Welcome back to Further. I am Brenton Grimm. Chris Carr, welcome back. Yeah. Spent a little time outside of the state. How was your trip? Good.

Yeah. Was out west.

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Utah, incredible.

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Visiting some national parks and doing some hiking and had fantastic weather. Couldn't have asked for better weather. And so, yeah, it was great.

Probably a little cooler than it was here.

(...) Well, the temperature read a little higher, but there was no humidity. So last Tuesday, when I walked out of the Cedar Rapids Airport into the wet blanket that was southeast Iowa, it was like, take me back to the 95 degrees. But yeah, so, but it was, yeah, it was great. The God's creation just continues to blow me away. And what a privilege to be able to visit.

For sure.(...) All right, well, as we've been going through these minor prophets, there's been something that I've been kind of curious about.

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And so part of it is like, why are these prophecies written as poetry? Like for us, if we were gonna give a warning to someone, I would not write them a poem, right? So like, what do you think the purpose of that is?

Well, I think it's largely culturally based in that that is, you know,(...) these were primarily oral cultures that they certainly, and we can even see in chapter two where God tells Habakkuk to write this down on tablets, write this prophecy down so that, you know,

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it can be proclaimed and read long after I believe you're gone or to, you know, in a greater way than you personally will be able to do. But it would seem that culturally this, you know, poetry and this kind of way of communicating, I think it's probably because it was helpful for them to be able to remember them when things are, I mean, poetry is basically their songs, right?

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And people, I know this is like,(...) cause this is my, for my own sake, my mind will more naturally throughout the week go to the songs we have sung on Sunday morning then to my message, and I'm the one that gave it. So we just remember things and we can recall songs that we haven't heard for years. The moment it comes on the radio, we're singing along. And so they, you know,

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again, it was very much an oral culture. And while the Israelites, many of them certainly could read,

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you know, that wasn't certainly true nearly as much as it would be today, or they definitely didn't have access to, you know, written material nearly as much as we do. So that would be, it's kind of my best, I guess, educated guess is why I think that's the way it is.

Yeah. Well, and this is maybe speculation too, but like, you know, in Jonah, I think we have it explicitly told us that he goes into the city and preaches this stuff, right? But is that the case for all of these, do you think? Or were they just handing off this written warning?

No, this is where Habakkuk is unique to, I think that all of the other prophets were actually, they went in and they were speaking.(...) Originally these were spoken and only later written down. Habakkuk is different because what I think is happening from just reading is that Habakkuk has this conversation with God and then later he writes it down. And again, chapter two, verse two guys says, I want you to write this down.(...) Write it on tablets, which is what they wrote on in those days. And so the Habakkuk, I think is a little bit different, but the rest of them, you know, the Lord would, you know,

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speak to the prophet and say, hey, you need to go, you know, like Jonah, go to Nineveh and say this. But that's true pretty much for all of the ones that we've seen so far in the series and the ones that are coming as well is that the word was originally an oral word and that was only later written down and put on the tablets and then passed along down through the generations.

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Sure, okay.

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You made a distinction between complaining about God and then complaining to God.

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Often Christians either feel guilty for bringing difficult questions to God or assume questioning him is a sign of some sort of like weak faith. You even made the comment like that sometimes we believe like mature, healthy Christians don't do that, don't actually complain to God.

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What is it, do you think in us that makes it so difficult to take that to God?

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Yeah, well, first I would say something that I said repeatedly is like,(...) God knows you have those questions, whether you verbalize them or even internally are saying those to God. Like they're there, whether or not you verbalize them,

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doesn't change that fact. And so this is not the difference between not having the question, like you don't have the questions. Like you can't prevent yourself from doing it, it's what we do with them. But I think what makes it so difficult is that largely I think we have the wrong,

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we have a wrong view of God. Like we just don't understand who he is and how he relates to us and what he even desires of us. He wants a relationship with us.

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And in any relationship, a healthy relationship, you need to be able to have hard conversations.

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It will be a day where that's not,

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in this fall-down world,(...) healthy relationships have hard conversations or are able to have conversations. In fact, a failure to our lack of having those or ability to have those with somebody means that there's something amiss in that relationship. You know, like we just talk between the two of us is like if you and I, like we just, we skirt around any hard conversation because you're afraid of how I'm gonna respond or I'm afraid like,

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I'm afraid to respond in a certain way to you when you bring something up, that's a sign of unhealth. Health is like, okay, we can have hard conversation, the difficult, we can work and navigate through those. And that's the relationship that the Lord wants to have with us and I don't think that, I just think we don't understand that and we don't recognize that. Partly this is because it's been taught wrong, we've been taught wrong in this and we've been, it's been modeled wrong to us and underneath some of that is this kind of pride thing. It's like we don't struggle in that way, we don't have quite the questions about this. We don't doubt God, we don't, you know, we just trust Him no matter what and that's just like,

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quite honestly, I think that a lot of times people are just not being either honest with other people or themselves or both of those things is that we see the, in the Bible, the greatest heroes of the faith had their, they wrestled with God.

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And you name somebody in the Bible and that you know of and say, hey, like, this is a model for us.(...) I can probably in pretty short order show you where they actually had a time in their life where they were struggling with God in some ways, the lack of understanding or why he wasn't acting.

(...) Yeah, well, much of the time in Christian circles, it's about what you look like outwardly, right? And so,(...) you know, if you're always trusting God or seemingly trusting God, right, that's gonna make you look better and that, yeah, that's a,

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that's hard to get.

Yeah, it is. But this is where it goes back to the difference between complaining about God and complaining to God. And we gotta be really careful here. It's not right to complain like about God

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in the sense that we're just like griping about him and we're angry and we're mouthing off and all of that. But we're not doing it, you know, it's not in conversation with him.

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In terms of like, hey, because here's the thing with Habakkuk, we see this throughout the Bible, Job is maybe even a better example of this.

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But,

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you know,

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kind of what they're doing is they're saying, God, like, here's what I believe about, like I believe you are this way, but what I'm seeing is not in congruence with that. And so my problem is that I do believe, it's not that I don't believe, it's that I do believe. And so like, something's not jiving with me here, but instead of doing, I mentioned like this term deconstruction, instead of like, people just walking away,

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they're not walking away, they're walking to him because there's a humility there. And that these deconstructions, you know, deconversions, there's actually a pride there is like God is beholden to me and like, I'm the ultimate authority. Like he doesn't answer my questions, it doesn't make sense to me then, you know, okay, then I'm walking away. These examples in the Bible that we have, the good examples, there is a humility underneath of that, but there's also an honesty and a candidness and a transparency where they're actually like being real. And I think that on the other hand, so the opposite end of the deconstruction, is the Christians who kind of,

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you know, even sometimes to seize themselves into thinking like, there aren't massive questions here

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of why this is happening. So yeah.

(...) Okay, so you, maybe two questions here. You said healthy Christians grieve and mourn much of the time.

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First,

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can you give us a better picture of what this should look like in our lives, but also like how do you,

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if this isn't your life at all right now, how do you start to move that way?

Okay, just two small questions.

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So I'd start with, but first is where we go all the time, right? We go to Jesus, who's known as the man of sorrows acquainted with grief. And that's not just in terms of his passion, like his suffering at the end of his life. Like he,

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Jesus was regularly sorrowful, grieving,

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like we see him crying like tears, whether he's weeping over Jerusalem or he's grieved over somebody's lack of faith or he is sorrowful over the pain and suffering that the sin has brought into the world. And so, Jesus is our savior, but he's also our model and our example. And so like if he, if that's, he's the perfect human being.

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Okay, and the perfect human being was a human being who was in the world that we live in, was sorrowful, he's grieving, he's shedding tears on a regular basis.

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And so that is,

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and again, I use examples, whether it would be Job or Habakkuk or Paul, or we could just go through, is that that's just the regular, I think maturing believer, i.e. Christian, is that's just gonna be a regular part of their life because as we live in this world, if we are actually facing the world as it is, there's a lot in our world to grieve and to be sorrowful over, beginning with our own sin and the fact that we, so continue even as believers to fall short of God's glory. And we continue to regularly be tempted to, if not given ourselves to trampling on his grace and to being ungrateful and unthankful and to struggle with all kinds of sins, it should grieve us how other people are suffering, struggling whether it would be with sin.

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If we can look out in the world and see all the millions of babies who are being aborted, all the people who are being sold and trafficked in this slavery, sex slavery and other type of slavery, if we can look at the natural disasters and the life that being lost and we look at the corruption, and I know it's like, oh boy, man, you're making me feel really, really bad, okay? But it's just like there's a lot of pain and a lot of hurt. And so we,

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and the American way is kind of to try to insulate ourselves from this and to try to, as much as we can do to keep ourselves from facing this and dealing with this. This is why we spend so much money on comfort. It's also why we're spending so much money on drugs that,(...) whether it be antidepressants or anxiety meds, and by the way, I'm not saying that it's wrong to take those. That's not my point.(...) So please don't anybody take it that way. What I'm saying is, is like the amount of money that is being spent on that is staggering, it's growing.

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And that's because in some instances,(...) we just can't deal with the sorrow and the pain.

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We just refuse to, we don't want to do that.

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And none of us, I don't think are going to be into that. So you asked them that second question is like, how do we kind of get started in this? And I just, I think first of all, it's the recognition of that sorrow and grieving is not something to be avoided.

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Yeah. We just got to accept that. And that there's not something wrong with us. If we are necessarily, if we are feeling sorrow and grief, that like, I think that that's a common misconception is like, if you're sad, something must be wrong with you. And the reality is actually something might be right with you. And a failure to ever be sad actually would be an indication that there is something wrong with you. And they're like, I know this is money watering and probably bringing up more questions because there is, I just preached a message(...) a couple of months ago on depression.

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And depression can be debilitating and it can be something that really does need serious treatment and addressing all for that. But at the same time, that doesn't mean that we always live happy, lucky, and it's always joy, joy, joy, and all of that kind of stuff. So I think just recognizing that if you're sad, that doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It actually might be that you're not mean there's something wrong with you. It actually might be that you're actually are alive and you're actually seeing the world as it really, really is. So you begin to do that, but I think it's also, this is why the scripture, there's so much of the Old Testament in particular that is what was known as lamentation.

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There's a whole book, but much of the Psalms, we find lamenting proverbs. Many of the prophets are lamenting. And literally the word lament means complain.(...) Now that's what, lamentations means complaints. Jeremiah is bringing his complaints to the Lord. And so just that helps to give us a language to it, but it's a language in which again,

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we're being taught and we're being shown how to move toward God with it.

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Because lamenting is, as one author, just put it a prayer in pain that leads to trust.(...) So what the biblical author shows us how to do is we're complaining to God, we're speaking to Him,

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and we're doing some in pain, but the ultimate end of that is where we end up with hope and we hope we end up with trust in the Lord and His sovereignty and goodness in the circumstances that we face. So recognizing that it doesn't mean there's something wrong if we are sad and we are experiencing sorrow. In fact, it might be a sign of health. Okay, and so it was like, okay,(...) we can then accept it oftentimes and then using the scriptures to show us and to teach us how. There's also some good Christian books(...) that we could maybe even put in the show notes there that we can read that can help us with that. And then I think the other thing is finding some, hopefully some believers who are able to come alongside you and to be okay with your sorrow and your grief and can actually let's mourn and weep and lament together. And Galatians 6.2 carry one another's burdens, like we have these things. And so, and I'll just end this as one thing I'd really encourage people on is that when people are sorrow and sorrowful, when they're sad, when they're grieving, that our first response should never be, oh, it's going to be okay.

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As believers, it is going to be okay one day, but that's probably not gonna be today. And so before we start just trying to make everything be okay because we don't want to not be okay,

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the best thing we can do for people who are suffering is to literally to,(...) here's another title of another book, "Weep with Me" or "Weep with Them."

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And the Bible says that rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.

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So that's the long and short of it. There's actually maybe more the short of it because there's a lot more we could talk about there.

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Yeah, yeah, there's a lot there. You said it might bring up more questions. It did.

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(Laughing)

(...) I just think you were talking about kind of balancing this side of how far to go on each side. I think there's caricatures of each of those sides and people that are completely ruled by these things and people who only want to look at these things as analytically and kind of move forward in this. And so, yeah, there's problems on both sides for sure. But finding a balance there.

Yeah, so real quick, you go back to Jesus here. So we had the sorrow and the grief part, but he also could be lighthearted. We see him laughing. We see him enjoying life. And he also went to a lot of parties.

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He did, like he did. He was at parties on a regular basis and celebrating. And so, again, the simplest thing to do that the simplest thing that encapsulates this is Paul.

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Sorrowful yet always rejoicing. Like it's both and it's not either.

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All right, you said that chapter two, verse four kind of encapsulates the theme of this book.

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What does it mean to live by faith? Is this simply referring to our justification, our righteousness before God,(...) or is there something else in view?

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Well, okay, so justification is a once for all.(...) I'm gonna get very technical here. Declarative act of God.

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In a moment when we place our faith in Jesus Christ, he declares us righteous in his sight.(...) And that is instantaneous, but it has effects that extend all the way into eternity so that we're righteous in God's sight and righteous with him forever.

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But that doesn't end our call to faith or our need to have faith in Christ. Like, well, I had faith in him and I trusted in him for my justification and now there's no ever need for faith ever again.(...) Because salvation is not just, when we talk about salvation, a lot of times we're just thinking of justification. But there's also sanctification, which is the ongoing process where we grow into maturity in Christ, we become more like Jesus. And that also, faith is also necessary. We have to trust in Christ for that because we can't actually transform and change ourselves. Only Christ can do that.(...) And so that on our part necessitates, requires faith. We have to have faith in order to be justified. We also have to exert faith to be sanctified.

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And so living by faith means trusting in Christ on a day-to-day basis and in whatever circumstance and situation that we find our self in. Because as Jesus said in John 15, without me, you can do nothing. We're abiding in him, which means dwelling in him. That's an exercise of our faith in trusting that he's gonna supply and provide our needs. And we're not trusting in our own self or in our own ability to do really anything we're trusting in him. So we're saved by faith, but we also live by faith.

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Okay, so I guess a natural question might come out of that. What would that have meant to the Old Covenant Jewish population?

Yeah, well,(...) so the sermon on Sunday was long.

(...)

I've been reminded of that today already.(...) And so I could have spent the whole sermon just on that one verse, chapter two and verse four. And when he says, "The just shall live by faith," he's saying, "Judgment's coming on the Babylonians,

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but the people of Judah,

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you'll live through this judgment that's coming." Like the Babylonians are bringing judgment and then I'm gonna judge them. But when they bring the judgment,

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you will literally live. You're gonna make it through my judgment by faith.

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The just shall live by faith.(...) And so that's,

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and so we see in chapter three Habakkuk expressing that faith,

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but then he's also showing how he's going to continue to live by that faith in those three things that we're requesting and remembering and the rejoicing. So yeah, you probably have some more questions in regards to that, but they wouldn't have had the full understanding of like being declared righteous

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by faith, but we know that we live by faith and by live not, we're not physically live, we're talking about spiritually in relationship with God. It's easier for us to pull those things,

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separate those things than it was for the people of Judah.

But I think it can also be easy to kind of gloss over some of these things we find in the Old Testament and just apply a gospel lens to it and kind of forget what the original audience would have actually met by it. So interestingly enough, we had a submitted question come up from this topic too.

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He said, "You mentioned living a righteous life versus an unrighteous life."

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And his question is, the concept of the righteous life almost sounds old fashioned.

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Why do you think it's become so out of vogue, which is I think out of vogue to say that, to refer to the Christian life that way? Why is it important also that we strive to live a righteous life?

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Yeah, I don't think I have maybe all that helpful thoughts on why is it out of vogue.

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But I do believe that it certainly has become less,

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seemingly important for us to live a life that is maybe what we call morally upright, which is basically the same thing as saying righteous. And we seem to be more comfortable with sin and less concerned with living a life of holiness. That's kind of the term I would use more, like instead of righteous holiness, they're really referring to the same thing.

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But in holy means separate.

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And of course we can get this wrong.(...) There's been ways we've gotten this wrong of separation wrong in the past for sure. But in terms of like, there should be a difference between the way that we are living as Christians and the way that the world and nine Christians live. And that's directly related not only to the positive things that we do and that we give ourselves to, but also the things that we don't give ourselves to. Like there should be a way of life for a Christian where we even,(...) and Peter talks about this in his first letter is like people look at us and like, why, it's kind of strange, why don't you do this? Like why are you not giving yourself into this?

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And so the answer to that, why is it so important that we strive to live a righteous or a holy life is because, well, first of all, God's called us to, there's 1 Peter 1.13, I'm holy, so be holy. Of course, that's a quote from the Torah that God gave to the people of Israel.(...) But God is holy, He's a righteous, and so we're His people. And so by nature we want to strive and to be like Him. And we have to understand is like,

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faith alone is what saves us, okay? We're not saved by anything that we do. But again, as Luther said, I believe it's Luther, the faith that saves is never alone. Yeah. Right. And so Ephesians 2.10, so 8 and 9, we love for migration, you're saved through faith and it's not of works, that's how anyone should boast. But then we sometimes leave off, verse 10, "For God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works."

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James, faith without works is dead. And so, he literally says, you say, hey, say you have faith, but there's nothing to show, like you have faith in God, but there's nothing to show that you're seeking to live for God and to be like Christ, then do you really have faith? And so it's absolutely like, and so let's just finish on this, is like that righteousness in the Old Testament we've seen this in a minor prophet, much, a large part had to do with practicing things like justice and the way you're treating your neighbors and people,

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that's your righteousness.

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And that's not only in the minor prophets, we can see it in Proverbs, we can see it in Psalms.

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And so, like God's calling them out for this because he had said, this is what it means to be my people, is to live in this way, I've saved you, I've brought you out of slavery and I've done so, because you're my possession, you're my people. Here's how my people live.

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And we go to those 10 commandments, that's those 10 commandments, this is what a righteous life looks like.

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But it's not in order to save you,(...) I brought you out of slavery, I brought you out of Egypt, I made you my people, you're my possession.

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And now this is what it means to live that way. And then we have the parallel to that in the New Testament in the Sermon on the Mount,

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is this is what it looks like to be my people, this is discipleship and these are the behabitudes. And so it's absolutely essential and important. And it is one of the greatest areas in which the church has room to quite honestly repent

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and to really practice the faith and walk with the Lord is striving to live a holy life.

Yeah, that's a lot of good stuff.(...) Going back to the first question there, why it seems old fashioned, I don't know, I think maybe looking back,(...) I don't know, I wasn't alive, but earlier last century,

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it does seem like virtue was something that was really looked upon fondly and maybe not in a way that it is now. And I think that you're right, you brought up that,

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I think we're desensitized to a lot of the sin that we're tied up in. And it just doesn't seem like it's as big a deal, but maybe that's because we can see the whole world through our phone immediately too. There's just, we're exposed to a lot more now.

So yeah, that's a good question. Desensitized is a good word is that we just become,

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we become, if we're not really, if we're not careful,

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we just become like the culture around us. And the culture around us and the culture of America,

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has become a culture, it's never been perfection or anything close, but it's become more and more immoral.

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There's no denying it.

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Or at least publicly, it's publicly more acceptable. I don't know if we're any more or less moral than we were in the 40s or 50s.

That's a fair point.

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And so, but as a result, like--

(...) But it's celebrated more.

Right, it's celebrated more. And so it's just, I mean, all you have to do is you just look at the language

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that is on the things that we are viewing more and more. You know, when I was growing up, like the F word,

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like it was like, that was like the worst thing ever. I was closer to the beginning of the last century than you are, but no, no, seriously. And like now you have a hard time finding something streaming where it isn't there and it isn't there a lot.

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Okay, and that's a cultural shift.

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And as a result, I'm pretty confident that believers are much more comfortable with that word

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than they would have been two decades ago.

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And that's just an example. It's not like,

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but we could talk about more serious things in terms of sex outside of marriage and couples living together and just a whole host of things.

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Okay,

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you pointed out that Habakkuk appeals to God's character when he asked for mercy. How does knowing God's character change the way we pray? And especially when we don't understand what he's doing?

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Yeah, I mean, I tried to hit on this some on Sunday, is that if we know his character is not,

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he's a God who delights in showing steadfast love and mercy. Never does it say he delights in being angry or bringing about judgment.(...) Like even says, I have no joy at the death of the wicked.

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And so we can pray with an expectation that God actually desires to show us mercy.

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Like that's what he wants to do. That's his default mode. And sometimes that mercy may be simply in giving us the ability to be able to patiently wait for him. Like that's what he says. Like I didn't talk about this too much, but there's a lot in that in there. It's like God tells Habakkuk, you need to wait for it. You gotta wait for it. And then in chapter three, he says, I'm going to patiently wait. And scores for us for patiently wait means I'm gonna wait like an hour or a day. It might be years, it might be till eternity,

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but God could give us the mercy to even just to be patient and to wait.

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We'll wrap up with this one. Habakkuk ends this book by rejoicing before his circumstances have even changed.

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So for our audience today, someone who's listening, who feels kind of stuck in suffering or disappointment, or it could be a host of things, what hope does the ending of this book offer them right now?

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Well, I'd say it's what the ending of the book actually points us to.

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And that's the fact that, eventually God would send, and it would be probably roughly about 500 years after this,

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but God would send Jesus.

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And that we actually have more reason to have,(...) to rejoice in Habakkuk does, because Habakkuk's only got this, I won't say vague, but it's a pretty unclear view about how God's actually going to bring about salvation. We can look back and we can see how he very clearly did. And so if Habakkuk can rejoice in the midst of basically, at least facing the loss of virtually everything, except for his physical life. That's not even promised to him, actually even here.(...) And he had hope in that. We can certainly look back with real clarity about how God brought about our salvation through Christ and how one day in the scope of eternity, it's gonna be one day soon. Seems like it could be forever, waiting patiently for that deliverance can seem like nearly impossible when we're suffering

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significantly, but because Christ came and he died and he rose again, we can know that he's gonna come back one day and that he is going to fully and finally save us forever.

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So Habakkuk, again, I think chapter three is one of the most practical chapters in the entire Bible.

(...)

About here's how you pray, you ask, you remember what God has done, and you rejoice in the midst of that because of what he has done and what he's promised to do. And if Habakkuk could do it with what he knew,

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we can do it with what we know, which is much, much, much more than.

(...)

Okay,(...) all right, well, thanks, Chris.

(...)

If you have any questions, ask it for thepodcast.com and talk to you next week.

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