Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics …...of Christ that we’re willing to bear the cost of discipleship. Oh, it costs to be a Christian, but think what it cost Him

Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics

Transcript - HR503 Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 19 of 20HR503

Illustrations of Biblical Preaching II: Long Paragraphs, Chapters, and Books

Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics

Lord, we thank You for the joy we’ve had together in this class in Biblical Preaching through the quarter, and we pray that You will continue to be with us and to help us to raise our sights, clarify our vision, heighten our ideals, and make us what You want us to be. We ask it for the glory of Your name, amen.

Well our subject for the two lectures this week, as you know, are “Illustrations of Biblical Preaching.” And I tried yesterday to give you some illustrations of single verses and short paragraphs. And I want today to take the longer paragraphs to give you one whole chapter and, if we’ve time, two whole books. But whether we’ll have time, I don’t know. We’ll try.

I want to introduce it by saying that some Scripture passages do need to be handled in this way, that is taking the whole paragraph and not the single text that we took yesterday. But that when we do it in this way, when we take a whole paragraph, it’s all the more necessary to discover the connecting link, to discern the thread which runs through the paragraph, or to isolate the uniting and dominating theme. Otherwise, the congregation will be unable to see the wood for the trees. They’ll become lost in the undergrowth, and they will miss the message as a whole. But having said that, there is a great need when expounding a paragraph to beget this dominating theme and isolate it. There is a danger that we must be aware of, of imposing an artificial unity on the passage. Our duty, of course, is to find the hidden unity that is there and to bring it out and make it plain. So that’s what I want to try to do in our session today.

Now the first paragraph I want to take is in Luke 14 at the end, and this is the passage in which three times Jesus says that unless you’re willing to do something, you cannot be His disciple. This is Luke 14 from verse 25 onwards. “He cannot be my disciple” (verse 26); “He cannot be my disciple” (verse 27). Verse 33: Whoever doesn’t renounce all he has cannot be my disciple.” Now as you

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meditate on that passage, it’s obviously a unity. Three times He says, “You cannot be my disciple.” It’s also equally clear what the uniting theme is. It’s the theme of discipleship. But as you meditate a bit more, it is more than just the character of Christian discipleship. It is the cost of Christian discipleship. For it’s in the middle of this paragraph that Jesus uses His two little parables (verses 28 to 31) about the man building a tower who sits down and counts the cost first and the king going to war who counts his soldiers, his army first. And he sits down. What’s identical in both parables is the little phrase “sit down first” comes in both. He will sit down first. That is, before he rises up to act, he will sit down to think.

So this then is the connecting theme, the cost of discipleship. And moreover the context is clear from verse 25, which begins the paragraph, “Great multitudes accompanied Him.” They were what sometimes are called “fellow travelers.” And Jesus was alarmed by the very enthusiasm of the people, that their enthusiasm was superficial. You can imagine the crowds following, shouting their hosannas to Him, enthusiastic in their support of Jesus. And then He turned around. You can imagine the whole crowd lurching to a standstill and a great hush falling upon them, and the hosannas die down. There is silence. And He then teaches the cost of discipleship to would-be disciples. Then it’s easy, of course, for you to unfold what the three are. The first is you have to put Christ before your family, your relations: father, mother, wife, children, brother, sisters. The second is that “whoever doesn’t bear his own cross and come after me can’t be my disciple,” for to take up the cross is to deny ourselves and our selfish ambitions. So that, you could say, is to put Christ before our relations, to put Christ before our ambitions. And thirdly, we’ve got to renounce all that we have; so that’s to put Christ before our possessions. And it’s not difficult to enlarge on those three. These are three things that people find very difficult to forsake: relations, ambitions, possessions. But we cannot be a disciple of Jesus if we don’t put Him before these three.

Now here would be a question, how are we going to end a sermon like that? It’s a very solemn sermon. And I think it would be very unwise to end on a negative note like that. And as you look even more carefully at the paragraph and see it in its context, one sees that Jesus did not do so. There are some indications here that He balanced this negative teaching with some positive reasons why people should still become His disciples in spite of the cost involved. So that He enabled them to weigh up, if you like, the



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pros and the cons of discipleship. What are these? Well to me it’s very interesting that “great multitudes accompanied him” (verse 24) immediately follows the parable of the great banquet (verses 15–24) in which a man had a great banquet and invited many people to the banquet, in which, of course, becoming a Christian and entering the kingdom of God is likened to being a guest at a banquet.

So one can say, although it costs to be a Christian, there are also great compensations in following Christ. It is a banquet. There are many wonderful things that He gives. He satisfies your hunger. He quenches your thirst. One can outline some of the delicacies of the banquet. I notice that it’s not only preceded by that, but it’s followed in verses 34–35 by a reference to “salt is good.” And we know what being the salt of the earth is and the saltiness of the Christian. And I think our Lord there is indicating that unless you’re willing to be a committed disciple, you can’t be the salt of the earth. So a second reason for facing the cost of discipleship is in order to be what Christ wants you to be as salt in the earth, to have a powerful influence in the community. But then there is a third reason that is at least indirect and implicit here in the phrase in verse 27 about taking up our “cross.” We’ve seen it being self-denial. But why did Jesus use that metaphor? There are many other metaphors He could have used for self-denial. You’d say the only possible reason is because He’d taken up a cross Himself and was even on His way there as He says these things, so that He is asking a cross for a cross. He is asking from us no more than He was willing to give for us. And it’s when we’ve glimpsed the cross of Christ that we’re willing to bear the cost of discipleship. Oh, it costs to be a Christian, but think what it cost Him to make it possible for us to be a Christian at all.

Now there it seems to me you’re taking a passage of Scripture. You’ve got your connecting theme of the cost of discipleship. You’re outlining the cost, but at the same time you’re outlining the compensation, so the reasons why we must count the cost however heavy it may seem to be.

Well now, let’s look at another very well-known . . . I thought it might be good to take one or two very well-known passages. And this time it’s the rich young ruler (Mark 10), and maybe many of us have already preached on the rich young ruler—Mark 10:17 and the following verses. Obviously you’ve got to take this as a whole paragraph, because it is a story. But again, what is the connecting theme? Well we know that what the man asked when



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he came running to Jesus is “What shall I do to get eternal life?” Now I’ve preached on a number of occasions on this passage in my ministry. And the last time I did so, which was not too many months ago, I was immediately hit by the problem. Here was a man who asked the religious question: “What shall I do to get eternal life?” which young men and women are not asking today. So that was how I began I think, if I remember right, the sermon. I said that this young fellow was a very attractive preacher. He was a young man. He was wealthy, but he was enthusiastic. He came running to Jesus. He had a spiritual quest. He was concerned. And then I immediately took the congregation into my confidence and said, well, now eternal life, you’re not asking that question today. People are not asking that question today. This is traditional religious language which people today say is meaningless.

So what does it say today? Well I went on to say what many people are asking and many of them, with all the enthusiasm of youth, are questions about the quality of life. There is an increasing number of people who are realizing today that it’s not enough to be alive. The question is, when I am alive, what kind of life am I going to live? Then I gave them some modern examples from my own contemporary reading. For example, the Club of Rome, this informal institution that was founded in 1967 to solve some of the problems of the world’s growth, population, economic breakdown, pollution, etc., commissioned MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to investigate. And you probably know that in December last year their work was published entitled “The Limits to Growth.” I’ll confess to you that I haven’t read it, but I have read one or two reviews of it. And from the reviews, I picked up that the report’s closing sentence reads, “The crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive but even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless existence.” Now I thought that was an extraordinary statement for a secular report. That it isn’t survival that people are worried about now but the quality of life, if they do survive, and whether they’ll fall in their survival state into a state of worthless existence.

Then I read a little later in the newspaper that when Mrs. Gandhi, the prime minister of India, was on a state visit to Stockholm earlier this year visiting the international conference on the environment, she said, “The ecological crisis is not about the environment; it’s about us and the quality of human life.” Now that, I said, and I spent quite a longer time than I have at the moment enlarging on this: how men and women all over the place are concerned



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about the quality of life. People are talking about alien nations. They feel cut off from reality, estranged from whatever it is that makes life worth living. And then I quoted from Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, who says, for example, that “Life is not what we are in our various professional capacities. What is of supreme importance is that each of us should become a person, a whole and integrated person in whom there is manifested a sense of the human variety genuinely experienced” etcetera. So I said thousands of people are asking how to become a real, authentic, integrated human being; how to discover the meaning of life; how to begin to live a life that has a quality of genuine humanness, in other words, how to inherit eternal life. Because that is exactly what eternal life is. Eternal life isn’t life that goes on and on and on forever. It does that, but that’s irrelevant. Eternal life is life that has eternal quality about it. This is what is meant in the Bible by eternal life. But you may not agree that that is a fair way to begin, but I would want to defend it and say that it is.

Now having said that, then, we are asking the same question as this young man. What can we learn from him? What we learn from him is that in the conversation he had with Jesus, he made three mistakes, all of which were inhibiting him from entering into this life, that is life indeed.

The first is that he didn’t understand Jesus, because in asking his question about eternal life he addressed Jesus as “good teacher.” And Jesus took him up: “Why do you call me good?” “You know what you’re talking about. Nobody’s good but God. Is that what you mean?” And so one would naturally go on to talk about inadequate and defective views of Jesus, the people today who think He’s just a nice guy or a noble teacher or even a superstar. But He is more than that. It gives us an excuse to talk about who Jesus is. He made a mistake about Jesus.

Second, he didn’t understand Jesus. He didn’t understand himself. He said he wanted to enter into life, and Jesus said he could do it if he kept the commandments. So he said, which commandments? And Jesus quoted a selection from the term. And then do you know what he said? He said, I’ve kept them all from my youth up. But is it true that he never committed murder or adultery in his mind, that he never entertained any lustful or angry thought, that he really loved his neighbor as himself? What about the poor in his community whose destitution he could have relieved from his great possessions? And hadn’t he noticed how selective Jesus was in the commandments that He quoted, that Jesus omitted



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the term, “you shall not covet.” Jesus didn’t quote that one. But that was his problem: covetousness, materialism, miserliness. And Jesus omitted the first four altogether about God—having no other God but [Him]—whereas his god was money. And yet the rich young ruler could say, I’ve kept them all. He did not understand himself. He thought he was righteous. He wasn’t. And then one can enlarge on how common that misunderstanding is today.

Third, he didn’t understand life. He then said, what still do I lack? And Jesus said, “You lack one thing. Sell what you’ve got and give to the poor. . . . Come follow me.” So Jesus set over against each other, in the starkest possible contrast, the rich young ruler’s great possessions and Himself—“Come and follow me”—so that He forced him to a decision: Which is the more valuable, all your possessions or Me? And he chose his possessions because he didn’t understand the meaning of life. Life is to be found in Christ. So one can apply that: of the necessity, if we are to enter into life, that we must understand ourselves, we must have less hypocrisy to perpetuate the make-believe in which we like to live; we must face ourselves. We must understand Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior of men, who was alone able to give us the life; and we must understand the meaning of life, which is not in the abundance of what we possess but in following Jesus. Now there again, the connecting link you see is life and what you need to know and understand in order to enter into this kind of life.

Now I would like to take you to an epistle if I may, and that is to 1 Peter 2 and particularly verses 1 through 11. Now here again one could pick out any of these verses and preach on an individual text. But what is interesting is, as I expect many of you have all often seen and maybe preached about, is the catalog of vivid metaphors that Peter uses to describe his readers. In verse 2, he likened them to newborn babies: “like newborn babies.” In verse 5, he likened them to “living stones”: “like living stones be yourselves built up as a spiritual house.” Thirdly, in the same verse he likened them to holy priests, to be a holy priesthood who offer spiritual sacrifices. Fourthly, he likens them (in verse 9). He says, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.” That is, they are the people of God, a chosen race, a holy nation. And fifthly (verse 11), “I beseech you like aliens and exiles.” So he runs through a gamut of metaphors. You’re like newborn babies, like living stones, like holy priests, like a holy nation, and like aliens and exiles.



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Well now it would be possible to expound on all those five in independence of one another and see no connecting link. One sees of course that each metaphor carries with it a corresponding obligation. Like newborn babies, you’re to desire the milk of the Word, the spiritual milk to grow up. Newborn babies have a duty to grow. Living stones in the building, well they have, I suppose you could call it, a duty of fellowship, that is, the building is the church. Every stone in the building is mortared in to other stones above and beneath and on the left and the right. And the duty of the stones is to belong together, fellowship. Holy priests, their duty is to offer sacrifices. That’s worship. We have to say what our Christian sacrifice is. It’s offering worship to God through Jesus Christ. A holy nation (verse 9) has a duty to declare the wonderful deeds of Him who’s called them. That is, they have a duty to witness, spread abroad God’s wonderful deeds. They’ve come out of darkness into light, so they must make known the good news to others. Aliens and exiles (verse 11), well their duty is to abstain from the passions of the flesh, i.e., holiness.

So here you have five duties: growth (newborn babies), fellowship (living stones), worship (holy priests), witness (a holy nation), and holiness (aliens and exiles). Well you could expound it like that and say, “Here are five duties that we’ve all got” and still, I think, miss the missing link. Because to me the missing link is in this fundamental teaching of the New Testament, which is the call to be what we are, the necessity of realizing what God has made us in Jesus Christ, and so understanding this and grasping it and digesting it that it has a revolutionary effect upon our behavior because it impels us to behave accordingly—to be what we are. Are you a newborn baby? Have you had a new birth? Is that what God has made you? If that’s what you are and that’s what everybody is after new birth, then we have this irresistible, inescapable duty to grow up into maturity. Are you a living stone in the building if you come to Jesus and join the church? Is that what God has made you, a living stone in the building? Then you must be what you are again as God made you. A holy priest? Is the whole church a priesthood of all believers? If God has made us kings and priests or Jesus Christ has made us kings and priests, then, again, we must exercise the function that belongs to priesthood, which is offering sacrifice, the sacrifice of our worship. Has God made us His own people? And there’s a phrase in verse 9 that comes out of Exodus 19. (Peter lifted them out of Exodus 19 where they apply to the Jews.) That’s what God said through Moses after the exodus, you’re a “chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation.” But why has God made us His people? In order that we may enjoy



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a monopoly of the gospel? No, He’s made us His people in order that we may spread abroad the excellencies. That’s why He’s made us His people, in order to serve the world. Are we aliens and exiles? That is because we’ve entered the kingdom of God, and our citizenship of that kingdom is our first citizenship. There is a sense in which we are aliens on earth. Oh, it’s true. Peter goes on to talk about our duties to the state to obey laws. We have got an earthly citizenship, but our first citizenship is heavenly. And there is a sense in which we are aliens and exiles. We don’t belong down here. We belong to eternity, and therefore, we must abstain from fleshly lusts that war against the soul. The soul is the important thing traveling to its eternal destiny. So the lusts of the flesh, which are hostile to the destiny of the soul, we must abstain from these. In other words, it’s what we are, what God has made us in Jesus Christ that enforces upon us our duty.

Now I heard in May, when I was watching television, a very good illustration of this that I’ve used a good deal since. And that was the day that the Duke of Windsor died in Paris; and that night there was a television program in Britain on his life. And he appeared on the screen from excerpts of earlier films of his life in which we heard him speaking about his boyhood and his upbringing and his abdication from the throne, etcetera. And he said this. He said, “Sometimes when I had done something wrong, my father [that’s King George V] who was a strict disciplinarian, would say to me, he would admonish me and say to me, ‘My dear boy, you must always remember who you are. My dear boy, you must always remember who you are.’” That is, you’re the crown prince of England. You’re going to ascend the throne. You must behave like it. Remember who you are. It’s when you forget who you are that you misbehave; when you remember who you are, that you behave like it. Now, you see, you conclude by saying, “Now I believe God says to us every day as we go out in to the world: My dear child, you must always remember who you are. Then you’ll behave like it.” Now there, you see, I think is a connecting link again, something, and even if the congregation forget the details, I think they’ll remember that fundamental truth, if you hammer it home, about the importance of remembering who we are.

Now let’s go to the Old Testament. Several of you have chosen a psalm for your lab sessions, so I thought I’d take a leaf out of your book and do the same thing and take Psalm 95, which is sometimes called “the benighted.” And it’s often sung in the Episcopal Church as a kind of invitation to worship. Now as you read the whole of this psalm, you will notice of course immediately that it



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begins (95:1), “O come, let us sing unto the Lord” (an invitation to worship); and it’s repeated in verse 6, “O come, let us worship and bow down.” But when you go on a bit further, you see at the end of verse 7, “O that today you would hearken to his voice,” and not harden your hearts like Israel in the wilderness at Meribah and Massa. “Forty years I loathed that generation. They are people who wander, not just in the desert, but they wander in their heart, and don’t regard my ways.” O that you would hear His voice! So as one meditates, one sees there are two invitations here. One is to sing God’s praises, and the other is to hear God’s Word. So when one has seen that the psalm is divided into two, you begin to look into the details and you see that the invitation to worship is, well, it’s addressed to one another really. It’s as if the congregation who’ve gathered for worship turn to one another and almost slap one another on the back and say, “Come along now. Let us sing unto the Lord.” It’s a congregation exhorting one another to sing God’s praises.

But as they do that, their worship is twofold. At the beginning it’s to make a joyful noise: “Come into his presence with thanksgiving.” But then in verses 6 and 7, it’s to bow down and kneel before Him. So here are two different kinds of worship. One is a joyful, exuberant worship, and the other is bowing down in humility and lowliness and kneeling before Him. What’s the cause of that difference? Well, “come let us sing to the Lord,” “make a joyful noise,” “come into his presence,” “make a joyful noise . . . with songs.” Why? Because (verse 3) “the Lord is a great God, and a great King.” The depths of the earth, the heights of the mountains, the sea, the dry land, all are His. That is, He’s a great Creator. But why are we to bow down and worship and kneel? Well because (verse 7) “He is our God.” He’s not only a great God, He’s our God, and we are the people of his pasture, the sheep of his hand.” That is, He’s the God of redemption. He’s not only a great God in the creation, which makes us jubilant, but He’s also our God who has in infinite condescension chosen us out of all the nations of the world and made us His own people and become our Shepherd. And we are the sheep of His hand, and we should bow down in humility that He loved and condescended to us like that.

So there is the invitation to worship; and the worship that is pleasing to God is a varied worship. It’s not all noise and timbrels and dancing. Sometimes it’s very quiet and reverent as we bow down and kneel before Him and think how great is His condescension in that He is our God. So there is an invitation to worship, but it’s an invitation to worship that is discriminating:



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worship that is aroused by the kind of God He is and our worship being appropriate to the attributes of God that we’re considering. Then we’re not only to worship Him, we’re to listen to His voice and not harden our hearts.

So I would conclude by saying here is a swing of the pendulum. First, we hear God’s Word as He speaks to us. And then we speak back to Him in worship, worship that is evoked by His Word. The worship of God is evoked by the Word of God. We listen to His voice, His Word, that tells us what kind of a God He is. He speaks to us; we speak to Him. And this swing of the pendulum as God speaks and then we speak is true in all balanced public worship; and it ought to be true in our private devotion as well—or, our private devotions. Do we hearken to his voice in the reading of Scripture, and do we respond in worship according to what Scripture we’ve read? And I think it’s in this swing of the pendulum, or this balanced devotion in public and private, the listening and the speaking—God speaking, our speaking—in this response of the congregation to revelation, that you have the true worship in public and in private. Well that again is a sort of connecting link I think in the whole psalm.

Now I guess and hope that I have time to attempt now a couple of whole books. And the first is the book of Job, and the second is the book of Habakkuk. You see Job is—I think I’ve tried to argue when we were talking about the interpretation of Scripture—can really only be understood as a whole. You can’t take one verse out of the book of Job and say this is the Word of God, something spoken by Zophar or Bildad or Elihu or one of those guys. Because actually what they said was often recorded in order to be contradicted at the end of the book. And when God appears at the end of the book, He says, “These men have not spoken about me what was right.” So since God Himself contradicts them, you can’t take any verse out and say this is the Word of God. You can only interpret it as a whole. Now granted, you can take a text out of Job provided you and I have done our homework. We can interpret it in the light of the whole. But the fact that it is a whole revelation is a good reason I think for beginning at least to preach on the whole book to the people.

Well the obvious place to begin is on the whole theme of suffering. It is to say that there is no problem that is more baffling in the world or in history to the philosophers as the problem of suffering. And there are several books in the Bible which do devote themselves to this theme, and none more so than the book of Job. Then one



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would one time manage to tell his story very briefly from the first two chapters of how he lost all his family and all his possessions and his flocks and herds. Then he was smitten by what some medical people think was smallpox and loathed himself and was sick and repulsive to look at in his symptoms. And you can tell the story in case they don’t know it. Now what is to be our attitude? Maybe you’ve had suffering, a calamity of some kind.

What is to be the Christian attitude to suffering? Well the book of Job gives us various alternatives.

1. The attitude adopted by Job is self-pity. Job was absorbed in himself and his sickness. It’s quite true that at first he met his misfortunes with amazing courage. And when his wife urged him to curse God, he didn’t listen to her. But gradually as the first week wore on, he could bear it no longer. He lost control of himself, and in Job 3:1 he cursed the day that he was born. His tottering faith collapsed in ruins. And this note of complaint and despair continues in nearly every answer that Job gives to his comforters, to his so-called friends. Sometimes he’s wildly defiant. He accuses God of cruelty, of injustice. He shakes his fist in the face of the Almighty, etcetera. You can go into the details. Sometimes he’s argumentative, but in the end he lapses into plain self-pity. He remembers his former prosperity. He contrasts it tearfully with his present distress. He cries, “Have pity on me, have pity on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me!” (19:21). And this is the attitude of a stricken sufferer who cannot see beyond his own suffering. He can only see his own sickness, and he wallows in self-pity—very understandable. We would all be tempted to do it, but it’s wrong. It’s dishonoring to God; it’s unbecoming in a rational human being, etcetera. So that’s the first thing. The attitude adopted by Job was self-pity.

2. The attitude proposed by the three comforters was self-accusation. That is, they asked Job not to look at himself and at his sickness but at himself and his sins. And their philosophy was brutally cold and utterly conventional. To them, sickness was always due to personal sin. “God is punishing you,” he says. “What have you done?”—Eliphaz. And you can quote some typical verse of Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar. They all say the same thing. Indeed they say, not only have you been punished for your sins, but if God was really just you would have got more than you’ve got already. Why these chaps were ever called Job’s comforters is difficult to tell. Anyway, that’s what they said. Now one would have, in applying this, to be cautious and say there is undoubtedly much



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in Scripture and in experience to support their view. It is not the only and the ultimate answer. But it is an answer. Some suffering is a divine punishment or a divine chastening, the Father wielding His rod, the Divine Gardener with a pruning knife, the Refiner of Souls refining silver and so on. It is perfectly true that sometimes suffering is described like this in Scripture. But nevertheless, it would be entirely wrong to say that all suffering is a punishment for our own sin.

3. Thirdly, the attitude recommended by Elihu—this is the fourth one, the young man who now enters at chapter 32—is self-discipline. That is his conviction: that God has a disciplinary purpose. He refers to God more as a teacher than as a judge, not punishment now so much as chastening. I may have used that word in the previous paragraph by mistake. I didn’t mean to. But now He is not the Judge punishing but the Teacher who is disciplining. And he urges Job to look not at his present physical sufferings but at the future at moral and spiritual benefits to be derived from his sufferings. And he uses the phrases: “[God] opens their ears to instruction, and commands that they return from iniquity. . . . He delivers the afflicted by their affliction, and opens their ear by adversity. . . . God is exalted in power, who is a teacher like him?” (36:10–22). So God is a Teacher, and He opens our ear. This is self-discipline; and there is much in this that is true in experience, that God’s great purpose is to transform us into the image of Christ. And He uses suffering as one purpose by which to discipline and transform us.

4. Fourthly, the attitude that is demanded by God is self-surrender. God appears in chapter 38, and He answers Job out of the whirlwind. And He hurls at him a rapid series of bewildering questions: Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Have you entered the springs of the sea? Have the gates of death been opened to you? Do you know the ordinances of heaven? Can you lift up your voice to the clouds that rain comes? Will you hunt prey for the lion? Who provides food for the raven? etc. Does the hawk fly by your wisdom? Does the eagle mount up at your command?

For two whole chapters God rains upon Job this battery of questions, setting forth His wisdom, His power, His love, and His providence. And Job is overwhelmed with confusion, stammers a few words, and then lays his hand on his mouth and says nothing. So God begins His questions again for two more chapters. In



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chapters 40 and 41 the battery of questions begins. Job is asked to consider the behemoth and leviathan, the hippopotamus and the crocodile, two wonderful chapters that describe their strength, resourcefulness, and fearlessness. And when this revelation of God in His power and His wisdom is finished, Job is simply overwhelmed. And he humbles himself (Job 42), and he says, “I’ve heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you and I repent. And I abhor myself in dust and ashes.” Now God has not answered Job’s questions. He’s not solved the problem of suffering. He’s not unlocked the mystery. He has simply revealed Himself as a God of wisdom, power, and love. And He has asked for Job’s trust.

Now I personally would conclude by saying this. That if it was reasonable for Job to trust God in suffering, how much more reasonable is it for us who have the full revelation of God in Christ? Job knew the God of nature. That is how He revealed Himself in these chapters. We know the God of grace. He knew the God of the earth, the sky, and the sea. We know the God of Jesus Christ. He knew the God of the crocodile. We know the God of the cross. And if it was right and reasonable for Job to trust God, how much more reasonable is it for us who have seen God revealed in Christ crucified? So the right attitude in suffering is not self-pity. It’s not self-accusation. It may partly be self-discipline. But it’s supremely self-surrender before the greatness of this God who has revealed Himself in Christ.

Now let me attempt finally to look at Habakkuk with you. And here I would introduce it by saying that another great problem, perhaps the biggest problem with which human minds have ever wrestled is the problem now of evil. And if Job deals with the problem of suffering, Habakkuk deals to some extent with the problem of evil. And one would enlarge on the problem. If God is all good and if He’s all powerful, why doesn’t He do something people ask. How often people have said that: Why doesn’t He eradicate the evil and the sufferings of the world? Now the prophecy of Habakkuk would technically be called a “theodicy,” that is to say a vindication of divine justice. And the prophet begins with a remarkably candid dialogue with God. Reverently but persistently he asks God these searching questions. He says right at the beginning, “O Lord, how long will I cry for help and you won’t listen to me? Why do you make me see wrong?” You see how long and why? He throws these questions in the face of God. Now so these are the questions we ask. Now that’s a simple introduction. Now then I would, I think, say, well because most of us can’t even pronounce the prophet’s



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name, let alone know much about him, I better tell you quickly the background. And I would then, I think, reconstruct the situation in Habakkuk’s day and the moral problem that he faced and see what light it throws on ours, and then secondly consider how it applies to our situation in today’s world.

So the first part of the sermon would have to reconstruct Habakkuk’s situation that he was a contemporary of Jeremiah. Jehoiakim was on the throne. His was an oppressive regime against which Jeremiah fulminated. He built his royal palaces by forced, unpaid slave labor. He opposed God’s Word through Jeremiah. He burned the scroll in the brazier. He murdered a lesser-known prophet. He spilled other innocent blood. It was an oppressive regime. And this situation Habakkuk describes in the first four verses. He writes of violence in the community. Law is slack, justice never goes forth. That is, there’s a breakdown in law and order. The law was not enforced. Justice was not administered. The wicked surround the righteous. The righteous are a minority group. The wicked harass them and threaten then. So here you see is a sick community, a nation without a conscience, lawless and on the verge of anarchy. So no wonder the prophet cries to God, “Lord, why don’t you do something? How long is it going to go on?” Well how does God reply? Well in two ways.

(a) His first reply (in verses 5–11) is to assure Habakkuk that He’s not inactive. Verse 5, “Look among the nations, and see . . . . For I am doing a work in your days that you wouldn’t believe if told you.” Verse 6, “I am rousing the Chaldeans [the Babylonians], that bitter and hasty nation.” And indeed within a very few years of this prophecy, these Chaldeans and Babylonians have besieged, captured, and destroyed Jerusalem, in which all this violence and oppression was so prevalent. So God claims that this ascendency of the Babylonian empire is His own work. It’s He who is rousing the Chaldeans. And He’s using them as His instrument of judgment upon His lawless people Israel. And there follows a vivid description of the Babylonian army, their military efficiency, their cavalry, their siege works, their ruthlessness. They terrorized the neighborhood (end of verse 11): “Guilty men, whose own might is their god!” Now that immediately raises a second question. God uses the Chaldeans to judge Judah, but the people He uses to judge Judah are worse than the people who are being punished. They’re guilty men whose own might is their god. So God’s answer is not a bit satisfactory to Habakkuk. So he raises a question again (verse 13): “You are of purer eyes than to behold evil. You cannot look on wrong. So why do you look on faithless



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men, and are silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?” The rest of the chapter (14–17) seems to rub in this ethical dilemma. It describes the inhumanity of the Babylonians.

So, in his perplexity at the beginning of chapter 2, Habakkuk says that he will seek God’s face again, not satisfied yet with the answer he’s got. So, he says, I’ll take my stand on the watchtower, likens himself to a man on sentry duty. He’ll watch and pray, looking and listening for God. And then comes, (b) God’s second reply in verses 2 to 4 when God tells Habakkuk to “Write the vision on tablets. The fulfillment of the vision may delay,” he says, “but it will surely come in the end. If it’s slow, you’ve got to wait for it, Habakkuk. You’ve got to be patient.” What is it? Well verse 4, which is the key verse of the book, and indeed a key verse of Scripture applicable to men and nations is that “the arrogance of the unrighteous will bring him to ruin, while the righteous shall live [that is, enjoy the blessing of God] by his faith,” or it might be his fidelity which is the fruit of faith. Now here the contrast, you see, is between arrogance on the one hand and humble faith on the other, between the haughty Chaldean on the one hand and the believing Israelite on the other, between the pride of a self-assertive person for whom might is right and the humility of a man who’s prepared to trust in God and leave his vindication to God. Now the rest of the book is an outworking of that epigram. You’ve got to wait for God to work, and He will vindicate right in the end. Well that’s a very quick summary. And if I had time, I know my time is really up, I would go on a little bit outlining the situation, applying it to Habakkuk’s day.

Now the second part of the sermon is, what is the application to our day? Well it’s very obvious. We live in the same situation—violence, hijacking, war, racism, the Munich massacre, breakdown of law and order, public indecency, increase of crime, materialism, etcetera. Not difficult to sketch that. So we have much the same problem. Why doesn’t God do something? Why does He allow evil to rampage? Is history out of control? Is it a random succession of events? Many people have said so. Henry Ford said, “History is bunk,” didn’t he, in 1919 when he was accused of this libel action with the Chicago Tribune. Hegel had his philosophy. That is an Eastern philosophy of history that it’s an endless cycle of events with no end. Classical Marxism says it’s working to a goal but because history has a built-in dialectic in the conflict of the classes. You can rehearse quickly various views of history. But the Christian view of history is different. It’s neither that history is


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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Illustrations of Biblical Preaching II: Long Paragraphs, Chapters, and BooksLesson 19 of 20

without meaning or without a goal, nor is it that history is moving to an inevitable earthly utopia in which the state will wither away. It is that God Himself is the Lord of history and the goal of history. And we’ve got to wait for Him, “the just live by faith.”

Now how can you believe that? Well I wanted to end. I’m sorry I’m going over. But I wanted to end with these two lessons. That is we can believe this if we remember two things.

1. God works in judgment as well as salvation. And this has been true of the great empires down history. It was true of Rome. It was true of Napoleon. Herbert Butterfield, in his great book on Christianity and history, says the story of Napoleon provided the world with a clear example of the way in which inordinate pride and ungovernable power are brought in the course of time to their appointed doom. Oppressive regimes have always fallen in the end. Now when I preached this in Britain, I said, “What about the British Empire?” Here is Britain today, lost an empire and looking for a role. Now I argue that I believe, although it was right of course to give independence to these colonial powers, yet nevertheless that there has been a judgment of God upon Britain because of the British Raj mentality. And if you’ve read Margery Perham’s book The Colonial Reckoning, you’ll know that she says the African cry uhuru for freedom is not a cry for political self-government, it’s a cry for human dignity and that the colonial regimes and the British Raj mentality, you see, oppressed. I know Britain brought justice, etc. But she also brought this lack of human dignity. So God works in judgment as well as salvation.

2. And secondly, God works slowly. There is a need for patience. God is working His purpose out. And what we need is a faith, which leads to patience. It’s silly to get impatient with God. And we must rejoice that He is the living and the sovereign God who’s working out His purposes of justice and of love. He works in judgment as well as salvation, and His purposes ripen slowly.

I’m sorry there wasn’t more time to enlarge on that. But it’s just an example of how you can take a whole book and try and apply it to today.

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Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics …...of Christ that we’re willing to bear the cost of discipleship. Oh, it costs to be a Christian, but think what it cost Him