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. 

Habakkuk 1:1-4 "Waiting for God's Answer"

This little prophecy really speaks important truths  into our  life. It addresses  the problem of God’s silence and seeming inactivity  at  times when you would have  expected  Him to act.

How  should we  understand God’s dealings with us in the process of history? Is history in the hands of God ? 

Or is He simply a remote deity that  may be compared  to  a watchmaker  making a watch, winding  it up  and  throwing  it into the desert waiting for its time to run out, remaining essentially uninvolved with the watch?

Or is He involved in history?  Is He “Yahweh – Jireh“, the Provider, or is  He  like many Namibian fathers  that not take care of their children  and  who are not involved in their lives?

I do not have to persuade you, that the  Scriptures portray God  as a caring, loving, heavenly Father.  He  not only has made the world (Gen. 1:1; John 1:3) but  He  also “sustains all things by the power of His  Word,” (Hebr.  1:3). 

The Psalms  are filled with affirmations of His providential love and care for all His creatures.  

He is involved in the  history of the world  (e.g. Psalm 2).  

He  knows His people, even before they are born (Psalm 139).   

He  deals with   stubborn and rebellious generations (Psalm 78:8). 

He cares for the  birds of the air  and the lilies of the field (Matt. 6). 

He is  the God of all the earth (Psalm 24:1)  and  of the Universe (Psalm 19). 

He is the God of the Macro-cosmos and the Micro cosmos. He is the God of the infinity of space,  and He is the God of the atoms,  electrons , quarks [1]etc. 

Presbyterian theologian   RC Sproul once said,  “There is no ‘maverick molecule ‘ in the Universe’. He indwells all things and all things hold together in Him- that is how intimately God relates  to all created things.

Here’s the question.  If God  is so involved in this world how come  He feels so far away at times? Many people would argue   that   great tragedies  in the world  (tsunamis,  earthquakes,  epidemics and  diseases, famines,  man’s  unrestrained cruelty) would indicate  that God doesn’t really  care about this world which He has created.

This is where  Habakkuk finds himself. If you had asked Habakkuk at this point  whether he felt that God was caring for Him or for his country, the nation of Israel, He would have perhaps initially said, "I don’t know ! He seems to have abandoned us! 

This  sentiment is discerned in  1:2-3, “O LORD, how long shall I cry for help and you will not hear? Or cry out to you “Violence” and you will not save? Why do you make  me see iniquity, and why do you look idly at wrong?”

SITUATION IN ISRAEL IN HABAKKUK’S TIMES

Habakkuk  is a contemporary of Jeremiah (which dates this  writing roughly  between 605-600 BC).  This is a time when Israel is at an all - time spiritual low, and it showed in her  moral and spiritual life.   Habakkuk was greatly troubled by  what he was seeing.  As a prophet he knew that the spiritual state of his nation was due to their own neglect of God.  Israel had forgotten her  God. She was following other gods. Sin and immorality are rampant. In justice prevails (1:3). Destruction and violence abounds  in society. This always happens when the   law  is disregarded.  Listen to how  Habakkuk puts it in 1:4,  
“So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted.”   There was serious spiritual apathy, which went hand in hand with a general moral,  judicial  and political decline.

THE PROBLEM

At this point  Habakkuk  did not understand why God allowed it all. He  had been praying  to  God for help (1:2)  but God did not answer! This is the  problem, and  this  easily becomes  a snare to many people. Why does a good God  not intervene  when the wicked surround the righteous?  It was not that Habakkuk wasn’t  wanting  God to deal with sinful Israel.   He was not defending  the evil  in the nation. He was  after all a prophet of God, and he had this   oracle (lit. a burden) on his heart and mind.    His problem was this: Why is God  not acting ?  Why is He so quiet?

I wonder whether  you  perhaps feel the  same at times? I confess that as a  pastor  with a burden for this nation, I often feel like this. I  know that  many Christians are overwhelmed at the rampant evil in our society and they are asking,  “why does God not do anything  about this ?”

THE ANSWER 

The answer is   in coming. God is not sleeping  on the job. The answer  to what He is going to do is for the  next semon Right now  we simply want to deal with the  state of mind in  which we find ourselves when we   perceive  that  God does not appear  to act  when we think  that He should. We need to talk about  our response to God's seeing inactivity. 

There is, of course a presupposition  behind our question:  Why does God not act? That is due to the fact that we  use the Bible in a  particular way.  Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones [2] drew my attention to this fact. He writes,   
“We tend to use  the Bible  as a text book  of personal salvation. Many people  seem to think  that the sole theme of the Bible is our personal relationship with God. Of course that is one of the central themes… but that is not the only theme in the Bible. Indeed, we can go so far as to say that the Bible puts the question of personal salvation  into a larger context. Ultimately the main message of the Bible concerns the condition of the entire  world and its destiny; and you and I, as individuals, are  a part of that larger  whole…”

The problem occurs when we look at  our world  from   a  limited, self- centered  perspective and when we fail to take into account the   grand message of the Bible  concerning the world and its destiny. This is the problem which we find in Habakkuk’s mind at this time. He could not reconcile what he was seeing, with what he was believing.

A similar example  of this sort of perplexity is found in  Psalm 73.  There the Psalmist confesses that he had almost stumbled. His feet had almost slipped. He had a faith crisis  when  he  considered how the wicked always seemed to prosper, while God  fearing men like  himself  always seemed to struggle. In fact he seems to begin to believe by and by that  his faith had been all in vain. The  more he tried to work this out in his mind, the more depressed he became. But thankfully the turning point   came for him in  Psalm 73:17, “… until I  went into the sanctuary of God ; then I discerned their end…”. 

It was not until he had  understood the big picture  i.e.  God’s perspective   on the entire  matter, that he began to  see the true future of the wicked. That  new perspective changed  everything for him, even though  the  prosperous and  arrogant people  in that 73rd  Psalm seemed  at this stage to  have continued  in the same frame of mind.

WHY THIS PROPHECY IS  SO VALUABLE TO US AT THIS TIME 

1.        We  need   a grand perspective of God’s  plan for  the world  in history. Does God’s silence and His choosing not to answer our prayers ( according to our desire) have anything to do with the fact that He is  not involved  with this world? Habakkuk will teach us that  this is not so. We shall learn that God’s silence and His non-answers to  our prayers are still to our benefit.  And, for that  matter  aren’t you  glad that God  does not answer every one of your often self centered and self focussed  prayers that tend to exclude eeryone and everything else?  For that matter too, aren’t you glad that  He did not answer Jesus’ prayer in the garden : ”Lord let this cup pass from me?”

2.        Secondly, Habakkuk will teach us , that things in history sometimes get worse before they may get better.  The divine surgeon has to cut before He heals. We  may be assured that  He always heals  His people – even if only beyond the curtain of death.

3.        Thirdly,  Habakkuk will teach us something about the apparent discrepancy between what we see and what we believe. Habakkuk was greatly troubled by what he saw. The problem was that he could not reconcile what he saw with what he believed.  He knew that God  had  to punish his nation. That was clear to him. He knew that God is holy and that his eyes were too pure to behold sin. But what he could not understand was that God could  use  means, which to Habakkuk’s mind were  unthinkable. In this case we  shall discover that God will use the Babylonians, a nation of idolaters  and ruthless people – to punish His chosen  Hebrew nation!

Now this all serves as an introduction.  We may need  to  prepare ourselves to correct our stereo- typical thinking of God. Habakkuk  was guilty of stereo-typical thinking. The value of reading the prophet Habakkuk  is that we might obtain new insights into the  nature of God’s  often perplexing working in this world.  And perhaps we will begin to understand why  things are as they are in the world.   There is wonderful scope  to broaden our spiritual horizons in this book. And perhaps a few of us will make a quantum leap in our understanding as we begin to understand the  nature of  the sovereignty of God.  There is wonderful scope to  learn  true humility. There is wonderful scope to live more by faith and  in dependence upon His grace. 

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[1] A quark  is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei

[2] Martyn Lloyd Jones:  Faith tried and Triumphant  (IVP) , p.4