If you would turn in your Bibles tonight to the prophecy to Habakkuk. The last time I brought the Word of God to you, we were introduced to the concept of the crucible, a bowl in which heated pressure is applied to an element in order to remove from it impurities and to refine it. We considered it a fitting metaphor for our experience not only as a nation after September 11, and not only as individuals in our particular trials and pressures, but also as the body of Christ, the church in the world. And we were reminded that our experience of the crucible is not to be understood as an occasional tragedy or inconvenience in an otherwise trouble-free and blessed life. Rather, we were reminded that we have always been in the crucible. The crucible of the world that began with the fall of Adam and Eve in paradise. And that continues as God applies the redemption that was accomplished by Jesus Christ, the Lord. God's work in this crucible will not be completed until the last day. The day of the Lord. As we have been studying with Pastor Voss from the prophecy of Joel. when the final separation of the wicked from the righteous in Christ will be realized. And we began to consider what it means to live by faith in the crucible of the world by turning to this book, Habakkuk. And this book is the record of an oracle received by Habakkuk, a prophet of the Most High God, a man of faith from first to last, and a man who proclaimed as well as modeled for us several aspects of true faith which we hope to consider in the months ahead. We return today to our consideration of Habakkuk's first plea, his first complaint to God, the Lord's answer and the prophet's response. Read with me again Habakkuk chapter 1, verses 1 through 12. This is the word of God. The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet received. How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you violence, but you do not save. Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong? Destruction and violence are before me. There is strife and conflict abounds. Therefore the law is paralyzed and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous so that justice is perverted. Look at the nations and watch and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe even if you were told. I am raising up the Babylonians, that ruthless and impetuous people, who sweep across the whole earth to seize dwelling places not their own. They are a feared and dreaded people. They are a law to themselves and promote their own honor. Their horses are swifter than leopards, fiercer than wolves at dusk. Their cavalry gallops headlong, their horsemen come from afar. They fly like a vulture swooping to devour. They all come bent on violence. Their hordes advance like a desert wind and gather prisoners like sand. They deride kings and scoff at rulers. They laugh at all fortified cities. They build earthen ramps and capture them. Then they sweep past like the wind and go on. Guilty men whose own strength is their God. O Lord, are you not from everlasting? My God, my Holy One, we will not die. O Lord, you have appointed them to execute judgment. O Rock, you have ordained them to punish. Here ends the reading of God's Word. In this dialogue, we see the first aspect of how Habakkuk lived and how we are to live as God's people in the crucible of the world, and that is by submitting by faith. Submitting by faith to God's promise, to God's plan, and to God's person. Now, last time we considered submitting by faith to God's promise in verses 2 to 4. When we learned that Habakkuk's plea was not one of fear or uncertainty, rather it was the plea of a prophet. A man commissioned by God, who had grown weary of pleading and warning Judah in her wickedness, And because of her unrepentance, called on God to save. His plea manifested his submission to God's promise to save through judgment. God's way of salvation. The way promised since the fall of Adam, accomplished by Jesus Christ on the cross. And which will fully be revealed when Christ returns. People of God, we heard that as prophets in the Lord Jesus Christ, as Habakkuk, our zeal is to be for the honor and glory of our God. our greatest desire is to be for the fullness of His promised salvation yet to come. Therefore, we too are to cry out, How long, O Lord? And thereby manifest our submission to His promises. And in this week of preparation, I again found the ground too fertile to cover all that I wanted to cover. Therefore, tonight we're going to consider only the second point. But I'm going to help you out this time and give you some sub-points so you know where we're going. Tonight we're going to consider submitting by faith to God's plan, verses 5 to 11. And we'll do this in three points. First, God's warning concerning His plan. Secondly, God's announcement of His plan. And lastly, God's larger plan. First, God's warning concerning His plan was issued with a command in verse 5. look at the nations and watch and be utterly amazed. He said, look, in effect, open your eyes. Look around at the nations. And he said, watch, pay attention to what you see. And in doing this, you will be utterly amazed. You'll be dumbstruck by the plan of God that is revealed now. You'll be speechless in your horror as the plan of God unfolds around you. It would be just as Isaiah prophesied about them. Be ever hearing, but never understanding. Be ever seeing, but never perceiving. And in this text, this short command, the Lord repeats himself to emphasize the amazement that they will experience. And that's an unfortunate term. We use amazement in a positive way today. Amazement in this sense is a very negative thing. He repeats himself such that it has the sense of be amazed in your amazement or be completely overwhelmed to the point of being speechless. Why did the Lord issue such a warning to Judah? We must ask. It's because the people of Judah were rebellious. This was the basis for Habakkuk's first plea that we considered last time. They thought they had God on a short leash to answer their every beck and call, to do for them whatever they pleased. They had no fear of the Lord and wickedness was rampant. Therefore, the promised salvation through judgment that He was bringing upon them would turn their expectations of salvation on His head. In their unrepentant wickedness, Judah had sown the wind and was now going to reap the whirlwind. That which God had once done for His people, He was now going to do to His people. And the Lord introduced His plan in verse 5 by saying, For I'm going to do something in your days that you would not believe even if you were told. I'm going to do something in your days. Or as the New King James translated, I will work a work in your days. It's a very specific language. It's the language of redemption. And it's used only one other place in Scripture. And there it has reference to the mighty saving acts of God on behalf of His people. It's in Psalm 44 and it begins, We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us the deeds that You did in their days. The works that You worked in their days. You drove out the nations with Your hand. but them you planted. The psalmist spoke of the conquest of the promised land accomplished by the Lord at the time of Joshua when Israel drove out the nations from the land. But now, in this text, in this oracle, that was going to be reversed. For from among the nations where God called them to look, God was raising up in Habakkuk today a nation that would drive them from the land. such salvation through such judgment would be unbelievable. What I'm going to do, I'm going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told, or better translated, though you were told. For even though they wouldn't believe it, God goes on from verse 6 to tell them exactly what He's going to do. Now, we must bear in mind here what the Apostle Paul taught us in Romans 9, that not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. In other words, not all who were circumcised in the flesh were circumcised in the heart. Therefore, the announcement of this coming judgment, this coming salvation, would result in two types of unbelief when it was presented. On the one hand, the rebellious in Judah, those uncircumcised of heart, would respond with total disbelief. They, like all in Judah, would have often heard the warning given through Moses in Deuteronomy 28 that included this specific means of judgment for disobedience to God. It says there, The Lord will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down a nation whose language you will not understand. A fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young. And even though they'd heard that, God had told Moses concerning them in Deuteronomy 31 that they will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them. On that day, I will become angry with them and forsake them. I will hide my face from them and they will be destroyed. Like men of all ages who trust in themselves and do not submit by faith to God, they would be overcome by the plan of God. Even though they lived saying, peace, peace, when there was no peace. And even though they lived saying, take it easy, eat, drink, and be merry. God's judgment would come on them like a thief in the night and they wouldn't know what hit them. On the other hand, to the remnant in Judah, those circumcised of heart by God's grace, the fact of judgment would come as no surprise. It came as no surprise to Habakkuk, and it should come as no surprise to us. Yet the means chosen by God seems unbelievable even to them. And it raised Habakkuk's second complaint or plea, which begins in verse 13, will consider another day. You see, the remnant of God knows that as God's chosen people, they are called to be holy as He is holy. And that the Lord corrects those whom He loves. And the remnant understands that in this crucible of the world, this is where this refinement takes place. By the sovereign and the loving hand of God. So they've been warned. And they've responded with some measure of unbelief or disbelief. And thus having warned the people of Judah, the oracle to Habakkuk proceeds with God's announcement of his plan, what he's going to do. In verse 6 he begins, I am raising up the Babylonians. And he continues through verse 11 to tell what that will be like. Now we do not have the time to consider all that the pictures painted here convey in verses 6 to 11. But together, taken together, they make plain two things. First of all, the power of Babylon. They had the power to overrun Judah, verses 6 and 8. They had the power to carry away the people of God, verse 9. They had the power to dethrone their kings, verse 10, and to destroy Jerusalem, verse 10, as well as the temple of God. All of which they did between 600 and 582 B.C. And although this power was delegated to them by the Lord to serve His purposes, these texts also reveal the pride of Babylon in her denial of God by trusting in her own strength, verse 11, in her promoting her own honor rather than seeking to glorify God, verse 7, and in her denial that God is the lawgiver, becoming a law unto themselves. Verse 7. Powerful and prideful Babylon was to bring judgment upon Judah for her attitude of independence from the Lord and for her prideful dismissal of the Lord and His law. As we sang in our song, evil is visited by evil. And that's what the Lord was going to do. Now hear now God's plan for Judah. Verses 6 to 11. Understanding all these things that it portrays, just get the picture. I am raising up the Babylonians, that ruthless and impetuous people who sweep across the whole earth to seize dwelling places, not their own. They are a feared and dreaded people. They are a law to themselves and promote their own honor. Their horses are swifter than leopards, fiercer than wolves at dusk. Their cavalry gallops headlong. Their horsemen come from afar. They fly like a vulture swooping to devour. They all come bent on violence. Their hordes advance like a desert wind and gather prisoners like sand. They deride kings and scoff at rulers. They laugh at all fortified cities. They build earthen ramps and capture them. Then they sweep past like the wind and go on. One theme that threads through all these verses. There are many pictures here, but there's one overriding picture, and that is the picture of Babylon as being like the wind. Verse 6 reads, Who sweep across the whole earth. Verse 9, Their hordes advance like a desert wind. And verse 11, They sweep past like the wind and go on. And the picture here is that of what the Bible calls an east wind. The east wind of judgment, Set loose by God from his storehouse and upon which he rides. The east wind of judgment that brought the plague of locusts to Egypt. That divided the Red Sea and drowned the Egyptians. And depicts the fate of all the wicked as described by Job. Chapter 27. Here is the fate God allots to the wicked. The heritage a ruthless man receives from the Almighty. The east wind carries him off and he is gone. It sweeps him out of his place. We're past the season now. We get just a glimpse of this east wind when we have the Santa Ana's blow. It comes down off the desert and things are dry and hot. And if they're really nasty, there's a lot of devastation. This east wind of judgment is also like a tornado that sweeps past and goes on, leaving behind only the deafening silence after its roar and total devastation. If you've watched news clips of people in those situations, they stand there dumbstruck. They're speechless. Like the east wind, the Lord raised up the Babylonians and He raised them up to accomplish His purpose. And this purpose was and is only seen and understood by the eyes of faith as it was by the prophet Habakkuk, who declared in verse 12 of our text, O Lord, you have appointed them to execute judgment. O Rock, you have ordained them to punish. Now, this was not to be a judgment and a punishment unto total destruction. The New King James substitutes the word correction for punish, which I think is more helpful. Because Babylon was to be used by God for the refinement rather than the destruction of His people in this crucible of the world. Why not destruction? Because in the fullness of God's plan, in the larger plan of God, there was yet something to be accomplished through His remnant, and that was the bringing of the Lord Jesus Christ. Though Babylon would overtake Judah and seize that which was not their own, he says in verse 6, it would not remain theirs, it would not remain in their own hands. For through his future judgment on Babylon, the Lord would return a remnant to the land. In all these things we see the sovereign hand of the Lord God, who as Job said in chapter 12, make nations great and who destroys them, who enlarges nations and disperses them. And his sovereignty extended even to the Babylonians, that ruthless and impetuous people. And his sovereignty extends even to Satan himself, as we learned in Job 1 with Pastor Voss just recently. Yet as God's instrument of judgment, that which God raised up to accomplish his purpose, Babylon was still responsible for its wickedness. And here we must face the seeming tension between God's sovereignty and man's responsibility. In this text alone, there can be no denying that the Lord sovereignly raised up the Babylonians for his purpose. And at the same time, we cannot deny that the Babylonians were responsible for their own actions, for their own motives, for their own idolatry. And even as God's chosen instruments for judgment, they were guilty. Rather than ascribing to the Lord glory and strength, as all the nations are called to do, and as we are called to worship this evening, from Psalm 96, Babylon sought her own honor and worshipped her own strength, for which she was declared guilty by the Lord, in verse 11. Guilty men whose own strength is their God. Babylon sought her own honor and was ultimately judged by God for her guilt consider King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel chapter 4 who said it who said it is not excuse me Nebuchadnezzar who said is not this the great Babylon I have built as my royal residence by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty? To which the Lord immediately responded, This is what is decreed for you, King Nebuchadnezzar. Your royal authority has been taken from you. And the Lord humbled him like a beast in the field for seven years. And consider King Belshazzar, or Belshazzar, in Daniel 5, who set himself up against the Lord, and whom the hand of the Lord wrote on the wall, God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end. You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting. Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians. And the Lord struck him dead that very night by Darius the Mede. God is not mocked. Vengeance is His. He will repay. And this very act of judgment on Babylon for what they had done to God's people according to His sovereign plan. Open the way for the remnant to return to the land, as the God promised. Now, when we read a section of Scripture like this that deals with a particular point in history and what God has done, we must remember that the Word of God has been preserved for us as well, as it has been preserved for God's people ever since Moses. So when we read this text and understand its workings and what the Lord is doing here, We must also see it in God's larger plan, his larger context. In this plan of God revealed to Habakkuk the prophet, in which he used means which we, like Habakkuk, might find troubling. We must see an episode of the greater plan of God to save his people through judgment in the crucible of this world. What is recorded in our text concerning Judah pointed ahead to God's ultimate plan of salvation through judgment. God's judgment upon Judah by means of the enemies of God on what remained of Israel his son prefigured the judgment by means of the enemies of God upon his only begotten son, Jesus Christ, on the cross. The promise of God's salvation was fulfilled in the flesh of Jesus Christ, who accomplished God's plan of salvation once for all when he took upon himself the judgment of God for the sins of his people and in order to give them his perfect righteousness and eternal life with God. Because this accomplished salvation that Christ has accomplished on the cross, that this episode in Judas history pointed to remains to be fully applied to God's people as he continues to forbear in history until he brings all of his people in. God's plan of salvation through judgment upon his people continued to speak after the cross to the apostolic church. For it also prefigured a very important event in the life of God's church, the rejection by the Jews of the gospel and the door being opened for the Gentiles to come in. The redemptive act within this plan of God, this greater plan of God, is recorded in Acts 13. When the Apostle Paul preached with Barnabas to the Jews in Pisidian, Antioch, he recounted the history of God's redemptive actions through Abraham, through Moses, through the judges, through Samuel, through Saul, and through David. And then he proclaimed to them the good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ. And he said to them, what God promised our fathers, he has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising up Jesus. For when David had served God's purpose for his own generation, he fell asleep. He was buried with his fathers and his body decayed. But the one whom God raised from the dead did not see decay. Therefore, my brothers, I want you to know that through Jesus, the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him, everybody who believes is justified. And Paul went on to warn them, after proclaiming the gospel to them, against rejecting this gospel, and he quoted Habakkuk 1 verse 5 in the doing. He says, take care that what the prophets have said does not happen to you. Look, you scoffers, wonder and perish, for I'm going to do something in your days that you would never believe, even if someone told you. and despite this warning the Jews did reject the gospel and so Paul said to them we had to speak the word of God to you first since you reject it and do not consider yourselves worthy of eternal life we now turn to the Gentiles that which God had planned to do no one would have believed it was promised from the beginning in the covenant with Abraham but the Jews would not believe it. Therefore it came to be by God's sovereign plan that the Jewish nation was cut off from the tree of life even as the native olive branch is broken off from a tree in order that a wild olive branch can be engrafted in. That's the picture Paul paints in Romans 11. And through this sovereign plan of God of salvation through judgment The way was opened for the Gentiles to come into the church. And at the same time, the way was opened for the Jews to be grafted in again by faith, as every other man has ever been engrafted into Christ. And as it was then, at the time of Paul, so it is now. Branches broken off are so broken because of unbelief. Branches that remain do so only by faith. Therefore, Paul warns us, the engraft of olive branches in Romans 11, do not be arrogant. You could insert, like Judah was. Do not be arrogant that you've been brought into the family of God. A similar warning is echoed by the Apostle Peter in 1 Peter. It says, be self-controlled and alert. And this warning was given to the church for two reasons. First, because our enemy, the devil, continues to prowl. seeking for someone to devour, and secondly, because the end of all things is near. And that day, the day of the Lord, that is pictured in this judgment upon Judah in our text tonight, will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar, the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare. And in order to stand in that day, under God's judgment, as Paul said, one must be standing by faith, and that in Christ alone, for salvation. Such standing in the crucible of the world includes submitting by faith to God's promise of salvation through judgment, to God's plan, not only for how he accomplished it, it's Christ alone is the only way of salvation, but also for how it's applied. to His church as He refines us through the trials that He puts us through. And ultimately to God Himself in His person, as we will see next time. So people of God, as we consider this text and we wait for this great salvation to be fully revealed, because we must continue on in the crucible of the world as long as the Lord will keep us here, having heard of God's accomplished salvation through judgment on Christ for his people, and having heard God's plan to consummate that salvation in a final judgment at the end of all things, you here tonight, as are all men and women, are faced with some choices. Either you will remain inattentive in your sin and be, when you least expect it, overcome by judgment, just as Judah was, just as the Jews were, just as all men will be on that final day. Or you will submit to His will, to His plan, and to His person in Jesus Christ the Lord, so that you may stand up under it when it comes. And as long as He delays and you remain here in the crucible of the world, either you will blame God for the means He has chosen, not only in the big plan of redemption, but for how He's going to purify you, for you will praise God in the midst of them for the work He's doing in you because He's promised to make you holy as He is holy. All who hear my voice, God's warning and God's plan remain the same. Judgment is coming and it will begin with the household of God. Submit to this warning of the text tonight and be alert. Submit to His plan, knowing that it is perfect in all its aspects. And submit to His person, in Jesus Christ the Lord, and be saved. In this way, you can confess with Habakkuk, in verse 12, we will not die. Amen.