Turn with me in your copies of God's word to the book of Habakkuk chapter one, beginning in verse 12 tonight, where we left off last week. If you're using the pew Bible and the pew rack in front of you, you can find that on page 785, just one book over from Nahum, where we have been recently. We'll be beginning in chapter one, verse 12, but reading through the first verse of chapter two tonight. So give your attention now to the reading of the word of God. Are you not from everlasting? O Lord, my God, my Holy One, we shall not die. O Lord, you have ordained them as a judgment, and you, O Rock, have established them for reproof. You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he? Make mankind like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler. He brings all of them up with a hook. He drags them out with his net. He gathers them in his dragnet. So he rejoices and is glad. Therefore he sacrifices to his net and makes offerings to his dragnet. For by them he lives in luxury and his food is rich. Is he then to keep on emptying his net and mercilessly killing nations forever? I will take my stand at my watch post and station myself on the tower and look out to see what he will say to me and what I will answer concerning my complaints. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. Let's pray. Almighty God, we ask now for your spirit to come upon us, to open our eyes to see wonderful things in your law, to illumine us so that this would not just be a mere word, but that it would truly be as it is, truly your effective, infallible, inerrant word, that it would bring forth fruit in our lives. And we ask in the name of Christ, amen. As a pastor, I naturally get a lot of questions about theology, theology in the Bible. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some are very easy to answer. They only take a quick sentence or two, and then we can move on. Some are a little more complicated, take a little longer to talk through. And my response is, well, hey, why don't we get lunch or come to my office? We'll sit down. We'll talk about it. But there's one theological question out there that's so difficult, that people have such a hard time wrestling with, that there are some theologians who say that it's actually impossible to even try to give a coherent answer to that question of theology. No, it's not about the Trinity. It's not about the incarnation. As profound as those mysteries are, they took centuries for the church to be able to articulate well and coherently. But this particular question that I'm thinking about, it's not about either of those things. The question that I'm thinking of is commonly called the problem of evil. To state it simply, it says, how can a good God, who is all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing, allow evil and suffering in the world? It's a difficult question. And I'm sorry to break it to you, I'm not going to give you the right answer to this question tonight. But what we are going to do is we are going to dive into a passage of scripture in which we see one of God's own inspired prophets wrestling with this very kind of thing, the prophet Habakkuk, as he is having a back and forth conversation in prayer with Almighty God, which has been preserved for us here in this prophetic book that bears his name. If you recall from last week in Pastor Ricky's sermon, this book was written around the year maybe 605, maybe a little bit earlier. It was written in the reign of one of the most wicked kings of the people of Judah, the King Jehoiakim. Judah, the southern kingdom that remained after the northern kingdom had been eradicated and exiled by the Assyrian Empire, they were now at a low point, a spiritual dearth. And Habakkuk is looking around at his nation, and he's crying out for the Lord to intervene. And God's reply to him, as it's recorded in verses 5 through 11, is that, yes, he is going to intervene. And the way he's going to intervene is by bringing covenant discipline upon the people of Judah through a wicked nation, the Babylonians, who are going to come and all but seemingly wipe out the southern kingdom and the covenant people of God. What we have here tonight, verses 12 through 17 and even into the beginning of chapter 2 as we've read, is Habakkuk wrestling with this revelation from God and this seeming inconsistency of how a good God can allow evil and suffering in the worlds. Habakkuk does this by essentially asking three different questions, which will be our three different points tonight. And the first question that Habakkuk is really asking of God, it's found in verses 12 and 13, and it's how can a good God allow evil? Look again at these verses. He says, are you not from everlasting, O Lord my God, my Holy One? shall not die. O Lord, you have ordained them as a judgment, and you, O Rock, have established them for reproof. You, who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the men more righteous than he?" Now to really understand what Habakkuk is wrestling with here, we need to notice the very first thing that he does in this prayer in response to the previous revelation that had been given to him in verses 5 through 11 about the coming of the Babylonians in covenant discipline. And the very first thing that Habakkuk does in these verses is he recounts the attributes and the actions of Almighty God. He says in verse 12, are you not from everlasting? speaking to the eternity of God, recognizing that we have an eternal God who has an eternal purpose, who isn't bound by time and the changes that come with history. No, he created time. He created history. He stands above it, transcends it. He is a God who is over it all. He's an eternal God. He is also a rock of a God. At the end of verse 12 here, he says, you, O rock, have established them. for reproof. speaking in a poetic way, evoking this imagery of a rock, of a God who is firm, who is solid, who is unchanging, unyielding, reliable. In theological terms, we call this the immutability of God. God is immutable, meaning he cannot change. He is outside change. Why? Because that is something that belongs to his creation. He is the God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He's also a holy God. Habakkuk calls him my holy one, one who is characterized by holiness. In verse 13, he says that God is a God who is of pure eyes. That word here translated pure is often associated in the Old Testament with the sacrificial system, with the temple complex. especially appearing in places like the book of Leviticus, a book that is devoted to the holiness of God's people because of their holy God. And indeed, God is a holy God. He is one who is set apart away from ordinary things and wholly devoted to himself, which is essentially what that word holiness means, to be set apart from ordinary things and devoted to God's purposes, and indeed, there is nothing more set apart than the transcendent Creator of all things. He is indeed a holy God. He is an all-powerful God. Habakkuk says, God, these Babylonians, you have ordained them and have established them for reproof. Even these wicked Babylonians, God is sovereign over them. God rules them. God reigns over them. He is an all-powerful God. But this eternal, unchangeable, holy, all-powerful God, He doesn't just stand far off. Nohabakkuk recognizes that He is my God. He's the God of the covenant. In verse 12, He invokes the covenant name, Lord. Yahweh, the name that God gave for His covenant people. He says, you, O Lord, are my God, my Holy One. You are my God, not just a God out there, no, you are the God who personally has called me and covenant with me and my people. In fact, the word at the end of verse 12 that is translated here for reproof, It's the same Hebrew word that God used in 2 Samuel 7, verse 14, when God made a covenant with David and promised that if his sons disobeyed, sinned, that he would bring reproof, he would bring discipline upon his people, telling us that Habakkuk has in mind here God's covenant with David. God's covenant with his people. This is the God who promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he would make them into a great nation, that he would bring them into the promised land. This is the God who promised to David that he would do good things to him, that he would build a house, that David would have an everlasting kingdom, and his own flesh and blood son sitting on an eternal throne. It's also exactly the reason why Habakkuk is so distressed right now. Why? Because he sees who God is. He sees what God's done. And it doesn't seem to match up with what he's seeing all around him. He looks at God, he says, verse 13, God, this God, you who are of pure eyes and to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors? and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he. I'm back at saying, God, I know who you are. I know what you've done. But from my vantage point, you appear silent. You seem to look idly on as the wicked do anything and everything they want. And indeed, it is going to be horrible things that the Babylonians are going to do. These aren't just small little things that God has ordained for discipline for his people, not light little evils. These are horrendous things that God has promised are going to befall the Judahites. These are terrible things. In fact, In verse 13, when he says, the wicked, they swallow up the man more righteous than he. This is an imagery that's very common in the Old Testament and even in the ancient Near East at large, this imagery of being swallowed up, completely consumed by death. In other words, it will be as if Judah will not even be left on the face of the earth, completely swallowed up, brought down into the depths of the grave, nothing left of them. And Habakkuk sees what God has promised. He sees who God is. He says, God, how can you do this? There are many difficult questions in the Christian life. And oftentimes, we find ourselves in the same shoes of a backup. We know who God is. We know what he's promised to do. We look around at our lives, and we can't make sense of it. Say, God, I know you're loving, but I feel so unloved. God, I know that you have promised blessing to those who are holy as you are holy, and yet, Father, it looks like the wicked are the ones who triumph. We feel like Habakkuk, who knows that God gave promises to his people to make of them a nation, to give them a land, to set a king of David on the throne of Israel. And yet, all of those things seem utterly broken. What do we do when we encounter situations like this in our lives? Well, for one, we do what Habakkuk does here. We first and foremost go to God. In a world that is unchanging, in a world that is full of evil and suffering, when we see evil running rampant and we can't explain it, what do we do? We go to the one, sure, steady anchor. The unchanging character of God. his unchanging purpose to redeem a people for himself through the Lord Jesus Christ. You must, we must, first and foremost, when we go through the turmoils of evil and suffering in this world, lay hold of God. Lay hold of that anchor that is steady no matter what wind, no matter what waves toss us about in this life. sure, steady, almighty God in his sure, steady word, infallible inerrance, steady as a rock. There's a great temptation in the Christian life to let our experiences interpret the Word of God and interpret who we think God to be. In fact, that was a great problem in the 20th century. After the After the Second World War and the atrocities that happened, there was a great movement in theology that basically said we need to bring God down to our level. We need to have a God who can suffer, a God who literally dies, a God who changes like we change, a God who interacts with people and changes based on their desires. That theology is, praise God, largely gone these days. But it's still out there in ways. And it left because it's just not true and it's unsustainable. It is no sure and steady anchor. There is only one sure steady anchor. And it is the word of God that stands up above and over our experiences of evil and suffering in this world. And we can take comfort in that. And we can begin there. Begin our struggle there just as Habakkuk does. Now, secondly, we see Habakkuk not only struggling with this question of how God can allow evil and suffering in this world, but we see also him struggling with how God can even use evil and suffering in this world. Again, verse 14, you make mankind like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler. He, that is Babylon, brings all of them up with a hook. He drags them out with his net. He gathers them in his dragnet so he rejoices and is glad. Therefore, he sacrifices to his net and makes offerings to his dragnet for by them he lives in luxury and his food is rich. What Habakkuk is doing here is describing an attack of the Babylonians upon a victim nation in terms of a fisherman going out, hooking his fish, pulling them in with hooks, pulling them in with nets, handling them as casually as any fisherman does a fish that he's just caught. And historically, this is a very apt image. The Babylonians were known for picking up on what is probably a practice started by the Assyrian Empire of conquering a nation and then exiling the peoples by hooking them through their mouths, lining them up, stringing them along, single file, and carrying them away. The brutality with which they would treat human beings made in the image of God, Habakkuk describes as being dragged along like a fish in a net. As if that were horrible enough, at the end of verse 15 here he says, you know what Babylon does when they do this? Do they have remorse? Tinge of conscience? No, he rejoices and is glad. While they are inflicting horrible, inhumane suffering, treating image-bearers like animals. What do they do? They gloat. They laugh. They take pleasure in it. They commit horrible acts of inhumanity against God's people, but even on top of that, verse 16, they act wickedly toward God himself. Therefore, he sacrifices to his net. and makes offerings to his dragnet. For by them he lives in luxury and his food is rich." Now, this isn't a reference to some literal historical practice of the Babylonians having temples dedicated to their hooks and their swords and their shields and battle weapons and those kinds of things. That's not what's going on here, but it's a poetic way to describe the state of heart of the Babylonians of these wicked people as they went out and conquered nations and as they were coming for the people of Judah. They loved nothing more than to conquer peoples, than to torture them, than to get rich off of their wicked, inhumane deeds. They have scorned the one true God and in his place put up idols like riches. food, wealth, warfare, placing their own inhumane deeds above the loving, generous, life-giving God of the Bible. But the real kicker to all of this comes at the beginning of verse 14, and this is truly what makes Habakkuk struggle here. He says at the beginning of verse 14, thinking about these things, You make mankind like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler. Second person, you. You, oh God, you are the one who has done this. And Bacchus is saying, God, I know that these Babylonians, they are the ones who are going to do these things. But he also recognizes you, God, you are sovereign. You are all powerful, meaning you are the one who has set all this up. You are the one who is doing this and enacting this on your people through the Babylonians. He recognized it in verse 12. He said, Lord, you've ordained them as a judgment. You have established them for reproof. Brothers and sisters, God doesn't just allow evil. God ordains it. He has established it. He uses it. He's in control of it. Now, Backhoek is struggling. He's saying, I don't know how to make sense of that. God of purer eyes than to look upon evil, who is holy, who is eternal, who is all-powerful, who is covenanted with his people, and he's using and has planned evil things for his people? How do we do that? How does that happen? It's a truth that's all across scripture. If you doubt it, then just even consider the fact that the most heinous sin that was ever committed in the history of mankind, the crucifixion of the very son of God was ordained by his father, was carried out. Yes, by the hands of wicked men. Yes, as human agents. who are under the rule and reign of God. Acts 4.28 says that yes, it was human beings, Pilate and Jewish rulers who put Christ on the cross, but Acts 4.28 also says they did whatever God's hand and plan had predestined to take place. How do we make full sense of that? Well, there's lots of ways that we could talk about that. There's lots of things we could say. I don't have time to go into all the details of these kinds of discussions that have been going on for centuries upon centuries, but what we can say is a few things. One, we can say that God does this for very good purposes. There is no greater sin that has ever been committed in the history of mankind than the crucifixion of the Son of God, and it has brought about a good that nobody ever could have conceived of on their own. Raising sinners spiritually from the dead, looking forward to their own resurrection, redeeming rebellious people, bringing them in to a new heavens and a new earth. God has planned it. God has ordained it. He has done it for very good purposes. We who now have the perspective of The whole revelation and not just Habakkuk's perspective can know better than Habakkuk ever could have that as hard of a truth as these things may be that we know God is good even in the midst of it and that he does good things even with evil instruments. Now this is a difficult truth. Maybe you're here tonight and you're struggling with these things. Maybe you struggle with reading verses like this. Maybe you struggle with these doctrines. My encouragement to you is to not try to sugarcoat these things. God doesn't need human beings to try to make excuses for him at the court of human opinion. No, go to the Word, wrestle with the Word, exactly what Habakkuk did here, and rest assured that you can trust Even this God, because he does wonderful, glorious things that defy human imagination. Things that, as he has already told Habakkuk, that we would not believe even if told. We see Habakkuk wrestling with how a good God can allow evil in the world, how we can use evil in the world. Lastly here, we see Habakkuk asking one more question in verse 17, the question of, When? Question, is he then Babylon to keep on emptying his net and mercilessly killing nations forever? If you think back to the hardest moments in your life, the deepest sufferings, the biggest griefs that you've gone through, my guess is there is a moment when you thought that you would never get out of it. Those moments in life when you've been in the storm, and you're still in the storm, and you're looking at the horizon, and you cannot see even a speck of light, and you wonder, is this going to go on forever? Is this my life now? Is there no end to these things? We're not the first people to wrestle with these things. Habakkuk is wrestling with that very thing. He looks around him, and he sees Babylon, and he sees what they're doing. It seems like it's just going to go on forever, that like a fisherman with indefatigable energy, he's just going to keep casting his hook, keep throwing out his net, pulling in weak, helpless nations and gloating over them. In fact, several decades before this book was written, the nation of Babylon, they had arisen onto the world scene. They had basically kicked out the Assyrians. They're the new reigning champions on the block, and they're going to nation after nation after nation conquering everybody that they want to and Judah sees that they're coming for us next. And in fact, that's exactly what happened. After this book was written, over the next two decades, Babylon would come in, successively exiling the nation of Judah in wave after wave, until finally in 586 BC, Babylonian armies sieged the city of Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and wiped out Judah as a nation in one last exile. And even then, it would be decades before they were overthrown by the Persians and the people would be restored. As far as Habakkuk can see, Babylonian cruelty is here, and it's here to stay. He knows what is true. God, you are from everlasting, and it seems like Babylon is forever. God is the one who is eternal, and yet it looks like Babylon will keep mercilessly killing nations forever. And he asked that basic question that Christians ever since the beginning of the people of God have asked. How long, oh Lord? How long? How long is Babylon to keep going on like this? How long are your people to continue suffering at the hands of wicked men? That's not just Habakkuk's question, that's our question even today. We say, how long, oh Lord? How long are American Christians to be marginalized for our views on things like marriage and human sexuality and the goodness of human life? How long are Chinese Christians forced to be hiding in house churches subject to raids by government officials at any moment? How long are Christians in the Manipur province of the nation of India to have their homes and their churches burned, forced into the life of a refugee? How long are Congolese Christians to be beheaded for their faith? How long are we to carry the cross and hang upon it until the resurrection day? How long, oh Lord, how long? How long are we to bear the burden of evil and suffering in this life. This is what Habakkuk asks, but notice what he does. In the first verse of chapter 2, he says, I will take my stand at my watch post and station myself on the tower and look out to see what he will say to me and what I will answer concerning my complaints. Maybe it's easier here to first see what Habakkuk doesn't do. What he doesn't do is simply consign himself to misery. Okay, this is how it is, all right. I'm gonna be lowly and miserable for the rest of my life and all of eternity. No, he doesn't do that. He doesn't ignore the pain, push it aside, pretend that it isn't there, pretend that life is just easy and we're gonna just smile through it. He doesn't turn from God. No, in fact, he does the opposite, he turns to God. He sets his face like flint toward his God. He refuses to back away from God. He refuses to turn from his covenant Lord. He is like Jacob, wrestling with God, refusing to let go until the Lord sends a blessing. And that, brothers and sisters, is what we must do as well. Life is difficult. There is suffering. There is evil in this world. It is allowed by God. It is even used by God. Yes, the world, the flesh, and the devil all rule and reign over the world in which we live. So what do we do? We do what Habakkuk does. We take hold of our God. Believers in the Lord Jesus Christ living on the other side of the first coming of Christ We can by faith in Christ hold on to our God because we have good reason to We have a God who has promised that he will come again That there is an end that the question, how long, does have an answer. Our Lord, when he ascended on into heaven in Acts chapter one, promised his disciples and the church through them that just as they saw him ascend into heaven to the right hand of God, so we would see him coming again in glory, returning to this earth to set up his kingdom. And at that point, these questions will all find their resolution. No longer will God use evil and suffering. He will banish evil and suffering. Their place will be in the lake of fire that burns with sulfur. No longer will we cry, how long? No, we will rest in the God who has come, just as Habakkuk set his face to look for his God, to wait by faith in the coming of his God with the coming of his answer. So we now set our faces to the Lord Jesus Christ, who has said that he is coming again with glory. And until that day arrives, brothers and sisters, continue wrestling. Don't let go of God, but rest in his promises, in his good purposes, and the promise that he will come again. Let's pray. Almighty God, We pray now that you would not let us let go of you, that you would not let us turn aside from you, but that you would hold us close, that even when the wind and the waves seem overwhelming and they are all that we can see, that you would hold us fast like a sure anchor, that you would hold us close to yourself until that day comes when evil and suffering are gone, and we live with you through Christ for all eternity. We pray these things in his name. Amen.