How do you do with delays? In 2017, our family moved back
to America from having lived for three years in England.
So when moving day came, we had vacated our house.
We packed up 10 suitcases, we bundled up three small children,
got them into a van, headed from Cambridge to Heathrow, got to
the airport, got their security, got onto the plane, got
everybody seated and sat for a couple hours on the runway
because there's a mechanical issue.
Then it was determined that the mechanical issue couldn't be
fixed and so the flight was cancelled and the soonest they
could reschedule the flight for was wait for it the next day.
So we D boarded the plane. We got delivered to a hotel.
There's a pretty sketchy bus ride in between where with all
this oversized luggage, it was like flying off the storage
compartments and the buses going around turns.
We get to the hotel, we're being deposited out for 24 hours, go
into our room, start unpacking a couple of suitcases.
Now, we'd especially prepared our son William for the trip
because he was only two years old.
He doesn't really know what's happening.
So OK, William, here's what's going to happen.
We're going to take a van. We're going to get on a plane.
We're going to be on a plane for a long time.
When we get off the plane, we're going to be in America.
So we get into the hotel room. William starts bouncing on one
of the beds, and he shouts in triumph.
We in America think about how much fun it is to load up three
small children in 10 suitcases and get them onto a plane.
And think about how much fun it is to keep those three small
children busy in a hotel with nothing to do for 24 hours.
Delays are not usually very much fun.
Delays often try your patience. They push your buttons.
They reveal sore spots in your personality and weak spots in
your character. What's the last big delay you
had to deal with? And did it show you anything
about yourself? For those of us who are
believers in Jesus, sometimes it seems like God takes his sweet
time to fulfill his promises. He made a promise to elderly
Abraham that he would give him a son, and he did. 14 years later.
He promised to deliver his people Israel from slavery in
Egypt. And he did.
After 430 years of oppression almost 2000 years ago, Jesus
promised to return and make all things new.
He obviously hasn't yet. From one point of view, that
looks like a delay. Would you say it's been a long
time and that promise hasn't been fulfilled yet?
There are also other circumstances that can make us
acutely aware of how long God is taking to fulfill that grand
promise. There could be circumstances
that tempt us to question whether He'll keep other
promises, like the promise never to leave us or forsake us.
We go through all kinds of trying circumstances as
Christians. Sickness, disappointment,
betrayal, discouragement, and doubt.
There can be problems that just get worse with time.
It can make you wonder, why is God taking so long?
Why is His promise so long in coming?
In our series so far in Habakkuk, we've seen that the
prophet Habakkuk wrestled with God's seeming in action toward
injustice. So he cried out to the Lord in
prayer. The Lord answered.
But then Habakkuk's problem was God's solution looked even worse
than the problem. And so he wrestled with God in
prayer again. And he resolved at the end of
that prayer in chapter 2, verse one, to wait for an answer.
In our passage for this morning, chapter 2, verses 2 to 5, God
answers Habakkuk loud and clear. Please listen as I read those
verses. Habakkuk 2 verses 2:00 to 5:00.
And the Lord answered me, Write the vision, make it plain on
tablets so he may run who reads it?
For still the vision awaits its appointed time.
It hastens to the end. It will not lie.
If it seems slow, wait for it. It will surely come.
It will not delay. Behold, his soul is puffed up.
It is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by
his faith. Moreover, wine is a traitor, an
arrogant man who is never at rest.
His greed is as wide as Sheol. Like death, he has never enough.
He gathers for himself all nations and collects as his own
all peoples. In the book of Habakkuk so far,
Habakkuk lamented, the Lord answered, Habakkuk lamented
again. And now in our passage, the Lord
answers again. But his answer makes it clear
that Habakkuk's waiting is far from over.
Habakkuk is going to have to wait a lot more, and so are all
of God's people. In this second answer, the Lord
tells Habakkuk that he must wait, and he tells him what he's
waiting for, and he tells him how to wait for it.
So here's our big question for this morning.
What should you do when God's promise seems slow in coming?
Our passage gives 4 answers. We'll see one in each verse .1
in verse 2. Read it.
Here's verse 2 again.
And the Lord answered me. Write the vision.
Make it plain on tablets so he may run.
Who reads it? This verse explicitly says that
this is the Lord's answer to Habakkuk's prayerful waiting.
This is the response Habakkuk has been waiting for.
But before the Lord gives him the content of that response, he
tells Habakkuk what to do with it.
Write it. Make it plain on tablets.
Now we have to ask, what exactly is the vision that Habakkuk is
to write down? The passage doesn't tell us
explicitly, but for reasons I'll explain as we go, I think that
verses four and five are basically the key to the whole
book. So I think that at minimum,
verses four and five are what Habakkuk has to write down.
But the section running from verse 6 to verse 20 in chapter 2
unpacks the promise of judgment that verse 5 implies.
So it's kind of hard to separate verses four and five from what
follows. Maybe he he wrote down more.
The point is not super important for our purposes.
In any case, what Habakkuk was to do with the vision is clear.
Write it down. Make it plain.
Now the tablets he wants to write on could have been wood,
could have been clay, could have been stone.
The purpose of having him write it on tablets was that it was
like a picture you could frame and hang up where everybody
could see it. It was like an announcement on a
bulletin board that you could put in a public place so that
anybody walking by could read it.
Now that last phrase in verse 2 might be a little confusing.
So he may run. Who reads it?
I think that the running here is a metaphor, meaning that whoever
reads it can do so easily and quickly.
Anyone can walk up and have no trouble getting the message.
They're not going to be stalled by it being too small or obscure
or anything like that. Maybe Hibakuk was supposed to
use big bold letters so that even if you stood across the
street, you can make it out just fine while this fanfare.
Why such emphatic instructions about what to do with the
message? What Hibakuk is supposed to do
with the vision? The reason is that the vision
the Lord is about to give Him is extra important.
All of these kind of trumpet blasts before it actually comes
are signaling how important it is.
God is about to provide deeper insight into the meaning of
events that are to come, and He's about to provide deeper
instruction about how to wait for His promise and how to live
well in the time between. God is about to reveal both what
to expect and how to live in light of that expectation.
That, I think, is why verses four and five are key to the
whole book. I'm not a big fan of billboards.
They're distracting and ugly. But here's the thing, they work.
They grab your attention, you're driving by and it's hard not to
look at that 40 foot wide sign here.
It's as if the Lord is saying to Habakkuk, make it like a
billboard, make it unmissable, make it so that it will grab
everybody's attention, so that everybody in the city of
Jerusalem can see this. What we hear in verse 2 is that
the Lord is determined to publish His word.
The Lord is determined to propagate His word.
There's a sense in which what the Lord told Habakkuk to do in
a special kind of format here, He also instructed all the
prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles and their
associates who wrote the New Testament to do the same thing.
The Lord could have, if he chose, simply given his
revelation in verbal form and said, all right, preserve it,
pass it down, teach it, memorize it, don't forget any of it.
Just pass it down, mouth to mouth, mind to mind, generation
to generation. He could have done that, but
what he did instead was instruct prophets and apostles to write
it down. He gave it a more fixed and
stable form, a form that could travel from region to region,
country to country, A form that could be translated into new
languages, a form that could be preserved over time, over
generations and centuries and millennia.
God's given us his word in a form that's reliable and
trustworthy. It's available and accessible.
It's able to be read by anyone who can read.
It's able to be heard by anyone who can listen to it being read
aloud. In other words, I think verse 2
supports the biblical doctrine of the clarity of Scripture.
God has given us His revelation in a form anyone can understand.
It's teaching about how to be saved and how to live a godly
life is accessible to all. You can get what you need from
Scripture to be right with God and live a life that's pleasing
to him. When God's promise seems slow in
coming, what should you do? Read it.
There's a sense in which the whole Bible expounds God's
promises. Of course, the Bible contains
more than promises, but it's promises that hold the whole
Bible together, promises that set the plot moving.
Abraham wasn't doing much of significance in terms of
salvation history before God's promise comes to him, calls him,
sets a whole new thing in motion.
God's promises and their fulfilment structure the whole
of Scripture. Now God's Word is packed with
detailed descriptions of what he promises to all who believe.
One good spiritual exercise is to read through the whole Bible
and pay attention to everything that is promised to stir up love
for your true Fatherland during your exile.
Read the letters your father has written to you about your
homeland. You could even take a certain
color pen or highlighter and mark every promise that you find
in that same color. Reading scripture with a view to
storing up God's promises is like filling up your gas tank
for a long road trip. The Christian life involves a
lot of waiting. Most of us will likely have to
cover a lot of Spiritual Rd. miles between now and heaven.
What do you have to do on a long road trip?
Say you're driving from here to Maine or you're driving from
here to Kansas City. You will have to fill up your
tank multiple times. One tank of gas is not going to
do it. When you study God's Word to
mark its promises, you are filling up your gas tank
spiritually to enable spiritual endurance.
So when you find God's promises in Scripture, you should also
meditate on those promises by turning them into prayer.
Ask God to enable you to trust His promises more than you trust
market projections. Ask God to enable you to desire
what he has promised you in heaven more than you desire
health or prosperity now. And remind each other of God's
promises. When you do that, you put a
little gas into another church member's tank.
Think of a promise that's especially encouraged you.
And tell someone else. Talk to him in person, or call
him on the phone, or text them or e-mail.
Help a fellow believer see and savour what God has written in
big, bold letters. When God's promise seems slow in
coming, keep reading the book that declares those promises to
you, and then read it some more. It's going to be a long drive.
Settle in point #2 wait for it. That's the Lord's exhortation in
verse three. Wait for it, for still the
vision awaits its appointed time.
It hastens to the end. It will not lie.
If it seems slow, wait for it. It will surely come.
It will not delay. The beginning of verse 3 says
still. Still the vision awaits.
Why the word still? Because it might look to
Habakkuk like it's already been a long time coming, and because
the full fulfillment of what God is promising here is going to
take a while. Just to preview a little bit.
In verse 5, we get just a hint that God will judge the
Babylonians for their sins. That's part of what Habakkuk has
been asking for. And then verses 6 to 20 predict
that judgement in detail. Babylon's downfall, historically
speaking, would come 70 years later when Cyrus the Persian
would conquer them. In historical terms, it's not
very long, but Habakkuk would almost certainly have been dead
by then. God's people would have to wait
a long time even for the initial fulfillment of the first part of
this promise. But the following verses in
chapter 2 point even further into the future.
We'll see more next week, Lord willing.
But just here's verse 14. For the earth will be filled
with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover
the sea. That didn't happen in Habakkuk's
lifetime. That didn't happen 70 years
later with the fall of Babylon. It still hasn't happened 2500
years later. If it seems slow, wait for it.
The vision the Lord gives Habakkuk is immediately
fulfilled in the historical downfall of Babylon and the end
of Judah's exile. But it is ultimately fulfilled
in both the 1st and the second coming of Christ.
That's why at the beginning of verse 3, the Lord says still for
still the vision awaits its appointed time.
Despite the long time between promise and fulfillment, it's
still coming. Despite the seemingly long
delay, God will still do what He said.
Why? Because the vision has an
appointed time to be fulfilled. We have to ask, appointed by
whom? Appointed by God who made the
promise. Appointed by God who sovereignly
rules the whole universe. People have different ways of
managing their upcoming appointments with other people.
You might have a journal kind of notebook that has a calendar in
it. You might have the one you put
up on your fridge or a wall in your kitchen.
For me, it's pretty much Google Calendar.
If I'm going to make an appointment, it's going into my
Google Calendar. If I don't put it in there, I'm
probably forgetting about it. There's a friend I used to have
lunch with once a month when we lived in DC.
He lived a block from me, and so we'd be walking back from lunch
and every time we got to his place, we're going to say
goodbye. I would just schedule the next
lunch, send him an invite right then and there.
He would laugh at me. The the predictability end of
lunch, we're going to schedule the next one.
The Google invite's going to show up from Bobby in two
seconds. Here we go.
Why did I do that? It's because I valued his
friendship. I didn't want to just forget
about it and have us stop getting lunch because we're
busy. Stuff's going to happen.
If we leave it the next time I might not see him.
So just put it on the Google Calendar right now, for still
the vision awaits. It's appointed time.
Verse 3 is telling us that God Himself has put the date of the
fulfilment of this promise on His own personal Google
Calendar. It's there.
He's not going to forget about it.
He's not going to miss it Now, unfortunately for our desires to
know more than we need to know, this is not a Google Calendar He
can share with any creature. You will not be getting viewing,
much less editing access to this calendar.
But who cares who needs it? God Himself has set the time.
That's all we need to know. God's not going to miss it.
Nothing could take it off His calendar.
Nothing could interfere with His commitment to fulfilling His
promise. God will fulfill it no matter
what the next little bit of verse 3 says.
It hastens to the end. It will not lie.
The word translated hastens is literally pants or breathes,
like someone working hard to reach a destination.
The point is that even if it seems like God's not doing
anything, He's active in ways we can't see.
He is purposely moving history toward its fulfilment.
Even when it looks to us like He's not doing anything, God's
purpose is working. God's promise is painting, and
it won't prove false because the God who gave it won't prove
false. The vision cannot lie because
the God who revealed it does not and cannot lie.
God will never rethink His priorities and decide to not
pursue that course of action. After all, there is no on again,
off again with God's promises. The rest of the verse says if it
seems slow, wait for it. It will surely come.
It will not delay. It might seem slow to us, but it
is not our job to judge God's timing.
God is like Gandalf and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings,
Frodo accuses him. You're late, Gandalf replies.
A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins, nor is he early.
He arrives precisely when he means to.
God's promises are never late, nor are they early.
They arrive precisely when he means them to.
So how can you keep faithfully waiting on God's promise when it
seems slow in coming? The first thing is to remember
that it's spoken by God himself. God has said it.
That's the only assurance we need.
That's the essence of faith. As Martyn Lloyd Jones reflected,
faith means taking the bare word of God and acting upon it
because it is the Word of God. It means believing what God says
simply and solely because he has said it.
You also have to make sure that what you're waiting for is
something God has actually promised.
There are all kinds of good things we hope for and long for
and yearn for that God hasn't actually promised us.
He might give them, He might not.
If you're counting on it, it better be God's promise that
you're counting on. Count on Christ's return.
Count on the resurrection of your body.
Count on inheriting the new heavens and earth.
Count on God never leaving or forsaking you.
But don't count on something you want that God hasn't guaranteed.
In this series so far, we've repeatedly come back to the
theme of waiting on the Lord. And here it is again.
The Lord knows we need repeated reminders to wait for Him.
The Lord knows we're impatient by nature, need to be told again
and again to wait on His promises.
When we're suffering and struggling, we can be tempted to
forget what we knew for certain in the clear light of day.
So when God's promises seem slow, how can you wait?
Well, it's about what weighs heavier in your heart.
God's promises or your plans. God's promises or your
suffering. God's promises or your fears.
Let the certainty of fulfillment outweigh the uncertainty of its
timing. Let the certainty of God's
promises being fulfilled outweigh the uncertainty of so
many of your desires being realized.
Let the certainty of God's promises outweigh your fears and
anxieties. Many of them won't happen.
Even if they do, the fulfillment of God's promises will more than
make up for it. As we sang earlier, the King
there in his beauty without a veil is seen.
It were a well spent journey those 7 deaths lay between.
How can you get God's promises to weigh heavier in your heart
than anything else? The fundamental thing to do is
pray that God will renovate your heart so that His promises are
the foundation of your life. Helps to examine your heart in
light of Scripture. Ask God to show you what you're
relying on instead of His promise, or that's competing
with His promise that you're putting more hope in than His
promise. And talk to another church
member about that. Open up the contents of your
heart. Say, help me rely on God's
promise more than on my plans. When God makes a promise, you
have only two options. Believe it or reject it.
Accept it or refuse it. And which option you choose
determines your relationship with Him.
It determines the course of your life.
Ultimately, it determines your eternal destiny.
So what should you do when God's promise seems slow .3 Trust it,
Trust it. That's the posture commended in
verse 4. Behold, his soul is puffed up.
It is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by
his faith. This verse really begins the
vision itself. This attention getting word
behold is a clue that this is the start of the vision.
Now in this vision, verse 4 begins a contrast between faith
and unbelief that also runs through verse 5.
It paints side by side portraits of someone who rejects God's
promises and someone who accepts God's promises.
In the first part of this vision, the Lord is describing
unbelief in terms that especially fit the Babylonians
and their kings. He's doing that to show how the
Babylonians exemplify and typify unbelief and evil in general.
The Babylonians who are about to swoop down and judge them are a
moral and spiritual example to avoid.
They're what God's people should not to be like.
They're examples of people who don't submit to the Lord and
don't trust His promises. So first, in verse 4, we learn
of the person whose soul is puffed up and whose soul is not
upright. In other words, they're proud.
They reject God's word because they think they know better.
They reject God's ways because they would rather be in charge
of their own life. Pride and unbelief are two sides
of the same coin. Refusal to believe and refusal
to obey are two aspects of the same reality.
If you're not a believer in Jesus, how do you respond to
pride? It's easy enough to spot it in
others, easy to see when someone has a too high view of
themselves. But what about spotting pride in
yourself? How easy is it to detect?
How do you respond if someone else ever suggests to you that
you are proud? It's hard to see your own pride.
It's maybe even harder to acknowledge when someone else
points it out. And it's harder still to get rid
of your pride. What can do that?
How could such a fundamental change be accomplished?
So that's 1/2 of the contrast. Pride, unbelief being puffed up.
What about the other half of the contrast?
Look at the second part of verse 4.
But the righteous shall live by his faith.
Now the whole focus of the context is waiting on God to
fulfill His promise, trusting that God will make good on His
Word even when you don't see any evidence of that coming.
So when Habakkuk refers to someone here as righteous, I
think he implies that what puts them into that category of
righteous is their faith. They're counted righteous by
faith. I think there's a deliberate
echo here of Genesis 15-6, which says Abraham believed God and he
counted it to him as righteousness.
So here the righteous person doesn't rely on themselves, but
on God's promise by faith. The righteous person looks not
to their own strength, but to God's strength.
They rely not on their plans but on God's promise.
Now, what does it mean that the righteous will live by faith?
I don't think this is describing the kind of course of life or
way of life, although that's true theologically.
I think it's a compressed way of promising ultimate salvation.
They will live. Finally, they will live
eternally. When all things are said and
done, they will be found living. Whereas the Babylonians, and
like them, all the wicked will ultimately be judged.
Those opposed to God will ultimately receive his
condemnation. Those who are righteous by faith
will be vindicated. So I think this promise of life
points ahead. I think it points to the climax
of history and beyond history, to the eternal life God promises
his people. It points to a life that is
beyond the reach of any invading army and every unjust oppressor.
It's a promise that might seem slow in coming, but it will
certainly come. This passage paints a stark
contrast. We often resist that.
We don't like that. We want there to be categories
in between. Well, what about the really
righteous person who maybe they don't believe in God, but they
do a lot of moral good works And shouldn't God just kind of look
at that person and say, oh, you're kind of doing the right
thing. You're kind of on my team.
I know you don't really get it or pay attention to me, but
you're you're doing sort of socially good things.
You're a good person. That's fine.
That counts. We don't like the absolute black
and white one or the other, yes or no.
But that's the picture God is painting here.
He's showing that the key to being right with Him is
believing Him. The only way to be accepted by
Him is trusting His promise. And He's made good on this
promise by sending his Son into the world to save all those who
had turned from sin and trust in him.
He made good on this promise that the righteous will live by
faith by sending his Son to become Incarnate, to live a
perfect life for us, to die on the cross for all who would
believe, and to rise from the dead three days later, beginning
in himself that eternal life that would be promised to God's
people. There's such a binary here
because when it comes to the good news of Jesus, you either
accept or reject. There's only two options,
because only by believing in Jesus can you receive this
eternal life. There's only a yes or no, black
or white, on or off, because this good news of what Jesus
came to do is the only way to receive life from God.
It's the only way to be right with God if you've not turned
from sin and trusted in Jesus, believe in him today.
So this verse, Vagad 24, is one of the most important verses in
the Bible for understanding how you can become right with God,
how anybody can get into a right relationship with God.
And so it's not surprising that this verse is quoted multiple
times in the New Testament. To that end, as we heard in our
call to worship, the apostle Paul quotes this verse twice at
key places in his letters. One of them is the Feast of
Statement of the book of Romans, chapter 1, verses 16 and 17.
I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for
salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew 1st, and
also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of
God is revealed from faith. For faith as it is written, the
righteous shall live by faith. So Paul takes this verse,
Habakkuk 2 four, to be a prophetic witness, pointing
ahead to the reality that all who trust in Jesus will be
declared righteous by God. Paul sees in Habakkuk's promise
a preview or a paradigm of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Whoever is rightly believing in God's promise in Habakkuk's day
is looking forward to its fulfillment.
Whoever believes in Jesus today is looking back on its
fulfillment. Everyone who trusts in Jesus
will be declared righteous by God, not because of anything
good we've done, but only because by faith we receive
Jesus's righteousness. That's the biblical doctrine of
justification by faith alone. As we confessed earlier in
Article nine of our church's statement of faith, we believe
the justification is God's gracious and full acquittal of
sinners, wherein He removes our guilt, reconciles us to Himself,
and declares us righteous. Now, justifying faith will
always show itself to be true over time by bearing the fruit
of love and obedience. But we are not justified by our
love or obedience. As Calvin put it, faith strips
us of all arrogance and leads us naked and needy to God, that we
may seek salvation from Him alone, which would otherwise be
far removed from us. In Romans 4 verse 5, Paul
teaches that the one who does not work but trusts him who
justifies the ungodly has their faith counted as righteousness.
In Galatians 311, Paul denies that anyone can be justified by
the law. And then he quotes our verse
Faith is how we receive Christ and perfect righteousness in
Him. We're justified by faith alone,
and the faith that justifies is never alone.
A helpful analogy for holding both those truths together is
like the role of the eye in the body.
The eye is not separated from the body.
It can't exist and do its function apart from the body.
But of all the parts of the body the I alone sees, faith alone
receives Christ and his righteousness.
There are infinite rich applications of this truth that
we could consider. Our pastor Michael will lead us
in considering a few of them in the devotional tonight.
For now, I'll just say this. What should this truth of
justification by faith alone do to your relationship with God?
If you trust in Christ, the doctrine of justification should
grant you a massive stable assurance.
Your standing before God does not rise with obedience or fall
with disobedience. Your peace with God does not
diminish based on how you feel or how warm or cold your love
for Him is. Because you've been justified by
faith, you have peace with God. There is therefore now no
condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, those whom God
has justified who will condemn. So when God's promise seems slow
in coming, trust it, receive it, rely on it.
If you do, what will be the proof .4 in verse 5?
Be satisfied in it. Be satisfied in it.
Now that's the opposite of what the wicked person in verse 5
does. So we're giving the opposite of
what is being warned about. Be satisfied in it.
Verse 5 continues the contrast by switching back to focusing on
the unrighteous, and it shows that those who are ruled by
sinful appetites are never satisfied.
Look at verse 11. Sorry, not verse 11, Verse 5.
Moreover, Wine is a traitor, an arrogant man who is never at
rest. His greed is as wide as Sheol.
Like death, he has never enough. He gathers for himself all
nations and collects as his own all peoples.
Again, remember that in this vision the Lord is describing
unbelievers in general in terms that especially fit the
Babylonians. One reason for that is to warn
his people not to be like them, but instead to live by faith.
But I think another reason for describing the wicked in terms
that fit the Babylonians is sort of to start profiling them, to
start forecasting their fate. Here's who they are.
Here's what they're like. You start filling in the dots
based on what you know of God's character and his purposes.
How do you think it's going to wind up for them?
Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a
fall. What's implicit here?
Verses 6 to 20 are going to make very explicit.
Babylon's days are numbered. He's going to judge them for
their greedy domination of the world.
And so we begin to see how verses four and five together
are the answer to Habakkuk's lament.
How can God let the Babylonians get away with all this?
He won't, but he's going to deal with them in his own way and in
his own time. So how can Habakkuk and the rest
of God's people live with that tension?
How can they bear up in the face of present devastation and
injustice and questions about God's righteousness?
It's by trusting in His promise that's the key.
That's the key that God gives His people through Habakkuk to
hold on, to keep trusting the promise.
It will become plain. There will be a difference
between the righteous and the wicked.
Those who trust in Him will inherit life.
Those who oppose Him will be judged.
And you have to keep holding on to that promise for as long as
it takes. So here in verse 5, the Lord
returns to what His people shouldn't do and shouldn't.
B. He begins with a warning about
wine and you might see a footnote in your Bible.
That's the Dead Sea Scrolls copy of this verse has the word
wealth. It's a very similar word in
Hebrew. You basically change one pen
stroke and it could have been wealth.
I think wine though is the original reading.
It's it's in the most of the manuscripts that makes sense in
the context. Here's how it fits.
Wine is a reference not to the beverage as such, but to
drunkenness. According to scripture, wine is
a good gift from God, but drunkenness is treacherous and
arrogant. To be drunk is to be never at
rest. Why?
Because you're giving into cravings and you always want
more. Too much is never enough.
When you want too much and drink too much, it will turn on you,
it will turn against you. You will be seeking enjoyment
and you will be damaging yourself and others.
So drunkenness is a sin, but it isn't merely a sin.
It's also a picture. It's it's a paradigm, it's a
parable. A drunkard always wants more,
and so does the king of Babylon. What does he want more of?
Peoples, nations, kingdoms and all of their resources to suck
up and take back to the capital and to tax to create a ever
flowing income stream. He wants more, always another
one. Where's another Kingdom I can
drink up for myself. Babylon's foreign policy is like
a drunk always wanting another drink.
Idols deliver for a time. Idols give you something that
keeps you coming back to them. If they didn't, they would have
no worshippers. It's not that idols don't work
at all. In fact, they can seem to work
really well for a time. Drunkenness, sexual immorality,
greed, lust for power, you name it.
If you give yourself to that idol, you will get something
from it. But eventually there will be
diminishing returns. Eventually your idol will turn
on you. That's why God calls it a
traitor. Idols demand more and more while
giving less and less. The longer you worship an idol,
the more you give it and the less it gives you.
That's the warning in this verse.
His greed is as wide as Sheol. Like death, he never has enough.
He gathers for himself all nations and collects as his own
all peoples. Ultimately, when you devote
yourself to any sinful desire, you never have enough.
That word for Sheol there, it's just a kind of Hebrew idiomatic
way of referring to the realm of the dead.
Kind of a synonym for death. Just like death swallows up
everyone eventually. That's how big the King of
Babylon's appetite is. It's a gruesome picture.
Kids in the congregation, what do you want that you can never
have enough of? Is there a snack that once you
start to eat it, it is hard not to eat the whole bag?
Maybe your parents wouldn't let you eat the whole bag.
Maybe sometimes. You've eaten the whole bag
anyway and didn't tell anybody about it, only got found out
later. Those snack foods are engineered
to make you want more without filling up your stomach.
That's what they're designed to do.
They're hard to resist. I have my own that I could name
that would be difficult for me not to eat the whole bag, but
that's a picture of what sinful desire is like.
In general. You want more and it isn't
enough. You have a ton and it doesn't
fill you up. You keep going and getting more
of it, but then you start to feel sick.
So what's the alternative? If endless craving is what we
shouldn't give in to, then what does God want us to cultivate
it's satisfaction in Him. You cannot grow as a Christian
through simple denial, only denial.
There is a denial we should denial selfish and sinful
desires, but only denial doesn't do it.
You can only drive out a desire for satisfaction in sinful
things or a sinful to great desire for something that in
itself could be legitimate. You can only drive that out by
aiming for a greater satisfaction in God.
You have to be more satisfied to have His promise then you would
be to possess the whole world. What Jesus said in Mark 836 is
so on point. For what does it profit a man to
gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?
So again, this passage presents us with a stark choice.
You can chase sinful desires that will never satisfy you and
always leave you wanting more. Or you can trust the God who is
Himself infinitely satisfying. The more you trust Him, the more
satisfied you'll be in Him. The more you rely on Him, the
more you find every good thing you're looking for in Him.
The more you submit to His commands and put sinful desires
to death, the more you'll find deep delights springing up in
places that used to be overrun by sinful desires.
The more you uproot the weeds of sinful desire, more
satisfactions in God will grow up in their place.
The battle for your soul is a battle for your satisfaction.
The war for your soul between Satan and God is a contest for
your love. It's a contest for your
affections. It's a contest for your desire.
Satan wants you trapped in a cycle of addiction to sin,
always craving, always wanting, never satisfied.
God wants to free you to be satisfied in Him.
But devoting yourself to the one true God produces exactly the
opposite of that kind of always craving and never being
satisfied. The more you love God, the more
you can be satisfied with whatever He gives and whatever
He withholds. The more you trust God, the more
happy you can be with God, even if being happy with God means
for now having nothing else to be happy about.
Every Christian has the universe as their inheritance.
The new creation will be yours. Everything that exists is held
in trust for you. What Paul says to the
Corinthians we considered a couple weeks ago in our Bible
study. He says in First Corinthians
322, starting in verse 21, For all things are yours, whether
Paul or Apollo's or Cephas or the world or life or death or
the present or the future, all are yours and you are Christ's
and Christ is God's. You don't have to crave for more
because God has granted you possession of everything, not
just Christian teachers like Paul starts with, but the world.
The world is yours. How?
Because Jesus is its true ruler and master and owner, and he
will grant you an inheritance in it.
Life is yours How? Because you share an eternal
life now. You already have a life within
you that will never stop, never end, never die, that nothing can
kill, nothing can threaten, and you will one day come to the
full inheritance of it. What else is yours?
The world, life, Death. Death is yours.
What on earth could that mean? It means death isn't supreme
over you. You're supreme over death.
Yes, unless Jesus comes back first.
You'll have to submit to death. Yes, unless Jesus comes back
first. You'll have to be, in one sense,
defeated by death. But Jesus already defeated death
itself. And if you trust in Jesus, you
will live to outlast death. You will live to see death's
final defeat. You will live to laugh at death
and mock death and taunt death. Death doesn't have the upper
hand on you. You have the upper hand on
death. That's what God has given you to
possess. That's what God has liberated
you from. That's what God has made you
free from. That's what it looks like to be
satisfied. In him.
Endless riches are coming, so you can endure poverty and
hardship now. God Himself will be the sum and
substance of the riches He promises you.
God Himself is enough to satisfy you forever.
What is making it hard for you to wait on God right now?
How are you doing with the delay?
Whatever it is, remember to look in two directions, backward and
forward. Look back on the promises God
has already fulfilled. He did fulfill this promise in
Habakkuk. If the vision seems slow, wait
for it. He fulfilled it in 539 BC when
Cyrus the Persian toppled Babylon.
A big chunk of this promise has already been fulfilled.
An even bigger chunk of this promise has been fulfilled when
Jesus came and died on the cross and rose again to give eternal
life to all who trust in Him. Look back to the promises God
has already fulfilled and then look forward what God has said
God will do. Our present sufferings are not
worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us,
and that's a glory that God has promised us.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we pray that we
would patiently wait on You to fulfill your promise because you
have proven so spectacularly faithful to so many promises
both in the history of your people and in our own lives.
Father, we pray that we would trust in you and wait for you.
Be satisfied in You as we look forward to the day when all your
promises will be fulfilled in Jesus name, Amen.