Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Special Note: Due to being ill, I was unable to be in person with the congregation. Instead, I recorded the service. The video above is taken from that recording.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk, the 2nd chapter, verses 6-20.
6 Shall not everyone taunt such people and, with mocking riddles, say about them,
“Alas for you who heap up what is not your own!”
How long will you load yourselves with goods taken in pledge?
7 Will not your own creditors suddenly rise
and those who make you tremble wake up?
Then you will be plunder for them.
8 Because you have plundered many nations,
all who survive of the peoples shall plunder you—
because of human bloodshed and violence to the earth,
to cities and all who live in them.
9 “Alas for you who get evil gain for your house,
setting your nest on high
to be safe from the reach of harm!”
10 You have devised shame for your house
by cutting off many peoples;
you have forfeited your life.
11 The very stones will cry out from the wall,
and the rafter will respond from the woodwork.
12 “Alas for you who build a town by bloodshed
and found a city on iniquity!”
13 Is it not from the Lord of hosts
that peoples labor only to feed the flames
and nations weary themselves for nothing?
14 But the earth will be filled
with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord,
as the waters cover the sea.
15 “Alas for you who make your neighbors drink,
pouring out your wrath until they are drunk,
in order to gaze on their nakedness!”
16 You will be sated with contempt instead of glory.
Drink, you yourself, and stagger![c]
The cup in the Lord’s right hand
will come around to you,
and shame will come upon your glory!
17 For the violence done to Lebanon will overwhelm you;
the destruction of the animals will terrify you—[d]
because of human bloodshed and violence to the earth,
to cities and all who live in them.
18 What use is an idol
once its maker has shaped it—
a cast image, a teacher of lies?
For its maker trusts in what has been made,
though the product is only an idol that cannot speak!
19 Alas for you who say to the wood, “Wake up!”
to silent stone, “Rouse yourself!”
Can it teach?
See, it is gold and silver plated,
and there is no breath in it at all.
20 But the Lord is in his holy temple;
let all the earth keep silence before him!
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Last week, Habakkuk climbed his watch post and God finally answered, closing with a promise that the vision would come, and a warning that pride and faithfulness can’t both hold the same ground. God also told him a list of accusations was coming, aimed at exactly the kind of pride that can’t wait. Tonight we get that list. Five woes, one after another, and then a single verse that answers all of them at once.
Five Woes
The first woe falls on whoever piles up what isn’t theirs, loading themselves with debts squeezed out of other people. Ancient Hebrew debt practices recognized two principles which we no longer utilize today and that these wealthy people also seem to have forgotten. First, every 50 years, during the year of jubilee, all debts were to be forgiven, slaves set free, and prisoners freed. Any debts should have been forgiven during that year. Woe to those who didn’t forgive debts in the proper way. Second, debts could be collected as needed, but provision was to be made to not ruin a person under their substantial debts for exactly the reason tonight’s text asks: won’t your own creditors eventually rise up against you? Won’t the very people you plundered end up plundering you back? Whatever you take from others has a way of finding its way home.
The second woe falls on whoever builds a house on evil gain, setting the nest up high, safe, above every danger anyone else has to face. Everyone should have a right to be safe and be safe, but the safety is an illusion when the house is built on corrupt business and cheating others. The very stones of that house, Habakkuk says, will cry out against its owner, and the plaster in the walls will answer them. The house itself becomes a witness against the one who built it.
The third woe falls on whoever founds a city on bloodshed, building something meant to last on a foundation of violence. Habakkuk asks whether all that labor amounts to anything and answers his own question: people wear themselves out for nothing when what they’re building rests on blood. And then, in the middle of this list of accusations, comes a strange, hopeful line: the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God, the way water covers the sea. Whatever gets built on violence won’t be what finally covers the earth.
The fourth woe falls on whoever forces a neighbor to drink, plying them with shame and humiliation for sport. Short of some high school and college students, I’m not sure how many people set out to get their neighbors drunk. I think Habakkuk instead wants us to be aware of the times when we could lead others to sin or encourage them to sin, because he turns the proverbial cup around: the one pouring it will drink from it too, and the shame meant for someone else will land, in the end, on the one who poured.
And the fifth woe, the one that gives tonight’s sermon its title, falls on the idol maker. “What use is an idol once its maker has shaped it? A cast image, a teacher of lies. Its maker trusts in what he has made, even though he made it, and it cannot speak.” When most of us think of religious images and sculptures, we think of a piece of art which depicts a person or scene. The ancient understanding of idols was entirely different. When a person or group created an idol they ascribed to it certain abilities including speaking, moving, and granting what was asked of it. It didn’t depict a god, it was that god. The woe was on the one who not only created an idol, but woe to the one who tells a piece of wood to wake up, or silent stone to rouse itself. Habakkuk isn’t being subtle. He’s asking, plainly, how anyone could hand their trust to something they built with their own hands, something overlaid in gold and silver that still, underneath all that shine, has no breath in it at all.
Five different sins that should inspire woe, and one pattern running underneath all of them: whatever you build to serve yourself, whatever you construct to protect or exalt or comfort you, ends up testifying against you instead. The house cries out. The cup comes back around. The idol, dressed up in gold, stays lifeless the whole time. Notice, too, that three of these five woes end with almost the same refrain, a line about human bloodshed and violence done to the earth and its people. Habakkuk isn’t cataloging five unrelated sins. He’s describing one sin wearing five different disguises: the belief that whatever we build for our own advantage is worth whatever damage it costs someone else.
Ancient Idols
It’s worth pausing on that last woe, because we tend to picture ancient idol worship as something more naive than it actually was. Nobody in Habakkuk’s world genuinely believed a block of wood was, by itself, a god. Across the ancient Near East, elaborate rituals existed specifically to install a deity’s presence into a carved image, ceremonies known in Mesopotamia as the “opening of the mouth,” meant to give the image sight and speech and the capacity to receive offerings on the god’s behalf. This wasn’t superstition so much as careful theology, built with real craftsmanship and real conviction.
Habakkuk’s mockery lands precisely because he knows all of that and refuses to grant it any weight. Dress the thing in silver and gold. Perform every ritual meant to give it breath. It’s still wood. It’s still stone. We can contrast molding an idol out of a raw material and attempting to give it life with what God does in Genesis 2:7: “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
God formed humans from the earth, but made them living creatures by breathing their breath into humans. This quickening, enlivening breath is difference between things that are alive and things which cannot, without God, be brought to life.
The idols Habakkuk describes get gold and silver and elaborate ceremony, everything human craftsmanship can offer, and still end up with no breath in them at all. The craftsman still made it with tools in his own hands, and no ceremony changes the plain fact that the maker made the god, rather than the other way around. That reversal, trusting in something you built yourself as though it could rescue you, is the real target of the accusation, more than the material from which the idol happens to be carved.
The Idols We Hold Today
It’s rare for people today to carve idols and purport to give them life through ceremonies and rituals, but the underlying move Habakkuk names hasn’t gone anywhere. An idol, in his sense, isn’t defined by its material. It’s defined by the reversal: something we built with our own hands and minds, that we now trust as though it has a life and authority of its own, even though it can’t actually speak, it can’t actually see, and it can’t actually save us the way we’ve decided it can.
We build systems and then bow to them as though we hadn’t built them ourselves. We build wealth and then trust it to protect us the way only something greater than ourselves could. We build national identities and then treat them as sacred rather than constructed. We build institutions, ideologies, even technologies meant to answer every question for us, and then hand them an authority no human creation actually deserves, forgetting, the way Habakkuk’s idol makers forgot, that we’re the ones who shaped what we’re now bowing down to worship. Some of these idols are quiet and private, the ones we’d only admit to ourselves at the end of a long night. Others get built collectively, entire communities and nations shaping something together and then treating the result as though it descended from somewhere higher than their own hands.
Habakkuk doesn’t distinguish much between the two. Both end the same way: gold and silver on the outside, no breath on the inside. None of that requires a carved image. It only requires forgetting who made what and trusting the creation more than the God who made us.
That’s the real accusation underneath all five woes tonight, whether the crime is plunder, or violent gain, or bloodshed, or humiliation, or literal idolatry. In every case, someone built something to serve themselves and then discovered, too late, that what they built had turned around to answer them instead. The stones cried out. The cup came back around. The idol stayed silent exactly when it mattered most.
Habakkuk closes this whole catalog of woes with a single verse that answers every one of them: “But God is in God’s holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before them.” After five accusations built on noise, on plunder, on shouting neighbors into humiliation, on idols people had to talk into waking up, Habakkuk ends with the opposite posture entirely. Not a god who needs to be roused, but on God who is already and actually present, asking only for silence in response. That contrast is worth sitting with tonight: everything we build for ourselves eventually demands upkeep, defense, and noise. It needs protecting, polishing, propping up, a case made on its behalf. God, Habakkuk insists, asks for none of that. God doesn’t need us to wake anything up, doesn’t need gold or silver or a ceremony to grant presence. God only asks that we stop long enough to notice who’s actually there, already breathing, already alive, already asking nothing from us but our silence.