Habakkuk No.5 Standing in God's presence

Let's look at the story of a man who came to church as a worrier and went away as a worshipper. Steve Tucker actually ought to be worried this morning because the gymnastics he put us through earlier on. I've brought the clip on this microphone, this night mic, and I think they're about £180 a time.

I'm sure we could get a good deal on the clip anyway, but seriously, from a worshipper, or from a worrier to a worshipper, from one who might see Worthing on a fairly dull day and have a look at the beach with its pebbles and occasionally its delicious smell of seaweed, to moving into the sort of brochure that the Worthing Town Hall puts out, which, like Glasgow municipality, completely fools holidaymakers who come here because they think the beach is sandy and the air is good, and so forth. Sometimes we can make things out to be better than they really are. Now when you go to the chapter of the book of Habakkuk, you might think that he's actually making things out to be better than they really are, but when, as you followed him from the first two chapters, you realise what he's been through, and how real he has become, then you appreciate that actually Habakkuk is levelling with you.

He's come from his worrying state, from the depression in the valley, to be a worshipper. He's changed his attitude, and he's moved into a new altitude, as on a watchtower he's seen something of the sovereignty of God and his circumstances, though they've remained the same, Habakkuk himself is different. You know that's one of the things that we look for in the tab.

Maybe you've come in some Sundays, certainly I do, maybe in the morning or in the evening, and you're not all that you should be, you're not feeling quite as well-worshipful as you ought to be. Life is wonderful, life is wonderful, I let Jesus in, that changed everything. We sing a song like that, it's taken out of the fifties or even one of the more modern ones, and you say, well it's not really true to my experience.

God in his grace steals across your heart, and he lifts you, and he deals with your emotions, and he deals with your worries, and by the time you're through in his grace, you go out feeling, well it was good to be in the house of the Lord, I was like a motor car that was empty, and I went away with my tanks full. Well, changing the metaphor, that was Habakkuk. His tanks are full in the third chapter, as we read what he has to say.

This third chapter is actually a prayer, in form of praise, it's like a scripture song written many, many years ago, and that's the reason why you get some funny Hebrew words that have not been translated, because nobody actually knows what they mean, apart from the fact they were directions probably to the conductor in worship, because they had music in those days as well in the temple. Directions as to how this was to be sung. Habakkuk 3 verse 1, a prayer of Habakkuk the prophet on Shigionoth.

Lord I have heard of your fame, I stand in awe of your deeds, O Lord. Renew them in our day, in our time make them known. In wrath, remember mercy.

God came from Teman, that's the area of Sinai. God came from Teman, the Holy One from Mount Paran. His glory covered the heavens and his praise filled the earth, his splendor was like the sunrise.

Rays flashed from his hand where his power was hidden. Plague went before him, pestilence followed his steps. He stood and shook the earth, he looked and made the nations tremble.

The ancient mountains crumbled and the age-old hills collapsed. His ways are eternal. I saw the tents of Kushan in distress, the dwellings of Midian in anguish.

Were you angry with the rivers, O Lord? Was your wrath against the streams? Did you rage against the sea when you rode with your horses in your victorious chariots? You uncovered your bow, you called for many arrows, you split the earth with rivers, the mountains saw you and writhed. Torrents of water swept by, the deep roared and lifted its waves on high. Sun and moon stood still in the heavens at the glint of your flying arrows, at the lightning of your flashing spear in wrath.

You strode through the earth and in anger you threshed the nations. You came out to deliver your people, to save your anointed one. You crushed the leader of the land of wickedness, you stripped him from head to foot.

The reference is to Belshazzar. With his own spear you pierced his head when his warriors stormed out to scatter us, gloating as though about to devour the wretched who were in hiding. You trampled the sea with your horses, churning the great waters.

I heard and my heart pounded, my lips quivered at the sound. Decay crept into my bones and my legs trembled. Yet, I will wait patiently for the day of calamity to come on the nations invading us.

Though the fig tree does not bud, and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls. Join with me on the last two verses. Yet, I will rejoice in the Lord.

I will be joyful in God my Savior. The sovereign Lord is my strength. He makes my feet like the feet of a deer.

He enables me to go on the heights. And the final instruction from the director of music on my stringed instruments. Remember a lady who was fairly well endowed, to put it sensitively, in the church where Rowena and I used to go in London.

And on one occasion she got up and she quoted the last part of verse 19. He makes my feet like the feet of a deer. He enables me to go on the heights.

And I thought, God, what a wonder that you can take this particular lady and lift her up onto the heights and make her feet like the feet of a deer. And yet, that is true, isn't it? The spiritual level, one day for those of us who's perhaps our body is not quite what they used to be, will one day be at the literal level when God renews everything and gives us a body like our Lord Jesus. And if you're new to the tab and you've not been in on this series, then previous notes are available by the welcome desk by that area and you can get a copy if you think they'll be of any assistance to you.

And if you missed one last week, because I don't think they were all quite so available as our instructions were a little unclear, then regulars you can pick up a copy and we will be using some of the material in our pastoral groups in two or four weeks time. Your PGL leaders will have it all worked out, I'm sure, in their diaries. Havocook is a funny name, isn't it? Glad I wasn't called Havocook, Havocook sergeant.

Once came across a Puritan preacher whose name was Obadiah Sedgwick and I thought, well Peter Smith would probably prefer his name than that one. Havocook, what does it mean? Embrace? It also means wrestle. And what you have here is a man who's wrestling with God.

He doesn't understand God. I want to tell you that not understanding God is not a demerit. Providing your lack of comprehension does not elevate you to a position where you think that God is answerable to you, He is not.

You can only understand God by believing in Him and then accepting what He has to say about Himself. Otherwise the Trinity will become a quartet, that your services are not required at the level of the Godhead, even if sometimes your husband or your wife seems to suggest that you're inferring that it is. You understand God by coming before His revelation and He teaches you about Himself and about His purposes.

He doesn't explain everything, He doesn't have to. But He will give you sufficient to go on for you to believe in Him and to hang on to Him all your life and outside that framework there is no way, I tell you, if my reading is anything to go by and many others far more able than me, I think, would come into this pulpit and declare the same. There is no other framework outside of the Christian faith by which you can interpret life and get it to make sense at all.

And even with a Christian revelation, there are times when you'll move into a sort of agnostic position. You won't understand, but you will believe. You'll believe because God asks you to believe not in signs and wonders, those are incidental in Scripture.

He asks you to believe in Him for who He is and because of His Word. As I tried to teach you some while ago, Abraham moved through pledges and promises and sometimes against things that seem to be illogical in terms of the developments in his life. Well, here is Habakkuk and he's been engaged, as I reminded you, in wondering and worrying.

And in the second chapter, we find him climbing a tower in Jerusalem, getting to a place of privacy and contemplating what God is going to do in terms of, well, the Jewish people, they do deserve God's judgment. You can't say of the Brits that they should be exempt from the judgment of God. No Christian person could say that.

Yours would be a reckless nationalism, my country right or wrong. I find that a very scary proposition that some people alas embrace. Our country is not always right.

Perhaps it's not always wrong. But as far as the Jews were concerned, Habakkuk declared they needed to know the judgment of God upon them for the wrong that they had done. But he was the problem.

God was going to take this Chaldean people, these Nazi-like folk to whom reference is made in the second chapter, and use them as a punitive agent in order to bring His own people, the Jews, to book. And you can work that through in history. God sometimes takes those who seem even more evil than the ones who need to be corrected and uses them.

I think it was Henry Kissinger who gave us the expression, the domino theory in terms of understanding Southeast Asian politics. One country after another country after another country after another country going under to communism. The Evangelical Church, to those who think about these things, to some degree, I believe panicked.

And sometimes even our historic missionary societies took up a position that they were anti-communist. As though you could defend capitalism. As though you could say that our way of government in the West is impeccable.

Every system of government has its own flaws. And God is in control. The day came when He shook the Soviet Empire.

The day came when He broke down the Bamboo Curtain. We discovered that His cause in the Soviet Union and behind the Bamboo Curtain was still developing in terms of the advance of the Christian Church, despite all that communism did, and all the murders that were engaged in, and all the hardship that resulted. So as it was now, so it was then.

God uses evil, if He wants, in order to bring about the ultimate good. And Habakkuk, who's got these problems, because he's a man like you and me, thank God, I say, for the warts and the pimples and the part of the faith of people in Old Testament times. Thank God this is an honest book.

It's not full of heroes. It's not full of men who were always walking tall. They fell as you and I fall.

They had their problems as you and I have our problems. And that's what makes this book so attractive. I tell you, I've been reading it for 50 years and more, but it never loses its magnetism.

It speaks to my situation. Well, here is this man, a broken man he has been, equivalent to some of you here who've not understood. Why did you have this son who was perhaps not mentally alert as you have been, as you would have wished? Why was it that you were in these particular circumstances? You didn't have a decent background, a decent home.

You knew what it was to be abused. And you bring all these problems to the Lord, and Scripture asks you to bring these problems to the Lord. And then you wait before Him, and even if He doesn't give you all the answers, He gives you sufficient to go on, which enables you to know that when you have Him and His eyes upon you, and you benefit from the sunshine of His love, you can progress forward and make sense of the framework of your life.

So Habakkuk, the wrestler who becomes a worshiper, starts to pray. And he prays and he blesses the Lord. Why? Because he's heard of Him.

He's heard verse 1 chapter 3 of the Lord. He's heard of the work of the Lord, and what's more, he knows of the wrath of the Lord. Lord, I heard of your fame.

I stand in awe of your deeds, O Lord. Renew them in our day, in our time. Make them known in wrath.

Remember mercy. Now, he's not come as a Jewish nationalist. He's not come as an unthinking evangelical, praying for present Jerusalem, not recognizing that within the Jewish fraternity, as within the Palestinian fraternity, there is wrong.

He comes and recognizes the complicity of Gentiles and Jews in rebelling against the Lord. And there is only one thing that you can plead for when men rebel, and that is that God in His grace will avert judgment by bringing revival. Renew them in our day, in our time.

Make them known in your wrath, in your righteous indignation, in the justice of the violence that could flow from the throne of heaven. Lord, remember your mercy. God has two hands.

One is the hand of mercy. The other is the hand of wrath. He will greet you by one of those hands.

There is not a third. There is no other option. And time and time again in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, the mercy of God and the wrath of God, they are presented for us to have a full understanding of this God.

He is no wimpish, candy floss figure. You cannot play fast and loose with this God. He is not almighty to you.

He is the almighty God who would have you respect and revere Him. And on that basis, you can come into His banquet in house and know the intimacy of joy and be as a child freewheeling in front of his or her parents, enjoying His company. But there are prerequisites in knowing this God and benefiting from that sort of fellowship.

Who is this God? Well, He is a God who comes. Where does He come? Verse three, well, He comes in history. The prophet will take you into the classroom.

He will remind you of a history lesson. God came from Teman. The exact location of Teman is unimportant to you at this point.

What is important is this, is a recognition that God has moved into history, in time, in space. God came. He came as a babe in Bethlehem's manger, but thou, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though thou art little amongst the thousands of Judah, unto you has come one whose goings forth have been of old, from everlasting.

What does that mean? That when Jesus was born as a babe in Bethlehem, He represents He is, none other than God. He came in time, and God came. Even before that, He made His presence felt to the Israelites in Sinai, and the lesson moves from history to geography.

God came from Teman, the Holy One from Mount Paran. You see, rightly in the New Testament, Christians look back to Bethlehem and to Calvary and to the empty tomb, but all this was after Old Testament times. To what did these people look back in terms of the great historical theological movements? I tell you, they look back to Moses, the bush that burned, that was not consumed.

Moses was invited to go onto the top of Sinai, and there in the creft of a rock, God passes by with His glory. Moses who comes down prior to that from Sinai with the two tablets containing the ten laws of God. Remember that.

God comes. He comes in history. He comes with such precision that His geographical location.

He comes as a person, declaring what His attributes are. God came from Teman, the Holy One from Mount Paran. You see, throughout the Old and the New Testament, the sort of psychology of God, if one dares use that word, is cracked open, and there is no embarrassment at all in terms of using it.

Oh Lord, verse 12 chapter 1, are you not from everlasting? My God, my Holy One. This isn't Thomas the doubter who is now being convinced that is to come in history. This is Habakkuk, and he speaks of this God and the psychology of God.

My Holy One. God comes in history. His movement can be traced down with geographical precision, and He releases indication as to who He is.

He is the Holy One. The Holy One. And why does He come? Well, He comes to inspect what's happening on the earth.

He really does. You see, He is aware, as you know, that things in our day, as was the case in Habakkuk's days, are not all that they should be. This God whose glory covers the heavens, this God whose splendor is like the sunrise, this God who is an awesome God, He has every right, not just to come, but to stand, to inspect.

Look at Him in verse 6. He stood, and He sees. What does He see? Well, He sees the Jews in the way they're living in Jerusalem. He sees these barbaric Chaldean people.

He sees a group of men assembled in Birmingham. He sees thousands of people demonstrating outside of the place where these men are assembled, pleading for greater justice and equity in the third world. God sees.

God stands. He may not always move to your timetable. That was Habakkuk's problem.

Lord, why don't you hurry up a little bit? But, you see, the point is there in Habakkuk's day as it is today. God in His omniscience knows everything. God in His omnipresence is always there, and God in His omnipotence has all power.

I bemoan the fact that India, who cannot put a sewage system into Calcutta to serve sixty percent of the inhabitants of that sprawling place, will spend millions on detonating nuclear weapons. But, you see, the West cannot criticize because the West has gone the same way. It has set up the same pattern.

How can you cast the moat out of India's eye when you've got a plank in your own? You see, the credibility of man at the international philosophical level is really reduced to nothingness. And in any case, his power, however explosive, is actually minimal compared with the power of God. God stands, and He looks, and with derision He will laugh.

For man is responsible to Him. Ultimately, finally, man of yesteryear will be brought to book, present-day man, and however long the course of human history might last, man will stand before God, as God stands silently sometimes before the world and checks over the nations that He has allowed to come into existing existence. And when this God stands and considers, the prophet also gets some sort of insight into God's abilities and enablings.

You see, this is the thing about Habakkuk now. He's been so raised in his understanding of the person of God. This is why you have to study a Bible, you see.

This business of just giving a little lollipop out on a Sunday morning, a 10-minute homilies, and I do speak with my heart, this is not some personal hobby horse. It's not because I'm a preacher. God has given us His Word and men and women to explain His Word, and you have to know about this God before you can fully pray.

You have to know about this character, this God, this being and His various attributes and what He can detonate. The ancient mountains crumbled. The age-old hills collapsed.

His ways are eternal. You see, this is the God who can release the powers within the belly of mother earth, the God behind storm and earthquake, the God behind the volcano, the God who can cause the powers within the bowels of the earth to come to the surface, and puny man with all his abilities cannot cope when an earth is out of control. And this God, this God can deal with the Cambodian taskmasters who brought millions of their people to the grave prematurely.

I saw the tents of Kushan in distress, the dwellings of Midian in anguish. Don't you understand? Whether it's the Kremlin or Peking, whether it's London or Washington, whether it's Clinton or Blair, whether it's Moedan in Kenya, whether it's Mandela in South Africa, these men stand before this God, and God will work out His purposes in their lives and in their communities, as well in our lives and our community. God stands, and the militaristic power of Babylon is as nothing compared with the cosmic power, the cataclysmic power of God.

God stands. The prophet asks the question, Lord, were you angry with the rivers? Was you rough against the streams? There was tide and storm. Lord, with whom are you angry? And the answer is God is not angry with our environment.

The world is His. Pollute the world, and you insult the landlord. You are but a tenant, and He will bring us to book for the way we treat the very earth that He has given to us.

The earth came fresh from His hands, and on six successive days He said, it is good, it is good, it is good, and what God has called good. If man pollutes and makes less than good, the Creator comes with rent book in His hands and demands an explanation. Were you angry? Was you rough against the streams? Did you rage against the sea? And God uncovers in response to the prophet's plea, and the prophet knows what he is about, that God's interrogation, God's conflict is not with the inanimate earth or the animals on the earth.

God has a problem with man, and so God uncovers His bow. God calls for many arrows. God makes His power felt.

Have you ever thought of the terror of the uncovering of the power of God? You uncovered your bow. You split the earth with rivers. Torrents of water swept by.

Sun and moon stood still in the heavens. The glint of your flying arrows. Oh, this is metaphor.

Oh, yes, to a large extent, this is poetry. I'm not boasting when I tell you I've read some of the greatest literature in the English language. My job before I came here was a teacher.

I taught English, but I know nothing in Shakespeare. I know nothing in Chaucer. I know nothing that compares with the poetry and the imagery that there is here.

But what is the poet prophet doing as he responds to the inspiration? He's showing you who this God is, what He is like, what His abilities are. When God uncovers Himself, you are face to face with an awesome being. There was a chaplain in the First World War, and his name was Woodvine Willie, because he always used to give woodvine cigarettes to the troops.

And do you know how bloody a conflict that was? How many men went to a gruesome death as a result of the First World War, and how little basically was achieved because we went to war again within about 20 years of the cessation of the First World War? Woodvine Willie, he was not only a generous man, a friend of the soldiers, the British Tommy, he was also a poet. And you can get his poems to this very day. And he's got one of this British soldier, Tommy.

Tommy is on the battlefields in Flanders. He knows he's dying. And he has a picture of Jesus.

He sees the eyes of Jesus. And as he looks into the eyes of Jesus, the poet goes on that he sees something of what he's done that was wrong. The prostitute who he patronized because she was short of money.

The failings of so many incidents in his life. They all came back. As he looked into the eyes of Jesus, he saw himself as he really was.

Woodvine Willie has this tremendous couplet. I looked into his burning eyes. And he said, well, I tell you that I turned and ran into a flaming hell.

You see the point? Again, it was poetry. But nonetheless, it encapsulates a truth. In the company of this God, you will be embarrassed.

Our God is a consuming fire. God is made agreeable to us through the death of Jesus Christ. That's why prayer is in the name of Jesus.

It is the Lord Jesus who deals with the problem of your sin. It is the Lord Jesus who comes with compassion and with forgiveness and with absolution. But the Lord Jesus too is no wimp.

There's judgment and there's warning. It's all there in his teaching. You cannot emasculate the gospels.

You have to take them as they are, or else you get a sort of unbalanced Christology. And here is the case. You see God's uncovering himself.

With his own spear you pierced his head, and his warriors stormed out to scatterers, gloating as though about to devour. Who is this? This is Babylon. This is Belshazzar.

And Belshazzar is eventually done to death. From the bowels of Babylon in come their enemies. And this man who has prostituted the very utensils that were taken from the holy place of the temple in Jerusalem discovers that he is weighed in the balances and found wanting.

Babylon is no more. He played with God and discovered he was playing with fire. And so, recognizing this aspect of the person of God, the prophet is glad to remember that in the wrath there is a mercy.

Verse 13, God strides. God strides through the earth, verse 12, in anger. But verse 13, you come out to deliver your people, to save your anointed one.

You see this perfect symmetry, this perfect balance found in this chapter. I tell you, not only is it literally speaking, in the realms of literature it is a gem. Theologically it is impeccable.

This is why I opted long before I knew the conditions that would break in upon my life and that of my wife's, why I opted to bring you to Habakkuk, because Habakkuk is a book from which you should blow off the cobwebs and discover here something of God as He speaks not only to an age gone by, but as He speaks in the present circumstance. The principle I say in the handout of your notes is set in concrete and applied in both Old and New Testaments. God strides into the world, but His hands are open.

He will grasp you with one or the other. In the one is judgment, and in the other is forgiveness. In the one is His wrath, in the other is His mercy.

There is no third option. Put the lot together and what have you. Well, you've got a worrier, and therefore I love Habakkuk.

You know, I can worry my socks off, I really can. Worried about this place for 28 years, worried about myself for even longer, worried about our frailty, worried about circumstances, but when you take your eye off your worry and you start to look at God, when you take your eye off the sea and your ear is deafened to the noise of the winds and you look towards Jesus, then you can walk, can't you, on the water. On your days, said Charles Spurgeon, you have to walk on the waters of uncertainty.

You do it as a Christian leader, you do it as a Christian community, you do it, so to speak, as an ordinary Christian, and I don't recognize myself as anything else but in the latter category, and it makes sense. You can have confidence when you have got this God firmly in view, this God of mercy and compassion, this soft, generous God who chuckles at Habakkuk because of the state that this man gets himself in. God does have a chuckle, and He does have a laugh of derision, but He never directs that laugh towards those who He loves.

To the broken person who's in doubt because of certain things that have happened in their lives, God never laughs at you in derision. He sometimes chuckles because He's going to lift you out of the circumstances, and the ones which are so unpalatable to you now, you'll be glad of later on, and God will say, well, I told you, but I'm only telling you now because I've told you then you wouldn't have liked me. And as Mother Teresa of Avalard once said, sometimes, Lord, it's no wonder that you have so few friends.

Look how you treat them, and at times, it doesn't seem as though God treats us harshly, doesn't it? I mean, there are many, many, many people here, and if I could write a program for your lives, I'd write it differently, but there I go again trying to elevate myself to the Godhead. One of my greatest problems, you ask my wife. God chuckles, and He says, push that pastor back on the coast.

I know what I'm doing, because God has to chuckle over Habakkuk's problem, and then He brings Habakkuk into an understanding, a realization of who God is, and nothing has changed. The newspapers are still going to carry the banner headlines, Babylon is fallen, and the Jews are going to be taken away from Jerusalem. Nothing has changed, but Habakkuk has changed.

His psyche has changed, and from a warrior, He becomes a worshiper. From mourning, He starts to dance. Though the fig tree does not bud, and there are no grapes on the vine, though the olive crop fails, and the fields produce no food, there are no sheep in the pen, and no cattle in the stalls, yet will I rejoice in the Lord.

I will be joyful in God my Savior. When I was doing the tour de force of ministry these last few days, one of the most busy and emotionally exacting in my life spoke to a bunch of students in Glasgow whose own future is a little uncertain. They've got many questions.

Another bunch of students in Berwick, just south of the Scottish border, was trying to get them to have some sort of anchorage in their lives at this present moment. Some of the people who are being affected by certain developments within Christian educational circles up there, where there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of hurt. And I went back in my mind as I was preaching to one of the most precious incidents I ever recall in Shanghai, meeting up with Wang Mingdao, pastor of Shanghai Tabernacle, a man whose boots I'm not worthy to clean.

And I met him just a year or so after he'd been released from 28 years in imprisonment. And I said to him, in the poverty-stricken conditions of his run-down flat, the top of a block of dingy flats in Shanghai, Wang, brother Wang, what kept you going? And he started to sing, all the way my Savior leads me, what have I to fear beside? He through life has been my companion, he through life will be my guide, every need his hand supplying. And so he went on with precision, a greater precision than I can recall of that old hymn.

But the point was this, he had his eye on the Lord, he knew about the doctrine of God, not just in an impersonal theological sense, he knew it personally, the mercy of God, the compassion of God, the closeness of God. And he was able to dance, though having been imprisoned and suffering deprivation during those 28 years. And Wang Mingdao is a modern illustration of Habakkuk.

But then I don't need to go to China. So are many of you here, modern illustrations of Habakkuk. You've worried, and out of your worry, you've recognized that God is sovereign, and instead of leaving it as a worrier, you have become a worshipper.

And I want to put on record that the most profound sermons in wording Talab, they never came from this pulpit. They're there, written, living, epistles, engraved on the personalities of so many people. Some here, some already amongst the Church of the Firstborn, which is in heaven, Habakkuk's, who moved from being worriers to worshippers.

Habakkuk, who recognized that God is always present, working out his purposes, offering mercy or otherwise judgment. Let's pray. And a moment for personal prayer and response.

And now a hymn. I'm not praying because the writer of this hymn expresses in far more eloquent and sensitive terms than ever I can my own thoughts at this point. Three, two, seven.

Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes. When we get to the fourth verse, we increase the tempo, at least we increase the volume, but we'll sing it without the help of our willing instrumentalists. Three, two, seven.

Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes. Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days. Almighty, victorious, thy great name.

Resting, abasing, and silent as night. No wanting, no wasting, thou rulest in light. Thy justice like mountains, thy soaring above.

From thee, blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree. And with thee, pray for the angels adoring. O, may we ne'er succeed.

It is only the splendor of my tired years. Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes. Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days.

Almighty, victorious, thy great name be praised.