Habakkuk 1:1-4, 1 This is the message that the prophet Habakkuk received from the LORD in a vision. 2 How long, O LORD, must I call for help? But you do not listen! "Violence!" I cry, but you do not come to save. 3 Must I forever see this sin and misery all around me? Wherever I look, I see destruction and violence. I am surrounded by people who love to argue and fight. 4 The law has become paralyzed and useless, and there is no justice given in the courts. The wicked far outnumber the righteous, and justice is perverted with bribes and trickery.
Habakkuk here makes a complaint to God. And when I was reading along in the Bible, this complaint stood out to me. Because it seems like something that we could say now. Habakkuk was complaining about Judah at the time, but he could just as easily been complaining about the U.S. or even Boston. It seems like every time we turn on the TV, we see more violence. Someone else got shot. Someone else was stabbed. There was another robbery. It seems that contention and strife are all around us. It’s no wonder half of all marriages end in divorce in the U.S. People just plain can’t get along with each other. We think that we’re such an advanced society, because we have such phenomenal technology and we think we’re so smart. But we’ve forgotten the basics of life, like how to get along with people. We have no justice in our land. I could give example after example of injustice, but I will just mention one recent thing that comes to my mind. Just recently a court in the United States decided that we cannot say “Under God” in our pledge of allegiance. These are the kinds of people deciding what is wrong and right in our land. Our whole sense of right and wrong is perverted. There used to be a day in our country when the majority were righteous, and the wicked were a minority. But it is true of us now, just as it was in Habakkuk’s day, that the wicked far outnumber the righteous.
Now violence and injustice and sin have been prevalent throughout most of history. If that was Habakkuk’s complaint, a simple answer would be in order. Since the fall of man, this world has been under the evil control of Satan. That explains why there is evil in the world. We don’t have to question the cause or the source of evil. The real issue here is the question of Habakkuk in verse 2. This question lays heavy on his heart. In fact, my version says in verse 1, “This is the message…” But in the Hebrew, and probably in the Vietnamese, it calls it a “burden.” And this is the burden of Habakkuk, “How long, O Lord, must I call for help? But you do not listen! ‘Violence!’ I cry, but you do not come to save.” The question of Habakkuk is simple. In all the suffering, in all the violence and injustice, “Where is God?”
He understands the wickedness of the human heart. He understands the violence of the people. He understands the injustice. His only question is why God doesn’t act. Surely, the omnipotent Creator God has the power to act. And surely because he hates wickedness, he has the desire to act. So, the question that plagues Habakkuk is “Why isn’t he acting?”
And the thing is that we may ask the same question. We could wonder about the violence and the injustice. But we could go even further than that. God has promised us a lot. He’s promised us a lot in his Word and maybe he’s made individual promises to you. And it may be something that you expect God to do, but you just don’t see it happening. It may seem to you, like it did to Habakkuk, that God has abandoned you. I’m not talking about small, insignificant things. I’m talking about things that are a real burden to you. They weigh heavy on your heart. And yet even when this thing weighs so heavy on your heart, it seems that God is unconcerned. And you can begin to question: Where is God in all this? How can God be in control if this is happening? And the temptation is to give up on God’s promises and to give up on God.
Joseph was a young man with a promise from God. He had a dream. And this dream was from God.
Genesis 37:5-7, “5 One night Joseph had a dream and promptly reported the details to his brothers, causing them to hate him even more. 6 "Listen to this dream," he announced. 7 "We were out in the field tying up bundles of grain. My bundle stood up, and then your bundles all gathered around and bowed low before it!"
Now before this time, Joseph had it pretty good. His life wasn’t lacking much. He was his father’s favorite. Later on he goes to visit his brothers who are taking care of his father’s sheep. Here they are, working hard, and he just gets a little task like going out to check on them. Certainly Joseph was satisfied with his life. And then along comes this dream. And this dream is great. And he’s so excited about it that he tells his brothers. And when he dreams a similar dream, he tells them again and tells his father. He told them, because he expected this dream to come true.
Well, I think we all know how the story continues. His brothers sell him into slavery to Egypt and tell his father that he is dead. This certainly doesn’t seem to be the fulfillment of the dream to him. How are his brothers ever going to bow down to him if he’s all the way over in Egypt, and a slave at that. But somehow, he doesn’t give up on God. Even in this horrible situation God is with him and he’s promoted to the head of Potiphar’s house. If that was me, probably at that point I’d start thinking about the dream again. I’d think maybe there is hope. Maybe there’s a chance.
Then when everything seems like maybe it’s started turning around again, his world comes crashing down for a second time. He’s accused of a crime he didn’t commit. In fact, if he had slept with Potiphar’s wife, he probably would never have been found out. But he was faithful to His God, even when he was surrounded by people and circumstances that didn’t point to God. And sure enough, he was thrown into prison. If that was an ordinary person, all hope would be lost at that point. Surely now he has to forget the dream. He has to forget God’s promise. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it was the pizza he ate before he went to sleep talking. But Joseph hung on. Yet, there he found himself in the same situation of Habakkuk, where God didn’t seem to be moving toward what he had promised. There he found himself in a similar situation to what you may find yourself in. Trying to hang on to God’s promises, but not seeing any evidence that God is involved.
Well, the Lord gives Habakkuk his answer in vv. 5+6, “The LORD replied, "Look at the nations and be amazed! Watch and be astounded at what I will do! For I am doing something in your own day, something you wouldn’t believe even if someone told you about it. 6 I am raising up the Babylonians to be a new power on the world scene. They are a cruel and violent nation who will march across the world and conquer it.”
The Lord then goes on for a few more verses and describes the brutality and the savagery of the Chaldeans. So God’s answer to Habakkuk’s question of why God isn’t acting is simply that God is acting. God knows exactly what is going on, and he is setting things in place to bring his plan about. And his plan is to bring swift judgment on Judea for her wickedness. And he’s going to use the Chaldeans to accomplish it.
It was good news. Habakkuk got just what he wanted. His complaint was that God wasn’t acting. And then God responded and said that he would act. And he would not only act, but I would be an amazing and astonishing feat when the judgment of God fell. His judgment would be so great that you wouldn’t even believe it if someone told you about it. I mean if every Habakkuk should have been happy, it should have been with this response. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t happy at all. This only made him more burdened. Maybe his mom taught him like my mom did that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” And he looked at the wickedness of the Chaldeans, and he couldn’t understand. He knew that Judah deserved punishment. He had no problem with the punishment of the people for their wickedness. In vv. 12+13, he says, “12 O LORD my God, my Holy One, you who are eternal – is your plan in all of this to wipe us out? Surely not! O LORD our Rock, you have decreed the rise of these Babylonians to punish and correct us for our terrible sins. 13 You are perfectly just in this. But will you, who cannot allow sin in any form, stand idly by while they swallow us up? Should you be silent while the wicked destroy people who are more righteous than they?” And then in vs. 17, he finishes off his complaint, “17 Will you let them get away with this forever? Will they succeed forever in their heartless conquests?”
The first thing we see in his complaint is that he doesn’t question the justice of God. He knows that God will not utterly destroy his people. He knows instead that his judgment of them is designed to bring them back to him. And he doesn’t question that God is right. He starts vs. 13 with admitting that God is perfectly just in his actions… But. But, he doesn’t understand. How could God, who hates sin, punish his sinful people with someone even more sinful than they. How could this possibly be God’s response. How could God possibly try to move this way.
And God would give us a similar response. When we don’t understand exactly what is going on, when we question where God is in all that’s going on around us, his response is that he is right there working. He has not forgotten us. Just because we haven’t seen him act yet, doesn’t mean he’s not working. It only means it hasn’t come to his fullness yet. Isaiah helps answer our question in
Isaiah 55:8,9 says, “8 "My thoughts are completely different from yours," says the LORD. "And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. 9 For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”
And this is the lesson that we need to learn from this. The lesson we need to learn from Habakkuk is the same that Isaiah learned: God’s ways are not our ways. So even when God is moving all around us, even when he’s doing exactly what we’ve been asking and praying for, sometimes we don’t recognize it. Why? Because we expect God to do things our way. But God has his own ways that we don’t understand. Certainly we could look at the Chaldean’s utter destruction of Jerusalem and wonder why God could allow that to happen. We could wonder what good could possibly come from such a horrible event. Now we have the advantage of hindsight. We know that the exile of the Jews from the land cured them of their idolatry forever. They may have had more problems by the time Jesus came, with the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but one thing you could never accuse the Jewish people of again at any time in history was idol worship. God’s plan worked. Now, we may look at things that are happening all around us and wonder the same things. We can wonder how this could possibly be God’s plan. We can wonder what good could possibly come of what’s going on, but the fact is that God is working whether we can see it or not. Oh, sometimes it even looks like the very hand of Satan. But we can be assured that God is in control. Sometimes it is Satan trying to thwart the plan of God, but God is in the foreground turning all those things around to his own good. Remember when Paul had his thorn in the flesh (2 Corinthians 12:7). It was called a “messenger from Satan,” and yet God let it stay, because it kept Paul from being puffed up. Because God could turn Satan’s plan to good, he let it continue. If there was no way to turn Satan’s plan to good, God WOULD NOT have allowed it to happen.
Let’s return to the story of Joseph. We know how his roller coaster ride toward the fulfillment of his dream ends. Indeed, he interprets a dream in prison for Pharaoh’s servant. Now, here is proof that Joseph never gave up on his dream. Imagine you had a dream that you thought was from God, but you didn’t see it being fulfilled, so you gave up on it. You figured you must have made a mistake. Now, if somebody else has a dream, are you going to be quick to tell them, “The Lord will give me the meaning of your dream.”? Of course not! Because you would see yourself as a failure at interpreting dreams. So, the very fact that Joseph is still interpreting dreams demonstrates that he has not given up on his dream. Well, he ends up interpreting a dream for Pharaoh, about the famine that’s about to come on the world. Pharaoh puts him in charge of the “Famine Preparation Committee” and makes him second in command in the land. When the famine hits, his brothers come down to get grain, and bow down before him.
Now, the bowing down part was the part that God told Joseph, but that wasn’t even the important part. The important part was that his family was saved in the time of famine. Jesus was a descendent of Joseph’s brother Jesse. That means that if the family had not survived, Jesse would have died too. And Jesus may never have been born! If not for being sold into slavery, if not for being tempted by Potiphar’s wife, if not for being faithful and being thrown into prison, if not for the courage to continue interpreting dreams, if not for the closeness with God that allowed him to hear the interpretation of dreams, and even without the forgiveness that Joseph had for his brothers, without ALL of these things, both good and bad, Jesse and his children would have died. And without all of these things, Joseph’s dream would never have come true. The things that looked to the flesh to be proof that God had abandoned the plan, were the very fulfillment of that blessed plan.
I don’t know about you, but when I’m praying, I ask God these kinds of questions all the time. My heart wrestles with these kinds of things. God has promised me that he will do things, and then I don’t see them coming about. Not only that, but I don’t see any way for them to possibly come about. Sometimes, my flesh even tries to rise up within me and question whether God is really in control of circumstances. Because if God was really in control, certainly this would have happened, or that wouldn’t have happened. But we can see from history, from Joseph, from others, that God is working, especially in those circumstances that we think he is not. Now with the Chaldeans and Habakkuk and with Joseph we have hindsight. We know the end of the story. We know what’s going to happen, so we can understand it. But with our own circumstances, the end hasn’t come yet. We don’t yet know how it’s all going to turn out. We don’t have the same hindsight. Or do we? Remember what Hebrews 11:1 says, “What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see.” And we’ll see this come up when we look at God’s response to Habakkuk’s complaint.
God’s actual response to Habakkuk actually begins in earnest in 2:5 and continues to the end of the chapter. And his response is very similar to what we have already seen. God tells him how the tables will be turned on the Chaldeans. He is told that they will ultimately be destroyed. They will ultimately pay for their own sins. It may seem now that it is unjust, but God will make everything right. It’s the same thing we’ve already seen, that God’s ways are different than our ways. We may think that the best way for God to accomplish his purposes is to do it his way, but his assurance is that when all is said and done, we will see that his way was indeed the best way. No matter how frustrating it may have been while we were going through it, his way is always best.
But the real gem to be mined here is in God’s introduction to his response to Habakkuk recorded in 2:2-4 “2 Then the LORD said to me, "Write my answer in large, clear letters on a tablet, so that a runner can read it and tell everyone else. 3 But these things I plan won’t happen right away. Slowly, steadily, surely, the time approaches when the vision will be fulfilled. If it seems slow, wait patiently, for it will surely take place. It will not be delayed. 4 "Look at the proud! They trust in themselves, and their lives are crooked; but the righteous will live by their faith.”
It’s all fine and good to read that somehow God’s plan is going to win out. But when you’re actually in the middle of that plan and you can’t see the way, it’s difficult. The first thing that God tells him to do is to write the vision down. This vision was Good News and it must be spread. This Good News must go out. And so we also have Good News. Our Good News is that Jesus is coming again to claim those who are his. And it is in that day that he will ultimately set everything right. It is in that day that the plan of God will become so evident to us. We’ll be able to look back and see how everything fell just into place. Our Good News is that as Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.” As Jeremiah 29:11 says,” For I know the plans I have for you," says the LORD. "They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.” Your Good News is what God has promised you.
And we must spread this Good News. Certainly we must spread the Good News of Jesus among non-believers. Anyone who knows me, knows that I am an advocate of evangelism. However, we must also spread it amongst ourselves. Now, surely, you may think, all Christians already know that Jesus is coming back, so why would need to spread it among ourselves? Well, another benefit of writing the vision down for Habakkuk was that he or anyone else could go back later and look at it and see that it was still there. And sometimes in this old world it’s so easy to forget that Jesus is coming back. Sometimes it’s easy to forget God’s promises to us. But it’s written down. It’s written down, so that we can constantly keep it in our minds. So when we begin to be ensnared by our circumstances into forgetting that Jesus is Coming Back and that he will set all things right then we can go back and check what’s written down. We can see once again in the Word, God’s promise to us. And in fact, it’s not only that I have made a connection between the message of Habakkuk and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The writer of Hebrews is the one who actually clued me in to it. For in Hebrews 10:37,38a, in speaking of the Second Coming of Christ, the author uses Habakkuk 2:3,4, “37 "For in just a little while, the Coming One will come and not delay. 38 And a righteous person will live by faith.”
And after we have known of this Good News, we have to wait. God told Habakkuk that the vision would not be fulfilled right away, but to wait. The time was slowly, steadily, surely approaching when it would be fulfilled. Now those three words, slowly, steadily, and surely, tell me that this isn’t just something that God is waiting to act upon, and then one day—Boom—it will all be there. Those words speak of a process. They imply that even as we wait patiently for the fulfillment, God is working behind the scenes to bring the vision to pass. And then one day, it will finally come to completion. God has been working on all the pieces, in ways that we don’t always see or understand, but it’s not that he hasn’t been working. The case is not that in the end, he will suddenly act, but that in the end everything will be connected and we will see how he has been working all along. Even now, even when we don’t see any evidence of it, God is working his plan. And each step in that process is important, just as it was in Joseph’s case. Even when things don’t seem to be connected to God’s promises, we have to live by faith and according to the Spirit, so that we may walk the path that God has for us.
Now, I promised that we would look at “hindsight” again. Remember that faith is evidence of things we do not yet see. And this is exactly what God tells Habakkuk at this point, and exactly what the writer of Hebrews quoted immediately after telling of Christ’s return, “The just shall live by faith.” And that’s our responsibility in this “in-between” time. In this time when we don’t see physically God’s work all around us, we need to see with the eyes of faith God’s work. When our flesh tells us that God’s promises cannot possibly come from the circumstances we now face, that’s when faith my arise, faith that allows us to see beyond the circumstances and see what God’s ultimate plan is in all this. By faith, we can see how everything is going to work out according to God’s plan. Everything we see may look like Satan is in control. We may see sin and suffering, violence and injustice. But our faith allows us to see God moving even in those circumstances. And it’s this faith that will allow us to remain faithful to God and his ways even when we don’t understand. It’s this faith that allows us to accept that even though it goes against all logic and everything that we are experiencing, God is on the move and his purposes will be fulfilled.
c. 2002 Rev. Stephan Brown
