more victims. Habakkuk is praying against the worst of human depravity that was going to crush God’s own covenant people.
Yet Habakkuk can pray because he knows his eternal holy God. The decree to permit the fall of man, the crucifixion of his blessed Son, the Day of Judgment and the eternity of hell — all these come forth from the holiness of God. So did the raising up of the Babylonians in Habakkuk’s day and the terrorists today!
In fact so it is with everything God sends into our lives. Our good seasons, our bad seasons, our winter times and summer times, our sickness and health, our malignant lumps and our benign lumps, our riches and poverty, our best days and our worst days, our gains and our losses are all things our eternal holy God permits.
In times like these may we be able to say with Habakkuk, “My eternal God, my Holy One!†That is why we pray for peace in Iraq and the Middle East and Kenya, and that the hungry will be fed in places like Darfur and Bangladesh and other such places. We pray for healing and restoration and revival. We pray to our eternal holy God, because the Scriptures portray God as merciful, kind, all-powerful, all-wise and faithful. He is totally committed to the good of his people, to those who trust in His Son so that they may be like Him and be with him one day!
Let us be aware, before we get puffed up with pride, that we can never see anything exactly as God sees it. Never ever! Our finite, sinful, biased minds limited by lack of wisdom, limited in space and time, are incapable of doing so fully.
Just as Habakkuk couldn’t get his mind around what God was going to do with the Babylonians, so we don’t fully understand God’s ways and thoughts. Humbling, isn’t it? But true. Ah, yes; we just wish it were different but it isn’t, and sometimes it breaks our hearts.
Finally and briefly, Habakkuk has made his complaint and now he tells us in Chapter 2:1 that he will look at it from God’s perspective. When we are close to God, when we know him and his rich promises, his character, his love, his holiness, his word, and the rich faith the church expresses, than even though we may not fully understand, we do get a different perspective on things.
From the presence of God we can assess the church and the world and our own lives more clearly. From there we can see how God is working, what answers we’re getting to our complaint. I guess we have come full circle. When we start with the right approach then we end with God, our eternal Holy God.
When war breaks out in the Middle East, or Iran, or some other catastrophe happens, God is God! When the lump appears under our arm or the diagnosis and prognosis is bad, or a loved one is taken to glory, when the Babylonians are upon us, we do not fear, because no calamity changes God’s love for His people.
Even though we don’t know what tomorrow holds, our eternal holy God does. And none of these things have any influence whatever on the unchangeable love of God.
There is nothing outside the circle of God’s decree and God’s control! Nothing happens but what God ordains. You may approve, you may disapprove of what he ordains, but nothing happens apart from what God ordains.
What’s more this gives us great hope. The mighty, godless Babylonians could do nothing at all by themselves — absolutely nothing — they couldn’t even take a single breath by themselves, without God’s approval. Neither can terrorists today, or Bush or Brown or Rudd. God is God over all!
So we say with Paul, “whether we live or die, we are safe with the Lord.” Congregation, he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”
Read Romans 8:35-39
Wow — isn’t that something! And all God’s people say,
Amen.