In Tune with Jesus
For in just a very little while, ‘He who is coming will come and will not delay.
But my righteous one will live by faith. And if he shrinks back, I will not be pleased with him.’
But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved Hebrews 10:37-39
Habakkuk 2:4 (quoted above) was a well known Old Testament text in the early Christian community. Paul quotes it twice in his own writings (Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11). The writer of Hebrews found Habakkuk’s circumstances and God’s answer to his cry very much what those reading this letter needed to hear.
Habakkuk was a prophet to Judah who was horrified at what God told him would happen if the people didn’t turn from their evil ways. The Babylonians would come and overthrow the nation. Habakkuk prayed, waited, watched and hoped. And yet, in the midst of the inevitable, God told him that the righteous were to go on trusting Him, even in the midst of the pagan onslaught. This was how they were to live. When everything around them was turning upside down, they were to hold on to their God – in faith. God was faithful to them and they needed to respond with their own faithfulness. ‘Faith’ and ‘faithfulness’ translate the same original word in both Greek and Hebrew.
The New Testament writers probably latched on to the Habakkuk scripture in part because they saw the time of trouble that had begun with the Babylonian invasion, had continued right through to their own day. Only now through the Messiah was God at last bringing deliverance and rescue.
‘He who is coming will come and will not delay’ (10:37).With the coming of the Messiah, both the devastating judgement and the rescue from it were not far off.
The lawlessness of having their property plundered (10:34) was a clear pointer, that while we still live in this present evil age, there is coming a new age (Matthew 12:32) in which God will give His people ‘better and lasting possessions’ (Hebrews 10:34). This is all a prelude to Hebrews 11 where we see the heroes of Old Testament faith looking forward to the new world God would make where they would find their true inheritance.
In Jesus this new world has broken into our world. We are caught in-between. We live in this present evil world but are out of tune with it, because we’re in tune with Jesus in the coming new world. We have ‘tasted… the powers of the coming age’ (6:5) but won’t enter it fully until either death or Christ’s return.
God continues to look for faithful followers of His Son in the midst of this crooked, evil world. ‘You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he promised’ (10:36)
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