This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “Habakkuk” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, February 19, 1995.
About this sermon
Habakkuk’s doubts about God’s sovereignty, justice, and righteousness are not disguised; he says plainly that something looks wrong. His faith at this point still looks like the world’s own form of faith, trapped inside the law’s terms. What God does across the rest of the book is remake that pagan-shaped faith into something genuinely Christian.
Sermon transcript
This morning we are reading again from Habakkuk, and we are reading chapter 1 in its entirety this morning. Give your attention to the reading of God’s holy words. the burden which Habakkuk, the prophet, did see. O Lord, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear?
Even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save. Why dost thou show me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance? For spoiling and violence are before me, and there are that raise up strife and contention. Therefore the laws slack. and judgment doth never go forth, for the wicked doth compass about the righteous, therefore wrong judgment proceedeth. Behold ye among the heathen, and regard and wonder marvelously, for I will work a work in your days which ye will not believe, though it be told you. For lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, which shall march through the breadth of the land to possess the dwelling places that are not theirs.
They are terrible and dreadful. Their judgment and their dignity shall proceed of themselves. Their horses also are swifter than the leopards, and are more fierce than the evening wolves. And their horsemen shall spread themselves, and their horsemen shall come from far, They shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to ease. They shall come all for violence. Their faces shall sup up as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand. And they shall scoff at the kings, and the princes shall be a scorn unto them. They shall deride every stronghold, for they shall heap dust and take it. Then shall his mind change, and he shall pass over. and offend, imputing this his power unto his God.
Art thou not from everlasting, O Lord my God, mine Holy One? We shall not die. O Lord, thou hast ordained them for judgment, and O mighty God, thou hast established them for correction. Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity.
Wherefore, lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue, when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he. And breakest men as the fishes of the sea, as the creeping things that have no ruler over them. They take up all of them with the angle, they catch them in their net. and gather them in their drag, therefore they rejoice and are glad. Therefore they sacrifice unto their net, and burn incense unto their drag, because by them their portion is that, and their meat plenteous. Shall they therefore empty their net, and not aspire continually to slay the nations?
We who are Jews by nature and not sinners of the Gentiles, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ that we might be justified by the faith of Christ and not by the works of the law, for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is therefore Christ the minister of sin?
God forbid. For if I build again the things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor. For I, through the law, am dead to the law that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not frustrate the grace of God, for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead and vain.
Pray with me now. Grant, Almighty God, that as our sins cry continually to heaven, each of us may turn to repentance, and by condemning ourselves of our own accord, may anticipate thy judgment, and thus stir up ourselves to repentance that being received into favor, we may find thee whom we have provoked to take vengeance, to be indeed our Father. And may we be so preserved by thee in this world, that having at length put off all our vices, we may attain to that perfection of purity to which thou invitest us. and thus lead us more and more to thyself by thy spirit, and separate us from the corruptions of this world, that we may glorify thee before men, and be at last made partakers of that celestial glory which has been purchased for us by the blood of thine only begotten Son. Amen.
Habakkuk’s prophecy, before it concludes, will set before us true biblical faith. But Habakkuk himself as he is set before us at the beginning of his prophecy, is a man in whom this faith must be brought to light. A man in whom this genuine biblical faith must be developed. We may even say that he is a man in whom this faith must be created. And that is the value, is it not, of this book. For before our very eyes, as the course of this book progresses, we will see this faith take shape.
This means then that Habakkuk will end better than he began. But this also means that we need not feel compelled to defend Habakkuk and his attitudes as we find him and them in the early moments of this prophecy. In other words, there is much in Habakkuk the man, there is much about his attitudes that simply misses the mark. The very best we can say about him is that he is as yet immature, that he stands short of a fullness to which now God will press him.
He has already questioned, has he not, the Lord’s sovereignty. lies beneath the surface of his first complaint, verses 2 through 4. And now, as he comes to God once more in verses 12 through 17, we will discover there that there is, lying beneath the surface of his prayer, a complaint against God’s sense of justice and righteousness. But as you are considering these things, the complaining prayers of the Baptist, you must not miss the fact that there is a form of faith expressing itself in the man.
It is a form of faith beyond which, by God’s grace, he will be moved. But it is a form of faith nonetheless. What form does this faith take? Well, sadly, as we look at it, we may be led to the conclusion that this faith of Habakkuk does not stand all that far removed from the popular forms of faith expressed in the world about him. Pagans believe too, you know. They have a form of faith. There is a popular variety of faith that finds itself expressed, yes, almost universally. It even communicates its message in the most innocent way. presenting itself most attractively. In our own time, there is the popular form of faith that asserts itself in our culture. Please, never get your theology from Hollywood. Never lift your doctrine off the TV set. It’s horrid stuff, even when it’s presented to us innocently and we’re gullible about it.
Think! Won’t you think? Now, I know I’m going to get into trouble for what I’m about to say. But there is that form of faith, that popular expression of faith. that is spread abroad through Hollywood and its products. And I have in mind, yes, I have in mind one of the most sacred products that Hollywood has ever produced. I have in mind the sound of music. I want you to think about it. We find that popular form of faith expressed in this musical as Julie Andrews is on her way to Christopher Plummer’s house, skipping down the road, singing, I have confidence in confidence.
Or, I have faith in faith. The form of faith expressing itself here is the type that rises up from within the person who is confessing that faith, or giving expression to it. And invariably, in this form of faith, the object of faith is very much connected to an aspect of personality.
In some cases, it’s actually genetic. Some individuals are just born a little more optimistic than others. Some are even relentlessly optimistic. But even where it isn’t genetic, We learn, yes, from the faith-meisters of our time, we learn that we all have within us these seeds of potentiality, and if we can just tap into that, then we’ll rise above all the storm and stress of life, and our existence will be a perfect call. Here, the form of faith is nothing less than sheer willpower. It is built upon an appeal to our inner potential, and we, having tapped into our inner potential, can even congratulate ourselves for having tapped into it. And then we can go on to congratulate ourselves some more, because with this faith that we now have in tow, we have developed a remarkable stick-to-itiveness and perseverance that is especially suited to help us face the ups and downs of life.
In fact, our stubborn optimism may even win us some awards. We might get some recognition. And that from the apostles and prophets—yes, once more, the faith-meisters of our day, those who are the exponents of the faith and faith gospel—we might even become the headliners at an emerald convention, or get to tell our story in the pages of Guidepost magazine.
Now let me assure you that there is nothing, nothing at all of this form of faith in true biblical religion. And let me assure you equally, as hard as it is for maybe some to take it and to accept it, there is nothing of Roger and Hammerstein’s I Have Confidence in Confidence in the biblical gospel. Still it is pursued by literally millions.
I ran into it myself early in my ministry I remember the early years of the 70s and the great strain and difficulty that this nation was undergoing, the strain that many families were experiencing. And I listened to the reports coming out of Southeast Asia. I listened with anticipation with regard to word about soldiers that would be coming back. I heard Those who were receiving their loved ones back speak. I heard them on the radio, I saw them on the television, I read their comments in the newspaper.
Those that were receiving back their loved ones, even the prisoners of war, their sons, their husbands, their sweethearts from that Vietnam conflict. And the refrain that I heard repeatedly from people who are receiving their loved ones back, I never lost faith.
But sadly, as the majority of these people went on to express themselves, to talk about that form of faith that they had in themselves, I was saddened even more to discover that the form of faith that they embraced was utterly and completely vacuous. There was no evidence that their faith had any vital connection to the faith spoken of in Scripture, the faith that is grounded in the concrete historical acts of God. The sense that you had as these people talked on was that the faith that they expressed was merely an attitude or disposition that they generated and maintained from within themselves, and that they actually believed that it was their faith that brought home their loved ones, that actually brought about the return of those that they loved. Now, some of you might be up to speed with me here, but as I have just stated the case, you may be perceiving in it the patterns of that age-old faith game. in which genuine faith, so called or so described, genuine faith is measured by its ability to gain for you what you want.
And such faith is even thought of as having the power to procure for you what you want. Clearly then those families whose boys failed to come home from Vietnam in the early seventies didn’t have enough weight. Isn’t that the conclusion? There’s something terribly wrong here.
In the faith game, faith is no longer a receiving and resting upon Jesus Christ or upon the works of God as they are presented to us in the Gospel. Faith is no longer a trust in God’s sovereignty and His righteousness as revealed to us in the Scriptures. According to the faith game, faith is just another form of manipulation. Faith is a form of voodoo, it’s a form of witchcraft by which we manipulate our destinies to our own liking.
If there is any of this paganism, and I call it paganism, if there is any of this paganism in Habakkuk, God is determined to rid him of it. and that in order that by the end of his prophecy he might be both a spokesman for true faith and a living example of what it’s all about. So if the faith game is oppressive in the man, it must be stopped. and every vestige of its manipulative devices removed in the interests of true piety. But you must know now, and this is where things get complicated, you must know now that the threat to Habakkuk is not merely a pagan manipulative form of faith. Habakkuk is a Jew. He has been raised in the covenant. He has been trained in the vocabulary of faith.
He knows God’s name, the special name of God. He knows God as the Lord, he knows him as Jehovah. How long, O Lord? He intones in verse 2 of that first chapter. He confesses later that the Lord is the Holy One. He is his God, verse 12. Thus he acknowledges a personal and covenantal relationship between himself and God. He believes that this God sustains a bond, a tie between Himself and His people. He believes that this Lord God has revealed Himself in the course of time, in history, by His mighty works and by His faithful words, at the center of which is His law.
In fact, it is precisely in the law That law as revealer of God, precisely in the law as the vehicle for defining righteousness and wickedness, right and wrong, that is so much in evidence in Habakkuk’s prayers. In the first prayer, verses two through four, the prophet is upset by the wickedness that stands so blatantly contrary to God’s law. which is forced upon Habakkuk, as it were, and by its very presence compels him to look at it day after day, continually, in the life of the nation of Judah. The Lord responds, verses 5 through 11. He is going to send the Babylonians, called here the Chaldeans, as the instrument of his judgment. But now Habakkuk comes back on the Lord, verses 12 through 17. Complaint number two, and here he addresses the Lord in language informed by God’s covenantal dealings with His people, and in language that claims God’s law as its basis for moral judgment and outrage.
Habakkuk’s prayers are very Jewish, that is important. They are not yet Christian. This means then for all of their covenantal sensitivity, all their awareness of the law, do you hear echoes of yourself in this? You have covenantal sensitivities, you’re aware of the law, but you stand short of where Habakkuk is going to end. For all their covenantal sensitivity and awareness of the law, for all their Jewishness, these prayers of Habakkuk are tragic.
They are opening up his soul. Do you know that about prayer? It opens up your soul before God. You understand why I am very impatient with the contemporary styles of worship in which there is such familiarity in prayer and absolutely no sense of the majesty and awesomeness and holiness of God. It is a very flippant activity. And I dare say that the soul of the church is being laid bare by its prayers. Your soul is made there before God in your prayers. How do you pray? There is yet then in this man as precious as he is to us even in his present state, and we do love him, don’t we?
There is yet in this man something unformed when it comes to his faith, something immature, and if it is left at its present state, it will cause death. If it doesn’t go on, Habakkuk is going to fall himself under God’s judgment. Now the obvious tip-off of the necessity for this is found in the opening verses of Habakkuk’s second prayer, making it plain that we are dealing here with a man immature, standing short of where he ought to be. Now this may be a little hard to see, and I understand that, because you see, invariably, These verses, 12 and 13, are misunderstood, and the reason is that most interpreters fail to reckon with the Prophet’s immaturity and even impiety at this point.
As far as these interpreters are concerned, there’s no movement in the man throughout the entire course of the book. And that is not true. Everyone, even from the get-go here, as he’s starting Habakkuk, seems to be concerned to set Habakkuk in the best possible light, even his faith, which is faulty at this point. So therefore, these interpreters approach Habakkuk’s prayers as if they are merely innocent inquiries of the Lord, righteous as far as they go.
By good people, these prayers are anything but innocent inquiries of the Lord. We are observing a man in desperation, and the whole of the old economy of Israel is in the balance. That’s what’s going down the tubes if he doesn’t get his way. This man is desperate. He is trapped. He is trapped, of all places, in the old economy, and he is trapped in God’s law, as his words in these verses testify.
He has been taught that the Lord is from everlasting, verse 12. Understand these words now. that there is a relationship between God’s eternity and His covenantal faithfulness. In other words, you can count on God’s covenantal faithfulness as much as you can on His eternity. So the covenant is in view, and this approach to the opening of that twelfth verse is proved by what follows. For there is a reliance by Habakkuk upon the covenant.
He calls the Lord, My God, My Holy One. It is on the basis of the covenantal bond that Habakkuk then declares, enigmatically possibly for us, we will not die. Oh yeah? We will not die. He has in mind what God has already said in verses 5 through 11. The Babylonians are coming. God has said, you are going to die. He says, no, we’re not going to die.
Therefore, he goes on to boldly suggest that God could only be raising up Babylon as an instrument of chastisement and correction, but not destruction. Thou, O Lord, hast appointed them to judge, and thou, O Rock, hast established them to correct.” As we move into verse 13, Habakkuk now presumes to give the Lord a lesson in justice. by applying the Lord’s own law to the Lord himself. After all, so says Habakkuk, your eyes, Lord, and this in keeping with what I know to be true from the law, your eyes are too pure to look on evil. You cannot look on wickedness with favor. Therefore, you cannot allow to happen what you said is going to happen.”
These are the words of a trapped man. He is desperate. A man whose former faith has him trapped in the limitations of the old covenant and in the limitations of the law itself. Here is a man whose faith is set upon the permanence of that Old Testament administration and all that it had in view. He sees no further than God’s promises to Israel with respect to the land. and he contends himself that he is righteous before the law, and therefore, because of his observance of the law, and because he’s on the right side of the question, the inheritance is guaranteed to him. What Habakkuk does not see at this point in the prophecy is that the land and the law, the ingredients of that old administration, are actually becoming obstructions to his faith.
He is being disdirected, and he is being led into a life of vain confidence and self-righteousness. Even though these are Habakkuk’s estimations with regard to the Old Covenant, they are not the Lord’s. They never were. the land and the law were meant to lead Israel to something greater. They were meant to lead Israel to the Christ, to abject humiliation and humility, and to the glory of a heavenly inheritance. The true faith rising off the pages of the Old Testament then points in another direction, a counter-direction to the direction that Habakkuk presently moves. Habakkuk, at this point in his own story, does not as yet get the point. But he will. For he will be brought, as it were, through death itself, a death to the old, that he for and in the new.
What about yourself? Is there something of a pagan manipulative form of faith to your faith? Or do you stand quite proximate to Habakkuk in his immaturity? You pray the language of the covenant, you rehearse the law, but even as you voice your prayers, your faith is still bound to temporal goals. And regardless of what you say with your mouth, those goals are guaranteed to you by your self-assurance that you stand acquitted in your own right before the biblical canons of righteousness. I’m okay.
But if this is your faith, it is not the justifying faith of which the gospel speaks. If you would have justifying faith, then read on in Habakkuk and live with him through the entirety of his prophecy. Dear, the faith of this man come to expression as the Lord himself would bring it to expression in him. That faith that grasps a maturity leading on into the gospel of Jesus Christ, and is of the temperament, belongs in the circle of that confession that rises then out of the Apostle Paul. For we know that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but through the faith of Jesus Christ. And even we have believed in Jesus Christ that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, not by the works of the law, for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.” Here we have no lasting city by a mature, justifying faith. we wait for and seek the one which is to come.
Our God, you tell us in the gospel that faith has come. And Lord, this faith is our faith. We would not then, O Lord, be afflicted by the manipulation of that form of faith too common in the world. And Lord, we would be saved from a vain spirituality in which we content ourselves with our covenantal language and our knowledge of the law. And in our heart of hearts, believe that we have a right standing with you because we are keeping that law, observing it, maintaining it, and thus distancing ourselves from the wicked. O God, our true faith is abandonment, whereby we abandon ourselves and rest in you. And our confidence is not in the law, but in Christ. And our home is not here, but in heaven. May we keep these things straight all our days, for Jesus’ sake.
The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.