Habakkuk 1:5-11 "God's Strange Answer"

Habakkuk, a contemporay  of the prophet Jeremiah, was prophesying in an age of spiritual apostasy in Judah around  600 B.C. Because of this the land seemed to be forsaken by God, and when  the good is absent, evil flourishes.  

Consider the choice of words  Habakkuk uses in the first   4 verses,  to describe the situation in the nation:“violence… iniquity… wrong… destruction… strife…contention… the law is paralysed… justice never goes forth… the wicked surround the  righteous… justice goes forth perverted…”.  

Habakkuk pointed out these things to God, but God seemed to do nothing about the matter. This is the God who had judged so decisively in previous times. 

• God removed Adam and Eve from Paradise when they sinned.  
• He  had judged the wicked people in Noah’s day.  
• He had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in Abraham’s  day.  
• He  had caused an entire generation of Jews to perish in the desert, when they rebelled against Him time and again.  

God has acted decisively in history when sin was rampant, but why is He so strangely silent now?

We might ask the same question in our own  day.   Lawlessness of all kinds and types is found in our  own society, so much so  that   in  our  own  city many people do not feel that it is not even worth reporting   crime to the police.  The judicial system is slow. Justice is often  not readily dispensed. Sometimes it even seems as if the rights of criminals are defended.   That is the situation in which Habakkuk  finds himself,   “… the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth.”   

And so we may find ourselvers praying about such  things in our own society, and yet, rather than seeing a decrease in these trends pertaining to wickedness, we see an increase of these trends in wickedness.  Why does God not answer our prayers? 

These are real questions, and it is a real mystery  as to why God does not act.  But the answer is in the making ...

Habakkuk  1:5-11: God’s answer to Habakkuk’s dilemma

Here we are helped to see  that  God is not silent!  In vv. 5 -11  He responds  to Habakkuk.

“Look among the nations, and see; wonder and be astounded. For I am doing a work in your days  that you would not believe if told.”   

Now,  God is not rebuking Habakkuk for questioning him. He is not rebuking him for being perplexed. In fact,  God  is in agreement  with His prophet – but the answer and solution that He offers to Habakkuk is  something  that  the  prophet had not anticipated at all. 

The response  from God in 1:5-6  comes in strong exclamations: “Look! See!  Wonder! Be astounded! Behold!”  

God announces  that He will do  something very different from Habakkuk’s expectations: “I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe, even if  told.” (1:5).

We do know from the Scriptures that God often works in unexpected ways. 

• He provides water and  food in a desert to  a  million people. (Exodus) 
• He  gives babies  to old  women  like Sarah  (Genesis 21)  and Elizabeth (Luke 1:13 ff) . 
• In Elisha’s day God  made an axe head float.  (2 Kings 6:1-6) 
• He gave  Israel  unusual and unexpected military victories (Gideon: Judges 7 &8 ; Jehoshaphat 2 Chronicles 17-20). 
• He heals incurable diseases, raises dead people when He wishes to do so  and He sets aside the laws of nature  so that  the sun stands still,  raging winds are calmed, and water is walked upon. 
• The greatest  unexpected victory  was  when  God  used  His own Son and a  cross  to secure  forgiveness of our sins,   providing  those who believe in the Lord Jesus with access into heaven. 

The   Scriptures teach us that God sometimes answers our prayers by allowing things to become much worse before they become better. He may sometimes do the opposite of what we anticipate. He may overwhelm us by confronting us with a Babylonian army. 

It is a fundamental principle in the life and walk of faith that we must always be prepared for the unexpected when we are dealing with God. 

V.6  And so  God makes  His will known to Habakkuk:  

“I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation. . .”  

Here is the surprise. God  will use  a ruthless, godless  nation  to deal  with  Israel’s sin. In 1:6-11  the ruthless nature of  God’s instrument of judgment upon Israel is revealed,

"For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, who march through the breadth of the earth, to seize dwellings not their own.  They are dreaded and fearsome; their justice and dignity go forth from themselves. Their horses are swifter than leopards, more fierce than the evening wolves; their horsemen press proudly on. Their horsemen come from afar; they fly like an eagle swift to devour. They all come for violence, all their faces forward. They gather captives like sand. At kings they scoff, and at rulers they laugh. They laugh at every fortress, for they pile up earth and take it. Then they sweep by like the wind and go on, guilty men, whose own might is their god!” 

The Babylonians  even end up exalting themselves as god!  You can hear Habakkuk’s mind ticking… "Are you saying that God is directing and using such monstrous hordes to punish His own people?” 

The answer is, "Yes that is what God is doing". ...“I am doing  a work  in your days that you would not believe if  told. I am raising up the Chaldeans (Babylonians)...”. 

Here is an illustration of  Proverbs  21:1.This Babylonian king's heart was in God’s hand. At this time  God was strengthening godless Babylon for the purpose of excercising judgement upon Israel.   

Christians must learn  to understand this. An attack on the church cannot always be simplistically attributed to the devil. The church needs to ask herself,  What is happening here?" Are the attacks upon the church  not due to the fact that God may be chastising the church, by allowing the enemy of the church  to  be victorious over her? 

Please note  that  in our text  God  is allowing these things to happen to His people Israel.  When  we see  the church besieged by  all sorts of anti- Christian forces, we must  not  come to simplistic conclusions. When communists, radical Muslims or atheistic humanists take away our churches, or when godless philosophies steal our children  and our way of life  we  must ask ourselves,  Why is this happening?   And when we see the same symptoms  in our so called  “Christian nation”, as we see in Habakkuk’s day,  we may  well ask ourselves, "Is this  not God who has been doing the sending of our enemies upon us?

May I remind you  that this is not a truth just found here in an odd little prophetic book in the Old Testament. 

• Seven hundred years before the time of Habakkuk, God spoke to  Moses,  warning the people of Israel, “If you do not obey the LORD your God . . . The LORD will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will not understand, a fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young . . . Then the LORD will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other” (Deut. 28: 15, 49, 50, 64).
• Similarly God spoke through the prophet   Isaiah:  “Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger, in whose hand is the club of my wrath! I send him against a godless nation, I dispatch him against a people who anger me, to seize loot and snatch plunder, and to trample them down like mud in the streets. But this is not what he intends, this is not what he has in mind; his purpose is to destroy, to put an end to many nations.” (Isa.10:5-7). Behind the Assyrian club or rod  was the arm of God.  

God uses unusual instruments.

Many  modern Christians  struggle with this. Some say, “I cannot believe  that a good God can do such things.”  But, may we ask,  “Who said that   good  cannot come out of this?  If you look what lies ahead in Bible   history, you will find  that much good comes out of this.  

• Israel as a nation greatly is humbled by God. 
• You will find godly people like Queen Esther and Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah rising to  take hold of spiritual  challenges.  These became a purified people,  and they led the nation of Israel not only back home, but also  in the rebuilding of the city of Jerusalem, spiritually encouraged and helped by the prophets   Haggai and Zechariah.  

So Habakkuk’s prayer for God to revive his work  (Hab. 3:2) would be answered via the Babylonian invasion and captivity of  Israel. God would not solve the  spiritual and moral crisis amongst his people by Habakkuk’s preferred method of revival. He would solve it in this ‘unwelcome’ way.

Now, all this does not mean that God ignores the sin and the ungodliness of the Babylonians. We will  see that  there is  yet more information to come concerning the fate  and the future of the Babylonians, but that will have to wait for our next  sermons.