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.
“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…”
“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.
[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
