Years ago someone I knew had lost a loved one in a tragedy, and a friend of theirs asked them: “How do you manage to still look to God in a time like this?” They said, “In a time like this, where else am I going to look?” (That reminds me of when everyone was leaving Jesus in John 6, and He asked His disciples if they were going to leave too, and Peter said to Him in John 6:68, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life”!) That was my friend’s attitude also. They knew that despite the questions they had, this wasn’t a time for them to turn away from God; that was the time when they really needed to turn TO God!

You may be in a time like that right now too; if you are, you really need, because of what you are going through, to tum to the Lord. He is the only One who can help You. In fact, God may have brought you to this service here today for that very reason!

But truthfully, I believe that difficult days may be coming for all of us soon. Last week we saw that like Habakkuk, we ourselves are challenged to live by faith in a nation that is about to undergo God’s judgment. We need to turn our eyes to God in these times. But who IS this God to whom we are turning; what is this God like?   (By the way, this is also what we’re studying in our Discipleship class at 6:00 Sunday nights) We also see something about this God described in our passage today, in Habakkuk 1:12 and following:

I. The ETERNAL God

“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; that is, He had no beginning, and He 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 also “TO everlasting” – He will never end. He was, and is, and always will be. A.W. Tozer, who wrote the book we are studying on God in Discipleship, said we can picture God as being like a great river, and we are standing on its banks looking at it. 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 if we turn our head the other way, and as far we can see ahead of us, that same river is still flowing from us. He said 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 in our difficult times when 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 or anything else in our lives. So often we put our trust in people 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 on them lose out on all they had invested. 

We had a church member in another state who worked faithfully for a company for many years, only to lose all the retirement he had vested in that company when it folded. In the Enron collapse a few years ago, the employees of that company lost over one BILLION dollars in retirement money! Now, I do believe that we should be wise, and save, and invest — but we also need to make sure that we don’t put all our hopes in something that could be taken away from us in a moment!  

The same thing is true with many of the people in our lives. Some of us look at certain people as the “rock” of our life: maybe our husband or wife, or a child, or parent. Listen, love that person God has given you, appreciate them — but know that they cannot be the “rock” of your life. They may be gone in a moment of time. They are temporal. 

But God is eternal. That will never happen with Him. 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 die. He will never lose an election and be replaced; 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, and know that He will never change. 

I encourage you: if you have never put your trust in God, to save you through Jesus Christ, give Him your life today. Tum from your sins and put your trust in Jesus as your Savior from your sins, and the King of your life. 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 your soul and your confidence to God; He will keep it for you; you will be “”kept by the power of God for salvation.”   Trust yourself to Him; He is the eternal God! 

II. The HOLY God

One of those things that does not change about God, 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 may be the most pre-eminent. 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. That God is “holy” means a couple of things: 

— First of all it means that He is “set apart” from everyone and everything else; there is none like Him. 

— Second, it means that He is absolutely good, and there is no corruption or evil in Him. He is  absolutely, perfectly holy! 

So 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, this doesn’t mean that God can’t even “look” at sin, that He just turns away from it and can’t even see it. Obviously that is not true. The Bible tells us that God sees everything: Psalm 139 says: “Where can I go from Your Spirit; where can I flee from Your presence?”  Genesis 6:5 says “God SAW that the wickedness of man was great on the earth…”. Of course God sees sin; He sees everything that you and I do — you 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, God “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 he 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 committing sin. 

This is the whole setting of the Book of Habakkuk:

— In this book, God is about to send the Babylonian army to judge Judah, because of their sins, as we saw last week. God is a holy God. Judah could not just keep sinning without bringing God’s punishment upon them.

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

— This is why we can be confident that God will judge OUR nation too, when she has turned from His ways. Why do we think He would not? Do we think that God has changed? Do we think He is no longer holy? Do we think that He has “evolved in His thinking”; that He is no longer the Holy One? Is He no longer a consuming fire? Do we think that now His eyes DO approve evil? NO! God was holy when He judged Israel; He was holy when when He judged Babylon — and He will be holy when He judges our nation — unless we repent. We KNOW that judgment must be 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 can’t be pleasing to God either, and you are inviting the judgment of God in your own life right now too! 

This is where SO many people today miss the mark concerning God: they underestimate His holiness; they think He’s ok with all the sins we’re committing. They think that God is like some “overindulgent grandparent” who just sits and smiles on their rocker while the grandkids get away with murder, saying, “Oh, aren’t they cute!”  

Understand: God does love you; He loves you more than any parent or grandparent ever did.  But He is also a holy God, and 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 don’t stop what you are doing, you will be judged by Him. He is a holy God.

God’s holiness is inherent, in His very nature. He cannot overlook sin. When Moses asked to see the glory of God in Exodus 34, the Bible says His glory passed 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. He says the guilty must be punished.  

This truth about the holiness of God has at least two applications:

A) Because God is holy, 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 will do. He cannot “just go ahead and let you in”. God is a holy God, and He cannot just overlook your sin. He will not. He cannot. It would violate His own personal holiness. 

You see how serious God is about this, that He would send His own Son, with whom He had shared His glory before the world was; to come to earth as a man to die, and He would pour all His wrath for sin on Him. Why would He do that, unless sin was very, very serious? And then Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane, 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 would not let that pass from His Son, because He knew there was no other way. Jesus went to the cross, because there was no other way mankind could be saved. 

All of which shows us: 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’ death on the cross was the ONE way your sins could be forgiven, and God continue to be holy. If you refuse Jesus’ sacrifice, do NOT imagine that God will just wink at your sin and let you in. If He told His own SON there was no other way, His answer will be no different for YOU! There is no other way. Because God is a holy God. 

B) This has some 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, while you ignore what you know His word says about your sin. God is not content with the sin in your life as a Christian. Do not think He will just let it “go by”.  He is a holy God. If you don’t put a stop to that sin, Christian person, God’s chastisement IS going to come into your life — and you’re gonna know it when it does! 

— 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. 

— God is not content to stand by while you cheat people day in and day out at your business all the while carrying the name of being a “Christian businessperson”! 

— God is not content while you watch pornography on the internet and act like everything is great between you and Him, because it isn’t. 

— God is not content with you gossiping about people inside the church and out, all the while portraying yourself to be such a “religious person.” He sees through all our “religious airs.” Our God is a holy God. 

If you think that God is “ok” with your so-called “Christian life” while you consistently, unapologetically sin, you are mistaken. “His eyes are too pure to approve evil.” Prove that you really ARE a Christian person, and turn from those sins before God’s chastisement comes in Your life — because it will come. Our God is a holy God!

It is especially important now, for all of us who claim the name of Christ, to cleanse ourselves from sin. Many believe that we are in the last days of the earth — or if not, that we are about to enter into a time of national judgment. It’s vital for each of us to be as clean from sin as possible, before we come into these times. Hebrews says God is going to shake everything in this world that can be shaken: and as I Peter 4:17 says, “judgment will begin with the household of God.” It is time NOW 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. 

III. The Sovereign God

There is one more characteristic of God we find here in Habakkuk 1, and that is His sovereignty. “Sovereign” means Supreme Ruler. “God rules.” He is the sovereign King, who acts 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.” Where did this Babylonian army come from? The Bible says GOD “appointed” them, GOD “ordained” them. HE raised the Babylonians up for HIS purposes, and then punished 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 would raise them up and use these ungodly people, to punish the people of God? How could He do that? He could do it because He’s the King of the Universe; He raises up who He will, and tears down who He will. He appoints and ordains according to His will, because 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.  We see the same thing in other scriptures:

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

—I was reading this week in Isaiah 44:28 where God says: “It is I who says of Cyrus, ‘He is My shepherd, and He will perform all My desire,’ and he will declare of Jerusalem, ‘She will be built.”” Cyrus was a pagan Persian emperor – and yet God declared that He would use him to restore Israel to the Promised Land, and rebuild the city of Jerusalem.

Over and over we see in scripture that God is sovereign; He can use “even the wicked for the day of evil”, as Proverbs 16:4 says. God causes all things to work together in ways that we can’t understand; He uses whoever 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, or when He does, or how He does it. 

I believe that like in the days of Habakkuk, as our country experiences judgments and difficulties — perhaps even from ungodly sources – we may be tempted to question God as to why He would allow this — especially when, like in Habakkuk’s day, there are still many in the land who are faithful to God. But His purposes were being worked out, beyond what Habakkuk and the people of Judah could understand. And we will have to trust that His purposes are always being worked out in our times too.

This is also true for many of us as individuals. As you personally go through difficult times, and you don’t know why certain things happen, and why your prayers aren’t answered, and why it seems like ungodly people who DON’T follow God are prospering — you aren’t going to understand. But as we will see in Habakkuk 2:4, “The righteous shall live by faith.” In all our hurts and questions, the most important thing is to just keep looking to Him. It is ok to question; it’s ok to ask — God’s 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 matter is that you have remained faithful to 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 STILL BE ON HIS THRONE!  “From everlasting to everlasting”, He is the Holy, Sovereign God. Keep your eyes fixed 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 Jesus Christ. One of the things that sticks out to me in this passage is the personal nature of the relationship that Habakkuk had with the Lord. Notice the personal pronouns he used in :12, “MY God, MY holy one”! God was HIS God, and that is what got Habakkuk through his most trying days. He knew Him. He knew he was His. Do you know for sure that God is YOUR God, because you have a personal commitment to Jesus as your Lord and Savior?

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

Not long after we moved to Louisiana, when our son Michael was still little,  we had to take him to get some vaccinations. We knew he was not going to like it, of course, and he had to have several shots, so they told me to hold him, and hold his arms in, while they gave those shots to him. I still remember holding him while they gave him one shot, and another, and another – and all he while he was writing in pain, and crying — and perhaps wondering why I, his own father, would be the one holding him while they did all this to him? I hoped that somehow, even as a little child, Michael knew that his father would only hold him through something that painful, because it was best for him in the end.

In the same way, You and I are going to experience things in this life which will be painful — maybe physically, or maybe emotionally or spiritually. And it may not make sense to us WHY we have to go through this 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 that He is also our Father whom we know and love — then we will be able to trust His love, and persevere in our faith.  BUT you can only do that if you KNOW that you have a real relationship with Him. Do you? Is your relationship with God real enough, to carry you through what is about to come to your life, and perhaps to our whole country in the days ahead?

INVITATION

God has revealed Himself to us in His word as an eternal, holy, sovereign God. What does that mean to YOU today? What do you need to do as a result of that?

— Some of us need to stop putting so much faith in other people/possessions, and make sure your ultimate hope and trust are in GOD. Some of these others can fail you or be taken away in this life; God never will.

— Some of us, even as Christians, need the reminder that God is holy, and there are some areas of your life that you know are NOT! God is NOT content with what is going on in your life. You need to address that sin TODAY, before God’s chastisement comes on — or maybe it’s already started! 

— Maybe you need to trust that God is sovereign/He’s in charge in some specific area of your life today. Stop wishing it were some other way, and trust His plan.

— Most importantly, DO YOU KNOW THIS ETERNAL, HOLY, SOVEREIGN GOD AS YOUR HEAVENLY FATHER? If not, you need to make sure of it today! Ask Jesus to be your Lord & Savior.