Welcome to Truth for Life, where today we're beginning our study in the book of

Habakkuk. An Old Testament prophet who wasn't afraid to ask God tough questions.

Alistair Begg will help us explore these questions during this study. We'll see that the

worries Habakkuk had more than 2500 years ago continue to plague many of God's people

to this day.

I think it is time for us as a congregation to be in the Old Testament, and so we are.

I decided that it would be good for us to go to the minor prophets because they are so

routinely neglected. I have somewhat arbitrarily decided to dip into the minor prophets here

in Habakkuk. Perhaps because I think in all the minor prophets I may have done one or

two studies in my life from this particular prophecy. Neither of them were any good, one

of them was while I was still a student, and it is a great investigation for me and a

journey on which we will go together. It is important to recognize that when we reference

this as one of the twelve minor prophets, as they are referred to, the reason that they

are regarded as being minor prophets in contrast to the five big ones is not in relationship

to their content, but it is simply in relationship to their length. And in contrast with, for example,

Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the minor prophets are all far smaller than those larger books.

And when we study in this way, in this little book of three chapters, I don't think that

we will have reason to regret the time that we spend. The temptation for us, especially

going into the Old Testament, is to immediately assume that we are so far removed from the

circumstances that are described in these chapters that they may well have nothing at all

really to say to us. But in actual fight as we are going to discover, although we are

a long way away, both chronologically and geographically, we are far closer than we

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