Habakkuk 2:2-20
I want to invite you to turn
with me to the book of Habakkuk into chapter 2 this morning.
So we’ll be in Habakkuk chapter 2. It took us three weeks to
get through chapter 1. It’s going to take us one week
to get through chapter 2. So we’re on a good trajectory,
don’t you think? Habakkuk chapter 2 will be in
verses 2 through 20. And you’ll remember as you look
through the book of Habakkuk and you explore the last chapter,
chapter one, and you look to this chapter, that there is sin
going on all over the place. And Habakkuk’s standing there
and it’s like clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here
I am stuck in the middle with you, right? He’s looking at the
people of God, he’s looking at the people with whom God has
established his covenant, And these people are by and large
apostate. They have rebelled in the most
wicked and the most profane of ways against the Lord. They are
actively transgressing the Lord’s commands and living in ways that
are not according to faith but according to please the lust
of the flesh and the lust of their eyes and the pride of their
own possessions. On the other side, we have the
Chaldeans. It’s a synonymous term for the
Babylonians, and these are pagan people outside of the covenant
of God. They’re living in the east, and
these are the people that God is raising up to bring his justice
and his discipline upon his own people for their failure to live
and to believe and to follow the Lord in the ways that he
has called them to do. And so you’ve got sin in the
world and you’ve got sin in the church. And it’s rampant and
it’s everywhere. And what we looked at in chapter
one was really the decay going on within the life of God’s people. And now what we’re gonna see
is God… pouring out his justice upon
those in the world, those who are the ungodly, the unrighteous,
the people who do not know God at all and have no desire to
do so, God is going to pour out his unmitigated wrath against
them. You’ll see five woes in this
passage. And so what you discover here
today is that God deals with those who hate him. He doesn’t
merely pass them by and sweep their sins under the rug and
ignore them as if they were really no big deal. He deals with them. He imposes his justice upon those
who hate God and hate his purposes and hate his holiness and seek
to live for their own pleasure and glory. And so what we’re
going to do is we’re going to see that, and then we’re going
to see, in contrast, how we, as God’s covenant people, ought
to live in light of the decay and the sin and the wickedness
going on in the world. And you’ll discover here that
he will call his people to live by faith. The righteous shall
live by his faith. We even saw that quoted in our
scripture reading from Galatians chapter three this morning. It’s
often quoted in the New Testament. So with that in view, let’s take
a moment to ask God’s help as we hear his word read and preached
this morning. Let’s pray together. Gracious God, we are naturally
hardened to your word. We are naturally callous to the
things of God. and we are distracted by so many
of the world’s cares. We very often feel as if we’re
the weed, the crop that sprouts up and there’s thorns and thistles
all around us, but we pray that you would remove those thorns
and thistles so that we would bear a great harvest because
we’ve heard your word. We believe you, we follow you,
and we seek to honor you in our whole lives. But that can only
happen if your Holy Spirit is working within us. So we pray
that he would do his work to refine us, to sanctify us in
your truth, for your word is truth. Pray it in Jesus’ name
and for his sake. Amen. The Lord is now answering
the second prayer of Habakkuk as we pick it up in Habakkuk
chapter two, verse two. 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 and will
not die. 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 never has enough. He gathers for himself all nations
and collects as his own all people. shall not all these take up their
taunt against him with scoffing and riddles for him, and say,
Woe to him who heaps up what is not his own, for how long,
and loads himself with pledges? Will not your debtors suddenly
arise, and those awake will make you tremble? Then you will be
spoil for them. because you have plundered many
nations. All the remnant of the people shall plunder you. For
the blood of man and violence to the earth, to cities and all
who dwell in them. Woe to him who gets evil gain
for his house to set his nest on high, to be safe from the
reach of harm. You have devised shame for your
house by cutting off many peoples. You have forfeited your life,
for the stone will cry out from the wall and the beam from the
woodwork respond. Woe to him who builds a town
with blood and founds a city on iniquity. Behold, it is not
from the Lord of hosts that the peoples labor merely for fire,
and nations weary themselves for nothing. For the earth will
be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the
waters cover the sea. Woe to him who makes his neighbors
drink. You pour out your wrath and make
them drunk in order to gaze at their nakedness. You will have
your full of shame instead of glory. Drink yourself and show
your uncircumcision. The cup in the Lord’s right hand
will come around to you and utter shame will come upon your glory.
The violence done to Lebanon will overwhelm you, as will the
destruction of the beasts that terrified them. For the blood
of man and violence to the earth, to cities and all who dwell in
them. What prophet is an idol when its maker has shaped it,
a metal image, a teacher of lies? For its maker trusts in his own
creation when he makes speechless idols. Woe to him who says to
a wooden thing, Awake! to a silent stone, Arise! Can this teach? Behold, it is
overlaid with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all
in it. But the Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence
before him. Amen. This is God’s wholly inspired
and inerrant word to us this morning. So this past Tuesday
I was at the state capitol and I approached the legislative
building and noticed a small group of people beginning to
gather and they were all dressed in green. And typically when
you see something like that, you can tell that people are
going to the Capitol to petition their elected leaders to vote
for or to support a certain piece of legislation or to oppose a
certain piece of legislation. Well, the crowd began to get
larger and larger and it began to take over more and more space
and what I discovered was that this past Tuesday was Reproductive
Freedom Advocacy Day in North Carolina. And so this was a group
from Planned Parenthood and a number of other organizations like that,
and they were there to lobby members of the North Carolina
General Assembly to maintain the status quo and protect and
expand abortion rights in our state. So there were speeches
from legislators, members of the State House and Senate, and
there were marching orders from Planned Parenthood and other
organizations who were there. And there were shirts and bags
and buttons and signs and literature all being displayed and distributed
to the people there. And as I took it all in, I could
not help but feel as if I had just walked into one of the most
sinister, wicked, crude, dehumanizing, hateful, godless contexts I’d
ever found myself. It had the stench of hell all
over it. And it was both sad and infuriating
to witness something like that. To see such no-holds-barred antagonism
towards God and His image-bearers and the things of God and all
that God is and His holiness and justice and goodness and
righteousness and truth. And God just completely shoved
out of the picture and exchanged for some kind of might makes
right justification for the murder of the unborn. That was what they were exalting
as God. That was what freedom and hope
and liberty meant for them. And so as I observed it all,
I just prayed. Now maybe I should have done
something more than that, but I certainly shouldn’t have done
anything less than that. And I just prayed, and I prayed
that God would either remove the scales from their eyes and
humble these people by their love for darkness and death and
sin and help them to realize it for what it is and stir up
some repentance in them, that God would impose the clarity
of what they’re doing by making this fierce, autonomous assertion
that they are the captain of their fate and the captain of
their soul, and that God would pull them away from the evil
one who prowls around like a roaring lion seeking to devour. whose
chief end is to kill, steal, and destroy. I pray that God
would draw these people to the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who
is the way, the truth, and the life, and the one who came that
we might have life and have it abundantly. I pray that he would
regenerate these people and forgive their sins and impute all of
his righteousness to them and that he would enable them by
the power of the Holy Spirit to walk in newness of life and
to give glory to the Lord in all things. I pray that he would
somehow give these people a Damascus Road experience and draw them
to the Savior. I pray that he would do that
And then I prayed something on the other side of the coin, was
that if it was not God’s will to do that, that he would thwart
their plans and prevent all of their wicked schemes from coming
to fruition, and that he would pour out his fierce, unmitigated
wrath upon them. Because God is a God of justice. And I prayed that his justice
would be done, that this sort of absolute wickedness would
not prevail, and that these people would not get away with this
in this life or the next. That’s what I prayed. Maybe that
wasn’t the nicest thing to pray, but I prayed it because I think
it’s consistent with who God is because God is a God of justice. And you see it all over the scriptures
that he hates sin, he hates evil, he punishes wickedness, and he
does it because he’s a good and faithful and wise God of justice. who is supreme over all things. The world in which we live is
corrupted to the core, isn’t it? You don’t need, I didn’t
need to go to seminary and spend three years and a whole bunch
of money and time and energy to learn that. You know that.
The Lord is, the world is just full of decay and corruption
all over the place. In fact, when you look at Romans
chapter one, Paul says that people are inventors of evil. We manufacture
new ways of doing evil all the time. It comes off the assembly
line, one right after the other, and there’s a new model coming
off all the time. And it’s why John Calvin, 500
years ago, said that the man’s heart is a perpetual factory
of idols. It’s the truth. He’s echoing
scripture. that the heart is deceitful above
all things. But what we need to do is step
back and understand that the only reason that we have a category
for sin in the first place, the only reason why that which is
wicked or evil or sinful, why those are even categories that
make any sense whatsoever, is because they are to be understood
in contrast to a wise and holy and good and perfect and just
God who is radiant and splendor and perfect in moral virtue and
is actually the one who defines that which is good and that which
is evil. And so, in other words, sin is
not some kind of social construct that people just individually,
you know, make up and determine what it is for themselves, or
cultures, or nations, or whatever. Just go about determining what
it is that can shift with every passing age and culture. God
is the normative reality of life, and He determines what it is.
So when we plumb the depths of Scripture, we’re able to determine
what is good and what is evil in light of all that He is in
His very being. And so the discovery, one of
them, that we’ve made thus far in Habakkuk is that wickedness,
this sin, it exists both within us and outside of us. It’s in
you, and you and I, we’re probably aware of like 2% of our sin. I mean, I look over the course
of the past week and I can think of ways in which I know that
I did not bring honor to the Lord’s name. That I did not love
my wife or my children or my neighbors or my family or whatever
the case may be. I didn’t live consistently with
who I am in Christ, who he declares me to be. And I can enumerate
some of the ways in which I know that I did that where I had to
take that to the Lord and I had to confess it to him and I had
to look to him and the finished work of Jesus Christ for me to
be my only hope and comfort in life and death. But honestly,
there’s probably two or 3% of all of the sin that I actually
committed that I’m aware of that I confessed. It just runs into
the very bone marrow, it’s in every cell, it’s in every molecule
of our being is that there’s a depravity there and it’s true
of each one of us. And it’s true out there in the
world. It’s true out there in the spiritual forces of evil. And so what that means is that
we are both the perpetrators of sin, and we’re also the victims
of it. And hurt people hurt people. Sin against people, sin against
people. And all that junk that is already
native to us we experience the the sin and the evil of the world
and it can oftentimes stir up that which has just been laying
there and been latent within our souls. And remembering that is crucial
for understanding God’s purposes in Habakkuk. Because the people
of Judah, God’s covenant people, They were not only guilty of
cosmic treason against God and the failure to love their neighbors
as they ought to, but they were also victims of this wicked nation. I mean, the Babylonians were
coming in to destroy everything in sight. They were coming in
to take these people captive, and they were coming in to do
so because God had ordained it to be, because God had brought
this to pass. He was enacting his justice against
God’s people, and he was using a wicked nation to do so, and
they were still, nonetheless, God’s people, were victims of
the sin and the wickedness of their hostile Babylonian neighbors. And so it was like those demonstrating
at the Capitol on Tuesday who had no regard for God whatsoever. That’s who these people were
that were coming in to wreak havoc upon God’s people. And
so ultimately the problem that you have and I have and that
we most urgently need to address is an inward problem. It’s our
native hostility to God. But there is, you know, and so
when we attack the world and when we point the finger at the
world for their sin on one level, it makes a lot of sense that
the world might come back at us with the words of the great
theologian Eric Clapton, who said, before you accuse me, take
a look at yourself. Right? So we can wag the finger
at the world, but we need to look at what’s going on in here.
We need to look at what’s going on in this church, and in your
family, and in your heart first. That’s where the repentance needs
to begin. But, that being said, after you own that, after you’re
humbled by that, and continue to be humbled, and continue to
take it to the Lord, and continue to trust Him for His grace, and
continue to look to Him for forgiveness, and to begin consciously living
in that way, we also need to look at the world for what it
is. that it is lost, I mean just
straight up as lost, as lost as you would be if you were on
the streets of Bangkok without any GPS and couldn’t speak a
word of Thai. You’d be straight up, you wouldn’t
know where you were going, were jack squat, you don’t know, it’s
flat as a pancake, and you don’t know north, south, east, and
west, and you can’t, lost. dead and lost. That’s the world
in which we live in, and that’s the world that it is. And what
we ought to pray is that this lost, decaying world would be
drawn to Christ, drawn to Him, repent of their sins, or that
God would indeed do that, or that God would, in His wisdom,
met out His justice against it. but not let this garbage continue
to go on, that it would be dealt with justly. And this chapter
displays how that happens, how God does that. To know God, to
know Him in His holiness, is to know Him also in His justice
and in His truth. And the truth will prevail. and
justice will prevail. He will not allow these hell-bound
Babylonians to ultimately prevail against his people because he
displays implicitly over the course of Scripture and explicitly
when you get into the New Testament to Matthew chapter 16 where Jesus
says that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church.
He promises that. We know that because God is just.
And for God to be just, he must, he must punish sin. He must do so. And it’s not because
God is some egomaniacal narcissist who’s dependent upon his created
people for some kind of self-validation. God is glorious, and He is the
King of kings and the Lord of lords, whether people recognize
that or not. It’s a matter of fact. It’s a
matter of who he is. He doesn’t need people to affirm
that. God doesn’t impose his justice
and punish sin because he’s got this kind of self-absorbed grandiose
personality disorder. The reason that God has to bring
to judgment, sin, and wickedness is because by his very nature
God is a just God. That’s who he is. Who is God? Well, people will say God is
love. God is love. He absolutely is love. He’s never
less than love. But God is a whole bunch of things. that are tangential to it, that
display that God is a God of love. And God is a God of love
because He’s a God of justice. He’s a God who hates sin, and
He’s gonna do something about it. It is, look, it is no, I
had a friend yesterday in Texas, by the way, who woke up in the
morning, and she went outside, and her minivan was just gone. someone up and took it. I don’t
know, I mean, it was just, it was stolen right out of the driveway.
And rightfully, she was sad and she was angered that a person
would do so. Well, what kind of society would
you want to live in if she hypothetically had a camera, you know, like
a camera, doorbell cameras, and it saw the person, it took video
of the person stealing the van. You could see this person, you
could see what they were wearing, and you could clearly identify
the person, and they stole the van, and they destroyed the van,
and the authorities did nothing about it. Well, you know, it’s
grace. You know, we want to be kind
people and loving people. Grace. You don’t want to live
in that society. Nothing’s safe. There’s no reverence
for what is true and good. You want justice. You want your van back and you
want the person who stole it to pay for it, whatever damage
they did, and you want them to be deterred from ever doing anything
like that again. All of us are like that. I don’t
care what political party you are, how old or young or what,
it doesn’t matter. Everybody would feel that way
because we want justice because we’re created in his image and
God is a just God. So it’s blasphemous to suggest
that a loving God would never punish so-and-so for their sin
because grace, because love. He would never be so narrow-minded
to be intolerant and impose His wrath upon those who violate
His holy nature and rule because love. Love wins. That’s not what
love is, and that’s not what justice is. It’s got to provide
some measure of encouragement to you. When you go to work, or you turn
on the news, or you experience something in your life where
the world comes at you and sins against you, or sins against
the church, or does something just pervasively evil like that,
and you look at it, and all you can pray is, how long, oh Lord?
Just like Habakkuk prayed earlier in chapter one. How long? You can know that this will not
just be something pushed to the side. That God will, in his time,
in his way, bring about justice against that which is wicked. It becomes easy to lose faith
that God will do that, though. because, like, my trip through
the drive-thru at McDonald’s that for some reason took, you
know, 15 minutes in the drive-thru this week. Like, why? You know,
you just expect it to happen now. You go through the drive-thru,
you do your order, you expect to have your lukewarm chicken
nuggets now. Right? But that’s not always
the way that God that God works, but we can know that he’s going
to bring about his justice. And we know that because look
at what he says here in the passage. There are five woes pronounced
upon these Babylonians, five of them. And just briefly, let’s take
a look at what they are. You look in verses six through
eight, You notice that because these Babylonians have exploited
God’s people, they’ve come into Judah, they’ve come in and looted
and pillaged everything in sight. They’ve fraudulently stolen from
them. What they can count on is that God would in due time
raise up other nations to come along and impose justice against
them and plunder them. Now this wasn’t just some kind
of pipe dream, because you know what happens a few years down the road in
like 530-something BC? The Medes and the Persians come
and they wipe out Babylon from the face of the earth. God raises up another nation
to bring punishment against this nation who is bringing punishment
against the people of God. He’s gonna bring that to pass.
He’s going to bring his justice. And then in verses 9 through
11, you discover that because of the Babylonians’ arrogance
and pride, because they were a fiercely religious people who
lived by faith, but their faith was not in the one true and living
God, but their faith was instead in themselves and in their accomplishments
and their understanding and their ways of doing things. But what
you could count on is that the Lord would totally subvert their
false sense of security by bringing them to destruction. They’d amassed
all of this wealth unjustly at the hands of other people, the
people of God, and God was going to plunder them. And then in
verses 12 through 14, you see the third woe. These people become
prosperous, wealthy, powerful, known in the world as a nation
who had all of these, all of the things that any nation would
want—power, security, opportunities for pleasure. And what God was going to do is he
was going to use all of those tangible items that that they
had stolen, that they had amassed for themselves from the people
of God, and what they were going to do is they were just going
to serve as nothing more than fuel to the fire that God would
pour out upon these people, because God is a consuming fire. In fact,
the more they had, the bigger and hotter the fire would be.
Aren’t you glad you came to church this morning? Then you discover in verses 15
through 18 that these people have disgraced God’s people. And so because they’ve maligned
and mischaracterized and spoken falsehood against the people
of God, God doesn’t take very kindly to that. He does not take
kindly to the world abusing his children and his bride, any more
than you would take kindly to some worldling maligning the
character of your husband or your wife or your children and
spreading that across all the world to hear and see. You would
not take well to that, and God takes that very seriously when
the world does that, and he is going to bring to shame those
who attempt to bring the church to shame. And finally you see
in verses 19 and 20 that all of their achievements, all of
the Babylonians’ achievements and conquests and exaltation
of created things, worldly ideas, possessions that they amassed,
all that, they were gonna be, that’s what was going to destroy
them. You worship idols that are going
to decay and rot, then you will be brought to decay and rot by
those idols that you’ve worshiped. all the things that they’ve leaned
on, they propped all of their weight, they propped every bit
of their weight up against their idols, and those idols were going
to decay, and they were gonna fall down with them when they
did so. So God is contrasting different
ways that they live. He’s contrasting the ways in
which they understand themselves in the world. He’s contrasting
different ways in which they answer the fundamental questions
of life, the ways that believers ought to answer those questions. God is a God of justice, full
stop. He hates those who proudly wave
the flag and march in the parade and celebrate all that which
is wicked and perverse and indifferent to God and exalts themselves
above him. And if you are a follower of
Christ, what you can have the absolute confidence to know is
that He will address this. He will deal with it according
to justice. And so the question that you
and I have to ask ourselves in light of the fact that God promises
to bring justice to a wicked world is this, how do we live
in light of that? How are you and I to live in
light of the fact that we have a just God who will bring justice
to a wicked world? Well, the answer is in this passage
in verse four. And it really shapes the entirety
of the book of Habakkuk. And what do you read in verse
four? Behold, his soul, he’s talking
about the Babylonians, are puffed up. It’s not upright within him. That’s the way of the world.
It’s puffed up with pride and arrogance. But, by contrast,
the righteous shall live by his faith. The righteous shall live
by his faith. We’re gonna discover that more
as we go into next week and the week after. But I would say this,
it’s the fundamental, faith is the fund, faith in God, faith
in the Lord Jesus Christ. that full dependence of your
life upon him is the fundamental instrument of the Christian life.
It’s like in baseball, right? You can have the top-of-the-line
bat and the very best glove and the most beautiful stadium with
the most manicured grass and all the bases and all of that,
but if you don’t have the ball, then you have no game. The ball
is the instrument. It doesn’t matter. You can have
all the best players on the team. It doesn’t matter if you don’t
have a ball. You gotta have the ball because the ball is the
fundamental instrument of the game. And faith is the fundamental
instrument of the Christian life. Faith is the object. It’s the means by which we lay
hold to our only hope in life and death. Our faith is not in
our faith. Our faith is just the means by
which we lay hold of Christ. And what Habakkuk says here,
what God says here, through Habakkuk is the righteous shall live by
his faith. There’s so much to discover.
There’s so much to discover about it, but what he’s doing is he’s
displaying two types of people here again. He’s displaying the
righteous and the unrighteous. The righteous are those who live
by faith in God, and the unrighteous are those who live by faith in
their own understanding and reason. Those are the two types of people.
And they answer the fundamental questions of life in different
ways. What are those questions? We all have to answer them. You
have to answer them. Consciously or not, you answer
them. You ask them and you answer them. You ask, who am I? Whose am I? Who am I and whose
am I? To whom do I belong? Where did
I even come from? For what purpose do I exist? What is my ultimate destiny?
Where am I going? What’s the end game? Where am
I going? And why does anything in life
matter at all anyway? We all have to come to terms
with those questions and come up with answers. In other words,
the righteous person is going to understand himself or herself
to be wisely, sovereignly, and solely created by God and in
His image. That God is the one who knit
together every little atom within your body. He created your soul. He’s made you in which you understand
yourself to be is someone who’s made in God’s image, made by
God, existing for His glory, but that you’re also a sinner
in the sight of God, justly deserving His displeasure, and without
hope, apart from His sovereign, gracious mercy to you in the
Lord Jesus Christ. That’s how you know yourself.
And so what you do is you shove all, you’ve got all these poker
chips, and you just shove them all right into the middle into
Jesus Christ. You take them away from yourself. You don’t hide
them in your pocket. You don’t slip them under, you know, in
your bag. You take all the chips and you
move them to the center and you push them right into Jesus Christ.
and you look to Him and you trust Him and you transfer your faith
away from yourself over to Him, and it’s that person who stands
righteous. You receive the righteousness
of God. That’s who you are. It’s not a subjective thing.
It’s objective because it’s a matter of fact. Your identity, your
self-definition is being a righteous person, not because of how good
you are, but because of how good Jesus is. but because of His
record becomes yours, His righteousness becomes yours. God should have done to you what
was done to these Babylonians. You should just be wiped off
the map. Everything about your life should be pillaged. His
reign of fire ought to just come down right upon you for the sins
that you’re aware of and the sins that you’re not. Because
he’s holy and you’re not. But instead, it all comes on
down to the Lord Jesus Christ. It comes upon him because what
Jesus does in the gospel is he takes all that crud in your life,
the stuff that would cause you to curl up in a ball in a corner
somewhere if people knew about it, those secret sins, what the
Puritans called the darling sins, the sins that you hate publicly
but you love privately, those sins, Jesus knows about them,
God knows about them, and He takes all of that and bears it
in his body and soul. He gets the justice that you
deserve. He takes it for himself and what you get in exchange
is his perfect righteousness. He stamps it and seals it upon
you and he looks at you, he looks at you as having the same righteousness
as his son. When the Father looks at you,
He’s not standing here like this, tapping His foot in disappointment
at the stupid thing that you did for the 927,000th time in
your life. That’s not how God looks at His people. You’re in Christ through faith.
And what does the Father say of the Lord Jesus Christ when
he finishes his work? Well done, my good and faithful
servant. And he looks at you because you’re in Christ and
you have his righteousness. Well done, my good and faithful
servant. You are my child. That’s who you are. That’s an
objective fact. That’s the reality. And so that
being the case, that your faith is in the finished work of Jesus
Christ and moved away from yourself, how do you live then? Paul says, just as you came to
him, so continue to walk in him. You continue to walk by faith.
You continue to look to Jesus. You continue to look at all that
He is, all that He reveals Himself to be, in His wisdom and holiness
and goodness and love and grace. And that begins to shape your
life and shape your understanding of the world and shape how you
understand the lost and shape how you understand your children
and your parents and your spouse and your neighbor who gets up at 6.30 in the morning
on Saturday and decides to blow leaves and wake you up. That’s how you begin to love
and live by faith. Because Christ is blazing at
the center of who you are because you understand your identity
is in Him. You are righteous in Him despite
the fact that you still fail to display that righteousness
all the time. So that’s how you can live. But
the unrighteous do something opposite to that, right? They
live by faith. They’re every bit as religious
as you and I are. There’s no irreligious person
out there. Everybody’s totally religious
in the sense that they’re people of faith, but their faith is
in themselves. Remember the Proverbs. Trust in the Lord with all your
heart. Lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge
Him, and He will lead your path straight. Well, they kind of
do the 180 thing with that. They lean upon their own understanding.
They trust in themselves with all their heart. They completely
reject the wisdom and the grace and the truth of the one true
and living God. And sometimes that shows up as
an angel of light and the person is super, super, super nice and
well-rounded and wonderful to be around and they’re living
in complete darkness. And sometimes it shows up with
the skull and crossbones, you know, eagle talons that’ll pierce
right through you like what I saw on Tuesday at the State Capitol. And everywhere in between. So there’s two kinds of people
and the question that you and I have to ask ourselves this
morning as we step out of here and go into this jacked up world
that we live in is ask ourselves, who are you? Who am I? To whom do I belong? How do the choices that I make
and the words that I say and the thoughts that creep into
my head displaying what I actually believe, and
in whom I actually believe. Is your life reflective, however
imperfectly, that your faith is in this merciful and compassionate,
slow to anger, abounding and loving kindness God, who sent
his only begotten Son into the world, that whoever believes
in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. Is that
indicative of your life, however imperfectly? Or is your life
displaying that you still live by faith in yourself? Your natively confused, decaying,
depraved self who’s naturally hostile to God. Those are the
questions that you have to address this morning as you leave here
and go into the world. Who are you? Whose are you? How does your life reflect those
answers? Let’s consider that now as we go to hymn and prayer. Our Lord and our God, we thank
you for your word, even when it’s so hard to hear, and wrap
our minds around and our hearts around, to think of you as a
God of justice, sometimes doesn’t always resonate very well with
us. It’s hard, especially when we
think of our neighbors, our friends, those we love, who, unless they
repent and believe, will be subject to your justice and your wrath.
And so we pray, oh Lord, that you would do in them exactly
what you’ve done for me and for all here who know you, that you
would pull us out of the grip of darkness and cling to us with
your promises of the gospel. Forgive their sins as you’ve
forgiven ours. Impute your righteousness to
them as you’ve imputed it to us. May they walk in newness
of life. May you continue to reign wherever
the sun in our own nation, our own community, and throughout
the world for the sake of your glory, for the sake of those
who’ve yet to come to know you, and for the sake of your church.
I pray this in the name of him who’s come such a distance for
us, our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.