The Wonder of Habakkuk 2:12 - A Lesson On Woe

This is the Truth Network Bible Wonders of Habakkuk. I do love the letter Lomet and the letter Lomet is both loving and learning in its own way. You can say they both start with L and you know today we get to do the 12th verse which is the Lomet verse of the second chapter of Habakkuk, and oh did I have a lesson to learn in this verse.

So many of these are just an exciting way that God is teaching me so much. So to read chapter, excuse me, verse 12 in English, it says, Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and establish a city with iniquity. So my first question as I studied this verse was like, you know, obviously, what does this woe mean? You know, I needed to understand the word in Hebrew and the Holy Spirit certainly sent me there as something that would, I would actually spend maybe an hour and a half trying to understand the word woe, as it is a very interesting word.

I guess it's the best way to put it is that it has many of the letters. In fact, the three letters that are in it are exactly the letters, three of the letters that are in the word woe are the same letters that are in God's name, Yahweh, you know, the yud, hey, vav, hey. Well, interestingly, the word woe has, starts with a hey and then has a vav and then a yud. And so you can kind of see in its own way it's kind of God's name kind of backwards, which had me perplexed and had me go back and study each of the letters that were involved until I could finally come to an understanding of myself how these letters were painting a picture of what this idea of woe was. Because I mean, I understand that it is going to really be bad for somebody who builds a city on blood.

And I understand that, you know, certainly iniquity is not going to play well. But I didn't understand the word woe. So I wanted to see what that was. And as I began to unpack that in my mind, the idea of hey is that you're going to express something. And the idea of a vav is that essentially, you know, you're going to extend that out and express it more vehemently.

And then the idea of the letter yud is the little that means a lot. But interestingly, in this particular order, what it really looks like is that you are trying to express or you're trying to take what is a little that's going to be a lot and you're going to condense it. In other words, the idea of the whole thing is that you're trying to squash God out of the picture so that you can be the main event. Or that the idea of contracting God, somehow, through your expression of what you're doing, you're going to try to contract God. Well, the result of that, as we can see clearly from this verse, is that God is going to explode onto the scene in your face. In other words, as you try to push that all down and make it about you, God will eventually come through and it will be woe unto you.

So it's interesting that what kind of begets the woe is kind of where your attitude is. And it took me back to the fourth verse again, which we've talked about time again, about behold his soul, which is lifted up, is not upright in him. And again, this gets the idea of the lamed is that if your soul is upright, it's going up towards God. But in this case, as you lift yourself up, you're upside down, so to speak, and you're contracting God rather than him being the main event. The famous verse about John the Baptist saying that I must become lesser and he must become greater.

It's pretty much the story of all our lives. Well, woe to the person that tries to make themselves much and God little, especially in doing that by building your city or your organization on blood. Because that idea of a city is really a community. By building your community on blood and by establishing a city or again, a community or a town with iniquity, which again, is this idea of almost childlikeness, like, you know, that's not fair. It's all about me.

I'm the center of attention. And, you know, that that idea of comparing ourselves against someone else all the time, you get this picture and you can't help but note that, you know, of course, this is unbelievably horrible when it's real and you really are establishing a city by blood, or when you really are establishing a community with iniquity. But it also works even in the company that you work for, or in the church that you go to, right, that those are organizations and they're established at some point by somebody that's either, you know, backbiting all these other people you see, because as you put down other people in any way, shape or form, especially verbally, then you're murdering them according to what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, right? And so you're establishing that by blood. So by backbiting, and you've worked for companies like this, or maybe you do now, you know, where people talk about one another all the time and put each other down and place themselves. It's always seems like it's, you know, striving and striving to figure out who's going to be on top. You know, those kinds of things are establishing, you know, your community on blood, or, you know, you know, again, building a city by iniquity, that idea of childlessness, like, wait a minute, I'm supposed to be on first here.

And that's not fair. They got, they got something I didn't get, and all those kinds of things that are essentially a picture of iniquity. So, you know, as I was thinking about that, I was like, man, now, you could say that about almost any church, and you could say that about almost any company. If, unfortunately, the problem is me, right? But I need to be the guy who's always building up the other people. And I need to be the guy that it's not about me, right?

That it needs to be about the other person. In other words, whatever company or whatever place you are, and I mean this within, you know, the ministries that I work for, whether it's Masculine Journey, or the Jesus Labor of Love, or the church that I go to, you know, what can I do? What can I do to do the exact opposite and make God the big player in this story? In other words, you know, if contracting God and making it about me is the worst thing you can possibly do, then the opposite is also true, right? That the best thing you can possibly do is make this about God first and other second, right? And as it said back in that fourth verse, the righteous will live by faith, because it's the opposite of this lifted up, puffed up spirit, is this idea of faith in God, and then faith in all the people that you're working with, or faith in the other people in the organization, or even in your family, and maybe most of all in your family making God first. And then how can I, again, build up the other people in my family? What can I do to make it about them, right?

Or in my marriage, and all those kind of things. Like, wow, this is really helpful. And the other thing that I couldn't help but note as I was studying this, unfortunately, Rashi had nothing to say about it. Matthew had very little to say about it. But what was fascinating was definitely the cross references. And it took me down a path I really wasn't expecting, that when Cain killed Abel, they take you clear through when you look at the cross references on this verse, that when Cain killed Abel, he got, you know, kicked out of the area there, and sent into the land of Nod, where he established a city. And that city that he established was named after his first son, which you're familiar with, it's named after his first son, which you're familiar with this name, but I don't know if you ever put it together with why there were two Enochs, right? Because Cain named his firstborn son Enoch. And so that city that was established essentially by blood, unfortunately, was named Enoch. Well, the word Enoch means to dedicate something, right? And so the point of this is that the Enoch, you know, he only lived 300 years, the other Enoch that was of Seth, right, of Methuselah, etc. That Enoch that was of the other line of Adam, he was only around for 300 years, and then he went up and got to be with God. But this Enoch that Cain established, unfortunately, all those people went out in the flood. And, you know, all sorts of other bad characters that you can think of came out of this particular city. In other words, it took a while, but woe unto them. Woe unto them because, oh, my goodness, you know, all that they supposedly worked for, all that they did, it all went in the flood.

I mean, it was just absolutely horrible. And, of course, to live in that city would have been absolutely horrible as compared to live, you know, with the other children of Adam and Seth, right? And those people that—those people who had a relationship and made God the center of their world, okay? And if you make God the center, then obviously, you know, all those that he made in his image could clearly have all the stuff that's necessary to make them, you know, the second thing. And so establishing a city, a community, whatever, obviously, what we learn from this verse or what I've learned from this verse in a new way and a beautiful way is that, oh, my goodness, how can I and the organizations and the groups of people that I'm in make God number one and all of them number two?

How can I do that to have great faith and great grace? Again, we thank you so much for listening to this podcast. We pray that you will share it with somebody that you think would love this kind of thing. We thank you again and covet your prayers as God continues to bear great light as he's revealing himself to us through his unbelievably wonderful Word. Thank you for listening.