The Wonder of Habakkuk 2:15 - The Proud Do The Unthinkable - Sometimes Me

Well, today we get to look at the Psalmic verse of the second chapter of Habakkuk, and the letter Psalmic is that letter that makes you tremble, but it's also that letter that can uphold us. Very, very powerful and a force to be reckoned with, and clearly in this particular verse, last time we went from the great light of God's glory filling the earth, and now you're going to see we're going to take a deep dive back into darkness, and the result of horrible sin, and I got to say this, one of the darkest verses I've ever unpacked, but nonetheless it's showing us the depravity that happens as we lose faith, and as I've really thought about that, the more I realize when it says the righteous will live by faith, if you don't have any, oh the death that you die, and the depravity, and the darkness, and oh my goodness, this is such a dark verse, and all I know to do is just kind of go through it. So verse 15, woe to him, woe unto him, that giveth his neighbor drink, that putteth thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look upon thy nakedness. And so wow, I think maybe I'll just go to the darkest way to look at this verse, would be the way the Jews look at it, or the way Rashi would interpret it, is that Nebuchadnezzar was a very vile man, and when he would conquer a country, he would take their king into captivity, and he would get him drunk, and he would do vile things to them, and I just will leave it there, and obviously that idea of woe, we talked about that a couple, three episodes ago, that it's like you have now jumped out of the airplane, and it is not going to go good for you, okay? It's like, and it really has everything to do with that letter Samak, because Samak in its own way is gravity, okay?

It's that force that's unstoppable. In other words, you have started something you can't stop, and boy oh boy, certainly when you do this, it really looks bad, and so there's a lot of interesting words in here that they talk about, that bottle word there, that you might remember when we were doing the 119th Psalm, where we said we've become like a wineskin that smoke, well that word is wineskin, and that idea of drunkenness, I think myself, the way that I would interpret this verse, now well let's go to Matthew Henry's interpretation first, and I think it's also very true that those people who go to the pub, and get their friends drunk in order to take advantage of them in any way, shape, or form, either by taking advantage of them fiscally, in other words trying to get them to go into a deal that's bad, or whether that's getting a woman drunk in order to take advantage of her, or however you go about doing that, you've started a force that God, you've jumped out of the plane, and you will be hitting the ground, I mean it's just not gonna go good for you, and God's sharing this with us, that when you go to that point of losing faith, it's horrible, so the place that that goes is all over the place, I mean there's a lot of ways that people take advantage of people by alcohol, but I think it goes even deeper and darker than that, as I have really thought about, oh my goodness, if you look in Revelations, chapter 17, chapter 18, you're gonna see that they talk about the whore of Babylon, and that idea of prostitution is a lack of faith at an unbelievable level, in other words, they are taking advantage of men that have no love for them, there's no faith that they have in the man that they're taking advantage of, they're just simply taking his money, and in so many ways, when you become faithless, I mean the more you go down that track of losing faith in your brothers and sisters, of losing faith in your neighbor, then oh my goodness, you die a horrible death because what you end up doing, as you speak badly of them, or if you do bad dealings with them, or whatever it is that you do to take advantage of someone in a way, you're getting drunk on their blood, and just as it says in Revelations, that the nations end up drunk on blood, and they're not talking about blood from a standpoint of murdering everybody, which obviously takes place in Revelation through all that goes on, but also just when they take advantage of people in vast numbers financially, or another way that I thought about is like when bullies, like mean girls, right, they're all in the hall, and they are just tearing up another girl, well as they do that, they know they did something wrong, but they have to justify it, so they think about how bad that girl was, or their judgment of that girl, whatever the situation is, so they raise themselves up, just like it said, where it said the man's puffed up, his soul's not upright in him, well the woman's puffed up, and her soul is not upright in her, and so as she tears down that other person, she's literally drawing blood, and getting drunk on that blood, because they get some big kick out of it, and that leads to more and more of that kind of behavior, which obviously we see leads to death in so many different ways, and I even thought about when I was in the car business, prior to coming to Christ, I took over what at the time was Eagle Pontiac as the general sales manager, and the F&I people were blatantly taking advantage of bad credit customers, and selling them all sorts of stuff that they knew they would never pay for, and that idea is like credit life, and accident health, and extended warnings that were way overpriced, and all sorts of crazy interest rates, and things that they would do to these customers, to just simply take advantage of them, because they were just do anything to get a car, and so they would put them in a situation where they knew their car would be repossessed in a few months, because there's no way they could make those payments, and if they made any of the payments, they were paying for crazy things, well if you would come into that office after one of those finance managers had dealt with one of those customers, one of them I can remember well, saying Robbie look at all the blood on the walls, man I slayed that guy, I cut him up into pieces, and that was the idea, he was drunk on weight taking advantage of helpless people, and poor people, I mean it was unbelievable, well needless to say I saw the demise of that particular finance manager, and I saw the demise of what happened to that organization as a result of those practices, it was unbelievable the money that ended up having to be repaid based on all those horrible things that they did, but the point still gets back to I think Habakkuk's really learning a unbelievably beautiful picture here in that the opposite of all these things is so true, that the righteous will live by faith, in other words all the blackness and darkness of all the things that go wrong happen as we take advantage of or look down or be prideful in any way shape or form of our brother or sister, but by the same token if we see their glory and we lift them up and we encourage them and we speak hymns and for spiritual songs and all those things that it tells us in all those other places as we find ways to see God and other people and bring that out, then we have the favor of God, and not only do we have the favor of God, we have the favor of other people, and we live in so much better peace and harmony as we see every reason to love our neighbor, not find a way to beat up on them or take advantage of them or anything else along those lines. And so as I said, I've thought a lot about this verse, and there's no doubt that it's a very, very dark verse, and how bad does it get when people totally become faithless, and they literally die a death that is something beyond gruesome. But the sad part of that is when I really look at my own life, when have I taken part in a situation where behind somebody's back we've talked about them and literally did not realize we were feasting on their blood and losing faith in that brother or sister and actually losing faith in ourselves because we have to put them down, and the more we put them down, the more we lift ourselves up, the further we get from God, right? And no doubt that pride cometh before a fall, and the idea of gravity here, this idea of the Psalmic, right, is here's this unbelievable force that you're coming up against. And what God is telling us here is, oh, you wait for it, but it is coming.

As surely as the sun comes up tomorrow morning, as surely as the earth goes around the sun, these forces are unbelievably powerful, and there is no stopping them. And so as Belshazzar, from what I understand, led all of his, part of that party that night was to get all his nobles drunk so that they would all sign a covenant with him to protect him against the Persians, and oh, oh, oh, what happened that night was he stepped on that scale and was found wanting, right? And so, Lord, help us to take the blood of Christ, not the blood of other people, so that we too can take up our cross and just look for the ways that we can be like you to our brothers and sisters, to love on them, to find their glory, to call it out, to bring them up, however we can bring the light, Lord, help us to do that today. And as you think about that, you might think about where you might share this podcast. I thank you so much for listening and pray for you today that, wow, we can bring the light and have faith and grace in our brothers and sisters.