Habakkuk—Week 3

Watch Dannah Teach—Is It Okay to Question God?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Is it okay to question God? Dannah Gresh says “yes.”

Dannah Gresh: When we’re in hard times and the spiritual amnesia is likely to set in, we go to God honestly, we go to God boldly, we go to God openly with our questions. Listen, He already knows what’s in your heart.

This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Surrender: The Heart God Controls, for Friday, September 25, 2020. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy: There really are times in life where we have a ton questions. I think we’re living in a year like that. We have questions about this worldwide pandemic, concerns about the economy, pain from racial division, and huge political differences. Maybe you’ve found yourself asking, “Why God!? This makes no sense. What's going on here?” You may even be facing what I’ve heard called a “grief within the grief”—some personal trials, on top of the national and global challenges we’re facing. Maybe you've been wondering:

• Why, God, would you allow me to walk through this lonely time as a single woman? 
• Why, God, did you give me a job only to have it taken away? 
• Why, God, were my parents taken from me in the middle of this time, when I couldn't even go into the hospital to say a final goodbye?

Though I haven't faced those personally myself, I have friends who have. Robert and I have certainly been experiencing grief upon grief this year as he has walked through a cancers diagnosis. So many of you have prayed for us this year, and I want to say to you a huge, “Thank you!”

We could not be more grateful for how the Lord has walked with us on this journey, how He has provided for us, and the sweetness of the prayers and encouragement that we have received from God’s people. We’re so grateful for that, but, again, that news threw our world into more of a tailspin, adding to the coronavirus that cancer diagnosis.

Of course, this wasn’t the first time I’ve faced deeply troubling circumstances. In fact, as I sat and listened to Dannah teach this series at the ˆ studio, the Lord brought to mind a really precious memory of something I learned on a really hard day of my life. 

You have heard me share before how in 1986 I was sitting at the memorial service for my then twenty-two-year-old brother, David, number six of the seven children in my family,  who had been killed in a car accident, a brother who beloved by everyone who knew him, he was preparing to go into ministry, he had come to love the Lord and had a real passionate heart for Christ and for people. Then his life was snuffed out. In God’s unfathomable will and providence, David was gone.

I remember sitting at that memorial service and hearing the pastor say, "It’s not wrong to ask why, as long as you ask not with a clenched fist but with a searching heart." Not with a clenched fist but with a searching heart. That was a huge word that I needed to hear that day.  I've needed that reminder many time since. You can say the same words and only God knows sometimes whether the heart is searching or clenched.

There’s a difference between those earnest, honest questions that we ask God and stepping over the line  where we’re making accusations or being demanding of God that He give us answers and the answers we want and in the time we want . . . a big difference.

Today, my dear friennd co-host of Revive Our Hearts, Dannah Gresh, will help us to learn how to ask the right kind of questions with the right kind of heart. She’s continuing in the series "Habakkuk: Remembering God’s Faithfulness When He Seems Silent." Let’s listen in.

Dannah: Bob and I live on a hobby farm in central Pennsylvania, and how I wish I could invite each of you over for an evening to meet all of our fur-babies. I call Bob “Farmer Bob” sometimes, because it’s definitely a tongue-in-cheek name. We aren’t farmers. We don’t know how to be farmers. Everything we’ve learned about keeping those animals alive, we learned on YouTube! And we’ve had some good success. Our animals have lived beautiful, long lives, with just a few exceptions.

I want to tell you about one of them that I miss so much. His name was Quito. He was a llama, and we got him when he was one month old. He had the most beautiful blue eyes. And the reason that the farmer that we got him from was so happy to give him to us is because those blue eyes aren’t an especially valuable trait in the llama world.

But oh, I loved them. I loved his personality. He would look at us with those big blue eyes and do the naughtiest things. My favorite thing was to watch him with his brother Dipstick who was named so because when he was born, he was all white except for the tip of his tail. It looked as if it had been dipped in oil. So it had nothing to do with his intelligence. It was purely a fitting metaphor for his tail.

But they would pronk at sunset. Now, you’ve probably never heard that word. Llamas have an entirely different vocabulary. When they lay down, it’s called cushing. And when they romp, it’s called pronking, and it was a sight to see.

Now, the naughtiest thing that Quito liked to do was stand in the watering trough, much to the chagrin of all of his pasture mates. They would not like drinking that muddy water. So every summer I would faithfully buy him a new baby pool, and I would put it out so that he could stand in his baby pool. (Can you say “spoiled”?) He was a good friend.

In 2018 in the fall, I was at a ministry conference for Revive Our Hearts in Indianapolis. I was gone for about a week. When I came home, I found Quito lying in the pasture. Now, whenever I see one of my babies lying in the pasture, I’m hoping they’re sunning themselves or taking a nice little nap. But I always make a mental note to check in a half an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour, to make sure that they’re moving.

Well, he wasn’t. So I walked out there, and he just looked at me with those big blue eyes. I pushed, and I prodded, and I tried to get him up. But he couldn’t do it. So I called the vet, and it didn’t take long for the vet to surmise that Quito had meningeal worm, which is the most insidious, horrific thing you can imagine.

They’re very rare, but they get into a host body. And there’s no sign that they’re even in there for quite some time, maybe even months, until the animal suddenly can’t start to stand because that worm is headed toward their spinal cord. That’s what they like for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It’s a horrific, horrible way for an animal to die.

Here’s the thing: The fact that one of my animals had one of those worms meant all of them were at risk. It was a really frightening couple of weeks as the vet treated every single one of them. We prayed over every single one of them.

After about a week, it was evident that we had beat that worm in Quito’s body, and that none of our other animals, praise the Lord, were infected. But he still wasn’t standing. Now, my vet told me he could be rehabilitated. So do you think that this girl who loves her fur-babies would stop at anything to figure out exactly how to do that?

Well, it wasn’t really a Farmer Bob and Dannah only project. It required very large numbers of friends from my church. We had to drag that fur baby into the farm barn. We had to build a lift. It would take, like, five men and several women cheering to lift him multiple times, trying to rehabilitate those muscles that weren’t working quite the way that they should.

But after about a week of this, we realized that it was far more torture than it was help to my sweet friend. So we had to call the vet. Bob and I sat there in the barn, and Quito was absolutely 100% normal except for the fact that he was never going to be able to stand again, which is no way for an animal to live.

So we talked with him, and we hand-fed him hay, and we said “goodbye.” And then as the vet administered the injection, we just touched him.

Life is a beautiful thing, and death is horrifying—every time. And when you see it, you have questions. Bob held me that night. He’s such a constant comfort, and when I have questions, a lot of the times he’ll hold me. 

I said, “Did I miss it? Did I make a mistake? Did I pray hard enough? Did I try hard enough?”

All the questions as he embraced me, and I embraced him. I think that’s how we’re supposed to bring our questions to God: in an embrace with a nearness and a closeness. Now, here’s the thing: That night, I had questions for God, too. I didn’t have the same posture. There was this thing in my head that I couldn’t get past: “God, I was serving You. I was away doing things for Your glory. Why could you let such an evil thing happen to my friend?”

Now of course, losing a llama is a small problem in the scope of life. But my friend, Kim Michell, just this past year, she saw the beauty of life, and she saw the horror of death. But it wasn’t a fur-baby. It was her sweet husband Kerry who didn’t win a four-month wicked battle with stomach cancer. I held her. She embraced me. And she asked me questions I did not know the answers to.

You know the hardest one? I’ve never seen two people have more faith than Kim and Kerry Michell—never in my life—when asking the Lord for healing. She looked me in the eye, and she said, “How could God not honor that faith? I had so much faith. I never even said ‘goodbye.’ Why didn’t God answer our prayers?”

Hard questions.

Is it okay to ask the Lord hard questions like that?

Well, as we journey through Habakkuk, I think we find the answer is a resounding, “Yes!” God gives us permission through the example of Habakkuk to ask hard questions.

Now, in our most recent session together, we learned that God really is concerned with everything that’s going on around us in our world. He says that He loves the sparrows. So I think He probably even had concern for Quito. But I know He loves us, and He had great concern for my friend Kerry.

But he’s more concerned with fixing what’s going on in our hearts than He is with fixing the circumstances of this temporary world, which, let me remind you, is not our home. He’s working on bringing us home, and He wants our hearts to be prepared to be in intimate communion with Him.

Now, I want to remind you that Habakkuk is a deep dive because you might be saying, “Where are the moments of eureka that you were talking about? I’m waiting for them.” Well, when you go for a deep dive in the ocean to see the wonders, it takes a while to get there. 

Today I want to go back to what we talked about that first day, and that is that Habakkuk gives us a permission slip to wrestle with God, to ask our hard questions. Hopefully you’ve been doing that. But today we need to revisit that because you need to know how to ask those questions. There’s a proper way to do it, and there’s a dangerous way to do it.

God is God, and we must approach Him with respect. Today we’re going to look at how Habakkuk does that.

Now, let’s remember Habakkuk’s name. Habakkuk used questions to talk to God, and in doing so, he lived up to his name. Habakkuk is an Akkadian word that means either “wrestler” or “embracer.” Which one was it? Well, we’re going to take a look and find out that I think maybe it was both. I think maybe he wrestled at times, and I think maybe he embraced at times. And that’s very significant.

If you’re taking notes, I invite you to write the word “wrestler,” and then right under it, write Habakkuk 1:1–4. Those were some of the verses we looked at in our first session.

Let me just look at verse 4 for a moment. It’s almost smack talk. Like, this is not the kind of respect you should bring to the God of the universe. He says, “So the law is paralyzed and justice never goes forth, for the wicked surround the righteous. So justice goes forth perverted.”

Habakkuk looks at God and says, “Your law is paralyzed.”

Wow! What audacity to speak to the Lord this way.

Now, there is some level of respect. He begins with, “O Lord.” But then that’s it. He lets loose. He’s wrestling with God. It’s very accusatory. It’s combative. His heart is wrestling.

Now, we come to a place in the book of Habakkuk where I believe there is a progression in the way he’s questioning God. He still has questions. He’s still asking them, but he’s doing it with a different posture. Maybe it’s the sobering news that God has just told him, “I have seen what’s going on in your world, and I do have a plan. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

Maybe he’s been sobered up and reminded that God is God. Or maybe it’s the fact that he’s maturing. Maybe he’s spent some time with the Lord and thought about this. We don’t know the time frame between those first few verses and the ones I’m about to read, but we do see that there’s a shift in his posture and the way he’s handling his questions with God.

Let me read Habakkuk 1, verses 12 and 13. (This is the second time Habakkuk asks God some hard questions.) 

Are you not from everlasting, O LORD my God, my Holy One? We shall not die. O LORD, you have ordained them as a judgment, [speaking of the Chaldeans who will come up against His people—You have ordained them as a judgment] and you, O Rock, have established them for reproof.

You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong,why do you idly look at traitors [you see, he’s still got some hard questions] and are silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?

Yep, Habakkuk is still asking questions, but do you hear how they’re now embedded with new respect? They’re embedded with truth. Let me point to just a few of the things that I see here.

First of all, he begins with “Are You not from everlasting? O Lord, are You not from everlasting?” He affirms what he already knows to be true. Now, he’s kind of probably asking, “Are You really everlasting?” But he knows that he’s learned that. He knows that he’s learned that God is everlasting, and he is depositing that into his question. I think that matters.

And the second thing we see that he says, “O LORD,” twice. Now, when he said that, he was using the covenant name of God, Yahweh. Now, faithful Jews could not think of the word covenant without thinking of faithfulness. They were somewhat synonymous to them. And so, in using that covenant name, he is declaring God to be faithful. He’s standing on that because he knows that is true.

Another thing we see is he says, “My God, my Holy One.” How precious that is. He’s getting closer, isn’t he? He’s becoming more intimate in the way that he talks with God. He’s remembering, “You’re mine.”

There is a sweetness in these questions that wasn’t in the first set. He’s not a distant God. He’s a personal one. Habakkuk is standing on that because he knows that is true.

And he calls God, “The Rock,” meaning He won’t be moved. He knows that God is strong. He knows that that is true.

What we see Habakkuk doing in these second set of questions that he wasn’t doing quite as vigorously in the first set is he is embedding his questions with what he already knows to be true about God.

I think it’s so important when we’re in hard times and the spiritual amnesia is likely to set in, that we go to God honestly. We go to God boldly. We go to God openly with our questions. Listen: He already knows what’s in your heart. He already knows your thoughts, what’s in your mind. You might as well speak them to Him. But could we do it by standing on what we already know to be true about God?

If you’re taking notes, I would write the word “embracer” on a line and under it Habakkuk 1:12–17. Maybe you just want to write that in your Bible. (I like to write in my Bible.)

Now, he’s becoming more inquisitory with his questions, and he’s clinging to God. There’s a nearness, and there’s an intimacy. I think that Habakkuk has wrestled with God, and I think he has also become an embracer.

What I believe he’s teaching us is this habit of faith. That when we ask God hard questions, we must embed them with truth. We must stand on what we already know and understand about God.

Do you recall in our first session we talked about faith and fear being sumo wrestlers in my head? Now, I don’t know if you’ve got a set in your head, but they’re in there. They’re constantly wrestling—faith trying to win; fear and pride trying to win.

Now, if they are sumo wrestlers, which is the analogy that works for me, then you’ve got to feed one, train one, develop the muscles of one if you expect it to win the wrestling match. And that’s where standing on God’s truth becomes so important.

We have to feed our faith in devastating times more carefully, more faithfully, more vigilantly than any other time. We must feed it at all times, but it is so hard in times of devastation to hold on to our hope and faith.

Now, I have this really difficult memory from just a few years ago. When it just felt like my personal world was falling apart, a lot of things were converging to be difficult—things in my marriage, things in my ministry, things in my personal life. I was becoming an empty nester, and walking through the grocery store could be a call for alarm and a breakdown.

I remember one time I went to buy ketchup, and I realized I didn’t need the family size. So I just had a great big meltdown in the ketchup aisle. I just felt outside of my mind.

I don’t know if you’ve ever walked through a season in your life where the pain is so great that your brain stops working the way that it once did. I found that I wasn’t thinking as clearly, thinking as quickly, understanding things. One of the big challenges for me was anytime there was silence, the wrestling match started up in my head, and the fear was winning. The fear was winning day after day after day.

And here’s the big problem: Because my brain wasn’t working the way that I would have liked, when I read the pages of my Bible, it just didn’t seem to make sense. How do you stand on truth when you can’t concentrate? How do you stand on truth when you can’t remember it? How do you stand on truth when you can’t think straight to recall it?

I called one of my girlfriends, and she said, “Ah, you need some index cards.”

And I said, “Okay. Explain.”

She said, “You know precious truths about God. Tight now I want you to back away from your Bible study.” (You do not get to back away from your Bible study because we’re in the middle of a very important Bible study. But there are times when you need to back away from the deep, deep, deep work because you need to cling to God, and you need to just be held.)

And so she said, “Your assignment for right now is find one verse a day to treasure. Find the one you need. If you have to, Google it. If the wrestling match is saying, ‘This is happening in your life,’ then find the truth by Googling it and just write it on a note card and carry it around with you all day.”

And that’s all I could do—that’s all I could do. What a treasure this ugly set of note cards. This might look like something that’s falling apart. I’m telling you, this held me together. I had so many questions. “Lord, I . . .” and I would go, and I would look at these words.

Let me see if I can find one for you. This is one. I said, “Lord, what kind of testimony can I have if my life is broken, if I’m full of fear? How can I teach Your Word? How can I lead teens and women in God’s truth if I can’t stand on it myself?”

And I found Revelation 12:11, “And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.”

And that particular day I just thought, Lord, if this hurt has to happen, can You make it a powerful testimony in Your life? You say that we overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony.

I stood on that truth while I said, “Lord, why do I have to get this testimony? Why do I have to have this testimony? I don’t really want to tell anyone this testimony.” I stood on the truth of what I knew.

Are you standing on truth when you ask the Lord your hard questions? Let me say, it’s okay if you started out wrestling—we all do. And it’s even okay if you’re still wrestling. But I invite you, as you’re able, gather girlfriends around you like I did, because sometimes we need that. Ask them to help you grow into an embracer, to bring God your questions while He holds you.

Let me encourage you to start embedding your questions with truth, punctuate your questions with more than a question mark. Use Scripture. Stand on what you do already know to be true.

Now, as I have studied Habakkuk, and I hope this happens for you, I have come to see all of the pages of the Bible so much differently. That could probably be true if I studied another book of the Bible. This is just the first time I have taken a deep, deep dive.

Did you know that you were in the hands of a woman who’s written her first Bible study? Oh, I’m sorry, but if you’ll just dig deep, I think you’ll see things differently.

One of the things that I saw was that the book of Hebrews is a book about questions. I didn’t see that before. And you know what else I didn’t see before? That it was written for the Hebrews. Okay, that was pretty blonde of me. I only say it to say this: As long as I’ve studied the Word—and I’ve studied it very diligently—there’s still so much that I’m learning.

And somehow, being in the pages of Habakkuk and understanding the pain of the Hebrew people made me look at this book differently.

Also, because I have been studying Habakkuk’s questions, I thought, “Oh my, those Hebrews, they did not get over their question asking, did they?” They’re still asking the questions in the time of the New Testament. Paul writes to them to help them remember their faith, to help them get over their spiritual amnesia.

Listen to this encouragement—it is such rich truth for you to stand on. I hope you’ll stand on it today. Hebrews 10:35–39 says, “Therefore do not throw away your confidence . . .” Oh, we could stop there, couldn’t we?

Do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, [Oh, do we ever!] so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised. For, ‘Yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay; [Get ready for this!] but my righteous one shall live by faith, [Whoa! There’s Habakkuk again!] and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.’ But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.

Maybe that’ll be your first index card verse. If you need it, I’m loaning it to you today. I kind of needed it this week.

Let us not be women who shrink back. Let us be women who do not lose our confidence, but let us be women who live by faith.

Now, in the following chapter of Hebrews, we find that great hall of faith where men and women who have walked in faithfulness are applauded. They’re acknowledged. We are invited to get on the seating chart. We are invited to be in that hall of faith, but we must persevere. Yes, we will have questions in this broken world that is not our home, but let us embed those questions with truth.

As we close today, let me remind you that Habakkuk is a book of prophecy. Much of what he’s writing about hasn’t yet happened. We will see it unfold in the book of Daniel in the years to come.

I want to pause at that. There’s a lot of prophecy in Scripture that hasn’t yet happened for us today. Twenty-five percent of the Bible is prophecy, and a big chunk of that we’re still waiting to see unfold.

Habakkuk teaches us to treasure those prophecies and to stand in faith for those prophecies.

I want to pause at the thought that there’s two ways we can respond.

The first is to embrace the burden and join the faithful in passing on the baton of the remembrance.

I hope you are loving the book of Habakkuk as I have loved it. I have been praying so hard that you would. It is a baton of faith for us to pass on. I think that Habakkuk passed it on to Daniel, to Shadrach, to Meshach, and to Abednego, and that is why they walked with such faith in Babylon.

But we have prophecies to pass on, too. Can we be like Habakkuk and pass on the faith that our brothers, our sisters, maybe our grandchildren or children, or maybe we will have to walk through those prophecies. We’re going to need a lot of faith.

Can we pass the baton on? Because the other opportunity is this: We can reject that responsibility. We absolutely can. And many have. We can reject the responsibility and selfishly nurture the contagion of spiritual amnesia in our world.

Habakkuk seems to have stood alone in Jerusalem. It looked to me like many were rejecting their responsibility to pass on faith, but he did not.

But I want to tell you this: Whether or not you pick up the baton to pass it on or whether or not you reject the responsibility, you’re going to have questions. Remember to embed your questions with God’s truth. Stand on what you already know to be true about our good and faithful God.

Nancy: Dannah, as you were sharing about the index cards and embedding your questions in truth, I thought of a friend, Monica Vaught. She serves here at Revive Our Hearts. During the pandemic while we were sheltering in place and all of us working at home, my heart kept going out to single women in particular who were by themselves at home, working, faithfully serving and seeking the Lord. I was praying, "Lord, encourage and strengthen them.

I love something that Monica did that I was reminded us as you shared. During that, she sent out a newsletter to her supporters. She said, "As I was in the Word each day, I would find a verse or two that spoke to me, and I started writing them out on 3x5 cards. As I started to collect them, I began taping them to the window blinds in my new home office."

She didn't have a home office, but she created a home office during the sheltering in place during the pandemic. She said, "Before I knew it, the blind was covered. She sent me a picture of some of those cards. I'll read a few of them to you. They are Scripture verses or short sayings that were good reminders. One was one of my favorites:

• Heaven rules!
• "The God of all grace will Himself restore you and make you strong, firm, and steadfast." 1 Peter 5:10
• "Wait for the Lord. Be strong and let your heart take courage. Wait for the Lord." Psalm 27

Her blind is covered with dozens of these 3x5 cards that were truths from God's Word that she was embedding in her heart and mind during this time when a lot of people were going crazy.

That's what happens to our minds if we don't fix them on Christ and His Word; we do go crazy really easily.

Dannah: I had so much fun watching her post those on social media as she would add them to her blinds, sharing them with us. They were great for my heart during those troubling times as well.

Nancy: She here she was sheltering in place, encouraging not only her heart but our hearts as well. She when on to write in her newsletter, "Again, it is a simple act but it brought encouragement to my soul. Now as I look out each day, I see my neighborhood . . ."

She's not just looking at herself and her problems, she's looking out at her neighborhood. She says, "This has become a sweet reminder to me of how we should view the world through the lens of God's Truth, His Word, and His promises. That brings hope."

So in these hard places, when our emotions are going rouge, and our thoughts are going crazy with the realities of what's going on around us, to focus our minds and fix them on Jesus and the things that we know are true . . . as Habakkuk did.

That gives us hope and perspective and our ability to see the world and our lives through the lens of truth. 

Dannah: That’s the kind of thing that a woman who is walking by faith does. She keeps God’s truth right in front of her which enables her to remember God’s faithfulness.

Nancy: That's exactly what we want to encourage you to do. One tool to help you stay in God’s Word during these challenging days is a new Bible study Dannah’s written called, Habakkuk: Remembering God’s Faithfulness When He Seems Silent. We’d love to send you a copy when you make a donation to support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts with a gift of any amount today. You’ll be helping us equip women all around the globe bring their questions to God and to embed them with truth from His Word.

To make your donation, call us at 1–800–569–5959. Be sure to ask for the Dannah's study on Habakkuk. Or you can make your gift and request this thank-you gift by visiting ReviveOurHearts.com.

Next week we’ll get to some really good news as Dannah continues in the series on Habakkuk. I call the verses she’ll teach on “the turning point,” because the prophet does something that positions him to take control of the questions and doubts and begin to walk by faith. Maybe you want to know what it is that this man of many questions did so you can get to the turning point in this difficult year. Well, we’ll learn about it on Monday. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants you to know how to bring your hard questions to God. It’s an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV.