Faith and Despair

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger. We’re missing Bryan Broome today.

We have come to the last days of the kingdom of Judah and the prophecy of Habakkuk, or how do you say it, Greg?

[guttural Habakkuk] Just because it’s more fun to say it that way. I don’t know if it’s any more accurate. It’s a little book buried in the minor prophets that no one can ever find.

Just off the top of my head I can’t even identify the part of the song that it comes in.

That’s how everyone learned the minor prophets, from the song.

…Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk…there we go, I found it. It comes after Nahum, if you’re wondering, or if you’re on your Bible app you just type in Hab and go.

The themes that we’re looking at in the book of Habakkuk are faith and despair. Do these come at the very beginning of the book? Are they telegraphed? How do they come in?

Habakkuk is writing, as you say, in the last days of the kingdom of Judah. It isn’t quite clear to Habakkuk what direction the future is going, but he knows that the culture surrounding him is full of wickedness, violence, sexual sin, drunkenness, and idolatry – in other words, a lot like today. And being a man who fears God, he comes before the Lord and points out all this and says, “Lord, you really should do something about this. This is horrible. All of this is happening.” Let me read a little bit…

Therefore the law is slacked, and judgment doth never go forth: for the wicked doth compass about the righteous; therefore wrong judgment proceedeth.

“In the courts, in society, everything is wrong. All the important people are making all the wrong decisions. It’s just absolutely horrible, Lord,” with the implication of, “and you need to do something about this. Why aren’t you doing something?”

Why dost thou shew me iniquity…O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear!

He could be living today. And God answers him. He says –

Behold ye among the heathen and regard and wonder marvellously: for I will work a work in your days which ye will not believe, though it be told you.

Okay, God’s going to do something. That’s great. “It’s going to be something spectacular and unusual, something you aren’t even going to believe is happening.”

“Okay, I can handle that.”

For lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and nasty nation, which shall march through the breadth of the land…

“What?”

“That’s not what we were hoping for.”

Yeah, this is not really it. And God goes on and describes the Chaldeans in some military detail. He goes on to say that in the end the Chaldeans are going to be so successful that they will give all the praise to their god. “We’ve got the coolest gods because we’ve got the coolest army because we’re just conquering everybody left and right. Aren’t we cool?”

Habakkuk does not exactly know what to do with this. He says –

Art thou not from everlasting, O LORD my God, mine Holy One? We shall not die.

He’s putting that out as, “Right? We’re not going to die? There’s nothing in here about us absolutely dying and not existing anymore, either personally or as a nation.”

O LORD, thou hast ordained them for judgment; and O mighty God, thou hast established them for correction.

“Okay, got that. We need correction. We need to be chastised and we are going to come out of this alive somehow, to some degree.” But then a theological question arises before his eyes.

Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity…

“So why are you using the Chaldeans, who are more wicked than we are, to punish us for our wickedness? That doesn’t seem like the God I’m supposed to know. God is holy and just. How can he pick up a really wicked weapon to punish a relatively wicked people?”

I don’t know what Habakkuk was thinking. Maybe he just thought God would just step in and do something directly. He doesn’t seem to be expecting revival. He seems to be expecting judgement, something that will stop the evil, but he hasn’t mentioned the outpouring of God’s Spirit or any such thing. But when he looks at who’s going to be the instrument, that’s just too much. He can’t wrap his head around this one.

I think of the saying, “God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick.” The point is that the instruments God uses, the people, are still sinful people, and the point is there aren’t any others. Of all the nations that should have been upright, Israel should have been it. They had this relationship with God, this covenant relationship, and they’re the ones who need rebuking. It’s just deeply ironic.

So Habakkuk finishes his protest and says, “Well, no kidding they’re going to give all the credit to their god, because you’re just going to let them get away with murder,” more or less literally. And for a time, God falls silent.

We move into the second chapter and Habakkuk says –

I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me and what I shall answer when I am reproved.

So he decides, “I’m going to wait. I’m going to be patient. I’m not going to badger God. I really would like an answer now, but it’s not coming apparently, so I’ll wait and I’ll think about this and think about what maybe God’s going to say, then think about how I’m going to respond when he says that which actually makes me look like an idiot or a rebel, depending on how this is going to play out.”

Think back to Job. “God demanded that Job answer him, and Job was lame, so I’ll think about it, without even really knowing what I’m thinking about,” and time passes, and then God does answer.

And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables…

That is, write it in some kind of book form that will be permanent.

…that he may run that readeth it.

“So that someone can run up to this thing, look at what I’ve said, and then run off and tell everybody. This is not a secret. It’s going to be permanent. It’s going to be from generation to generation. Here it is. I’m going to tell you what it is, but you’ve got to wait for it. It’s going to come in its due time, but it will come. Here it is.”

Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith.

At first glance I suspect that that sounds a little like a letdown. He’s looking for something really profound with lots of multisyllable words and cross-references to all kinds of passages, backed up by some treatise on theology.

The first part is “His soul which is lifted up is not upright in him,” so the proud man is not upright. “Lord, knew that one.”

“Yeah, I came here for some amazing sign. I didn’t want like a moral judgement.”

“Alright, so you’re talking about us? Our pride? We’re lifted up? Okay. Or are you talking about the Chaldeans? Wait, could you be talking about both of us? But they’re pagans and we’re your people. Oh, we might both be guilty of pride and not be right with you? And you will deal with that? It has nothing to do with ethnicity or religious background or what rites and ceremonies you pass through or who your parents were or what promises God gave in the past? It has to do with whether or not you’re proud and lifted up?”

As Habakkuk meditates on the law at hyper-speed, “Alright, yes, yes. Psalms, Proverbs, yes. Ecclesiastes, yup. Job, for sure. So God is no respecter of persons. God holds all of the proud accountable. He brings them all to naught, whether they’re Jew or Gentile. Okay. How about the second part, though? ‘But the just shall live by his faith’?”

Again it may sound like a simple moralism, a religious truism, and yet Paul in Romans and then in Galatians, and the writer of Hebrews both take this verse and build major arguments and multiply words and chapters in the New Testament based on this one obscure verse from this one obscure minor prophet. “The just shall live by his faith.”

When I taught through this in Bible study several months ago now, we worked through the Habakkuk passage here, and then I spent a further night seeing what Paul does with it in Romans, and then another looking at what he does with it in Galatians, then finally a third night in what the writer of Hebrews does. It took that much time just to milk for what’s on the surface in the New Testament, so we’re not going to do justice to it tonight, but there are some things we can say.

There are three words that are important: just, live, and faith.

The first is, how are you right with God? As Habakkuk is honest with himself and honest about his people, he can figure out pretty quickly, “We’re all proud. Part of the reason that I’m objecting is I’m proud over the fact that God is using Gentiles to judge us, because we’re better than them, aren’t we? Oh wait, you mean we’re not? Oh.

“That’s pride, isn’t it? I was condemning my own people. Wait, was there pride in that maybe? But then when I heard about the Chaldeans coming, I was really upset because we should be better than them. We are better. We have the promises. We have Abraham as our father. If this is so, if we’re all guilty of pride and our souls are lifted up and it’s all about us, then how shall a man be right with God?”

And again his mind might go back to Job. “How shall a man be just with God?” It’s a good question. If God is holy and just, infinitely so, he demands a perfect righteousness, and Habakkuk as he considers these things can really quickly realize just at a superficial glance, “I’m not perfect, and further consideration will show me how not perfect I am. I can look at my people and they’re worse than I am, and the Chaldeans are worse still. But we all have this in common – none of us measures up to the righteousness of God. So do we all fall in the first category of being proud and our souls lifted up and God is going to judge us? But is there some other kind of righteousness, then?”

We’ll skip to the third word, which is faith. Faith means belief of the truth, and it means trust. The answer of the Heidelberg catechism, “What is true faith?” is “True faith is not only a certain knowledge, that is a sure knowledge, whereby I hold for truth all that God has revealed to me in his Word, but it’s also a hearty trust which the Holy Spirit works in me by the gospel,” and it goes on to tell us what that certain knowledge and certain truth is. It’s about Jesus and the salvation he provides.

Faith is, first of all, an informed faith. It knows stuff. It’s not just, “Well, I hope things will turn out. I have confidence in confidence alone.” No, it’s belief in something God has revealed, so first you have to know it, but then you have to believe the message, and that means believing the person who gave the message. Do we trust the gospel or do we trust God? Yes, because the message is from God, and to believe his words is to believe him. To trust the words is to trust him.

So being in a right relationship with God somehow hinges upon not that I’ve done everything I should have, but that I can trust God to somehow cover all that I have not done, and all the wrong things I have done.

So it’s righteousness by faith, and as Habakkuk contemplated this his mind might go back to Genesis 15, where Abraham looks at the stars of heaven and believes God’s promise that his seed will be equally innumerable. Abraham believes God and it’s counted to him for righteousness. Paul will develop the phrase “justification by faith.”

Then there’s the other word, the second word – live. It’s not simply to be alive and survive, but live. This is something the writer of Hebrews spends a lot of time with when he comes to talk about faith. He mentions, yes, we’re right with God by faith, and he keeps bringing it up again and again. A lot of it’s in the chapter we all know, Hebrews 11, the faith chapter, the heroes of faith. He keeps coming back to, “…and so became heirs of the righteousness which is by faith,” and “He had this testimony that he pleased God.”

Again and again that’s there, and yet the focus of the chapter is these great men and women of faith lived by their faith. It wasn’t just a one-time thing that brought them to God in Christ. It wasn’t something that saved their souls for heaven, that you then put on a shelf and pick it up occasionally and look at it, but it’s the motivating force and power and direction of their lives.

That’s what Habakkuk needs to know. Why would you need to know that? Habakkuk has already seen why you need to know that. The world is confusing. God’s providences are confusing. God’s sovereign reign is confusing. It all comes up in, “If I were God, I would…”

See, that’s it. I have noticed many times in the last several months particularly that I’d be really rotten at being God. “If I were God I would do it this way,” and then I stop myself and say, “And Lord, I don’t know how you’re going to do this, but I know you’re not going to do it my way because it’s my way and my way’s got to be wrong.” I’m all for the “smite them a good deal” kind of thing, but God has much subtler ways.

Maybe now is the time to pull back the veil a little to what Habakkuk does not know and is not exactly told. “So the Chaldeans are coming. They’re going to overrun your nation. They’re going to lay siege to Jerusalem and take it. Your king is going to be under their thumb for a while. Your people are going to be rebellious and stupid until they draw down the wrath of the Chaldeans, at which point the Chaldeans will come and will obliterate your city, destroy the temple, raze it to the ground, take all of your people captive, carry them away to Babylon and points beyond, and you’re going to be there for 70 years, all of you.

“At the end of that time I’m going to bring a lot of you back, but by no means all. A lot of you are just going to stay in pagan lands and settle down and have kids, and they’re going to have kids, and you’re going to keep spreading and moving and being merchants and pursuing the call of the road, until eventually you’re going to have communities all over the Babylonian empire, and after that the Persian empire, and after that the Greek empire, and after that the Roman empire.

“You guys are just going to keep spreading out all over the place, and many of you will never come back to Israel, but a remnant will. They’re going to rebuild the temple and the city, and they will be under the thumb of yet another pagan dictator, and then another one after that, and then another one after that. Their time of freedom and self-determination will be very brief. And yet in all of this I’m setting things up for Messiah to come, because the Babylonians are going to take you captive and spread you all over the place and you’re going to keep going.”

There’s that. So eventually there will be Jewish communities spread throughout the known world with their synagogues, their preaching stations, with their completed Old Testaments, bearing witness to the Gentiles around them, worshiping every Sabbath day, and telling them that there’s this Messiah, this Savior who’s coming.

“The next empire is going to send you back home, protect you, and rebuild the temple. The third empire is really going to be annoying insofar as it’s anything, but they’re going to spread their language all around the world and it will be the language that I’m going to write the rest of scripture in.

“The fourth empire, they’re just going to be mean and nasty and vicious and stomp on everybody, but in the process they’ll do that to everybody equally, so hey, the world will call it peace and there will be roads and post services and they’ll administer rather impartial justice so that for a few hundred years my servants will be free to go all over the world and declare the advent of Messiah.”

Habakkuk didn’t get to know any of that. What he got to know was, “I’m God. I’m in charge. I’ve got a plan. Trust me one day at a time, moment by moment. What seems to be coming may seem overwhelming, impossible. How can the kingdom of God ever go forward in this? How can a Messiah ever come? Is there an end? Will the wicked always prosper? Will the righteous always be under their thumb?”

And God’s answer is, “No, but I’m not telling you how it’s going to work.”

If we had a book that chapter-by-chapter told us our future, year-by-year, month-by-month, who we’re going to marry, how many children we’re going to have, where we’re going to live, what our investments are going to be, what callings we will move through, where we’ll work, who our boss will be, whether they’ll be nice bosses or bad bosses, how many grandchildren we’re going to have, who’s going to be the next president, and the president after that, and the president after that, what the next five major decisions the Supreme Court will….”

If we had that, our lives would require very little in the way of faith. We would just say, “Oh,” as the days passed. “Look, what God said happened. Oh, it happened again! Oh look, it happened. It’s just a book full of checking off all these things that God said would happen. Isn’t it nice to know all that God knows that pertains to me, so I never have to worry about anything?”

I feel like we would also be rather disappointed.

“It’s all in the book. I read the book.”

And there’s nothing but what’s in the book.

“Yeah, I don’t have to worry.” Do we have to worry or do we choose to worry? As we look at the world around us, do we fall into despair? Is that because, “Well, no one can be hopeful in the midst of this,” or is it because we refuse to trust the sovereign God?

Sometimes our theologies are so bad that we don’t even know what the word sovereign means. You know there are evangelical Christians who don’t know what the word sovereign means? There are evangelical Christians who have never heard the word, first of all. They haven’t got a clue. But there are people who hear sovereign and they don’t understand what that means.

They think, “Really big, really powerful,” but “He does according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth, and none can stay his hand or say unto him, What doest thou?” and who works all things after the counsel of his own will, who orders that all things work together for good to them who love him, those who are called according to his purposes.

“You mean my sickness? The death of my child? I lost my job. The fire that wiped out my whole town? God ordained that? That’s not a nice God. I don’t like that.”

Well, that’s the God you’ve got. Would it be more comforting if all those things happened and God had absolutely no control over them?

No, it would not.

It would be frightening, I think.

Then we’re thrown back with Habakkuk of, “Alright Lord, you have a plan. It’s obviously not my plan. This is not the way I would do it. You are wiser than I am. You are holier than I am. You love your people more than I love them, or more than I love myself in any right sense, so I’m going to believe. I’m going to trust that you know what you’re doing, and that you’re not going to let anything fall through your fingers. I’m going to believe that all things work together for my good.”

And though all things may not in the moment be equally good – things that hurt, hurt; things that are sad are sad, yes – but there is a point and there’s a process and a plan, and in time God will accomplish his purposes. And when he’s all done, they may not look at all like what we thought they would look like.

Just to give you one example that comes readily to mind, in the wake of the Reformation a lot of Christians in the Protestant tradition were looking for a second reformation. “It’s got to be coming soon, right? I mean God started the process. He’ll do another reformation.” Guess what? He never did, not like that. Then came the revivals. “Oh, that’s it! God’s going to do revivals.”

And awakenings.

The Great Awakenings – the first awakening and the second awakening, and they go on and on and on, and they all are less and less effective than the ones that came before. We keep waiting for, “Well, God will send us a great revival.” He’s not done it that way yet. Maybe he will. Maybe there is another reformation coming up, but I doubt it’s going to look like the first one.

It can’t. The world is not now what it was then.

Exactly, it’s not the same world.

To pick for a moment upon our Scots friends, because they’re easy to pick on, do we really expect the whole world to sing Scottish metric psalms with a Scottish dialect all across the world one day? At least at one time there were probably Scots Presbyterians who said, “Well, of course, that’s the way it’s got to be.” No, any more than America is going to be replicated all over the globe.

There was a time it was America. “Well, that’s how God does things. Every nation needs to look like America. We need to export republican democracy,” or whatever we call the thing. That hasn’t worked so well.

God is the God of newness, the new thing he does in the earth. We make a mistake when we think that God is going to take us back to some point in history and make it like that again. “If we could only go back to colonial America, Puritan New England, Elizabethan England, to Calvin’s Geneva. How about just the antebellum South? How about the Victorian age?”

“Oh yeah, that’s a place to…”

“Jane Austen?”

“I’m sorry, no. I don’t want to.”

“The 1950s and Leave It To Beaver. That’d be great! Or Camelot! Alfred’s England?”

We pick times and places and we think, “Wow, these were really great times. If the world were just like this…”

All of those things stopped being what they were because they were imperfect, and because of their imperfections they eventually collapsed into something that wasn’t so hot, that wasn’t so good.

I do not want to go back to the 1950s. I was born at the tail end of the 1950s and I don’t see anything hopeful there. I see a lot of taking God and Christianity and the Christian legacy for granted, and very little in the way of real solid earth-changing faith and theology.

We are where we are. We stand with new challenges and they’re scary, and the world is not the safe world our grandparents knew. So we trust God. We live by faith.

In my original article I referenced the book Witness by Whittaker Chambers, which I’ve never read, unfortunately, but you have so I’m going to let you talk about it in just a second. For younger folk, which may be most of our audience, for all I know…

Yeah, most of it, at least.

Whittaker Chambers was a man who in the 1950s got pulled into the Communist conspiracy. He was an educated man, a writer, but he fell into such despair over the political and economic conditions of the world that he saw no hope – no hope in Christianity or the gospel or the church, which he was more or less familiar with.

It wasn’t that communism looked good, it just looked like the only answer on the table, and he joined the Communist party. In the end, though, he became disillusioned, broke from it, and lived to tell on his fellow Communists, for which of course they never forgave him.

Which he didn’t really want to do.

No. So why don’t you go ahead and tell us a little bit about him. I think it’s worth the time.

As you say, he saw communism as the answer to the great crisis that he saw. He’d call it a crisis of history, where everything is falling apart. There is nothing but strife, and the world in which he found himself was unsustainable. There had to be an end to it, and he believed the right and proper end was communism.

Communism was not really all it was cracked up to be, in his experience. He was a member of the open Communist party, and then it was a little bit self-defeating in its politics, as we can observe with the whole Trotsky-ite witch hunt. The Communist party keeps purging itself of its greatest adherents. It’s a common recurring problem throughout its history.

Sort of like the French revolution.

Much in common with the French revolution. So he broke with the open Communist Party, but he was still a communist and would say so in his soul, as it were.

Then he was looped into the Communist underground, which required that he remain apart from the public Communist party. He worked for I want to say the State Department, but my memory is failing me, but he worked for the US government and reported things. He helped to smuggle documents.

He describes in his book Witness the structure of the various Communist apparatus, the different rings that they had, how they distributed information so that nobody knew too much. Nobody really knew the other members of the Underground. They knew only the people that reported to them and who they reported to, and only by false names and that sort of thing.

I forget where I was going. I’m off on a rabbit trail. It’s a very interesting story if you’re interested at all in how secret societies function.

It’s a good antidote to those who poo-poo the idea that Communism had any real presence or was any real threat.

Right. You can get the idea from mainstream history books that it was all just a witch hunt and it was meaningless, and this guy Whittaker Chambers sold out Alger Hiss. They’ll pass over the fact that Alger Hiss was guilty, and his activity led to the deaths of thousands of people because they were smuggling military secrets to Russia, so real facts. He was part of the Russian conspiracy. Communism and support for Russia were interchangeable and inseparable.

He didn’t want to join the Underground. His wife said, “Please don’t,” and it was only because he couldn’t really get out of it and keep his family safe that he joined. Then eventually he had to take a great risk to flee the Communist party.

Again, I was going somewhere with this and there was very clear direction, and I got distracted because it’s a cool story. Where was I going with this, Greg?

I don’t know. I’ve been told the story of his conversion. Do you remember that?

Yeah. He had contact with the Quakers from early in his life, not throughout his life as a strong thing, but it was something that made an impression on him in his youth. When he converted away from Communism, he points back to a moment when he was looking at his daughter’s ear, his baby girl, and saying, “There is no way that perfect ear came about by chance.” He goes, “That thought was a seed that grew, and Communism couldn’t squash it.”

Even when he wrote his book Witness closer to the end of his life, kind of reflecting on his experience and what he’d learned, he still saw this crisis of history as something that was coming. The Quaker faith that he came to, he acknowledged, “My theology is weak. I’m a baby in these things, but the peace of Christ is totally antithetical to Communism.” The way he talks about it is very personal, very experiential, but it was in the company of the Quakers that he sensed the peace of Christ.

You can see the direct opposition in the way that he’s framing his thinking between Christ and Communism. There was still some sense of a crisis, still some sense of, “We are coming to the end of something huge, and it’s not going to be clean and not going to be nice.”

And in some ways he was right, as we’ve watched history unfold since then. It has not been clean. What we’re seeing now is not clean and crisp and bright and rainbows and puppy dogs. It’s vicious. The tares are more obviously tares. We’re waiting for the wheat to become more obviously wheat. The wheat looks rather sickly right now.

Chambers died believing therefore himself for his own heart Christ was sufficient, but not really being able to see that there was any answer for society, for the nations, for the world, for organized society.

In part because his inclination was localist. He and his wife bought a farm and intentionally wanted to raise their children apart from the hustle and bustle. They didn’t watch TV or listen to the radio. They wanted to be close to the land because that’s what they thought was best for the souls of their children. I have a real sympathy for that perspective.

Well, if God calls you to be a farmer, that’s great. But if it’s a way of running away from life, then maybe not so much.

So here we stand. I haven’t heard so much about it in the last couple years, but for a while there a lot of Christians were fleeing to the mountains, fleeing to obscure uninhabited states, thinking that if you get up in the mountains, you get far away, then it will be better.

Well, in some ways of course it’s better. You don’t have government officials poking their nose in all the time and you can fly under the radar, and certainly anyplace outside of California it’s probably cheaper and cleaner on a lot of levels.

But as you look back at the New Testament epistles, you never find Paul writing to say the church at Corinth and saying, “Boy, you guys have such problems with sexual immorality and dishonesty and schism. Why don’t you all get together and move up into the mountains of Ararat. That would be a great spot.”

“Get out of Corinth. That’s the problem with the Corinthian church.”

“Yeah, Corinth is the problem. Go move someplace else,” or to the church in Rome. “Don’t you know the antichrist is going to arise in Rome? What are you all doing there? Get out. Go someplace else. Go where it’s safe for your families.” You can read the whole New Testament and you’re not going to find that.

Oh, my goodness. I have a fun tangent about the antichrist and Rome. I was reading an Anglican reformer’s work and he’s arguing, of course, that the whore of Babylon and all that – the Pope is the antichrist and we know this because Rome is the only city founded on seven hills. That was his argument. If you Google “cities founded on seven hills” Wikipedia will give you a list. It is a long list.

He’s like, “We know it’s not Jerusalem, because Rome was founded on seven hills.” Jerusalem was also founded on seven hills.

Yes, I know this.

Apparently, he didn’t. Sorry, that was a tangent.

In Jeremiah – and think back here to Dr. Schaeffer’s book Death in the City where he makes a big point of this – that God did not have Jeremiah write to those in captivity and say, “Babylon? Oh, stinks to be you guys. Look for any chance you can to get out of there. At least go to some place safer, like…I don’t know, Greece? That would be a good move, or Egypt.”

“They took Jeremiah there by force and that wasn’t part of God’s plan.”

“Well, it’s got to be some place better than Babylon. Just get out of Babylon.”

It doesn’t happen. He says, “Settle down. Plant gardens. Plant fields. Build houses. Have kids. The captivity is long. You’re in it for the long haul. Pray for the peace of the city you settle in.”

“But they’re pagan cities founded upon magical principles around some local deity!”

“Yeah, they really need your prayers, don’t they?”

There’s two ways of looking at this. This is too wicked for us to take, or this is too wicked for us not to attack with the gospel. If you believe in a sovereign God who has the power to change hearts and lives, and who is well-intentioned toward humanity, that’s a little bit different than if you have a weak puny God who may or may not – depending at this point on whether you’re Arminian or Calvinist – love everybody but can’t do a thing about it, or only loves a very few people and has predestined them and they’re getting out, but let the world burn – there’s nothing really encouraging in any of that.

But when you have a God who has promised to bless all nations, although not the way you think or on your timetable but for real, then you can hope that what you are doing today counts in the long game. You may not know why. You may not know how. But God put us here. He’s planned it out.

He is not a God who wastes energy. What we are doing is eternally significant and we just have to wait until the end, until the whistle blows, the trumpet sounds, and then maybe God will explain some of it, or maybe we’ll talk to somebody in heaven who says, “Oh, you’re that guy? You know what happened because you did that stupid thing over there? This happened and then this happened and then this happened, and I got saved and then I went out and evangelized five nations.”

“What? I was just having a bad day. I thought I was just yelling at people.”

“Well, you were, but it was the gospel that came out of your mouth while you were yelling, and that started…”

You mean God uses me when I’m in a bad mood? Yes, because if he waited until we were perfect, he’d have no instruments to work with.

When I was younger there was the saying that God will never use an unclean vessel. Ha! Sometimes God is most glorified by using unclean vessels. Think of Samson. Think of Jacob. People criticize them left and right, and sometimes not completely correctly but sometimes so, but it’s not about them in any case. It’s about the power of God. It’s about the power of God’s Spirit.

I would say again we’re back to two things we need to believe about God. First, he is sovereign. There’s your Calvinism kicking in. He ordains the end from the beginning, from ancient times things not yet done, saying “My counsel shall stand and I will accomplish all my will.” He’s got it.

Secondly, his plans for the world are what we would reckon as good. He wants to reconcile the world to himself, and in Christ he’s already done so. He wants to save the world. He wants to bless all nations. If he’s not sovereign it doesn’t matter what he wants. If he’s sovereign but doesn’t really care and is content to just save a handful of people, even though it cost him his son, then those are two very different theologies.

When you can put the two together and say sovereign God who means the world infinitely well – yes, there will be people who will go to hell; yes, there will be nations who are smashed; yes, there will be war and suffering – but at the end of the story we will sit back and the universe will applaud the grace and mercy of the sovereign infinitely wise God. That’s the side to be on, and that’s hope to live by, and it’s hope for right now.

I don’t know what the next year will bring us. I don’t know what the next six months are going to bring us. We all like action adventure movies, right?

That doesn’t mean we want to live in one.

Well, you know what? We’re stuck in one anyway, so now’s the time to appreciate it, and the only way you can do that is taking God at his word, believing that God is sovereign and that he means us well, we being his people and ultimately the world, and that if we live in that there’s hope and we don’t need to despair.

I would love to be able to go back in time and talk to Whittaker Chambers and explain to him, “Look, you’re looking at the power of communism. What if I told you that within…” – I’m not sure when he died, but let’s put it probably around the late ‘50s or early ‘60s – “…within 20 years communism is going to collapse, the Soviet empire will break apart, West Germany will be reunited with East Germany, the wall will come down, and Berlin will be one city.

“All these people that you’re afraid of are going to be dead, and the Church will be evangelizing and translating the Bible into more languages than you even know about right now. We’ll have these new technologies by which we can reach every person on the planet in God’s time, and World War 3 will not have happened and Armageddon will not have happened and the gospel will still be going around…”

The thing is, we don’t need to know that. We don’t need someone coming from the future to tell us, “It’s going to be okay.” We simply need to believe the promise of God, and that’s what it means to live by faith.

Awesome. Let’s wrap up with some recommendations.

You know there are times when saying that and making that transition feels like a little bit of a letdown. We’ve been talking about such grand things and such big hopes and faith and stuff, and now it’s like, “Well, what did I have for breakfast today?”

But it shouldn’t. That’s the flesh getting in the way. That’s saying, “This is grand. Let’s go out and storm city hall or take over the Capitol building or take over NORAD or at least Hollywood. Let’s go out and change things right now!”

“How about let’s go have a cup of tea and watch an old movie and read a good book and play with our grandchildren.”

“Well, that doesn’t do anything!”

“No, no, that does everything. It’s living out life in the light and in the shadow of God’s promises.”

People who are full of themselves, whose souls are lifted up to pride, it has to be all about them. They have to go out and fix everything, and if you don’t jump on their bandwagon then you’re a traitor, you’re a failure, you’re handing the world to the bad guys. “Come on, get out here and help!”

You know what? I’d rather spend the evening watching Casablanca with my girls, if I can just keep my oldest daughter awake through it. That too is the kingdom of God. We go to church on Sunday and we worship the Lord of heaven and earth, and God makes even our enemies to be at peace with us his way.

So it is absolutely appropriate that we stop and say, “Okay, so what did you have for breakfast today? And what book are you reading? And what’s your favorite piece of music right now? Have you got a new pet in your house? What’s Gretchen’s first Christmas going to be like?”

The living part of living by faith.

Exactly, not living in terror, not living on the ragged edge, but just living, because God is that big. So what have you got?

I’m going to recommend homemade applesauce. I got together with a lady in my church who knows how to can and make applesauce and all sorts of cool stuff like that that I want to learn how to do, and we had a lovely morning making applesauce. Gretchen doesn’t like it. She’s an ungrateful little child. [laughing]

My wife just had a bunch of girlfriends over last night and they watched some random rom-com. I’m going to recommend rom-coms, romantic comedies.

Now, I’m a guy and therefore by definition not supposed to like them, and they’re not my favorite genre, I’ll be honest, but when it is done well, when it is done with a touch of humanity and with at least some conscious or unconscious nod to the gospel, to true love and to purpose and to meaning, romance and marriage and courtship are some of the funniest entertaining things in life. They make for stories that go on for generations.

“Let me tell you about when Grandma met Grandpa,” and it just keeps going on and on. “Daddy, tell us how you and Mommy met and how you fell in love!”

“Well, we met each other and said, ‘Uh, might as well,’ and we went and got hitched.”

“That’s boring. Come on, what really happened?”

That’s basically what David and I did. [laughing]

Oh, there’s more to your story than that. I may even know things you don’t know.

Anyway, there is something to be said for the better rom-coms, better romantic comedies, as they make us face what it means to be human, to love, to lose, to fight to get back, to fight to hold on to a relationship that’s worth holding on to.

Of course, the background for all of this is what Jesus did for us. He came as the divine bridegroom to win us, and we weren’t always a willing bride. In fact, The Runaway Bride would be a good title for the Church.

No kidding. [laughing]

And yet he pursues. If I had thought about it, I’d come up with an entire list of names of rom-coms and fit them together in one elaborate parody of the gospel, but I didn’t perceive this was going this way. Folks at home, you can try this. Look at some of your favorite romantic comedies and see how the titles and the themes play out into the gospel.

Now, are all these producers and directors and writers and actors self-consciously Christian? No, but to tell a story that touches humanity they at least have to get some of it right, and in there there can be humor and delight and joy.

As Christians we can see further and say, “Now if they had just had this happen…” or “This is the place where all the Christians in the room should get down and start praying,” or “This is where the pastor should walk up and say, ‘Not so fast, bud,’” or “This is where the father should say, ‘Alright, let’s open the Bible…”

But rom-coms. Christmas is coming up. There are plenty of good Christmas rom-coms.

I always think of Oscar Wilde’s line from The Importance of Being Earnest where he says, “The essence of romance is uncertainty.” There’s something to that, to the ambiguity, the chase.

Another one of our mutual friends was talking recently about the difference between Hebrew as a language and Greek as a language, where Hebrew is all about the ambiguity and the shades of meaning and the poetry and the images. Greek is like a scalpel. If you need a surgical strike of meaning you use Greek, which he argues is why the Old Testament is in Hebrew and the New Testament is in Greek, but that’s a story for another day.

Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.

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Thanks so much for listening. Have a good night.