Habakkuk—Week 5

Watch Dannah Teach—What's the Right Kind of Fear?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: The Scripture has lots of warnings against idolatry, but what does that look like today? Here’s Dannah Gresh.

Dannah Gresh: You name it . . . we can make an idol of it. We will carve it into something we can worship with our time, with our talent, and with our money. I can make my own god.

Nancy: This is Revive Our Hearts for September 29, 2020. I’m Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Here in the West we may be tempted to assume that idols are not as prevalent as they were in the ancient world, after all, the religious landscape of our lives are not strewn with golden idols. Well, it’s true that at least in most parts of the United States, we don’t see temples on every street with carved idols.

But on today’s program, we’re going to examine five ways that idolatry may be entering into your life through the doorway of pride. Now, if you’re tempted to turn this program off right now, let me do you a favor and say, “Stop!” Pride is deadly. It will kill your desire to cry out to God and to submit to Jesus.

But here’s the thing: As dangerous as pride is to your spiritual life, it’s pride that makes it difficult to see pride in our own lives. Today my co-host, Dannah Gresh, is going to take five characteristics of an idolatrous group of people in the ancient Middle East, the Babylonians, and help us consider whether these qualities could be true of us.

Dannah’s continuing today in her series on the book of Habakkuk. This Old Testament book helps us to know how to talk to God when we’re living through devastating and difficult times and how to walk by faith when it would be easier to live in fear. And how appropriate is that for this year, 2020? The book of Habakkuk is always timely, but it seems especially helpful during this crazy tumultuous year.

In fact, I’d like to encourage you to dig deeper by getting a copy of the Bible study that Dannah has just released. It’s called, Habakkuk: Remembering God’s Faithfulness When He Seems Silent. We’d love to send you a copy of this study when you make a donation to support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts with a gift of any amount.

Revive Our Hearts is helping women around the world walk by faith in fearful times. And we’re so grateful to you for helping make that possible with your prayers and your financial support.

To make a gift, you can visit us at ReviveOurHearts.com, or you can call us at 1–800–569–5959. When you make your gift of any amount, be sure to ask for the Bible study on Habakkuk. It’s something you can do by yourself or, better yet, get a group of girlfriends around to do it with you even if you need to do it online. It will work great for that.

If you’ve missed the first four sessions in this series, be sure to go back and listen to them in the archives at ReviveOurHearts.com.

And now, Dannah, let’s review what we’ve been learning in Habakkuk’s school of walking by faith.

Dannah: Well, sure, Nancy, but let’s begin by saying that we’ve learned that it’s okay to wrestle with God—to bring your questions and your doubts directly to Him. And what a comforting truth that has been for me in this difficult year.

Maybe you have some big questions for Him during the global pandemic and the time of political and racial unrest. You know what? God is not afraid of our questions—He can handle them.

Nancy: Habakkuk also helps us to remember to bring those questions, those doubts to our heavenly Father with the reverence worthy of the God of the universe.

Dannah, one of the things I was really struck by when I first heard you teach this series is that Habakkuk embedded his questions with what he knew was true about God. That God was, for example, everlasting and all powerful.

What do you already know to be true about God? I want you to learn to stand on that truth when you bring your questions to God. As out of control as everything may seem in our world at this point.

Let me remind you that in the middle of this pandemic, my sweet husband Robert has been battling with cancer, is going through chemo. Through all of this I’ve been clinging even more tightly to a truth that I’ve learned from the Scripture, and that’s simply this: Heaven rules. Just two words. I say it over and over again. In the midst of my fears or my doubts or my questions, I keep pressing into that truth, what I know: Heaven rules. That’s what brings calm and stability to my wavering heart in these difficult days.

Dannah: Nancy, as you’ve been sharing that and saying that—for many years—but so frequently lately, it calms my heart. It’s so appropriate because what Habakkuk prophecies about, the coming Babylonian exile of the nation of Judah, Daniel actually lives through hundreds of years later. And he is the one that brings us that biblical statement: Heaven rules.

At one point Daniel is given an understanding of one of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, and he interprets it by telling the prideful king that no matter how much he thinks he’s in charge of Babylon and the nation of Judah at the time, heaven rules.

Nancy: Yes, Daniel chapter 2 . . . and those two words are circled in my Bible. They’re highlighted because, really, you could summarize the whole thread of Scripture in those words: Heaven rules.

Today it may look like we’re dependent on health care systems or the weather forecast or what’s happening with natural disasters or the government or even that we need to take care of ourselves. But at the end of the day, God is on His throne, and He rules over everything that’s going on in my life and in yours as well.

Dannah: Yes. In fact, another thing we learned is that the prophet Habakkuk climbs up into a proverbial watchtower to look to see where God is actually at work.

Nancy: What a sweet reminder that is that even when it’s hard to see, God is at work. So often He’s wanting to do a work, not just in our world, but in our own hearts.

I don’t know about you, but God has been working overtime in my heart this year, and I’m so thankful for it. Actually, it’s been through the pressures and the problems and the challenges that I’ve seen some of the sweetest fruit.

I’m thankful for the opportunity God has given me this year to live as if I actually do believe that I can trust Him to write my story. I’m so thankful that the Lord in His providence had Robert and me write a book on that very theme, You Can Trust God to Write Your Story, a year ago, and I believe that was His way of helping to prepare us for what we would face this year.

Now, as we’re walking through cancer, through chemo, we’re getting a chance to live out that message as we trust God to write this new chapter of our story.

Dannah: Nancy, it’s been so humbling to watch you live that out so well. And many of us are praying for you.

Nancy: Thank you.

Dannah: Well, today we’re coming to a part of the book of Habakkuk that stepped on my toes. We’re going to examine the pride and idolatry of Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian people, specifically five characteristics of them that we don’t want to have present in our own lives. And studying these, Nancy, was really a helpful, rigorous, self-inventory experience for me.

Nancy: Dannah, as you talked through this content, it was a good heart check for me, and I know it will be today for our listeners as well.

Now, find your way to Habakkuk chapter 2, and let’s listen in as Dannah continues in this series on “Habakkuk: Remembering God’s Faithfulness When He seems Silent.”

Dannah: If you’d met me in my twenties, you would have met a very fearful woman. I was afraid of my shadow. I was afraid of the dark. I was particularly afraid of public speaking. (Doesn’t God have a sense of humor?!)

My husband Bob and I, as we approached our wedding day, had a heart to share the gospel at our wedding. I was so excited about this. I believe that marriage is a picture of the gospel. It’s a picture of Christ’s love for the Church. We wanted so much to tell everyone that we were going to do our best to paint a beautiful picture of Christ’s love with our marriage . . . but I chickened out!

Not that I didn’t want to be a good testimony. I just couldn’t get myself to say what was essentially three or four minutes of words in front of the audience of roughly 250 people. I couldn’t do it. I was terrified.

But my fears went deeper than fear of the dark or fear of speaking in front of people. It really was a fear of being found out—a fear of being known. “If people really knew who you were . . . if people really knew your secrets” . . . that terrified me more than anything.

I came to a certain point where I just got so tired of being afraid that I began to just press into it and said, “Lord, I don’t want to be afraid anymore. Show me how not to be afraid.” And I’ve got to tell you: He didn’t go easy on me!

He took me through a process that made me realize that my fear was sin. He didn’t really feel sorry for me. He needed me to confess it and to repent.

It was during that time that the Lord gave me a treasure of what I consider to be my life verse. Let me read it to you. It’s from Psalm 25, verse 14, and it says:

The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him,and he makes known to them his covenant.

This verse just jumped off the pages at me. Do you recall when we were talking about hearing the voice of God, that it just has weight? I read that whole Psalm that day, and none of it had weight the way that this one did after I had just prayed, “Lord, help me to stop being afraid.” Then He showed me a verse that said, “Be afraid”—be very afraid. What?

But the first part of that verse really resonated with my heart—the friendship of the Lord. If there’s anything that my fear and hiding made me, it was lonely. I felt like nobody really knew me, and I couldn’t really share my dreams, my hopes because I’d be too terrified to try them if I did tell anyone.

I certainly didn’t want them to know about my sin—the sin that I was currently struggling with, and even the sin that I had long ago stopped struggling with. That was more terrifying to me than anything else.

So I rolled up my sleeves. I studied this verse. I said, “Lord, I think what You’re telling me is that everything I’m afraid of is because I’m not afraid of You, but I don’t understand that. So help me.”

Why would we be afraid of God? Do you ever think that when you see the verses that talk about fearing God? Like, He is my hope. He is my faithfulness. He is everything good in my life. He is every turning point I’ve ever known. So why would I be afraid of that?

So I studied the verse, and I found that the Hebrew word there for “fear,” basically meant, “to shake and quiver.” I was, like, “Well, Lord, that didn’t help me. I still don't understand.”

So I wrote a list of all of the verses in Scripture that talked about fearing God. And from all of those verses, I wrote my own definition. To this day I still remember it. It means, “to worship, to bow before, to submit to, to stand in awe of.” I think that’s what it means to fear God.

So I said, “Okay, Lord, I have this list of all of the fear-God verses, and I’m still terrified of speaking in public. I’m still afraid of the dark. I’m still afraid that somebody will find out who I really am. Help! I don’t understand.”

And then, as I encouraged you in our last session, sometimes we have to study the Word and then sit quietly and ask the Lord to help us understand. On that particular day, I thought, Okay, bow before, submit to, stand in awe, and worship. I’m going to do it.

I just love giving physical acts to the things that the Lord is teaching me, so I bowed before the Lord. I got down low, and I said, “Okay, Lord, I’m bowing before You. I’m worshipping You. I’m submitting to You. I’m standing in awe of You. I still don’t understand what it means to fear God. Will You help me?”

I closed my eyes, and I just waited. As I closed my eyes, I just had this sense that if I had to do the thing that scared me most, which would be to tell someone my sin, to tell someone my past, that there’s no way, if God asked me to do that, that I would bow before Him, that I would submit to Him, that I would stand in awe of Him.

In my mind I began to see that my life was one of bowing and submitting and standing in awe of people in my life, not God. It was what people might think if I made a mistake if I stood up and spoke at a stage, that kept me from standing in front of an audience and sharing the gospel at my wedding day. It was what people might think if they knew my sin and the fact that, “Oh, Dannah Gresh actually knew the Savior.” That was terrifying to me what they would think and how they would judge me.

God revealed to my heart that I was covered in the fear of man. Do you see the opposite of the fear of God is the fear of man. God has a lot to say about that in the book of Habakkuk. Because fear of man, as we talked about a few sessions ago, really makes us reactive. It makes us mean-spirited.

What we’re really trying to do is to protect ourselves. What we’re really thinking about all the time is ourselves. That kind of fear, fear of man, is a form of pride. And Habakkuk’s book speaks to that issue over and over and over again.

Today we’ve kind of come to one of the important habits of walking by faith, and it’s having the right kind of fear: Fear of God.

Now, let’s review where we’ve been.

We’ve been learning in Habakkuk’s school of walking by faith that we need to remember to wrestle with God, to take our questions to Him—not to social media, not to friends, not to other people that are going to conjure up more doubts, but to Him.

We’ve learned that we need to remember to look and see where He’s at work, and that His first concern is not the world around us but what’s going on in the condition of our hearts.

We’ve been remembering to embed our questions for the Lord with truth so that we come to Him with what we already know to be true when it seems like everything else is falling apart, and so that we come to Him with honor and respect.

And in our last session, we remembered to stand, watch, or to listen to God.

And then in this session, we’re going to talk about remembering to fear Him.

Now, just recall with me that the core verse or the thesis of Habakkuk is found in chapter 2, verse 4. It says:

Behold his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him, [talking about the Chaldeans and their pride and how puffed up they were] but the righteous [in contrast] shall live by his faith.

So the idea of living by faith or called to live by faith is introduced to us in contrast to pride. We cannot be women of fearfulness (fearing man) who are walking out our lives living pridefully and walk in faith. They’re two opposite directions. You can’t do it.

Pride is the opposite of faith. You can’t move in the way of something if you’re going in the opposite direction.

In chapter 2 God takes some time to reveal to us five evidences of prideful living. And these evidences are called “Woes.” Not only are they God saying, “Woe—that’s bad.” But He’s saying, “Woe to you because I’m going to fix that in your heart.”

He’s talking about the Chaldeans, but I think He is also talking to us and asking us to examine our hearts to see if any of these five “woes” are present in our hearts. We’re not going to read through every single one of them, but I want to highlight one verse for each of them.

Remember that the people of God are far from God—emotionally and spiritually. And it is these people, these proud, arrogant, puffed up, prideful people that God is going to use to take them into a physical exile so that they can really get to the point of feeling the pain of being far from God. What a thing!

Can you think of someone . . . I know looking at the faces in here—you have such sweet faces—who could possibly not like you? What enemies could you possibly have? But you probably have someone that rubs you a little bit the wrong way. How hard would it be if that person was used by God to address sin in your life? You would not like it one bit, would you? And neither would I!

But that is what God is saying. He’s sort of putting a mirror up to the people of Judah and saying, “Is it possible that some of these things are also present in you?” Let’s look at them.

The first “woe” we see—and if I were you, what I’ve done in my Bible is I’ve circled every time I see the word “woe,” and I’ve taken inventory of my heart in that specific area.

We see in chapter 2, verses 6b and 7a that they’re greedy and selfish, that “it’s all about me.” It says:

Woe to him who heaps up what is not his own—for how long?—and loads himself with pledges! Will not your debtors suddenly arise, and those awake who will make you tremble?

So He’s talking about how the Chaldeans would march into other people’s land and just steal from them, take from them. And then they would also sometimes make vassal nations, that is to say this nation was now subservient to them and had to pay them taxes. What right did they have? None! But they were greedy—“all about me.” They couldn’t live in harmony with the people groups that were next to them because they felt themselves to be so superior.

Now, we would never say that we feel superior to all the people around us, but we certainly do sometimes act it—when have to have the best seat in the house, or when we have to go first in line. I mean, little things prove how much we’re thinking about others around us and how much greed is alive and well in us.

I couldn’t help but in thinking through this (this is not what He’s speaking of in terms of the Chaldeans) but when it talked about the word “debtors,” I thought, Man, we really are a culture that loves to normalize debt. The average American household has about $100,000 of debt. That actually sounds low to me based on some of my friends who I know have had to dig out through having tons and tons of credit card debt, home debt, car debt.

Bob and I have really tried hard not to live in debt. God wants us to live free so that at any time our resources and our money are available for His service, for His use, not to make Dannah more comfortable.

Are we living greedy, selfish lives? Or are we living thinking about the person next to us and thinking about: How does my life serve and lift up the Lord?

The next thing we see, the next “woe,” is in Habakkak 2, verse 9. It says: 

Woe to him who gets evil gain for his house, to set his nest on high, to be safe from the reach of harm.

And it goes on to speak about this, and it’s still speaking about stuff. Right? But a different tone. It’s talking about placing our security in things—our security in homes—our security behind gates.

The Babylonians had a huge gate. They had huge mass of wide walls that horses and chariots could go across that wall. Why did they have that wall? Because they believed that everything inside of it was what kept them powerful, what kept them important.

You know, we have the same problem. We place false security in the things that we own—the size of our bank account, how much reserve we have to make it through hard times, how big our house is, what kind of clothes we wear, how new our car is.

I’m not saying that sometimes the Lord doesn’t bless us with some of those things, and I think that He loves to bless us with some of those things. But are we thinking that that is what makes us secure? It can turn on a dime—and it has in multiple times through history. As economies have collapsed over and over again, people who thought they were in comfort, suddenly were in poverty. Our security is not in the things that we own.

The third “woe” is tyrannical power. And we find this in Habakkuk 2, verse 12, where it says: 

Woe to him who builds a town with blood and founds a city on iniquity.

The Chaldean people, as they rose to power through the nation of Babylon, were ruthless. There are paintings and drawings and renderings and archeological writings about how they would treat their captives. We see in the particular book of Habakkuk there’s some troubling language in here. It’s hard to understand where it talks about, 

You make mankind like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler. He brings all of them up with a hook;he drags them out with his net. He gathers them with him in his dragnet (Hab. 1:14–15).

When I read that, I thought, Man, there’s a lot about fish in here. And I didn’t understand that. What is this? And I dug a little more deeply. Several of the commentaries I read led me to archeological documents, historical, ancient documents of antiquity that described how many of the people groups in that area—the Assyrians and Babylonians included—would often take a hook, like a fish hook, and stick it into the cheek of a captive, and they would line them, cheek to cheek, hook to hook, to march them into captivity. That’s horrible!

One of the drawings I came upon troubled me so much because it was a picture of an Assyrian king. He had his crown on. He has his royal robes on, and he looks so powerful and so regal. But it was a very gory picture. He also had two of his captives in front of him. One was bowing, and one was standing. Both of them had hooks in their cheeks. And the king was raising a sword to gouge out the eye of the one that was bending down.

They would take paintings like this, and they would put them in their museums. They were so proud of how strong and fearful they were as a people group. They were tyrants. They were terrorists. They were bullies.

I don’t think any of us are going to find ourselves in a picture like that one of the king, but we certainly do find ourselves putting ourselves so far above others that we’re hurting people that maybe God means us to protect. We’re reacting to people, maybe in our own homes, with unkind words. We might not carve out anyone’s eye, but certainly sometimes take a good stab at their heart. We can be tyrants with our tongues. Woe to us.

The fourth “woe” is found in Habakkuk 2:15 and several verses surrounding it. It says: 

Woe to him who makes his neighbors drink—you pour out your wrath and make them drunk, in order to gaze at their nakedness.

Now, I realize that in our culture today, where women sometimes are not treated with respect and honor and protection, the way that God designed them to be treated, that that can be a really inflammatory verse. It’s in there because God was upset about it. It’s in there because God was upset about it. And He says, “Woe to you.”

This kind of stuff is still alive and well in our culture. It wasn’t just the people that were being devalued, but, in Habakkuk, we find that God’s upset about how the land and the animals are treated as well. This is His land, His creation, His masterpiece, His art. And there is nothing more beautiful than the pinnacle of creation—His image—men and women created to look like Him.

Do we honor and respect that? Are we living in a culture that creates honor and respect for that? The Chaldean people did not. And I would suggest that sometimes our cultures also are guilty of that exploitation.

And the final “woe” we find in Habakkuk 2:19: 

Woe to him who says to a wooden thing—awake! To a silent stone arise.

The final “woe” we see is idolatry.

It seems crazy to me that somebody would carve something out of stone or out of wood and then bow before it and think, You can make me satisfied. You can meet my needs.

But don’t we do that with our lives every day when we put things in our heart to take up space, like entertainment, or money, or power, or our career. You name it—we can make an idol of it. We will carve it into something we will worship with our time, with our talent, and with our money. We’re guilty of this, too.

All of this is bookended by pride because it starts with our core verse where it talks about, “Hey! These people are puffed up, and they’re proud.” And then at the end we come back to idolatry, which, at the core of idolatry, is this whole sense that, “I can craft my own god. I can make my own god.”

Proud, puffed up people. People who don’t fear God. People who are struggling, just like I was, with fearfulness and living that doesn’t honor God, isn’t obedient to Him.

The only way I’ve found to overcome my fear of all the stuff that scares me is to tamp, destroy, and strangle my pride, because that’s what it’s all about. “Do I look good? Do I look capable? Do I look like I’m enough?”

Nancy from Habakkuk series: Idolatry is trusting in anything else or anything less than God made us. So, you trust in your money, you trust in your children, you trust in your husband, you trust in the economy, you trust in the government, you trust in yourself? It makes you an idol worshipper. You trust in your own creation.

And the point here is: How stupid is that? How foolish is it? The foolishness of making something with your hands, an inanimate object, and then bowing down and saying, “Help me! Help my crop. Help my fertility. Help my problems. Give me decisions. Tell me what to do.” How foolish is that?

Woe to those who speak to idols and say, “Do this and do that.” There’s no breath at all in that thing that you have made, that thing that you trust in.

Now we come to verse 20, and we see the contrast here: “But the Lord”—no idol here! No metal image. Nothing overlaid with silver and gold. “The Lord is in His holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before Him”—listening in awe, in reverence of God on His throne.

Don’t fret! Don’t be perturbed! Don’t be disturbed! Don’t be anxious! In His perfect time, He will accomplish His purposes. So in the meantime, stand before Him in humble silence, in reverence, in awe. Trust in Him. “The righteous shall live by his faith.”

Dannah: What a good reminder! We can trust Him. We can live by faith during this fearful year.

That was Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. I retrieved that bit of teaching from the archive of Revive Our Hearts. In twenty-four dynamic, information-packed sessions, Nancy teaches verse by verse through the three chapters that comprise the book of Habakkuk.

If you’ve been challenged by today’s program, you might want to go back and listen to this deep dive into this ancient book of prophecy.

You know, Nancy, that series is so relevant to the year 2020 even though you recorded it several years ago.

Nancy: God’s Word is always timely, and it’s always timeless. That’s one of the things I love about it.

And today, as you’ve helped us identify the pride and idolatry in our lives, Dannah, I thought to myself how often God orchestrates the timeliness of these messages.

As I said earlier, pride is deadly. Idolatry is dangerous. These things kill our desire to cry out to God. I’m so thankful, Dannah, that you’ve taken us to the Word today to expose those twin sins in our hearts, and just in time to prepare us for a month-long focus that’s going to begin here on Revive Our Hearts on Thursday, October 1.

We’re calling this month, Cry Out! And with everything that’s going on in our world, I just felt like we needed to take an entire month to focus on crying out to the Lord—for our own hearts, for our families, for our churches, for this nation, and for our world.

Our team has developed a 31-day Cry Out! prayer challenge. It begins Thursday, and you can get this email in your box every day starting October 1 through the month of October. You can get all the details and sign up to receive this 31-day email at ReviveOurHearts.com. This challenge starts the day after tomorrow, so be sure you sign up in time to receive that challenge.

Each day we’ll include a passage of Scripture to meditate on, a brief devotional, and then some prayer prompts to help you cry out to the Lord.

Thanks for listening to Revive Our Hearts today. And before we sign off, let’s begin now to cry out to God by asking Him to help us see where pride or idolatry could be snuffing out our desire to do just that. Here’s Dannah to pray.

Dannah: Lord, we confess to You that we are full of pride. We are full of ourselves. We are exhausted by the thought that we have about ourselves all day long. And, Father, sometimes we’re not really mindful of how much we’re thinking of ourselves, but we certainly are lacking thoughts of others and the proper fear of You.

This week, as we take inventory of our hearts, I pray that You would not make it easy—as You didn’t make it easy for me when You first revealed this to me in my twenties. Don’t make this an easy week, Lord. But at the end of the week, may we realize that we have experienced revival in our hearts as we have been repentant and mindful, probably of things that we’ve had blinders on concerning.

Let us see, Lord. Let us see our sin so that we can have the right kind of fear—the fear of God, that we might walk and live by faith. In Jesus’ name I ask this, amen.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth helps you identify the toxic symptoms of spiritual disease. The program is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.