SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR
2/14/2016 11:15 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
Drunkenness and Violence
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Habakkuk
2:15-17
Message of
the verses: “15 "Woe to you who make your neighbors
drink, Who mix in your venom even to make them drunk So as to look on their
nakedness! 16 “You will be filled with disgrace rather than honor. Now you
yourself drink and expose your own nakedness. The cup in the LORD’S right hand
will come around to you, And utter disgrace will come upon your glory. 17 “For
the violence done to Lebanon will overwhelm you, And the devastation of its
beasts by which you terrified them, Because of human bloodshed and violence
done to the land, To the town and all its inhabitants.”
I think it is time to review what we have been
looking at under the third main point “Declare God’s Judgment (Hab.
2:6-20).” What we have been and still
are looking at is judgment upon the Babylonians as Dr. Wiersbe writes “In this
‘taunt song,’ God pronounces ‘woe’ upon five different sins, all of which are
prevalent in the world today.” We are
now looking at the fourth of five of these woes pronounced by the Lord in
today’s SD.
What we are talking about in these verses is a
repulsive picture that can be interpreted both personally and also nationally
as far as the Babylonians are concerned, however as Dr. Wiersbe wrote this can
be associated in our world today around the world. Now I don’t want to get into whether or not
it is okay to drink or not, all I can say is that the Bible speaks a lot about
not getting drunk, and the other thing I know and that is that when it came to
wine in the Jewish world the content of alcohol was much lower in Biblical days
than what it is in today’s wines.
Dr. Wiersbe points out that the word “neighbor’
could also refer to a neighboring nation that was ‘intoxicated’ by Babylon’s
invading armies. In Scripture, drinking a cup of wine can be a picture of
judgment (Jer. 25:15ff), and nakedness sometimes speaks of the devastation effects
of military invasion (Isa. 47:1-3).”
As we have seen all along in these “woes” of
judgment is that the things that Babylon was doing to other nations will one
day come upon them. We have learned that
God was going to use Babylon to bring Judah into captivity and then God was
going to chasten Babylon for doing this, and I know that this is hard to
understand, but there are some things we just have to trust what the Bible says
will happen even though we do not understand.
We do however know that God cannot make a mistake so we just have to
take this by faith that God is doing what will bring glory to Himself.
We have one more woe to look at in this section and
that we will do in our next SD, and that woe is “Idolatry,” which is surely a
big problem today as it was in Habakkuk’s day even though the idols today are
not so much things made of wood or gold, or silver that people bow down to.
2/14/2016 11:34 PM
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