The Wonder of Habakkuk - Verse 1

This is the Truth Network. Hidden treasures in the book of Habakkuk. Oh, I love to start out on new adventures in a new year, and as it turned out, my wife didn't have surgery this morning as her doctor had COVID, so we'll be praying for that. But as a result, I got a chance to jump in here with Habakkuk, and as we talked about, that this would be our first, I guess, episode in this whole concept of where God's taking us for 2023, and it was an interesting turn for me because I really had never had a real desire to study Habakkuk or look into it, but immediately, you know, I could tell very clearly that that was what God had for me, as we learned, actually, in the Song of Solomon, you know, in the fifth chapter when he said that the Lord is, or she said, the church was saying that she slept but her heart was awake, and that's the voice of my beloved knocking. Well, the voice of your beloved, and I'm sure, you know, from time to time, I hope you've heard his voice, and it has a pull on your heart, and it has everything to do with the idea of Habakkuk, I believe, that pull on your heart that the Lord's voice has, and so, you know, he clearly put that Habakkuk on my heart, and as I, and I, you know, questioned it, obviously, I'm like, Habakkuk, really? And he was like, yeah, really, and so, you know, as I enter into that, of course, the very first thing I would do is look up the word Habakkuk in Hebrew, and naturally, if you can hear by the sound of it, it has those letters that we have been in search of in the 119th Psalm, you know, the idea of the statutes, the het and the kuff, and you can hear the ha in Habakkuk, it starts with a het, and then there's plenty of kuffs, actually, there's two in there, and there's a bet and a vav to go with them. So, as I looked up the word Habakkuk, and I saw that those were my letters, I went, okay, God, we must be going there, and the idea of Habakkuk is actually this hug from the bosom, and clearly, for those of you who have studied the book before, he was someone that loved God intensely and was certainly a prophet.

He lived in the time of Josiah, and so he was a contemporary of Jeremiah, and probably not too far off of Isaiah, because, you know, it was Isaiah that was certainly there when Josiah died, and, you know, part of Isaiah is his lamenting that, and so you can kind of get the time frame of this, but it says clearly in the first verse that we're going to go ahead and start, because it's the best way I know to look at it, it says the burden, which, and again, this would be the aleph verse or the wisdom verse, and there's a lot of wisdom here, it says the burden which Habakkuk the prophet did see, and so it might even seem redundant because of the fact that, you know, prophet in Hebrew is very much connected to this idea of seers, and so here's what the seer saw, but nonetheless, it's really an amazing thing that this word burden, and the word Habakkuk, so, you know, you start out with this het and then a bet, and so, you know, you have this idea of this house that is united, because that's what the bet is would be house, and here we have this union of house, and then you have this kuff, which would be, you know, the idea of proximity close to God, and then you have avav, which means hanging on to heaven and another kuff, and interestingly, when you just take that concept of a het and a bet, it's like this idea of bosom, and so here's a hug from the bosom, and so I think it's important to note that probably Habakkuk was a hugger, the kind of person that was intimate with people, and loved them deeply, and I think that's part of the reason why this was such a burden to him, because the prophecy that we'll, you know, begin to see here in a minute is of the Babylonians coming and essentially casting judgment on the people of Israel, and so, you know, you could imagine if you were seeing that the children of your friends were going to undergo this horrible punishment and beheadings and all the different things that Nebuchadnezzar would do, you know, put out the eyes, etc., etc., just cruel, cruel treatment of the people that you know and their families and those kind of things, and Habakkuk is trying to understand, right? And because he loved those people dearly, the good news is, according to what we can see here, he loved God even more dearly, and so it was important to him as he pushed in and went into that position of the statute, of course, to draw into God that he would be given this information, but the interesting word, the most interesting word in the verse to me, the one that I just keep, the Holy Spirit keeps taking me back to, it says the burden, the burden, and that word burden is very much connected to the idea of forgiveness, interestingly, in that the word burden is a mem, which would be the Messiah or more, and then a shin and then an aleph, and the word forgiveness is a nun and a shin and an aleph, okay? So you can see the relationship, and as interestingly, when you're trying to forgive somebody, there's this burden of God's love, right? That you know you're supposed to do it, but you just don't know quite how to do it, and in this case, you know, that the shin and the aleph is like, the idea, as we studied in the 109, I mean, as we studied in the Song of Solomon, you might remember, it says jealousy is as cruel as the grave, the flames of fire, right? And so here you have this shin of God's love. In other words, God is intensely jealous of what's going on in Israel and how they've chased after gods and other gods and things, because he knows the damage that not only is he doing to themselves, but they're doing for generations, and it's, you know, breaking God's heart, and he burns with his vehement flame, and so as a result of that, there is going to be a judgment, which is why that meme is on the front of those two letters, and so unfortunately for Habakkuk, or fortunately for Habakkuk, however you want to put it, he's the one that gets to see this vision of what's going to happen. God shares it with him because he loves him, he trusts him, and he obviously wants him to work through how he's going to feel about this thing so that we could all study it later on, and of course there's very, very famous verses in Habakkuk.

I'm not going to give you a spoiler alert, but there are some amazing verses in Habakkuk that we're going to be getting to, but right now we're just going to get the idea of, wow! Sometimes, like, you know, I often think of the Clint Eastwood movie where, you know, he's got a girlfriend and somebody keeps on picking on him, beating on him, and you're like, man, I would not want to be that guy, because you know when Clint Eastwood catches up with him, this is not going to be good. Well, it's kind of like that when you know that all these people are moving away from God, and these people that were entrusted with God's law, they were entrusted, you know, with his house, they were entrusted with his testimonies, and all these things they were entrusted to keep, and now they have forsaken that, and you know that it's not going to go well. And so it's hard that, unfortunately, Habakkuk has this burden of, he sees what this is going to be, and he is trying to reconcile it, and trying to do what God would have him do in this situation. And so the question you can't help but to ask yourself is, you know, what kind of burden do you have like that? Like, you know, on my case, I was thinking I've got two different loved ones that I've got burdens for, you know, one of them is, you know, essentially staying away from other members of the family, and you know that this is not going to play out well, and you know that there's going to be judgment as a result for that, and you want them to have insight, and it's just a burden that's constantly with you.

Like, man, I was hoping that this would be better, that they would get insight. I have another family member very close to me that has been shamed and guilt poured on them for so many years that they can't come out from underneath them and underneath it, and they continue to blame themselves for all these different things that are going on. And, you know, unfortunately, I see this happening, and I try to reason with this person, and I pray for this person, I do all these things, but unfortunately, you know, so far they haven't seen the light.

And so it's like you see somebody that is burning, fixing to put their finger down on the hot stove, and you know that they're going to do it, and there's nothing in the world you can do to stop it. But I think that the idea here is that the faith is that God's judgments are right, and in faithfulness, he is going to afflict the people that you love. In other words, he wouldn't do this unless this is what they needed, and nobody will know how to do it better, and nobody would know how to do it exactly in the right amount like God knows how to do it. But nonetheless, as we set up this book, I think it's important to note that here, Habak was a lover of people. I mean, clearly that's in his name, it's all over his name, that he liked to be close, he liked to be intimate, and in that, you know, clearly he also was close and intimate with God, and as a result, God gave him vision, he gave him a burden, and he trusted him. And so we're going to see how that plays out in these upcoming adventures, in these hidden treasures, now in the prophecy of Habakkuk. And I'm so grateful that you're going on this journey with me, and thank you so much for listening. God bless.