Most people who know me know that I am a history buff; they may also know that I am an archaeology buff. Now this is a dangerous combination because whenever I have an opportunity to preach on a subject that requires a little historical background….. Well, I always worry because I know that not everyone shares my passion for history and so I really do try to keep the history lessons as short and as interesting as possible, because I know the alternative is to have the sermon become, as my dear friend Bill Heller would say, “A snoozer”. But a little historical background will be necessary in order for us to understand today’s story so I promise to try to keep that history lesson to a minimum.
The prophet Habakkuk lived during the time leading up to, and including the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the subsequent destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Habakkuk was one of the twelve Minor Prophets and also a contemporary of Jeremiah. Interestingly, while most prophets’ ministries are all about carrying God’s word to the people, Habakkuk’s prophetic ministry was all about bringing questions to God. Habakkuk was concerned about injustice in Judah and he was perplexed by God’s apparent lack of action. In today’s Old Testament lesson we heard Habakkuk ask “How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save? Judah was, for the most part, not the faithful nation that God had called them to be. Habakkuk had witnessed the worship of the gods of other nations; he was seeing what the Bible diplomatically refers to as “Doing evil in the eyes of the Lord”, and then there was the little matter of the slaves, but that’s a story that requires a little explanation.
Judah had been severely threatened by the Babylonians twice before the time of Habakkuk’s prophecy, the first time being in 605 BCE when the Babylonians invaded Judah and King Jehoiakim ended the siege by agreeing to pay a heavy tribute. As part of the agreement the Babylonians carried away to Babylon about 10,000 of Judah’s best and brightest citizens and the story of this first diaspora is told in the book of Daniel. Four years later Jehoiakim allied himself with the Egyptians and refused to pay the tribute, thinking that Egypt could protect Judah from Babylon. They couldn’t. The Babylonian army first defeated the Egyptians, and then turned their attention to Judah for a second time. King Jehoiakim was killed in the subsequent siege and was replaced as king by his son Jeconiah, but the Babylonians attempted to insure Judah’s compliance by taking Jeconiah and Jeconiah’s sons back to Babylon and installing Zedekiah as king in his place. And just as an aside, I have to say that as an archaeology nut, there is a collection of ancient tablets called the Babylonian Chronicles that were found in modern Iran and translated in 1956, the chronicles tell this whole story from the Babylonian point of view and as a Christian I take great delight in the fact that the chronicles confirm a significant part of the Biblical record in the process.
Now Zedekiah, who was supposed to be Babylon’s obedient vassal, also decided not to pay the tribute and we read in Jeremiah 34 that when King Zedekiah realized that his actions had placed Judah in imminent danger, King Zedekiah declared a time of repentance and one of the things he did was to declare that all Hebrew slaves were to be set free. Now this is all part of that Year of Jubilee thing that you may have heard about somewhere along the line. People were often enslaved when they owed a debt they could not repay and according to Jewish law, every seven years the Israelites were supposed to free all of their Hebrew slaves. In addition, every 49 years, all land that had been purchased was supposed to revert back to its original owner and all debts owed were supposed to be cancelled. But in the 800 plus years since Israel first entered Canaan, this had NEVER happened. So at this time when Judah was in dire trouble King Zedekiah declared that all slaves were to be freed, but when the danger had passed, most of the wealthy Judahites reclaimed their slaves, re-enslaving them; some repentance huh?
So Habakkuk had seen all of this injustice and he cried out to God for an answer, but the answer that God had for Habakkuk was probably worse news that Habakkuk could possibly have imagined. “Watch what I am about to do and be amazed” God said. “I am raising up the Babylonians, that ruthless and impetuous people”….. Now any historian will tell you that the Babylonian army was one of the most vicious and cruel armies that has ever existed on this planet. The people of Judah had already experienced the wrath of the Babylonian army, and the prospect of another Babylonian attack was just terrifying. Habakkuk was now even more perplexed by the fact that the instrument by which God would judge Judah was much less faithful and much less righteous than those upon whom God’s judgement was falling. God’s answer to Habakkuk was to assure him of the ultimate judgment of Babylon and to say that “The righteousness person will live by his faithfulness”. God was calling Habakkuk to take God at His word; to trust that God knows what He is doing, and to believe that ultimately, God will make all things right.
And so Babylon did attack Judah, and when Babylon attacked this third time, there was no opportunity for diplomacy; twice Judah had refused to pay the tribute and now Babylon was going to make an example of them. Now I have no desire to belabor the misery suffered by the people who endured the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, or the horrible things that happened during that siege; nor do I wish to talk about the ways in which the tens of thousands of Israelites, both military and civilian were tortured and murdered by the Babylonian army after Jerusalem fell. The story of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem can be found in the book of Lamentations. It’s not a happy book. Additionally, for those who follow archaeology, there was an extremely well-documented account complete with rather graphic carvings of the fall of Jerusalem’s sister city Lachish that was found in the Library of Ashurbanipal that was discovered by archaeologists in 1849. This text and the accompanying pictures teach us much about the methods of the Babylonian army.
Finally, God’s judgement on Judah was complete. Jerusalem was besieged and fell. The entire city, Solomon’s Temple and all, was burned to the ground and nearly every surviving inhabitant was carried off and dispersed throughout the vast Babylonian empire. But our story doesn’t end here…..
Some 70 years later a new empire arose in the Middle East and the Persians under Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonians. In a brilliant move probably orchestrated by Cyrus’ PR department, Cyrus invited any of the Jewish people living in Babylon who so chose, to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the walls and the temple, a story you will find in the book of Ezra. During their 70 years in exile, most of the people who had actually lived in Judah had died and their families had been born and lived their entire lives in Babylon, so when the offer was made to return to Jerusalem, most of the people were unwilling to endure the hardship that returning to a derelict land and rebuilding a city promised. Those who did return were, for the most part, faithful Jews who had continued to worship, to follow the law, and to teach their faith to their children. While the Jews who were carried away 70 years earlier were not the faithful people that God had called them to be, the remnant that returned to Jerusalem were a dedicated people, faithful, committed to God’s law, and seeking to rebuild the Holy City and the Temple. It was their work that set the stage for the birth, life, and ministry of Jesus. Watch what I am about to do and be amazed……
Our call to worship today quoted a passage from Isaiah “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways”. The book of Habakkuk begins with a prophet, looking at the world through earthly eyes, and questioning God because God appeared to be inactive and uninvolved. As God helps a faithful Habakkuk to see the sweeping majesty of His plan, Habakkuk stops looking at events with earthly eyes and begins to see God’s big picture with heavenly eyes. The book of Habakkuk ends with Habakkuk singing a wonderful, chapter long song of praise to God.
Standing here today some 2500 and something years after the fact it may be easy for us to forget the terrible human cost of these events and the suffering endured by the people who lived through this time. When we do force ourselves to remember them, there are no explanations that make it right, or even that make it make sense, there are no platitudes that smooth over the difficulties, and the simple fact is that facing the truth is no easier for us than it was for Habakkuk. A whole lot of people suffered terribly and many of them died and somehow, just like Habakkuk, we can’t make sense of that. We wonder, as did Habakkuk, how could God possibly allow something like that to happen, but we need to remember that we are all hopelessly stuck with a pair of earthly eyes. Our minds are composed of the library of our experiences and our experience tells us that this life is all that we can count on, and the prospect of the finality of life without having confirmed knowledge of a life beyond is quite honestly more than we can bear. And so our earthly eyes tell us to hang on to this life with all that we have. Our earthly eyes tell us that there is finality in these tragedies.
But our earthly eyes are wrong. In Habukkuk God says “The righteous person will live by his faithfulness. To look at the world through heavenly eyes is to have faith that God is right, that what He says is true and will really happen. It’s been wisely said that “Christians are people who do not live by explanations but by promises”. We have to learn to be satisfied with knowing that all of this will, at some point, make perfectly good sense.
There was a heartbreaking, heartbreaking picture that was all over the news this week. Of course there are heartbreaking pictures in the news just about every day, but being the grandfather of a three year old grandson who I absolutely adore, this picture of a refugee toddler’s body laying in the surf just hit WAY too close to home. I would have preferred not to see this picture at all, ever, but the news being what it is the pictures were plastered over all of the networks and internet and after the N’th time seeing it I got to thinking to myself, why can’t medical science just fix this? Why can’t there just be some way to bring this little child back to wholeness…… But then that’s exactly what God is promising to do, isn’t it? God IS going to bring this little child back to wholeness. In fact, He’s going to bring EVERYTHING back to wholeness; back to the way everything was intended to be in the first place. Those of us who have grown up in the church have been hearing these words since we were little children and we know in our heads that it’s true. We’ve read God’s word and we believe it, but just like the man who said to Jesus “I believe Lord, forgive my unbelief”, it is so, SO hard to take what we know in our heads and implant it firmly in our hearts. But that, my friends, that is what living by faith is all about.
In our Gospel lesson today we heard Jesus talk about entering the kingdom of God like a child. If we are to begin to be able to see our world with heavenly eyes, then we must indeed begin as a child, knowing nothing; emptying ourselves of all that we think we know and allowing God to fill us with a knowledge of a life that transcends our senses, a life that is more than that which we can hear, see, taste, touch, or feel. We must forget everything we think that we know about religion, and morality, and faith, all of the things that have been learned through our earthly eyes, and we need to begin to view God’s Kingdom with heavenly eyes, with eyes that view events not in finite terms, not in mortal terms, but in eternal terms. We don’t need to be asking ourselves the question “How does this event affect my life”. We need to be asking ourselves the question “How does this event affect eternity”. Our difficulty in making this transition is exactly why Paul said “If Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless”. The resurrection is what gives us hope, but the resurrection also gives us the ability to look at events with heavenly eyes; to interpret events based not on how they affect the individual, but on how they affect the Kingdom. And when we begin to view the world in this way, our priorities begin to change dramatically. Our focus shifts from what is important in this life to what is important to the Kingdom.
7 of the original 11 disciples remaining after Judas departed are thought to have been executed by the Romans. At great personal cost they gave their testimony, and their testimony, along with the testimony of many, many other 1st through 3rd century martyrs has been given enormous weight by their willingness to die for what they believed, and in the case of the disciples, that which they had personally witnessed. During the two plagues that struck Rome Christians tended to plague victims, often at the cost of their own lives. The love that they showed in this act caused many Romans who had despised the Christians to come to faith.
Now please understand that I am not advocating that we all go out today and do something that costs us our lives, but I AM advocating a faith that shares the certainty of those first century Christians that followers of Christ ultimately lay down their life only to pick it right back up again. I am advocating a faith that is absolutely certain that God will keep His promise to make everything right and whole. I am advocating a faith that is certain that God Himself is going to wipe away every tear. I am advocating a faith that allows God’s promises to permeate our being until our belief resides not in our heads, but in our hearts, and our eyes see not that which is earthly, but that which is heavenly. Amen.
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