I am laughing because my daughter left me a gift. It's one of those gifts that's actually it's kind of a turd, not literally a turd, settle down. It's just she does this from time to time. She will come in here to where I work and she will leave me dumb things and wonderful little notes with hearts on them. So what she left me this time is a snow baby. My buddy Austin keeps giving me these stupid collectibles from the 90s. I don't know who these things are for, but they're like the kind of thing you would buy in a Christian bookstore in 1991. It's supposed to be cherished or something. They're called snow babies. And this one, it's a little baby in like a fuzzy onesie holding a couple of ice skates, and they're just awful. He sneaked it under my Christmas tree this year, and I opened it on Christmas morning to great disappointment, because it's a snow baby. My daughter knows how I feel about the snow babies. So she left me a turd gift. I love you, kiddo. You are the absolute best. I don't have there's no thing. There's a tie-in. I just I was sitting down, I was gonna talk about Habakkuk and stuff, but then there was a snow baby. Wait, we uh I forgot about the snow baby. Likewise, it's real easy to forget that Habakkuk is in the Old Testament. Why do you listen to this program? It's terrible. We're in the book of Galatians, and we're in the part where Paul is rounding out of the super angry corrective tone that he's taking, and into more of the lightly angry corrective tone. But now he's into making his case. He's cleared up some mistruths, some gossip that has been spoken. He's put the data, the timeline back in front of this church in Galatia to be like, hey guys, some people came into your church and tried to cause problems here and you fell for it. But if you really actually think about the facts, both of our relationship and of what God has done in your life, and of the Bible, and of logic, you'll see these people are full of crap and they're just making stuff up and causing problems for no reason, and you will be able to figure out that you should ignore them and why you should ignore them. So we're past the part where Paul is hitting them with the shock and awe campaign of like, yeah, you guys are, I can't believe how quickly you got this wrong. What is the matter with you? You're wrong about all these things. We're past that. And now we're into the part where he, in a fatherly way, is giving them language that they can use internally in their own brains, amongst themselves as a congregation, and externally to defeat these bad ideas and not just to move forward believing in the true gospel message because Paul said so, but believing in it because they actually believe it and they've actually thought it through. And you and I are the beneficiaries of this process because this letter is timeless. It speaks to questions that are going to come up in most churches eventually, questions that are going to come up in most Christian traditions eventually, questions that are going to come up over the course of a lifetime of faith eventually. And so we're getting into some of the most deep water, important theology of the New Testament here. But again, Paul isn't just making this up out of thin air and being like, believe me, because I'm very popular right now, and believe me, because I'm speaking the loudest and most recently right now. No, he's drawing on a ton of reason and particularly drawing on a ton of Bible to spell out what the true gospel is, to remind the Galatians of what they believed in in the first place, and to remind them that the law of the Old Testament was never a tool meant to save. The thing wasn't built by God or designed by God to make a person have right standing before God or to resolve a person's sinful nature once and for all. Rather, right standing before God only is achieved by receiving the gift of God, by believing what you heard is the language Paul uses. So he just got done quoting Deuteronomy 27, 26. Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law. He's drawing from a text in the law to say that the law itself says this isn't gonna work. The very law the agitators have been appealing to destroys the case the agitators are making. But now Paul is gonna flip it around to something from the Old Testament that is proactive, that is positive. Here's the constructive counter proposal. He says clearly, no one is justified before God by the law, right? You'd have to keep the whole thing. It's impossible, you can't do it. Because, quote, the righteous will live by faith. Now, you probably saw this coming, but that is a quote from the book of Habakkuk, specifically Habakkuk 2.4. So let's just zip back to the Old Testament, find Hosea. Homer jumps, angry otters, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah might navigate happily, Habakkuk, happily, Habakkuk. Yes, that is my acrostic that I use. Yes, it is stupid, and yes, it works. Here we are in Habakkuk. This fella, like most of the prophets in the Old Testament, was a prophet to the southern kingdom of Judah. So after the two kingdoms split, you got Saul, you got David, and then you got Solomon. And that's all the longer that Israel is a united kingdom. Then the northern kingdom comes to be known as Israel after Solomon. They don't have really any good kings at all. They pretty much just get everything wrong. A couple of prophets speak to them, but it seems to fall on deaf ears. Then you got the southern kingdom where you got a lot of bad kings, but you have some good kings along the way. They got Jerusalem down there as well in the temple, and some of these prophets who speak to the southern kingdom, the kings down there, actually listen to, and then it goes well for them. Well, in 722, the northern kingdom falls to Assyria. They're just gone, absorbed, just I mean, they're obliterated. It's a pretty freaky thing. That's basically ten of the twelve tribes of Israel just knocked out. The southern kingdom holds out a lot longer, despite the fact that they're surrounded on all sides by giant superpowers who are coming and going. But eventually, in 586 BC, the upstart, reborn Babylonian kingdom, under the leadership of Nebuchadnezzar, shows up, and over a series of a few visits, they conquer the southern kingdom of Judah, take everybody away into captivity in Babylon, and destroy Solomon's temple. It's absolutely devastating. Well, a couple of the prophets who are prophesying on the front end of that are Jeremiah, who a lot of people know about. He's the weeping prophet, lamentations, things are gonna get bad, you're about to be taken. When they take you, this is what you need to do. Work for the prosperity of the city, but know that I will come for you. That'll taken Liam Neeson's speech is kind of the tone of Jeremiah, but Habakkuk is different. Habakkuk is writing probably 15, 20 years before Nebuchadnezzar shows up. He's seen the writing on the wall. I've accidentally made that pun like 10 times in my life, and I just made it again. He knows that Jerusalem is gonna get wiped out and this is gonna happen. But rather than giving a whole bunch of instruction in his book to the people of Judah to say, here's what's gonna happen, here's how to respond to it, here's what God is gonna do in the future. Instead, Habakkuk throws his energy at questioning God. It kind of sounds like some of the negotiations that Abraham had with God back in the early days of the Old Testament, or some of the negotiations that Moses had with God back in the early days of the Old Testament. And it's kind of freaky and off-putting as we've discussed to see these guys come off as almost, in a modern sense, flippant toward God and be like, no, no, no, you're doing it wrong. This is gonna come off the wrong way. I mean, when Peter does that in the New Testament, he looks like an idiot, but for whatever reason, in the deeply ancient parts of the Old Testament, a few of these guys apparently knew the character of God so well and were on such speaking terms and in such a place of trust that they could kind of approach God in that way. I don't know, makes me a little bit nervous. Famously, Abraham and Moses take that posture before God, but then much later on, Habakkuk takes that posture before God. And I love this book because it's Habakkuk asking the honest questions, not sounding overly spiritual, but instead looking at the grand scheme of history and the character of God and knowing what God is going to do next by punishing his people through the power of Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. And he's like, I have some questions about this. Cool, man. Fair enough. I would have some questions about that as well. So the book of Habakkuk is very short and it's basically just a dialogue. It's a polemic's not the right word. It's a debate, a conversation. Habakkuk asks a question, and then God answers the question. So question number one is How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you don't listen or cry out to you? Violence, but you don't save. Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong? Destruction and violence are before me. There's strife and conflict abounding. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in on the righteous, so that justice is perverted. Habakkuk's first question is basically, why are you letting this go unchecked? You've seen how screwed up we've been, but so have the prophets. We're trying. Why did you let it get to this level? Why haven't you fixed us? And answer number one is more or less, well, it's happening now. This is the fix, and it's going to be with the Babylonians and is going to be ugly. And then Habakkuk's like, okay, question number two then. Why would you use the Babylonians? They're even worse than us. And the quick version of God's answer is they're going to get theirs. I'm doing something here. And then the book ends with Habakkuk being like, Cool, you're God, I'm not. I trust your character. And he praises God for all of chapter three. And then that's that. I'm kind of underselling the book. It's a great book. You should just go read it end to end real quick. I mean, heck, maybe I should have just read it to you. Now, tomorrow we're going to come back and we're going to pick up on the one little thread of thought, the one particular verse in that grand context that Paul is alluding to over here in Galatians chapter three. I am going to go find a creative way to dispose of this snow baby, and I'll catch up with you, Man Yana. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.