The Wonder of Habakkuk - Verse 3 - Why Do We Have To Look At Sin?

This is the Truth Network. Bible Wonders of Habakkuk. The Lord has taken me on such a deep dive in Habakkuk.

Oh my goodness, that is why it's been a few days since I did a podcast, because it took a while to process all that he was teaching me. And so, wow, I'm in verse three, as we had talked about verse two. And I have to say, the more I've studied verse two, that the idea of how long, oh Lord, just definitely is correct.

And, you know, when are we going to get there? I did a whole show on that on the Christian Car Guys show Saturday, but this next verse is such a mouthful. I can say that I really ended up just doing a deep dive into all these words, which took some time, but I'm so glad I did.

And I hope you'll see the fruit of that in what you hear today. So the third verse, which would be the gimel verse, which is no doubt, has got a lot of gimel in it, which would mean bounty. And it's a very bountiful verse, if the idea is to come against sin. So, and here we have the verse in English, in the King James version, I'm going to read it in the Hebrew translation as well, or the one that Rashi translated, because I think it's helpful as well. So it reads in English in the King James version, why does thou show me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance, for spoiling and violence are before me, and there are that raise up strife and contention. And again, I want to read that in the Rashi translation before we start diving into it, which I think is extremely helpful to me, because they look at a couple of things completely differently, which is just helpful to give you a rounder, you know, more full view of what all is being said in here. Why do you show me iniquity and look upon mischief and plunder and violence are before me, and the one who bears quarrel and strife endures?

So again, similar words, and fascinatingly, you know, you would think that when you look up cross-references, that you would see cross-references all over the place, but unfortunately there aren't any, but I would tell you that there are. I mean, as far as in looking at the normal apps to look for cross-references, there aren't, but believe me, when it comes to strife and contingence and inequity and all these different words that Habakkuk is sharing here, are very much connected in the groupings that he groups them, and they're very much connected, you know, both to the New Testament and all over the Old Testament, in the book of Proverbs, in the book of Romans, in the book of, you know, Corinthians. It doesn't hardly matter where you look, these things are put together, and they're put together for reasons that, you know, honestly, as I thought about why I struggled with this verse as much as I did struggle with this verse, number one, I didn't understand the words, and I needed to do a deep dive on these words, especially the word inequity, which I had misunderstood, honestly, and was wrong about. So you can tell I'm wrong about a lot of things, but God keeps continuing to teach me more and more, and oh, so as I really studied these words, I could see that sin is really how, you know, just a horrible, horrible thing, and how it escalates, and how it endures, as Rashi puts it, and it just builds up like the Tower of Babylon, it just keeps going up brick by brick and all that kind of stuff, and it starts out with that word iniquity.

So what I did, or what I want to share with you today, is actually take all these words and look at how I do these things, right? Because all these things rise up in me, you know, that's, I mean, obviously Habakkuk is asking God, why is he seeing this rampant in his culture, and why is he seeing this rampant as the Babylon, as the vision and the burden that he sees, and of course, all these sins are the reason for the judgment that God is bringing, but the challenge for all of us is all these sins, well, it is for me anyway, these sins are very much an issue with me. So rather than go through a deep dive on all the words, which would take probably six podcasts, God just led me to share with you this prayer that I pray based on this verse of Habakkuk.

And so, Lord, help me not to believe that my, and again, we're going to take these words one at a time, but a prayer that goes along with the words that, again, that Habakkuk used and time and again are in the New and Old Testament. So the first word being iniquity, here's the prayer that would go with that. It's like, Lord, help me to not believe that my lust will make me happy. In other words, when you have faith that your lust will make you happy, that's this iniquity that it ends with its final none. And that's the idea of iniquity.

And I'm, Lord, I'm asking you to help me not to believe that my lusts are going to make me happy. And then when it comes to the idea of grievance, which is translated mischief by Rashi, it says, you know, Lord, help me not to aspire to be a big deal, right? To want to transcend, literally yoked with my own aspirations. This idea has very much to do with what happened in Babylon and being yoked to this idea of raising up to make a name for myself.

Okay. And so that's the prayer that I did along with that. So the word, the next word that comes up is spoiling in the King James version and plunder in the Rashi version. And so that word has very much to do with like the devil and burning like the devil.

And it interestingly is even connected to the word breast. And it is also connected to the word plow, but this is the evil version of that word. And so I'm asking God, don't cause me to burn like the devil spoiling and plundering, engage in ruining my testimony and plowing my heart with evil. I mean, there was my prayer along that for that idea of, you know, either, you know, spoiling or plunder. And then the next word is violence. And that violence is the same violence that we saw in the previous verse in verse two.

And it's the violence that they're talking about, you know, that God caused all the judgment of the flood to happen. And so when I looked into that word, my prayer was, Lord, help me not to unite with the insanity of the godless, right? And not to unite with the chaos, because as I saw that word, you know, Lord, help us not to be part of the chaos.

It's very interesting. I think Maxwell's smart at it, right on this one, you know, that, that the enemy is chaos in so many different ways. And interestingly, that word in Hebrew sounds a lot like chaos.

It's Hamas, and you may have heard that word too, but it is Hamas. And it has the idea of being actually uniting with all the craziness that's going on, which people just have a tendency to want to fall into the crowd. And that's that idea of violence. It's violence that just grows with each other. Okay, so the next word that is strife. And of course, you'll find strife all over the place in, you know, the New Testament and the Old Testament. And so here's my parallel along those lines is, Lord, help me not to cry out in misunderstanding. Help me to understand so that I don't cry out against righteousness, that I don't cry out against you. And so, you know, the idea of that word is actually this horrible cry that is, the headwaters of that cry is this huge misunderstanding, which probably is just talks about my life and so much, but we don't understand.

So we cry out as if we should get some kind of answer to our problem when we don't even understand the problem. And that is strife. And so when you think about people that are crying out all over the place and they don't really understand it, it just leads to this idea of strife and then contention. And you note that strife and contention are almost always put together.

They're put together in the book of Proverbs and Proverbs 17, 14, it says the beginning of strife is as when one letteth out water, therefore leave off contention before it meddleth with. So, you know, again, the strife and contention, they come together. And so with the idea of contention has to do with judging and judging that you believe that you're right, right?

So why do I judge and plead my cases? If I am right, Lord, help me not to always be contentious and push my point because I'm right, Lord, help me to fall away from that idea of contention. And so, you know, as you go through all these, you can't help but see pride, self-centeredness is all over all of them. And I think it's really helpful to look back at the book of Romans in chapter one and two that see that essentially when they left off seeing as God as the answer to their desires, God is the answer to their aspirations. God is the answer to their joy seeking and their pleasure seeking. You know, once you leave off any of that stuff, then you are left over to all the stuff that happens in Romans one and two.

And so if we worship God, give him credit for all the things that we do. You know, we're not going to fall into these, but again, you know, these are hard things to look at. They really were for me because it's just, you know, it's easier for me to delight in the things in Solomon and I think God knew that than to dive into these words that have to do with sin. And the other challenge for me with these words has been that it's hard for me to see how these beautiful letters that mean such beautiful, amazing things can also mean these horrible things when they're corrupted and the order that they're in and what this actually means. So, you know, it's fascinating to me that this whole idea of plunder and spoil, that word that is shad is the same word as breast, same letters. And if you add a yud on the end of that, that's the word Shaddai, okay? The almighty. And, you know, so to do a deep dive for me on these words, to look at these letters and see how they were corrupted was actually something I didn't want to, you know, I guess dig into and God knew that.

So he took me here, but it's very much worth from my standpoint, studying these ideas and praying these prayers along the lines of what they mean to you. Because clearly this is the setup for what God, what caused God to give back this vision. And here, he doesn't want to see these things either. In fact, that's his whole, he said, why are you showing me this stuff?

Right? Because we don't, we want to look at it. It's not a natural thing, but God wants us to see it because a lot is at stake. If we can see it in our own life, then we can begin to show others, you know, the way that God shows us. And so what an opportunity we all have not to be involved in iniquity and strife and plunder and contention and all these words that we've talked about in this verse. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. Thanks so much for listening.