A sermon on Habakkuk 2:4 by the Revd Dr Geoff Leslie
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

Early in the 1500’s, so the story goes, a young Martin Luther was burdened with feelings of sin and worthlessness, wondering how God could ever accept him or forgive him. He was in Rome and began to climb the marble steps outside St Peter’s Basilica on his knees.  At each step he would pause and recite prayers and confessions.  About halfway through he began to think of a text of Scripture – one which we read today: The just shall live by faith.  It began to form in his mind that this hard work of abasement and self-flagellation was an attempt to please God when all that was needed was faith. God would offer his free gift of righteousness to those who believed.  Luther stood up and exclaiming ‘The Just Shall Live by Faith’ he walked away from the steps beginning his journey to find freedom and love in the arms of God.

Luther’s use of that text is actually quite different to the way Habakkuk first wrote it. Let me summarise the plot of the book of Habakkuk because it is crucial for understanding the book of Romans and Paul’s theology in the NT and it is helpful to us today.

Habakkuk is not a normal prophet’s book. Usually, those books are full of messages the prophet delivers to the people from God. This is instead a dialogue between the prophet and God.

1. a. God, look at the way Israel’s society is behaving. It is full of corruption, violence and injustice.  We are supposed to be a light to the Gentiles and an example of good living because we live by your Law.  How long will you put up with this? Aren’t you going to do something?
   b. God answers, yes I am going to do something. I will allow Babylon to conquer Jerusalem. They are the best country in the world at smashing cities and destroying nations. I’m bringing them in to do the job against Israel.
2. a. But God, you do not support evil, how can you tolerate the Babylonians? They are worse than us!
   b. God says, ‘Yes, they are puffed up and wicked, but you can be sure that they will be brought down. Woe to him who…’ and then there are 4 woes that sound terribly familiar: Woe to those who make themselves wealthy by extortion and exploitation of the poor…
   Woe to the one who builds their country up by ruining other nations ….
   Woe to those who use violence to strengthen their kingdom….
   Woe to those who make young people drunk so they can look on their nakedness, Jeffrey Epstein….
   Let all the earth be silent before God. The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
3. Habakkuk worries, ‘But in all this, there could well be some collateral damage. How will we survive on the day of calamity?’
   b. God says, ‘The righteous will survive by their faithfulness.’  He talks about trusting God and living by your values.  As one paraphrase puts it, Some people won’t have a bar of it
   because they are all spineless fluff;
   but those who are fair dinkum live by it with enduring courage and integrity.  [Laughing Bird] The righteous survive by faithfulness, they hold to their integrity, they trust God, they keep looking up, when the world is crashing around them and people are panicking and despairing, the righteous hold onto their faith that God will deliver them, that salvation will come, that there is a future and a hope.

What do the words mean?  The Just/righteous  shall live/survive/be saved  by their faith/faithfulness

In the typical OT context they mean this:

Tsaddiq   Righteous   This term was used for people who stood out in their generation for their goodness.  Noah was a TSADDIQ.  Abraham argued with God 50 – 45 – 40 – …..10 tsaddiqim whose existence would have saved Sodom.   Rabbis suggested that there are always 36 hidden tsaddiqim who are saving the world.

In Luke 2, ‘There was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon; he was a tsaddiq, righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel and the Holy Spirit was upon him.’ Cf Ezek 18:5ff

If I asked for your thoughts about what makes a righteous man or woman, I’m sure we would come up with words like:  kindness, compassion, integrity, fairness, and there is a spiritual component.  Simeon is a good example; he is a tsaddiq – righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel – he has a hope in God’s future, and the Holy Spirit is upon him.  There’s a quality that can be sensed.

Are you the tsaddiq in your street? In your family? In your workplace? The one people are not afraid to be alone with, the one people can tell their secrets to, the one who supports you when you’re treated badly, who helps you when you are in trouble.

Live – means just that, survive, stay alive,  – in the context it means you won’t become collateral damage, you will be protected

By faith/faithfulness     Originally the meaning seems to be ‘by steadfastness,  by endurance, by sticking to it despite all the challenges, holding fast, keeping on’. As we will see it is capable of having other meanings which are very important.

Habakkuk’s faith enables him finally to utter the timeless words of confidence that the book ends with. “Though the fig tree does not blossom and there be no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there be no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Saviour…

The phrase ‘The just shall live by faith’ becomes a crucial text for Paul in the letter to the Romans. Written in the late 50s of the first century, Paul feels like he is in the same boat as Habakkuk.  Israel has rejected Jesus and is rebelling against the Empire and the Romans are threatening it with destruction.  It’s a replay of Israel and the Babylonians. Paul says the Gospel announces that Jesus has been declared the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead, he is Christ the Lord, and everyone who believes that will be saved, “first for the Jew, and then for the Greek (shorthand for the Greco-Roman empire and culture). For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith just as it is written, the Just shall live by faith.” 1:16-17   

It takes a bit of unpacking but Paul sees the wrath of God coming against Greco-Roman culture – he spells that out in the rest of chapter 1 but then he spends a couple of chapters explaining that the Jews will experience it first.  2:9 “There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil, first for the jew and then for the Greek, but glory honour and peace for everyone who does good, first for the Jew and then for the Greek.”  Historically that is what happened.  Jerusalem was destroyed by Rome in AD66 – 70, not long after Paul is writing, and he predicts that Rome will be brought to its knees and acknowledge Jesus as Lord.  But the righteous will live by faith.  He points out that keeping the Law getting circumcised and observing the Sabbath won’t save you.

But for him Jesus has shown the way.  He has demonstrated living by faith.  We trust in the faithfulness of Jesus. He was a Righteous one, he went through the wrath of God in the form of a Roman cross and God vindicated him by the resurrection. So he says, the Gospel shows us the righteousness that we are to have – we see it in the faithfulness of Jesus and if we have faith in him, we identify with Jesus, we die with him and we are raised with him, we are saved by him, we live in him. I think that’s what he means by ‘the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith’.  It is from Jesus’ faithfulness to our faithfulness.  If the Christians in Rome would be saved, they were to hold onto their faith in all the chaos and turmoil of the Empire and its violence. Eventually, the quiet faithfulness of the martyrs, the steadfast non-violence and goodness of the Christians brought the Roman Empire to surrender and acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord. [I am interpreting Romans here in the ‘Narrative-historical’ frame, not so much about justification, life after death and Judgment Day]

In a similar vein Habbakuk is also quoted in Hebrews.  Writing to encourage believers to hold onto their faith and not fall away, he quotes from Habakkuk in chapter 10:

“Do not throw away your confident trust …you have need of patient endurance…. For “the Just shall live by faith”… We are not of those who shrink back… but those who have faith and preserve their souls.  Now faith is…”

This leads into the famous Hebrews chapter 11, the chapter on Faith and here he gives us a working definition of the kind of faith you need to persevere and endure:

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

What this means is that there are two types of invisible things – things that are future, not yet revealed but hoped for; and things that are invisible because they are in the spiritual realm – like God and like promises.  But these things become concrete and real when you act upon them. When you see the invisible and it affects the way you live, others can tell that the spiritual things are real to you, that the promises are certain.

To have a hope beyond this government and this technological world, to believe in something bigger, something truer, this is always an element of living by faith.  Like Simeon who was ‘waiting for the consolation of Israel’, or Habakkuk who could rejoice when the crops failed because he believed there is a God who gave him strength and joy apart from the things of this world.

Recap: For Habakkuk, Israel will be punished by Babylon, then Babylon will be punished but the righteous shall live by their faithfulness.

For Paul, Israel will be punished by Rome, then Rome will experience the wrath of God but Jesus has shown the way and he has been declared Lord and those who have faith in him will be saved.

What about us today? I don’t want to comment on Israel, God is working with the Jews in ways I can’t be sure of. But we in the church are also heirs of God’s promises to Abraham and the faith of Jesus.  How is it looking?

The church is really in the bad books.  Whereas the church has been the backbone of our civilisation, it is now on the outer. It is condemned by Royal Commissions and mocked by comedians. It is considered irrelevant by most sectors of society, tossed out, disregarded, despised.  And some of that is possibly deserved.

But the secular culture that condemns the church is not all good, it is not godly, it does not bring redemption to all mankind. It is flawed and failing. Wars are increasing, the planet is suffering, technology is ruining our society in many ways.  God will bring an end to it.

And we hold on to the belief that Christ will come again, that there is a New Creation promised for this earth, that there will be a Resurrection Day and Judgment Day, the details of which I cannot describe. 

But we know this. That people who are TSADDIQ, who are righteous, who are full of kindness, integrity and Holy Spirit.  The Just shall live by faith.  By their ability to see the invisible and believe the promises of hope. By their persistence when the ignorant people mock and condemn, by their trust in God when the fig tree fails.  Are you one of them?  Have you got faith in the faithfulness of Jesus? Do you believe God is with you and wants you to live ‘in the spirit of ceaseless prayer and the struggle of the beatitudes, discerning the pathways into which God is calling us and letting God’s grace keep you conscious, honest, simple and merciful?’