01 Introduction to Habakkuk

Krisan Marotta: Welcome to the Wednesday in the Word Podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. This is the first talk in a new series on the Old Testament Book of Habakkuk. Today I'll introduce you to the book and its author. Lecture notes are on the link below this podcast. Lecture notes are the handout I would give you if this were an in-person talk. You can also find those lecture notes by going directly to wednesdayintheword.com slash Habakkuk One. And by the way, Habakkuk is spelled H A B A K K U K. I'm really glad you decided to come along. I probably don't have to point this out to you, but life is full of surprises. Sometimes they are good surprises. You get a raise, you get a new job, you find out you're going to be a parent or a grandparent. Sometimes they're bad surprises. You fail in school, your business goes under, a relationship breaks up, you lose a good friend, or maybe you go bankrupt and have to start all over again. Or even worse, civil war breaks out and you are caught in the conflict. The problem is we don't expect bad surprises. We think that as children of a loving God, bad things are not supposed to happen to us. Consciously or not, we often assume, well, look, if I'm the child of a loving God and a follower of Jesus Christ, I should be living in a bubble that will protect me from things like suffering and failure and loss. But Scripture teaches that both blessings and tragedies come to both the forgiven and the unforgiven. God sends rain on both the faithful and those who reject him. Faith does not protect you from being fired or experiencing a serious car wreck or any of the tragedies of life. Cancer strikes both believers and non-believers, and civil war happens whether you're a Christian or not. And that raises a really tough question. How can a loving God let these bad things happen to me or to the world? How can we say that God is good and loving and merciful and gracious when his people are persecuted, experience loss and tragedies, and may be caught in the conflict of war? We often speak of God with the metaphor of a loving father, and what father lets tragedy strike his child if it's in his power to prevent it? So why do God's people suffer? Well, that's precisely the question answered by the book of Habakkuk. The book begins with the prophet calling out to God in distress. His life is full of injustice, he's suffering under a corrupt government, and he cries out to God for relief. When God answers, Habakkuk discovers the answer is worse than his original complaint. Well, now Habakkuk faces even more tough questions. How can a loving God let this happen to his people? And furthermore, why should we keep trusting him in the midst of this thing he's got planned? Well, those are the themes we're going to address with our study. But before we look at the text, I want to set the historical stage for this book. The author, Habakkuk, was a prophet to the southern kingdom of Judah. He was roughly contemporary with the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel. We know very little about the man himself, and most of the evidence for when this book was written is in the book itself. In Habakkuk 1 6, God reveals to Habakkuk that he plans to use the Taldeans, also known as the Babylonians, to judge the southern kingdom of Judah. Well that places this book in the period after the fall of the northern kingdom and before the fall of the southern kingdom. Now you may be wondering what all that means and where this is in biblical history, so let's start at the beginning. The history of the nation of Israel starts with God calling Abraham. Abraham had a son named Isaac. Isaac had a son named Jacob, and Jacob, who was later renamed Israel, had twelve sons. Through one of Jacob's sons, Joseph, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob end up as slaves in Egypt. That eventually leads to God bringing them out of slavery through Moses in what we call the Exodus. After the Exodus, this large tribe is wandering around the wilderness in the Sinai Desert. That period ends with the conquest of the Promised Land, or Palestine, which is recorded in the book of Joshua. Each of the twelve sons of Jacob, or Israel, has become a large tribe and they divide up the land by tribe, essentially creating the nation of Israel. The conquest of the promised land is then followed by the period of judges. After the twelfth judge, Israel says, You know what, this isn't working. We need a central government like all the other nations, and they ask God for a king. God gives them Saul first, and then David and his son Solomon. And that's the period of what we call the United Monarchy or the United Kingdom. That period also has its ups and downs, but overall, under the reign of King David and King Solomon, Israel experiences her glory days of peace and prosperity. After the death of Solomon in 930 BC, civil war breaks out over which of his sons should inherit the throne. The struggle turns into a civil war, and in approximately 931, the ten northern tribes split from the kingdom, naming one son, Jeroboam, as their king, and they become the northern kingdom, which is called Israel. The two remaining tribes in the south make another son of Solomon their king, Rehoboam, and they become the southern kingdom, which is called Judah. And that begins the period of biblical history that we call the divided kingdom. The northern kingdom cycled through nineteen kings, all of them bad, and by bad I mean they worshiped other gods, and they turned the people away from Yahweh, as opposed to seeking to follow Yahweh and keep his covenant. Finally, God disciplines the Northern Kingdom for their rebellion against him, and in seven twenty two BC the ten northern tribes are conquered by Assyria and they are taken into exile, leaving the tiny nation of Judah to struggle on alone. Judah or the Southern Kingdom had a more mixed history than the Northern Kingdom. They had some good kings and some bad. Among the best kings were Hezekiah and Josiah. Among the worst kings were Manasseh and Amon. During the long reign of the evil king Manasseh, Judah was a vassal state of the Assyrians, and Manasseh installed altars to the Assyrian gods in the temple of Yahweh. Yahweh is another name for the god of the Bible, the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. As long as Judah paid their tribute and obeyed their Assyrian masters, they were left in relatively quiet existence. However, those conquered states that rebelled against Assyria were trampled with fierce cruelty. So to set the stage for Habakkuk, let's pick up the story about six hundred forty BC when Josiah becomes king, and I'm going to read Second Kings chapter twenty two verses one and two. Josiah was eight years old when he became king, and he reigned thirty one years in Jerusalem, and his mother's name was Jedediah, the daughter of Adiah of Boscoth. He did right in the sight of the Lord and walked in all the way of his father David, nor did he turn aside to the right or to the left. So Josiah was a good king, he instituted many reforms. Under his reign he repaired the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. While they were making those repairs, the workmen found a copy of what's called the Book of the Law, which probably means the Pentateuch, and Josiah read it and repented. As a result of rediscovering the law, Josiah institutes sweeping reforms, he removes the foreign Assyrian idols from the house of the Lord, and he turns the people back to following Yahweh. As Josiah is reforming, though, the Assyrian Empire begins to weaken. The Assyrians don't even protest when Josiah removes their gods because they now have bigger problems to deal with. The Babylonians, who were also known as the Chaldeans, were one of the vassal states of Assyria, like Judah was. They see Assyria weakening and they begin making plans to rebel. They see a weak Assyria as their chance to seize power. The Babylonian prince Nabo Pelazar reestablishes Babylon as an independent city around 626 BC. Nabopelazar forms a military alliance with the Medes and embarks on a quest to gain dominance over the empire and destroy Assyria. In about six hundred twelve BC they sacked the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. Around six hundred nine BC, the Egyptian king decides he needs Assyria as a buffer between his kingdom and this Babylonian Mead alliance, so he heads north to help Assyria resist the rebellion, marching through Judah in the process. King Josiah decides to stop him, and this is recorded in Second Kings chapter three, verses twenty nine through thirty seven. In his days Pharaoh Neco, king of Egypt, went up to the king of Assyria to the river Euphrates, and King Josiah went to meet him, and when Pharaoh Neco saw him, he killed him at Megado. So that is Neco killing Josiah. His Josiah's servants drove his body in a chariot from Megado and brought him to Jerusalem and buried him in his own tomb. Then the people of the land took Jehoahaz, the son of Josiah, and anointed him, and made him king in place of his father. Joahaz was twenty three years old when he became king, and he reigned three months in Jerusalem, and his mother's name was Hamatel, the daughter of Jeremiah of Libna. He did evil in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his fathers had done. Pharaoh Neco imprisoned him at Riblah in the land of Hamath, that he might not reign in Jerusalem, and he imposed on the land a fine of one hundred talents of silver and a talent of gold. Pharaoh Neco made Eliakim, the son of Josiah king in place of Josiah his father, and changed his name to Jehoakim, but he took Jehoahaz away and brought him to Egypt, and he died there. So Joakim gave the silver and gold to Pharaoh, but he taxed the land in order to give the money to the government of Pharaoh. He exacted the silver and gold from the people of the land, each according to his valuation, to give it to Pharaoh Neco. Joakim was twenty five years old when he became king, and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem, and his mother's name was Zebediah, the daughter of Padiah of Ruma. He did evil in the sight of the Lord according to all that his fathers had done. Now I probably didn't pronounce all those names correctly, and that might have been confusing, so let me hit the highlights for you. Josiah is killed at Megado and his death is disastrous for the nation. Under Josiah, the kingdom prospered. Josiah was a just and merciful ruler who tried to do right in the sight of the Lord. After Josiah's death at the hands of the Pharaoh, the people place his son Jehoahaz on the throne, but three months later, as Pharaoh returns from his unsuccessful attempt to help the Assyrians against the Babylonian Mead alliance, the Pharaoh deposes Joahaz and carts him off to Egypt and installs Jehoakim on the throne instead. As a vassal king of Pharaoh Neco, Jehoiakim reverses the reforms of his father Josiah, and the prophet Jeremiah charges him with all manner of evil, which you can read about in Jeremiah twenty two. About four years later, which is about six hundred five BC, Nebuchadnezzar II, who is now the ruler of Babylon, defeats Egypt at the Battle of Carchamesh. Jehoiakim swears allegiance to Babylon, and now the whole of Syria and Palestine fall under Babylonian control. It is during the reign of Jehoiakim that most scholars think Habakkuk prophesied. As he writes his prophecy then, Habakkuk and his country have faced a series of really bad surprises. Habakkuk's world is in tremendous geopolitical turmoil. Judah has an evil king on the throne who's as bad as Manassas. The reforms of Josiah are a thing of the past. The king is unjust, he's ruling with a heavy fist, turning the people to foreign gods, and he's enacting these heavy punitive taxes to pay his tribute first to Pharaoh and then to Babylon. On an international level, they've lost whatever feeble protection they had from the Egyptian king. They are now a vassal state of Babylon, and the Babylonians are proving to be worse than the Assyrians. Into this setting, Habakkuk seeks the Lord and he asks, Lord, how long is this going to go on? When are you going to rescue your people? Life is just one big bad surprise after another. He looks around and he sees his nation spiraling downward in evil and rebellion against God. He looks at the evil nations who are gaining power over Judah and oppressing the people, and he says, Life is bad and it's getting worse. So he turns to God and asks, How long? How long are you going to let this go on? When are you going to save your people? So this book of Habakkuk speaks to one of the most fundamental questions of faith. We believe in a just, righteous, and merciful God, and yet we look around at the chaos and crime and violence in the world and we say, Lord, where are you? How long will you let this go on? Your people are struggling under an evil regime. Your people are turning away to idols. The wicked seem to prosper and the righteous seem to perish. Life is bad and it's getting worse. We're crying out to you and you don't seem to be listening. As we'll see, when God does answer, the answer is worse than the original problem. And I'm sure many believers who live during the time of Hitler's Germany, as well as many believers who are facing persecution today, ask this same question. God, how can this be? How can a righteous, just, and merciful God let this go on? Well that's the basic problem of the book. And as we'll see, God doesn't exactly explain himself in the sense of justifying specific actions. Rather, he calls us to understand who he is and what he's doing in history. So in God's answer, we're gonna see the answer to our two theme questions, which are first, how can a loving God let his people suffer? And second, why should we keep believing him if we're not rescued from the tragedies of life? Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word, the podcast that explains not only what a passage means, but also seeks to teach you how to figure that out. You can find all the episodes in this series on my website, wednesdayintheword.com, or wherever you listen to your podcast. There is no charge, no spam, and no ads. It's all free to help you improve your study skills and understanding of nature. I do have one request. If you've been blessed by this podcast, please leave a positive rating or review wherever you listen. And most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and where you learned. Our theme music is graciously provided by my friend and favorite singer-songwriter, Reggie Coates. You can listen to all of Reggie's music and find his CDs at heartfeltmusic.org. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.