Habakkuk 1:12-13           “The God Who Reigns In Evil Days”

  Years ago I knew someone who had lost a loved one in a tragedy.  Friends of theirs wondered that they kept their faith in God.  One of them said, “How do you manage to still look to God in a time like this?”  He responded, “In a time like this, where else am I going to look?”  His tragedy was not an occasion for him to turn away from God; that was the time when he most needed to turn to Him. 
     Some of you may be in a personal time like that right now; you really need, because of what you are going through, to purposefully turn to the Lord.  He is the only One who can help you.  God may have brought you here today for this very reason. 

     But truthfully, I believe those kinds of  challenging days may be coming for all of us soon.  Last week we saw that like Habakkuk, we are challenged to live by faith in a nation that is under condemnation for its sins.  Where do we turn in times like that?  We saw that the ultimate answer is found in Chapter 2:4, “The righteous shall live by faith.”  We must turn our eyes to God in these days.  But who is that God to whom we turn in these times; what is this God like?  We see something of Him described in our passage today, in Habakkuk 1:12-13 …

 THE ETERNAL GOD

:12 “Are You not from everlasting, O Lord my God?” 

     The first thing that we see about God from this passage is that He is eternal – “from everlasting.”  God is eternal; He had no beginning, and will have no end.  His very name, Yahweh, comes from the Hebrew word, “I am”; and reminds us that He was, and He is, and He always will be.  Psalm 90:2 says, “Before the mountains were born, or You gave birth to the earth and the world; from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.” 

     Years ago Charles Spurgeon said:

“There was a season when as yet the sun had never run his race, nor commenced flinging his golden rays across space, to gladden the earth.  There was an era when no stars sparkled in the firmament, for there was no sea of azure in which they might float.  There was a time when all that we now behold of God’s great universe was yet unborn, slumbering within the mind of God as yet uncreated and non-existent; yet there was God, and He was ‘over all and blessed forever;’ though no seraphs hymned His praises, though no strong-winged cherubs flashed like lightning to do His high behests, though He was without a retinue, yet He sat as a King on His throne, the mighty God, forever to be worshipped – the Dread Supreme, in solemn silence dwelling by Himself in vast immensity, making of the placid clouds His canopy, and the light from His own countenance forming the brightness of His glory.  God was — and God is.” 

     He is “from everlasting”; eternal – and as Psalm 90 says, He is “TO everlasting” – He will never end.  He was, and is, and always will be.  A.W. Tozer said we can picture God as being like a great river, and we are standing on its banks.  It is flowing right before us – but if we turn our heads one way, we can look back, and as far as we can see, that river has been flowing towards us – and we turn our head the other way, and as far we can see ahead of us, that same river is still flowing from us.  That is how God is.  From eternity past; He has always been God.  And forever into eternity future; He always will be God.  He is “the same; yesterday, today, and forever.”  He is the eternal God – “from everlasting.” 

     Men come and go; times come and go, but God does not change.  And because He does not change, we can depend on Him, we can depend on His love, His faithfulness, His purpose, even when in difficult times we don’t understand what is going on; we can still depend upon Him.  He is absolutely consistent and faithful. 

     We can’t say that about anything else in our lives.  People put their trust in frail human beings and in things that do not last.  Companies and institutions that are trusted close, or go bankrupt or go out of business, and the customers and employees who put their trust in them lose out what they had invested.  In the Enron collapse a few years ago, the employees of that company that crashed lost over one BILLION dollars in retirement money!  You can put all your hopes in something that will just disappoint you!    

     Yet that will never happen with our God.  The God of the Bible is the everlasting God.  You can entrust yourself, your life, your family, your soul to Him, with all confidence.  He will never lose an election and be replaced as God; He will never be cast out of heaven by a coup (they tried that once!)  God is everlasting.  You can entrust everything you have to Him with all confidence. 

     In fact, today, I would adjure you: if you have never put your trust in God, to save you through Jesus Christ, entrust yourself to Him today.  Turn from your sins and put your trust in Jesus as your Lord & Savior.  These are very uncertain days; you do not know what news tomorrow’s headlines are going to bring.  But you CAN know that you are being held by the One who holds tomorrow.  People are looking for safe investments in these uncertain days; where can you invest safely?  I can tell you the very best investment: invest your life and your soul and everything you have to the God of the Bible.  If you will, then you can say with the Apostle Paul, “For I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have entrusted to Him until that day.”  Entrust your life and soul and confidence to God; He will keep it; you will be “kept by the power of God for salvation.”   Entrust yourself and your situation to Him; He is the eternal God!

 THE HOLY GOD

     The God of the Bible is the everlasting, eternal God, who does not change.  And one of the things that does not change about Him, we see in this passage, is His holiness.  In verse  :12 Habakkuk calls God, “my Holy One”, and then says in :13, “Your eyes are too pure to approve evil, and You cannot look on wickedness with favor.” 

    Of all of the qualities of God, holiness is THE salient one; His holiness is above and through all of His other qualities.  When Isaiah saw the vision of God in the temple in Isaiah 6, the angels were calling out “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!”  He is the thrice-holy God.  The holiness of God means a couple of things: 1) it means that He is “set apart” from everyone and everything else; there is none like Him; 2) it means that He is absolutely good, and pure moral perfection; there is no corruption or evil in Him.  He is absolutely holy!

      Because God is a holy God, we must be holy to relate to Him.  Habakkuk says here in :13, “Your eyes are too pure to approve evil.”  Now, we need to understand first of all what this verse is NOT saying, because some translations word it just a bit differently.  The old King James says: “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity.”  The NIV says: “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil.”  These translations make it sound like God can’t even look at sin, that He just turns away from it and can’t even see it.  Well, obviously that is not true.  The Bible tells us that God sees everything.  “Where can I go from Your Spirit; where can I flee from Your presence?”, Psalm 139 says.  Genesis 6:5 says that in the wicked days of Noah, “the Lord SAW that the wickedness of man was great on the earth …”.  Of course God sees sin; He sees everything that you and I do –we cannot escape His all-seeing eyes!  As the venerable Matthew Henry wrote years ago: “He sees all the sin that is committed in the world … (YET not with) allowance or approbation.”  In other words, He “sees” sin; sure, but He does not APPROVE of it; that is the point.  And that is exactly how the New American Standard version translates it: “Your eyes are too pure to approve evil.” 

     And in fact, Matthew Henry goes on to say, sin is “an offense to Him, it is odious in His eyes, and those who commit it are thereby made obnoxious to His justice.”  THIS is the point of the passage: God sees sin, but He does not see it approvingly.  It is always an offence to Him, and He does not fellowship with those who are in sin.  This is the whole setting of the Book of Habakkuk:

— God is judging the nation of Judah, and sending the Babylonian army against them, because of their sins of violence and wickedness and lack of justice, as we saw last week.  God is a holy God. Judah could not continue sinning without bringing God’s punishment upon them. 

— And in the same light, those Babylonians that God was sending to judge Judah, would themselves be judged for THEIR sin! (:11) “But they will be held guilty” – for “their strength is their god” (:11) and their “violence” (:9). Babylon had their own wickedness; God was going to use them to bring His punishment on His people, but they were still responsible for their sins – and they would not escape God’s judgment, for He is a holy God! 

— This is why we can be confident that God is going to judge OUR nation, when she has turned from His ways.  Why do we think He would not?  Do we think God has changed?  Do we think He is no longer holy?  Do we think that He has “evolved in His thinking”?  Is He no longer the Holy One?  Is He no longer a consuming fire?  Do we think that His eyes now approve evil?  NO!  God was holy when He judged Israel; He was holy when He judged Babylon– and He will be holy when He judges our nation too – unless we repent!  This is why we KNOW that judgment is coming on our nation, because God is a holy God! 

— And by that SAME count, you must know that if you continue in your own personal sin, you cannot be pleasing to God, and that you are inviting the judgment of God in your life too!

     This is where SO many people today miss the mark concerning God: they underestimate His holiness; they think He is ok with you just as you are in your sins.  Now God does love you; but He is too holy to fellowship with you when you sin.  Isaiah 59:2 says “Your iniquities have caused a separation between you and your God.”  God “sees” what you do, certainly, but He does NOT look with approval on what you are doing.  And if you do not stop what you are doing, you will be judged by Him.  He is a holy God. 

     This holiness is inherent in the very nature of God.  He cannot overlook sin.  When Moses asked to see the glory of God in Exodus 34, the Bible says that the glory of God went before Moses as he stayed in the cleft of the rock, and as God went by, He proclaimed, “Yahweh, Yahweh God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth … YET He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished …”.  As God passed by before Moses, He proclaimed the very innate, inherent qualities of His nature.  And one of those innate, unchangeable qualities is His holiness; He cannot just overlook sin.  The guilty must be punished. 

     This is why, for you to have any hope of being saved, you MUST come to Jesus as your Savior.  God cannot just “overlook” your sins – as so many people think He’ll do. He cannot “just go ahead and let you in” to heaven.  God is a holy God, and He cannot just overlook sin.  He will not.  He cannot.  It would violate His own personal holiness and justice. 

     You see how serious God is about this, that He would send His own Son, whom He had loved from eternity past in heaven and with whom He shared His glory; to come to earth as a man to die, and on whom He would pour His very wrath for sin, and Jesus, knowing the awful price He was about to pay, sweat drops of blood, and cried out to God the Father and said, “If possible, let this cup pass from Me” – but God did not let that cup of judgment pass from His Son, because He knew there was no other way; God sent Jesus to the cross, because there was not other way we could be saved.  I am here to tell you today, that if you refuse the sacrifice of the blood of Jesus for your sins, there is no “Plan B”!  God is a holy God, and Jesus was the ONE way your sins could be fixed.  If you refuse that sacrifice, do NOT imagine that He will wink at your sin and let you in.  He will not; indeed, He cannot.  God is a holy God. 

     This has application for those of us who consider ourselves to be Christians, too.  Don’t think that God just stands by and looks approvingly on you, when you are ignoring what you know His word says about sin.  Don’t think God just “winks” at what you are doing, and will just let it “go by”.  Our God is a holy God.  If you do not turn away from that sin, Christian person, God’s chastisement is going to come into your life – and you are going to know it! 

–God is not content with you looking at pornography on the internet and acting like everything is ok between you and Him; it isn’t. 

–God is not content to stand by while you cheat people day in and day out at your business, all the while putting on a sham of being a “Christian businessman.” 

–God is not content while you gossip about people inside the church and out, all the while you have such airs of religiosity about you. 

–God is not content for you to claim to be a Christian, purified by the blood of Jesus, while you consistently engage in sexual immorality.

     If you think that God is content with your so-called “Christian life” while you are consistently engaged in sin, you are mistaken.  “His eyes are too pure to approve evil”, and He does NOT approve of what you are doing.  You need to prove that you really ARE a Christian person by turning from those sins before God’s chastisement comes in your life.

     It is especially important now, for all of us who claim the name of Christ, to cleanse ourselves from sin.  Many of us believe we may be coming into the last days of the earth, or into a time of national judgment.  It is vital for each of us to be as clean as possible from sin, as we prepare for these times.  Soon everything that can be shaken in this world will be shaken; and as I Peter 4:17 says, judgment will begin with the household of God.  It is time for you to take the sin in your life seriously.  God did not look with approval on sin in Israel; God did not look with approval on sin in Babylon; God does not look with approval upon sin in America– and He does not look with approval on the sin in your life either!  He cannot!  God is a holy, holy, holy God. 

 THE SOVEREIGN GOD

     There is one more characteristic of God we find here in Habakkuk 1, and that is His sovereignty.  He is a sovereign King, who plans and executes events in this world according to His will.  We see this in verse 12, where Habakkuk speaks of the Babylonian armies who were coming, and says: “You, O LORD, have appointed them to judge; and You, O Rock, have established them to correct”  That word “established” can mean “ordain.”  God “appointed” them; God “ordained” them.  He did all that He did with the Babylonians, raising them up, using them for His purposes, then punishing them to demonstrate His justice – all according to His will, for He is a Sovereign God.   

     Now Habakkuk wrestled with this: why would God use these ungodly Babylonians as part of His plan?  Weren’t they sinful?  Didn’t he just say they “come for violence” in :9?  Didn’t he say in :11 that “their strength is their god”?  And yet God was going to raise them up and use them, these ungodly people, to punish the people of God?  How could He do this?  He could do it because He is the King of the Universe; and He raises up and tears down, and appoints and ordains according to His will.  God is a sovereign God.

     We may not always understand it, but scripture tells us that God does indeed use evil people and nations for His purposes.  He tells us here that He was going to use evil Babylon to punish Judah.  (And then He declares that He will punish Babylon for THEIR sins!)

— In Isaiah 10:5 God calls Assyria, “the rod of My anger …”  In the early days of Isaiah, God was going to use the violent and wicked Assyrians to punish Israel.

— Isaiah 44:28 “It is I who says of Cyrus, ‘He is My shepherd, and he will perform all My desire, and he will declares ofJerusalem, ‘She will be built.’”  Cyrus was a pagan Babylonian – and yet God would use him to restore Israel to the Promised Land, and to rebuild the city of Jerusalem. 

     Over and over we read in scripture that God is sovereign; He can use “even the wicked for the day of evil”, Proverbs 16:4 says.  He causes all things to work together in ways that we cannot understand; He uses whomever and whatever He will.  God is sovereign.  Now, WE, on the other hand, do not always understand what He is doing, and so like Habakkuk, we question God, or wrestle with Him about why He would do what He does, when He does, or how He does. 

— I believe that like in the days of Habakkuk, this may be increasingly true in Americain the near future.  As our country experiences judgments and difficulties, perhaps even from ungodly sources, we may question God as to why He would allow this, when, just as in Habakkuk’s day, there are STILL many in the land who are faithful to God.  But His purposes were being worked out in their day, beyond what Habakkuk and the people of Judah could understand.  And we must believe in His sovereign purposes if we face that same troubling scenario.   

— This is true for many of us as individuals.  As you personally experience trying times, and don’t know why certain things happen, and why your prayers aren’t answered, and why it seems like some ungodly people who are NOT following God are prospering – you are not going to understand.  But as we shall see in Habakkuk 2:4, “The righteous shall live by faith.”  In all your hurts and questions, the most important thing is to just keep looking to Him.  It is ok to question; it is ok to ask – God is big enough to handle it!  But in all of your trials; in all of your questioning and asking, keep your eyes fixed on Him.  When all is said and done, all that will have mattered is that you have kept faithful to Him – the eternal, holy, Sovereign God, who IS in charge – who DOES have a plan — even in dark and difficult days!

     The bottom line is, when all of the dust has cleared, when all of history is done, when all the evil has been judged, all of the good rewarded, and when all of our questions have been answered: GOD WILL BE ON HIS THRONE!  From everlasting to everlasting, He is the Holy, Sovereign God.  Keep your eyes on HIM during your difficult days on this earth.  Trust Him, and keep looking to Him, no matter what. 

CONCLUSION:

You can only make it through those kinds of days if you have a real, personal relationship with God through Christ.  One of the things that sticks out in this passage is the personal nature of the relationship that Habakkuk had with the Lord.  Notice the personal possessive pronouns he used in :12, “MY God, MY holy one”!  God was HIS God, and in the most difficult days, that is what got Habakkuk through.  Can you say that?  Can you say that you know for sure that God is YOUR God, because you have a personal commitment to Him as your Lord and Savior? 

     It makes all the difference, in the most difficult, hard to understand times of life, that you know that you have a real, personal relationship with the Sovereign God who is orchestrating events. 

     I think back to not long after we moved here, when Michael was still little-bitty, and we had to take him to get some vaccinations.  He was not going to like it, of course, and he had to have several shots, so they told me to hold him in my lap, with my arms around his.  I still remember very well holding him while they gave him one shot, and another, and another – and all the while he was writhing in pain, and crying – and perhaps wondering why I, his father, was holding him while they were doing this to him?  But of course, I was doing it for his own good.  I could only hope that somehow, even as a little child, Michael knew that his father would only hold him through something that painful, because it would be worth it in the end.

     In the same way, you and I will experience things in this life which will be painful – perhaps physically, or maybe emotionally or mentally or spiritually.  It will not make sense to us WHY we have to go through such pain.  But if we can look into the eyes of the One who is holding us, and know that He is not only eternal, and holy, and sovereign – but also OUR Father, whom we know and love – then we will be able to trust His love, and endure.  It is only by knowing that we have a real relationship with Him, and by keeping our eyes fixed on Him, that we will be able to persevere through the most difficult days.  But in order to do that, you must be sure; you must “know that you know” that the One who is holding you through those times, is indeed your own Father, who loves you, and is working out His sovereign, holy, and eternal purposes.