Tag Archives: my Holy One

HABAKKUK’S SECOND DILEMMA-3

Bible Study, ,

Habakkuk 1:12-15 NLT
[12] “O Lord my God, my Holy One, you who are eternal— surely you do not plan to wipe us out? O Lord, our Rock, you have sent these Babylonians to correct us, to punish us for our many sins. [13] But you are pure and cannot stand the sight of evil. Will you wink at their treachery? Should you be silent while the wicked swallow up people more righteous than they? [14] Are we only fish to be caught and killed? Are we only sea creatures that have no leader? [15] Must we be strung up on their hooks and caught in their nets while they rejoice and celebrate?”

Poor Habakkuk! He just couldn’t keep up with God. First, he had to process God’s incomprehensible plan to raise up and permit a godless nation to overrun his people. Now he has to come to terms with a contradiction in the very nature of God. If God is holy, how can He use ungodly idolators to fulfill His purposes?

Since God patiently responded to Habakkuk’s questions, it seems that He didn’t consider Habakkuk’s questions arrogant or impertinent. He had something important to teach His distressed prophet about the wisdom of His ways. He responded to Habakkuk’s honesty by taking him step by step through His actions to a place of understanding and personal faith.

Let’s consider Habakkuk’s second question. How can a holy God use ungodly instruments for His purposes? God’s answer, which we will see in our next meditation, opens up a new perspective on God’s sovereignty.

For the moment, we must consider God’s relationship with evil. Evil people with their evil deeds impact our lives every day. Some of us live with them; we work with them; we bump into them in the course of our day; they are around us everywhere. They govern our nation and are bent on inflicting their ungodly decisions on all the people. Where is God in all this?

The story of Job will help us gain a true perspective of God’s use of evil. First, God never tolerates the evil in people. He has no part in it. He is holy, utterly separated from evil people’s thoughts, actions and behaviour. God never tempts us to do wrong.

James 1:13-15 NLT
[13] “And remember, when you are being tempted, do not say, “God is tempting me.” God is never tempted to do wrong, and he never tempts anyone else. [14] Temptation comes from our own desires, which entice us and drag us away. [15] These desires give birth to sinful actions. And when sin is allowed to grow, it gives birth to death.”

Our sinful behaviour comes out of our sinful nature…our desires, our choices, our actions but…

Evil has inescapable consequences and evil people will reap them…and the consequences we suffer are not God’s fault.

However, God uses what evil people do, either to us or by us, to corall us into thinking and learning differently about sin. In His wisdom, God works, IN ALL THINGS, for our good.

What an astonishing revelation! How riveting to realise that not even our sin, heinous as it might be, is wasted in our lives. We learn more from what we have done wrong than what we have done right. God weaves our sinful behaviour and its consequences into the tapestry of our lives, the dark threads forming a contrast and revealing the magnitude of His mercy and grace.

Can you see the difference between God causing sin and God using sin in the lives of people? Since He is holy…utterly separate from sin, and demands holiness on us if we are ever to approach Him and be acceptable to Him, He took action to ensure that unholy humans would be transformed by His grace from sinners to saints.

No, Habakkuk, God’s action by raising up and using the ruthless Babylonian army was never a denial of His stance against sin but rather the evidence of His sovereign mercy. Without His drastic intervention to turn His people from their idolatrous ways, the Jews would have perished in their sin. He was preparing them for the moment when He Himself would break into history in the form of a tiny human baby to deal with sin though never part of it.

God’s reassurances regarding the mystery of His ways would lead Habakkuk, step by step, into a new perspective and a new way of handling life’s seemingly insoluble dilemmas.

To be continued…

THE DILEMMA DEEPENS

Bible Study, ,

THE DILEMMA DEEPENS

Lord, are you not from everlasting? My God, my Holy One, you will never die. You, Lord, have appointed them to execute judgment; you, my Rock, have ordained them to punish. Your eyes are too holy to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing. Why then do you tolerate the treacherous? Why are you silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves? (Hab. 1: 12-13).

So, Habakkuk, you got your answer. God is going to sort out the mess in your country by sending the Babylonians against your people. They won’t stand a chance against the Babylonian army. They will be slaughtered or enslaved, and then where will their precious idols be that they so loved to worship? Where will the rulers be who loved to lord it over and oppress the people? What about the apostate priests and false prophets who led the people astray?

Habakkuk was appalled! “God, is it possible that you who are eternal and indestructible because you have nothing to do with evil, will do a thing like this? How can you raise up a godless nation to correct your own people? How can you use these people against your covenant nation?” The Israelites, in spite of Habakkuk’s complaint against them, looked like saints compared with the Babylonians. If he thought his people were bad, what about these vicious killers?

If the prophet’s first dilemma was puzzling to him, God’s answer was even more difficult to understand. Instead of giving him something to hold on to, God had deepened his confusion. From his perspective, what God said He was doing was not solving the problem at all. He was only making it worse. Many of his people were already suffering cruelty and injustice at the hands of their rulers. Now the Babylonians were coming to wipe them out. What sort of a solution was that?

Let’s put their situation into a modern-day context. Who are God’s people? Two categories: Firstly, God’s ancient people, Israel, are still His covenant people. In spite of their rejection of His Messiah, God has never disowned or abandoned them. And in spite of the teaching of some that God has finished with His people, that is not what the Bible says. So why have they suffered so badly since the time of Jesus?

Secondly, the church belongs to God. It is the body of Jesus of which He is the head. He loves His church and is passionate about her because she is His betrothed bride and His representative on earth until He comes. He has entrusted His Spirit to His church to lead her into all truth and to empower her to represent Him and do His works on earth. It is imperative that the church remain pure so that He can reveal Himself to the unbelieving world through her. Why is the church in many parts of the world suffering at the hands of cruel and ruthless killers?

When His people veer off course, God does not force them back to His way. He has to corral them by hedging up their way so that they return to His word and follow His leading because He is the only way to eternal life. Every other path leads to destruction.

So. what does He do? He allows and orchestrates circumstances that are painful and difficult enough to draw us back to Him. Isn’t it true that people often treat God like a celestial 911? They can do without Him until crises come and emergencies arise. Then they begin to shout and scream for His help. Is that the kind of father He wants to be to us?

When we look at the global church today, in many ways it is no better than God’s people were in Habakkuk’s day. Power struggles go on in the individual congregations; money and wealth preoccupy the teaching of many; the church is continually being fragmented because people cannot get on with each other or they are divided by their pet doctrines; church leaders fall into sin and live no better lives than the people in the world; many of the churches are no more than business enterprises or social clubs.

What is God going to do about it? He is raising up the “Babylonians.” What kind of an answer is that? Suffering divides the men from the boys. It either turns people into apostates or sons. People either turn against God when they suffer or they learn obedience as Jesus did.

Son though He was, He learned obedience from what He suffered and, once made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him (Heb. 5: 8).

God is smart. He knows that suffering forces us to choose what we value most and hold on to it. More of that tomorrow . . .

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.