Stevemidkiff's Blog

Habakkuk 1:4 The Embrace Of Faith part 5

The Defiance Of God’s Law v. 4 

No Standards                          Therefore the law is slacked,

No Security                              and judgment doth never go forth

The Defenselessness Of God’s People

Surrounded By The Grotesque   for the wicked doth compass about the righteous

Strangled By The Gruesome       therefore wrong judgment proceeds

Surrounded, Strangled, Suppressed & Stifled   

The word Compass, in the Hebrew, means to surround and encircle in a menacingly negative way.  It’s to be threatened by the adverse, the damaging, and the destructive.

It’s perplexing to feel smothered by what’s outrageous, or worse to get choked and asphyxiated by absurdity.

But why are we stunned, it’s predictable.  God has explained what to anticipate in Romans 1, describing the downward spiral of a 12-step program of pushing God away.

When any individual or society turns there back on God, the political climate adjusts the laws of the land accordingly.

Prov.12:8 the wicked walk on every side when the vilest men are exalted. 

We shouldn’t be shocked that we’re legislating to eradicate God’s principles and design.

So as we see, our culture is on this strange race downward, which is a time warp of moral deterioration.  We can gage with accuracy, this proportional drift, and it’s directly related to degree we refuse and reject God.  We see it up close and personal every day.  Our media intelligentsia clatter out that we’re progressive, we’re taught that we’re enlightened.  But the trend and flow is we’re slathered in regression, reversion and decay, and that we’re actively barbaric on many levels.

What Habakkuk relates, in his day, is the current facts of our day.  This prophet of the past is proclaiming a contemporary frustration that we face now.   He demands an explanation from God, he’s saying, why is the Lord allowing these damaging effects to gain ground.  But God is only letting us have what we’re demanding and wishing after.

This prophet was a man of robust faith, and we can learn from his freedom of expression with God, that faith isn’t just passive and calm.  Faith can cling with a stout grip, demanding an explanation, especially in the face of irrationality and senselessness.

I find encouragement in this cry to the Lord.  We see the Spirit of God inspiring this story in these pages to show us feelings and faith running side by side in the face of the impossible and unexplainable.

Why do the distortions of evil, why do the jaws of disease and death, seem to swallow us up, and engulf us, from every angle?  Why aren’t the curses of evil and the consequences of the fall reversed?  Why do we taste bitterness and gall in our lives, to the point, that it caves us in?

But when we’re surrounded and feel crushed under a load of distressing odds we still are to stand in the veracity and authenticity of God’s Word.  We need to pray through, and hold on, for God’s sovereign enactments, and solid decisions.

It may appear that wrong judgment, and incorrect decisions, are distorting the hopes, and destroying the possibility of right things happening, too those we care for and love.  But we have to keep praying, stay in there with God, asking Him to enact His sovereign, beautiful, over-ruling love and mercy

When outnumbered, we need to call on God, to demonstrate His assuring truth, that nothing is against us when He is for us.  We need to boldly ask our Lord for His faith perspective.  We need to call to God to help us to rises above the impossible & to work through every difficulty & seeming setback.

We need the Lord to overrule with right, as we cry to Him for His perspectives, when destructive decision rage and threaten.

Eph. 5:16 confronts us with the responsibility to:

Redeem the time, because the days are evil.

The master of evil is stalking us, roaming all around, filling every day with negative alterations and destructive challenges.

Prov. 15:15-16 All the days of the afflicted are evil: But he that is of a merry heart hath a continual feast. Better is little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure and trouble therewith.

In the Gospel of Mark there’s a woman who experienced all her days being evil.  For 12 years she was drained with a bleeding disorder.  Her misery was incessant, unbearable and degrading.

I think it’s interesting the sarcasm of Mark saying she suffered many things from the physicians.

It’s bad to see your health flop over a cliff, but then to be a punching bag of research and experimentation for the medical quacks and pharmaceutical guru’s can leave you major bedraggled.

In utter desperation she bungled from one doctor to another, always yearning that someone or something could cure her. But she found nothing but stupidity and incompetence from the doctors.

To top it off she spent all that she had.  The medical profession bilked her of her money and nothing in her life improved but she was getting worse and worse. Mark 5:26

As John Phillips writes: she was bankrupt, broken and bitter.

That’s how we need to come to the Great Physician.  He’s a Doctor who has never lost a case and His fee is free.  Not only free but also He says of all our debts, put that on my account.

All she needed to do was touch His garment and the fountain of her blood was dried up. Mark 5:27-29

Touching Jesus garment is the  Better is little with the fear of the Lord of Prov.15  

With Jesus we find a merry heart and have a continual feast.

4. Habakkuk 1:4 The Embrace Of Faith part 4 

 Pressure Creates Prayer v.1-17

     The Disregard Of God v.3

     The Defiance Of God’s Law v. 4 

No Standards                       Therefore the law is slacked, 

Just by way of review this feeling of unanswered prayer although it constantly collide in our emotions we need to encourage ourselves in the Lord and His listening ear.

Hab. 1:2 O Lord, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! Even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!

When our heart feels this load, this pressure of affliction and ache over our and others needs, we need to carry all the bondage and struggles to the Lord.  We have to do what the prophet did and take the problem and the burden to our only true burden bearer.  Jesus invites us to come:

Matthew 11:28 (Phillips NT) Come to me, all of you who are weary and over-burdened, and I will give you rest! Put on my yoke and learn from me. For I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. 

Prayer is the place where problems are put on the only one who has a solution for every pressure and issue. Prayer is sharing the unexplainable as we exchange our perplexing heartaches and stresses both for others and ourselves, lifting them out of our incapable hands into the hands of one who is sovereign in capacity. Prayer is shifting the burdens of our hearts to Jesus heart.

Prayer is accepting His promises that He wants our burdens and all the draining encumbrances that we can’t handle.

But prayer is also getting those feelings out on the table, all those unwanted doubts.  This is where we can gain a sense that even though we may feel that God is not hearing us, or that He’s holding out on us, or giving us a rock instead of bread, or poison instead of soothing medicine.  No matter what our tangled heart feels, we can still be honest and place it all in front of His love and understanding ear.

O Lord, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear? 

To feel unheard, unheeded, unnoticed, unremarkable, undetected and unobserved is a lonely encumbrance and strain.

   The Disregard Of God v.3

   The Defiance Of God’s Law v. 4

No Standards                       Therefore the law is slacked, 

Enable veracity to stand alone in your principles and light

The law is God’s principles, His design for rational life.  The law is God’s instruction of how we’re to love.  We are fulfilled only when we pour out love for God and His love in us, for each other.  This is the way life is supposed to work. This is God’s design.  This is how everything goes smoothly and civilization is preserved in order and perfection

To say that God’s law is slacked is to observe that people don’t care about what is right.  To slack something is to loosen it up.  The laws of our nation have been slacked as they have been redefined and liberalized over and over.

Slacked in the Hebrew means to be fainted and weakened.  It means to prostrate and reduce, to paralyze and numb.  We have a slang expression in our culture in which we say someone is slacking.  In the urban dictionary slacking means being lazy, not working, or being lackadaisical, half-hearted and apathetic.

This slacking of the law is the circumstance where the majority has no respect for the true law.  People don’t comprehend that order is a result of promoting and complying with God’s law.  There is a difference between the principle of law and the principles of law.  We are free of one but there is no freedom or point to break the other.

When humanity rejects law, which is the only force that brings unity, peace and order, then they embrace chaos and create anarchy and mayhem.

We seem all confused about the decline and deterioration of our nation and world. Why can’t we recognize that it’s the perversion of the law, and the slacking of its precepts that are the main issue?  Therefore the law is slacked.

But is God disregarding us in this time, is He ignoring us and avoiding our cries to Him, No, nothing can separate us from the love of God.  Not death, or life, not nakedness or peril or violence.  Demons can’t get between God and us; nothing from the past, nothing in the present and not a thing in the future can interfere with God’s control of all things.

He hears every prayer, answers every prayer and invites every prayer.

Two prayers were made in Dothan in the Old Testament.  The first prayer was from Joseph, Gen.37:17, which started in Dothan when it was a pasture area.  He came to his brothers to check on them for their father Jacob, and everything went wrong. He was thrown into a pit, sold into slavery, falsely accused of rape, thrown into prison and this all culminated into a lengthy incarceration.  It seemed like there was no answer to Joseph’s prayer and everything goes haywire.  I’m sure he began to cry the minute he was tossed into a pit and the answer of release was 14 years off.

The second prayer was from Elisha 2 Kings 6:13, hundreds of years later in Dothan that is now a city. Savage forces of the Syrian army surround the city.  It appeared under this siege everyone would be destroyed, and Elisha prayed and God sent angels in chariots of fire to surround the alien threats. Elisha declared an amazing truth as he viewed the situation as he said.

They that are with us are greater then they that are with them.

Were the chariots of fire from God missing when Joseph prayed and only present when Elisha prayed?  No, God was working a different salvation through His man Joseph then He was through His servant Elisha.

God is for us, nothing is against us and we can pray in confidence. He hears and is working His will and purposes for His ultimate glory and our crucial good.

No Security      and judgment doth never go forth:   

Educate us to pray through to enact Your sovereign decisions 

   The Defenselessness Of God’s People 

Surrounded By The Grotesque   for the wicked doth compass about the

                                                                      righteous;

When outnumbered, demonstrate that nothing is against us, when You are for us & give us a faith perspective that rises above & works through every difficulty & seeming setback

Strangled By The Gruesome       therefore wrong judgment  proceeds 

Disallow with right perspectives when destructive decision rages 

When we have the incorrect standards, we make improper decisions.  Or another way of saying it is, the wrong rules result in the wrong results.  Or the wrong direction will place us into the wilderness of wobbly destinations.

The law of the Lord is love.  Character is the fulfillment of God’s commandments and His laws are summed up in the character and walk of Christ.

When we are obsessed by any other pursuit then being close to our life in Him and we fail to allow His Spirit to fill our lives and His Word be our firm standard then inadequate results will mark our life.

Jesus said if we abide, or are close to Him, and He abides, or is free to live His life through us, by His Spirit, that we can ask in prayer, and we will see His answers in our life.

When we feel all we’re getting in our requests is unanswered prayer, we need to go back to God’s Word and learn from the testimony of the why God delays at times.

Maybe He’s developing our patience and perseverance.  God’s denials might be His developing of Christ’s life in us.  He didn’t remove Paul’s problem but He did give the grace of enablement to aid and assist his needs for every moment and circumstance.  The Lord’s supportive facilitation is really the answer in every prayer. His grace to respond is His answer.  We are to desire His will and purpose not our will.

The goal is not the removal of the difficulty or even the healing of the disease but more the help of His Spirit within to bring glory to God and show what Jesus is doing in and through us in the situations of life.

The unexpected ways of God are the crackle of the supernatural that show His empowering capacity no matter what the challenge.  God’s answers can be incredibly unexpected, unpredictable and amazing.  The best way to stay on our feet is to stay on your knees.

It doesn’t matter how powerless the civil, spiritual or parental authorities are around us.  Prayer is God’s power unleashed in all situations and time frames of our life and we need to grow in our faith in a living Lord who is in touch with every circumstance of our life.

Habakkuk 1 3 The Embrace Of Faith

  Pressure Creates Prayer v.1-17 

    The Disregard Of God v.3

Is God ignoring our prayers?  Do we feel snubbed by God?  Is He insulting our expressions by allowing things to take place around us that are wounding and emotionally abusive?

When we read or hear advice on prayer it always appears like a play on the fact that we don’t pray enough.  Unfortunately that is typically the circumstance.

Prayer is not really a duty, nor is it an obligation.  Prayer is a pleasure and an indicator of our dependence. My feeling is we’re praying all the time, we’re communicating our feelings and thoughts regularly but maybe we’re not trusting God with them.  Maybe we’re praying and depending on something or someone else for our needs.

With those thoughts as the background of our scenery, its not that God is disregarding and ignoring us, but that we’re snubbing and banishing Him by praying to everything but Him for our needs.

When we feel forgotten by God or as if we’ve been neglected or overlooked by Him it may be that He is allowing our circumstances to demonstrate that we are really the one’s who have pushed Him aside to some degree, or even abandoned Him.

We have all these desires and needs and we yearn and thirst after them.  But the very things we crave in life are only found in our connection with God. He is our source of love, joy, and peace. He is the only spring of patience endurance.  The Lord is our fount of gentleness and tender kindness.  We won’t find our thirst for love and acceptance met anywhere else but in Him.

In a deluge of demands, we’re surrounded with a God who is meek and doesn’t press us with intolerable ultimatums.  If we look anywhere else with our needs, we won’t find His humble gentleness, but instead stipulations, requirements and jeering taunts of inner insults.

In a world that is spinning out of control He fills us with self-control and disciplined moderation.  We desire good things and He gratifies us with His goodness and generates confident faith and trust in us.  The reason, we fail to pray, is we are digging for our needs, and filling the vacuum in our hearts with other things.  It’s not that we’re not praying.  It’s that we’re praying at the altar of other things, which have become our idols.  We’re constantly praying, would be my conjecture, but just not to the real and only God.

God won’t force Himself on us, but in mercy He’ll allow us to realize the end result of our fabricated dependence we’ve permitted to develop in false gods.

His Complacency in the Face Of: 

Crookedness     Why do You show me iniquity,  

When evil floods in from every angle we cry for your healing touch & merciful words to lift up a standard

When life spins out of control it’s not because God is complacent.  To accuse Him of not caring is the exact opposite to the truth.  He opens the curtain of evil to lift us to Himself.  It’s not an opportunity to accuse Him of ignoring us, but a demonstration to deepen our trust in Him.  He’s allowing us to see what takes place when He is ignored and rejected.  To come away with the feeling that we’re being slighted or spurned is to accuse the Lord of our own lack of faith.  We have to let Him show us what we’re really depending on for our needs, to learn to depend on Him.

Paul quoted in his writings from Habakkuk three times.

For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, the just shall live by faith. Rom. 1:17

This is God’s plan for revealing righteousness to us, a process begun and continued by our faith. To understand that God does the right thing every time, and has placed His righteousness to our credit, and in our lives, is entered into by faith.

Again Paul writes: But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for, the just shall live by faith.” Gal. 3:11

Righteousness of character is not by our performance before God, it’s by trusting in what He has accomplished and what He is doing by His Spirit in us and around us.

Then Paul warns: Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him. Heb. 10:38

The context of this section of Hebrews is started in Heb. 10:32, where these people He’s writing too are cautioned not to ever forget Jesus and the joy of knowing Him.  His light has revealed everything so perfectly.  So when there comes a massively painful struggle.  Or when people are harsh and we endure insensitive accosting words and difficult experiences.  It’s really that Jesus is still under attack.

Jesus said in the world we’ll have tribulation, but He challenges us to be positive about this, because He has overcome the world.  Jesus has won despite the obstacles and in Christ we can conquer as we represent Him.  He purposes to win through us.

These accusing words of our doubts, uncertainties and hesitations, may feel like our inner thoughts but could be the voice of the evil accuser, Satan.  When we committed our lives to Christ, we signed on to battle that never lets up.

We sympathize with those, all who believe in Jesus, and are suffering for Him. Paul says in Hebrews, we’re cheerful when our own goods are confiscated, for we know we have a much more solid and lasting treasure in Heaven. We can’t throw away our trust as it carries with it a rich reward in the world to come.

Patient endurance is what we need, for after doing God’s will, we are to receive what he has promised.  For yet a little while, and he who is coming will come and will not tarry. Now the just shall live by faith; but if we draw back, we disappoint our Lord.

We are not to be those who cower back and act like we’re lost, but we’re to maintain and continue strong in our faith until the salvation of their souls is complete!

We also find a quotation from Habakkuk in the book of Acts, “Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish: for I work a work in your days, a work which you shall in no wise believe, though a man declare it unto you,” Acts 13:41.

Habakkuk warned of the looming Babylonian invasion Hab. 1:5. Isaiah warned of the imminent

Assyrian invasion Isa. 28:21; 29:14. Here in Acts, Paul warns the Jews of a Roman invasion that was only a decade or so away.  He does it by bouncing off these quotations, taking them from their historical contexts, and applying them to current events of his day.  Paul, by the Spirit, was not thinking only of the Roman invasion foretold by Jesus. He was alluding of the eternal horrors that await all Christ-rejecter.

The warning is to all to behold, and look well to our decisions. Any who reject Christ could expect

certain and awful judgment. They would perish in their sin, having added to all their other guilt the sin of rejecting God’s Son.

Crushing          and cause me to behold grievance?

As pressure & agonizing stress assault at each turn, lift us to closeness in you & your nearness in us

The Lord is showing us that the things that crush us are the bashings that open up the aroma of His fragrant beauty upon us as we allow His life in us through all agonizing difficulty.

We have an opportunity to share Christ with others, who may have rejected Jesus, as we allow Him to live by His Spirit through all He allows in our lives.

Corruption        for spoiling

As life appears to teeter into the realms of insanity, grip us with your stabilizing tenderness of sensitivity. When all around my soul give way I rest on his unchanging grace

What appears to be the decaying and decomposing of our stability and security is the joining of our attachments to Christ’s alleviating and unchanging grace and love.

Crime           and violence are before me:

Show us how the wrath of man will praise you the remainder of wrath you’ll restrain

That God would use the rage of others, even the furious frenzy of every refuge we trust in, allowing them to fall away into oblivion, and reverse it into His praise, is one of the most compelling paradoxes of all ironies.

Complaint     there are that raise up strife

Train us to respond to all strife in the wisdom of Christ

The power of God unto salvation is the torture, crucifixion, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. Paul said he was not ashamed of it.  God’s ways shouldn’t mortify or embarrass us.  We need to enter into the glory of His purposes.

The rejection of Jesus was the ultimate strife of the universe.  The wisdom of Christ was not to call the armies of heaven to defeat the rage of Satan and the world.  Jesus defeated sin, death, demonic insanity and the world’s liars by humbling Himself to God’s will and design.

Contention     and contention

Enable us to redirect contention into blessing

Our call is to reroute controversy into God glory and praise as we allow His blessings to pour out in our lives and through our lives, by placing our confidence in the Lord.

Habakkuk 1:2 The Embrace Of Faith part 2

The Perplexity Of Faith v. 2   (Faith’s ironies)

There is a baffling mystery in the incomprehensibility of prayer, God, can seem so opaque.  We get so overloaded in a murky cloud, the Lord feels inaccessible and distant.

But prayer often begins in a complaint.  We’re plagued by disorder, a stinging grievance, so we grumble and moan in protesting objections. We whimper and sob, where are you, why is this happening?  There’s the sting of unfairness, the bite of unreasonableness and the grind of irrationality.    

  The Delays of God v.2 O LORD, how long shall I cry

Alter our schedule to agree with Your timing

Spouting off at God, spurting out our frustrations with His scheduling, jumping up and down at Him, aggravated with His tardy delays isn’t always as rude as it appears.

Faith is not some stoic, passive apathy, where we’re just dopey, and docile, with every disgusting postponement of our inner anticipations.  We should agonize to Him for our longed for expectations. 

If God places the passion in us, then we should fight on in prayer, soaked in craving conviction.  We’re too, stagger not at the promise of God through unbelief, but be strong in faith, giving glory to God.  Tenacity, persistence and even obstinate resolve before the Lord, is a proclamation of His worth and the attractiveness of His value. 

It’s a waste to beat around the bush with God.  There is no sense in sparing His ears.  We need to cry louder and scream our need to Him.  We are called to His sovereign throne to assail His righteousness.  It’s appropriate to storm the court of His perfection with demands for His power to rain down on all our injustices and the wrongs that surround us.   

  The Deafness Of God   and thou wilt not hear!

Assure our doubts by adjustments to Your sensibilities 

We need to seek the heart of God. We have to find His sensibilities and explore how He really feels.  What is it that brings a response from the throne of grace? 

There is a capacity of deep feeling in the Spirit of Christ and tender compassion where we can feel His inner sympathies and know our burdens are from Him and special to His heart.

He’s not deaf, what seems to be unresponsiveness is not divine indifference as though our heartaches we’re meaningless and irrelevant.  There not!  He’s promised in all our afflictions He’s afflicted and He remembers in deep pathos the wormwood and the gall.

 The Disappearance of God even cry out unto thee of violence,

                                                              and thou wilt not save!

Adjust our emotions to agree with Your constant appearances.  Develop in us the purity to see only You

When You appear to disappear, show us how You’re drawing us into Your appearance 

Why does God rub our face in the sin of those we love so deeply?  Why so much devastation, pain and bashing of our little ones who we knew as tender babies?  Why so much viciousness, and selfish debauchery?  Why is God’s Word defied and ignored and how long will our loved ones exploit His design? Integrity is not defended; we get wrung out by surrounding deception and cheating exploitation.

Habakkuk seems to accuse God of ignoring it all, of doing nothing about it, and he’s demanding action.

God will act, He is involved, His love and ways are intricate and complex and He wants us to cast our every care and frustration on Him.

God moves in a mysterious way

His wonders to perform;

He plants His footsteps in the sea,

And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines

Of never-failing skill

He treasures up His bright designs,

And works His sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,

The clouds ye so much dread

Are big with mercy, and shall break

In blessings on your head

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,

But trust Him for His grace;

Behind a frowning providence

He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,

Unfolding every hour;

The bud may have a bitter taste,

But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err,

And scan his work in vain;

God is His own interpreter,

And He will make it plain.