[written in the shadow of the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign]
Prophet Habakkuk offers us a word for our times giving a fully ample perspective on what is happening in the world right now, and especially to those who believe themselves to be Christian nations and to those inside them who are a true prophetic remnant. I am going to begin with a brief conversational outline of what Habakkuk has to say, then will develop its application to what is now happening.Habakkuk is first appalled by the lack of justice in his own land (Israel) where the Law has failed to be enforced righteously. And he asks God:
"How long do I have to keep praying about the violence and debauchery in this land and you do nothing about it? Why do you let this go on? How long before you deal it? It's terrible."
God responds,
"You need a global perspective because I'm going to do something about this you wouldn't believe if I told you [but I'm going to tell you anyway.] I'm raising up a world class power, Babylon, to come in and take over your land and everyone else's. It's an arrogant power worshiping its own strength that no one can contend with."
Habakkuk is further perplexed and responds,
"Well, Lord, so they are going to bring judgment, fine. But you can't look at any evil and they're even worse! So why will you put up then with all their injustice too? The whole world goes about doing its own thing and these idolaters come along and eat up everybody. Where's the justice in any of this?" (Then he says,) "I'm going to stand out here until I get an answer to this."
The Lord responds back,
"I want you to write this down big enough for the busiest person to get. It's an end times vision. Yes, you’re right, this is an evil power, but the righteous will live it all out by faith. Though this Babylonian system will plunder all the earth’s wealth, it will be brought down and be plundered. This system has plotted the ruin of nations and made protections for itself in the midst. For all the nations have poured their efforts into nothing but hell fire. But my glory will finally cover the earth out of it. All the destructions and idolatry and debauchery will come back on this system."
Habakkuk finally responds,
"Earth, shut up. Lord, I've heard what You've done before. Do it again. In all this wrath remember mercy. Lord, all the ancient governments are fallen and You've shaken up the whole earth. You've thrashed all the nations but are come to save your anointed people. You've destroyed the antichrist as he was about to destroy all of us. My body couldn't take it, but I will wait this whole vision thing out patiently. And though the whole economy is ruined around me I will force myself to rejoice in You, Lord. You've made me able to stand over all of this from a higher place."
The reason I want to share this with you is to provide a weighted anchor for you against all the moaning and blathering going on about this “most critical election in our lifetime.”(Yes, I’m sorry to confess, but I got sucked back onto the Charisma News page last night through an email link someone sent to check out an article by Michael Brown, leading to articles about Rick Joyner, Dutch Sheets and ultimately to a deranged (?) facebook video by Lance Wallnau, the latter all about this election… It must be for a reason, and so here we are:)
In Habakkuk, we have all the ingredients that we have today in America. We have a lawless society that has abandoned its own legal framework for justice, a prophetic intercessory community in anguish over this state of affairs, all the meanwhile the whole world under threat of final takeover by a global commercial system spoiling all nations through controlling all money globally with military capability for enforcing that control.
People, we are living in the time Habakkuk’s vision foretold and which he was determined to patiently wait out. Because this is so, everything we need to know about the Lord’s mind for this time is available here, regardless of what the contemporary prophetic may be voicing to the contrary.
You Won’t Believe It
See the first thing of import God has to say in response to Habakkuk’s anguish, “I’m going to do something you wouldn’t believe even if I told you.”
Remember, He is speaking to a prophetic intercessor.
And that’s exactly what happened. God told Habakkuk what He was going to do, which was to raise up this evil system to judge Habakkuk’s society and conquer the earth. Sure enough, Habakkuk couldn’t believe God would do this. In effect he said, “How can You do this since You can’t stand evil and this system is worse than what we’ve got now? I need an answer for this.”
And this is where we’re going to camp a bit, because this is exactly where the media-based prophetic intercessory community is now in regard to what God has said He is going to do.
Modern America is a type of ancient Israel for its unbelief and injustice as a result of abandoning its divinely influenced legal framework. Israel forsook God for idols and abandoned the law of Moses. America forsook God for materialism, officially kicked God out of its public schools in 1962, morally descending from there, and otherwise has been abandoning its lawful Constitutional framework in favor of a commercial legal system for about a century.
OK. So the prophets and intercessors have been in anguish. And rightly so. But the problem is America’s mainstream prophets and intercessors as well as those of other Christianesque countries have not believed what God has said He would do, even though it was told us thousands of years ago.
First of all, they are all in denial of judgment. The culture prophets are busting loose over the dramatic deep descent of America’s culture. But none wants to call it judgment. Habakkuk at least acknowledged the judgment at hand. But none of these today wants to admit the obvious by using the “J” word. “Jesus didn’t come to judge anybody….yada, yada.”
Go on. Read what they have to say. Find me a culture prophet who will boldly proclaim America is already under God’s judgment. Instead, I read that they want to blame the “enemy.” Rick Joyner wants to blame a “gate of hell” through abortion. (In the wake of America’s official rejection of publicly led prayer, abortion was already God’s judgment, as was the entire 60’s free drug and sex counter culture movement, the civil riots and Vietnam War that Roe v Wade came out of.)
Lance wants to blame the leftist system, as do most other mainstream prophetic Christians. And they altogether with Sheets want to blame the Christians who “won’t vote” and who won’t be convinced into believing that “Trump is Cyrus, God’s Secret Samson Hero.”
The Foundation of Mercy
This unbelief brings us to the theme of today’s article, “in your wrath, remember mercy.” Here is the problem. In the culture prophetic we hear prayer after prayer for mercy. But there is absolutely no recognition of wrath on which such prayer is based. Yet the truth is, there is no mercy where there is no wrath at issue. Mercy has no meaning except as a plea in the acknowledged face of the wrath of a Holy Jealous God.
Mercy is not a plea for release from the destructive works authored by the devil. It is a plea for release from the deserved judgmental works authorized by God, however they may be otherwise destructively authored by the devil.
So again this is our problem. Speaking vicariously, we (the culture prophetic / intercessory community) have never come to deal with the holy jealous righteousness of our God. We reject it. We don’t believe in it. We don’t believe God is jealous or that He is angry at all with anybody about anything.
God is angry!
“…[H]e who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.”
And He displays that zealous anger through His true prophets, through those who understand that His love is to His standard of pure internal union with His Son which He zealously protects, defends and advances against all unrighteousness in the universe.
So it is that the cultural judgment has been earnestly in force for over half a century. Without belief in this, there is no mercy to be had. Things can only get worse. Prayers for mercy fall on deaf divine ears.
For those of us who do acknowledge God’s judgment however, we must plead for His mercy. And we do here. And may you also so plead. We will come back at the end to close with this thought. But first, let us proceed through the rest of what God said He would do.
God Raises Up Our Oppressors
God told Habakkuk to make it plain for everybody ever after to read, no matter how busy (“fast paced”) they were even though they wouldn’t believe it. It is that God is raising up the world commercial system called “Babylon” to rape the nations, which we would not believe He could morally do.
And then from there the story is that He will destroy this same destroyer.
Here again is where we must reckon with what God has said He will do and is responsible for. We want to see God destroy the destroyer. So did Habakkuk. And so do all of today’s mainstream and wilderness prophets. So do I. And rightly so. That is the great longing of my own heart!
But just like the wrath and mercy relationship, we must first recognize that God has raised up this system and the reason He has done so, and we must respect that purpose. It is not just that the “dragon breathes his life into it” which he does (Rev. 13). It is that God authorizes the dragon to do so.
And why? It’s because the nations to a man are all guilty of idolatry. As God says it, all the nations have poured their efforts into nothing but what ends in hell fire (Hab. 2:13). God judges idolaters by arch idolaters, then destroys the arch idolaters. That is simply the way He does it.
Therefore, before we can pray for deliverance from the world system, we must act in reverence before the Lord regarding His raising up of that system. As God raised up Nebuchadnezzar of old, and every other potentate for his purposes, before ever laying them low again, so He is doing now with the rulerships behind the New World Order.
God raises these powers up to ultimately show forth His own glory. That is what He said about Pharaoh. “For this purpose I raised you up, that I might show my glory through you.” It was God’s destructive glory in jealous defense of His Holy Union with the Son against all the idols of Egypt that He intended to display.
And so it is of the New World Order at hand. And this is where we may ultimately find solace. God will bring that order down. But the entire raising as well as demolishing is for His glory. We say we want to see His glory, right? If so, we must submit to His purpose in raising up the Pharaohs He does in order to demolish again, and by which He works His deliverance of His anointed ones.
So again, we pray for deliverance. And that is the hope left to us in Habakkuk’s prophecy. Yes. We want to be delivered from this system! And we will be. But we must accept the entire plan. We must accept God’s part in the whole plan, not just the end of the plan. And we must await its outworking with patience, as Habakkuk said. We must not resist the early side of the process of glory and deliverance—a process that at least to some degree afflicts the righteous as well as the wicked.
It is accepting this early side of the plan, of God’s raising up the global foe, that is what we have not been willing to believe though it was foretold to us.
For this reason, God tells Habakkuk that we must trust Him by faith on all this, and that by such faith we will be justified in the end.
It Takes Faith to Believe What Was Foretold
People, this is where the New Testament saying “the just shall live by faith” originally came from. Right here in Habakkuk. It is talking about the faith to enduringly believe in and throughout God’s raising up the afflicting work of the adversary in order to bring about their demolition unto His glory and our deliverance. Do we have faith to acknowledge this?
Today’s prophetic movement does not have such faith. It walks in unbelief. It denies God’s judgment to begin with, and further denies that God has anything to do in raising up the global order now threatening us. Not good.
The culture prophetic wants the mercy without recognizing the judgment, and it wants the glory and deliverance without acknowledging the raising up of the destroying power which He must do.
This has been the historic pattern every election cycle, cycle after cycle. I’ve been trumpeting this to the e-community of faith for almost twenty years. The more that the culture prophets go on like this, the worse things get. Yet they never change, going from defeat to defeat.
If Hilary Clinton is elected president, and there is every likelihood at this hour she will be (though I wish it might not be so), will you have the faith to believe that God raised her up to this, even if only later to take her out and bring us deliverance from her evil schemes? Will you believe in God’s judgment, that it is just and richly deserved by us all?
Yes, we can still believe for deliverance. I just wrote you about how to pray for leaders so we can find such deliverance. But can you first believe God raised up the oppressor? (And who can ever finally second guess God’s mind, intent and purpose to turn the heart of an evil king as rivers of water, or possibly an evil queen? Even Jezebel is given an opportunity to repent (Rev. 2:21))
It takes big faith to believe in the big plan of God, and not just it’s hoped for end. We look at Daniel. Daniel had a great calling in the end mind of God. But that calling as the greatest end times prophet of the Old Covenant only came about because Daniel himself was first victimized by the beast God was raising up against His people and which swallowed up Daniel with all the rest. Somehow, Daniel found a way to come to terms with that swallowing up by the beast. And because he did in faith, He was able to be raised to that call.
By the end of his book, Habbakuk musters himself to the very same faith God has exhorted here. He looks around. He sees a ruined economy. No grapes on the vine, no figs on the trees, no produce in fields. But still he forces his soul to accept the affliction and rejoice in His terrible God. He declares that God has put him up on high places to see this from a much greater perspective.
A Last Call….
So finally then, we return to our theme. We ask God to remember mercy in His wrath. First however, let us be sure we have embraced the wrath by faith for what it is. Let us accept the judgment for what it is. Let us accept the fact of our victimization under the conditions of judgment, and believe by higher faith in that unforeseen raising to come like Daniel.
Similarly, we ask God for the deliverance and to show His glory against the enemy. First however, let us be sure we have accepted God’s purpose in raising up the oppressor.
Whether you think that oppressor is to be Hilary Clinton, or the left wing socialist complex, or the global new order elites who step in to take over the United States in the aftermath of civil war, or for those of you in Israel under the continued threat of Islamic oppressors, let us accept God’s transcendent purpose in the raising of whatever “pharaoh” en route to His demonstration of His glory and our deliverance.
This is yet one more call to all the culture prophets in the land to stop fighting God in what is happening through His justly deserved judgment on us, to accept that judgment, to pray for His mercy only in context of acknowledging His wrath, and to accept God’s raising up of the oppressor for what it is as the necessary context for our prayers for His glory and deliverance to succeed.
The sooner we all get out of denial, accept the judgment, repent before it, and respect and side with God in raising up our oppressors, the sooner I believe we will all find the mercy, glory and deliverance we have been praying for all these years.
Can we come to Habakkuk’s higher place of faith to believe what has been told us?
Chris Anderson
New Meadow Neck, Rhode Island
First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org11/16
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