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Habakkuk |
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| Chapter 1 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 3 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 2 | Prayer | Devotional |
Prayers
Lord God, we know that You love justice. We are amazed at Your patience, for there is still evil all around us. We see perversions of every kind. Yet we know that Your ways are great. You have a plan involving even powerful and evil nations. You work out Your holy goodness using armies and peoples who are swift to devour. Even evil angels fit into Your glorious plan. You are the everlasting God. You have ordained judgments upon the earth. Will You use a wicked nation to discipline Your church? Surely we are brought to wonder about the unfolding of events even in our time, but it is well beyond us to guess the details of what will come to pass. We do know what You have revealed in Your Word, and we have come to know You, O great and majestic God.
Sovereign Lord, we wait for Your Word. There is much that we do not understand. Your Word will finally come with power. Your people will live by faith. Though the wicked man will gather up what is not his own, he cannot take it with him beyond this life. There will be surprising witnesses that will rise against him in the day of resurrection that he does not expect. There are many things that we do not know now, but we know that the earth shall be covered with the knowledge of Your greatness and Your glory. All idols will be exposed as nothing. You are in Your holy temple. You do what is right now. You will do what is right forever. We worship You with awe and reverence, and trust You in everything.
Father God, we humbly beseech You that You would remember mercy in Your wrath. We plead the blood of Christ Your Son. You sent Him to be a Substitute for sinners. Your justice has already come upon Him centuries ago. There was nothing missing in His atoning sacrifice for Your people. Surely our wickedness has been utterly crushed through His merciful death for Your people. We tremble at the truth of Your holiness and Your costly love. The wicked who hate You will not prosper forever. Though we seem empty now, we are full of the joy of Your glory, and we will worship You in the splendor of Your majesty forever.
Devotionals
This world is not everything. In fact, our lives as we know them in this place under God’s wrath and curse are such a small percentage of our entire existence, that the actual number cannot even be expressed. We are not allowed to divide even the life of Methuselah by his total years in eternity and come up with a result. Nonetheless, though our days in these mortal bodies are very brief, it does not always feel that way to us. What is the purpose of this time that we go through now, this time that is such a small part of our existence, but which can seem to drag on and on? The Lord has ordered things for us here, things that we are supposed to see, questions we are supposed to consider, things he wants us to learn. The prophet Habakkuk had lessons to consider. God allowed him to see certain things, and then to address questions to the Lord in order to learn some vital truths that we can consider today as we read this Old Testament book.
Habakkuk had a question for God. The prophet was deeply troubled by the unrighteousness of the Lord’s people in Judah. He cried out to God about these matters, and was puzzled by the Lord’s inactivity. The Lord is slow to anger, and the prophet wondered just how slow God would be in addressing the violence and contention, the injustice and lawlessness that seemed to be everywhere. His concern was not only to see the unrighteous punished, but also that they be stopped lest the few who seemed faithful be entirely overwhelmed by the wickedness around them. Why did God seem to be doing nothing about it when His people had apparently so thoroughly given themselves over to lives of sin? What point was there in crying out to God when it did not appear that He was going to do anything about the situation?
The Lord had a surprising answer for Habakkuk. Though it may have appeared that He was not addressing the problem, there was much that this prophet could not see. God had been raising up the Chaldeans for some time, and they would soon be used by the Lord as an expression of His divine chastisement against His own people. God described these agents of His judgment to the prophet. The Babylonians were called bitter, swift, dreaded, fearsome, proud, violent, and deadly. They were not followers of the Lord, for their true god was their own might. This was the nation that God had prepared to address some of the problems in Judah that grieved Habakkuk so deeply. Devastating trouble would soon come upon Judah. If Habakkuk could have seen it, He would have been astounded. In fact, if the Lord had told the people of Judah all that would take place, no one would have believed Him.
Habakkuk seemed taken aback by this revelation. He knew that this could not be the complete end of the descendants of Jacob. God had made promises about their future. The prophet remembered that the Lord was and is from everlasting to everlasting. Surely there must be a big picture beyond the coming trial at the hands of the Chaldeans. There must be a correction coming rather than a final conclusion. As the prophet considered the Lord’s answer to His first question, a second began to form in His heart. Would the Lord use a people more wicked than Judah to swallow up Judah? Would God let that happen?
The world beyond the Promised Land was not a place of purity and peace. Sin was everywhere. Yes, the Babylonians could do this work against Judah if that was the Lord’s will. They could cast out their brutal military net and take in the Lord’s people as their captives. But what would the Lord do when the Babylonians made religious offerings to their own strength, like fishermen who sacrifice to their nets? Surely this could not be the final end to God’s actions in this world so infected by sin and so overcome by death? Would powers like the Babylonian empire simply kill nation after nation without mercy? There must be something else that the Lord had in mind beyond more luxury for the wicked.
We pause here at the end of the chapter and wait with the prophet for the Lord’s answer. During our brief days on this earth it is not unusual for us to see wickedness, and it is not unheard of for us to have to wait for an answer to our questions. There are some things that we see already. The Lord is not asleep. He is well aware of wickedness within the covenant community, and He will surely take action. That action will be according to His schedule and not according to ours. The action that He takes might shock us if we were to see it. It is very unlikely that we will be able to understand all that the Lord is doing as He accomplishes His perfect plan in His great war against evil.
Habakkuk wrote this brief book prior to the most important battle in the Lord’s great plan of victory. Many people would be very surprised by the way that God would use the brutal force of the Babylonians against His people. Yet they would be utterly shocked if they could have seen that greatest of all battles that we now know as a fact of history. In the cross of Christ, God has taken upon himself the full force of the wrath due against us for our pervasive evil. To send a strong foe against His people in every generation would only have had a temporary impact upon the deep problem of our sin. When Christ gave His righteous blood for our salvation, God permanently addressed the problem of our evil. If we need more proof than the Lord’s words “It is finished,” we need only to look at His resurrection. There are still many questions for which we do not have answers, but the cross and resurrection of Christ are the overwhelming facts that assure us that our God is very serious about punishing sin, and that our failures and disappointments will not be the end of the Lord’s story for His people.
We have many questions for the Lord. We cannot expect that all of those questions will be answered right away. It is part of the glory of God to conceal some things, just as it is part of His glory to reveal other things. Habakkuk had a question for the Lord concerning the wickedness of God’s covenant people. The answer that He received was a surprising revelation; that the Lord was preparing a powerful nation to bring destruction upon His own people. This led to a second question from the prophet, one which He brought before the Lord at the end of the prior chapter. Could it possibly be that God would use a people that were more wicked than Judah as the agents of His wrath against His own beloved nation? Could this be the end of God’s story of working with the descendants of Jacob? As the second chapter of this brief book begins, we find the prophet waiting for the Lord’s answer to this provocative question. Habakkuk began with a concern about the unrighteousness of the people. Now, based on the Lord’s answer, He seems to be wondering about whether God’s plans could really be right, for they seemed so very wrong.
The Lord’s answer to this second concern is one of the most important revelations given in the history of God’s dealings with mankind. It is quoted by the Apostle Paul in a pivotal section of his letter to the church in Rome. Like many of the Lord’s answers to us, it will not satisfy all of our curiosities. As we have said, it is part of the glory of the Lord to conceal. Yet He has revealed what we need to know. In giving His answer, God emphasizes the importance of the words He is about to say. It is clear that this is an answer that is not only about the crisis with the Babylonians. It is a vision that goes beyond that moment to a later time in the history of salvation. His answer is this: “The righteous shall live by his faith.”
The righteous man is enabled to trust God through all kinds of circumstances that may seem to accuse the Almighty. Yes, the Lord has noticed the depravity of His people. Yes, the Lord is using a more depraved nation to discipline them. Yes, God is perfectly aware that such a plan seems questionable to Habakkuk and to other observers, and to those who would place themselves in the position of being judges of God. The righteous man will trust the Lord, and will remember that it is the Lord who is the Judge of all the earth, not the earth which is the judge of the Lord. The Judge of all the earth will do what is right, though we may not see the rightness of it, nor perhaps appreciate the beauty of it immediately. At just the right time the Lord will do just the right thing. Until that time, the righteous are called to wait, to believe, and thus to live.
The Lord knows all about drunken, greedy, and arrogant men and nations. He knows His plans to overrule their proud boasts. He knows that such people must eventually pay for their wickedness. As they have done to others, they will have done to them. They imagine that all will be well for them forever, but their day will come. They will be plundered and destroyed. God knows about the wickedness of the Babylonians. The Lord intends to have no rivals in the age that is coming. Beyond the time of the Law will be the age of the gospel, when the message of the Lord’s glory will be taken to every corner of the earth. But beyond that age will come an age of a new heaven and a new earth. In that final resurrection age, it will be a complete and undeniable fact that “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” This is what the righteous man must hear and believe. The efforts of the wicked to win their own victory over decay by their own might will eventually come to nothing. God will win every battle. Therefore the righteous can live by faith now.
The Lord is not taken in by Gentile idolatry. He knows about their religion and their brutality. The things they are so impressed with in themselves will not be their glory in the Day of Judgment, but their shame. Every proud boast will be put to silence before the Lord of Hosts when He comes with resurrection power. The Lord’s heavenly temple will be in the midst of mankind, and all the earth will keep silence before Him.
This kind of overwhelming revelation is what we need to take to heart every day of our lives, lest we believe the lies of those who would impress us with their creaturely abilities and smooth words. None of us could stand in the coming Day of Judgment if it were not for the righteousness of Christ credited to our account. It is the great fact of biblical religion that the righteous will live by faith in Him who has become for us our righteousness, and who has borne the weight of the Day of Judgment that was surely coming against us.
As we see Jesus in the Word and consider that He came to us not with proud boasts, but with amazing humility, we should be able to accept the fact that the way to lasting glory is not through the oppression of the weak or through the applause of the many. To all appearances Christ died on the cross as a weak man who had been abandoned by everyone. Never before has there been such an unlikely source of power for mankind as this one Son of David facing an unjust sentence of death. Yet our assessment of Him with the eyes of flesh would be so very wrong. That man on the cross was there for us. He was and is both the wisdom and the power of God for us. We must not be surprised that there are many things about this life that we do not understand. If we want to really live, we should trust in God, and believe His promises. His Son died to bring us a life that no earthly power could ever take away from us, and all earthly powers will one day be judged by Him.
If we finally understand God’s greatness, if we finally see more of our desperate depravity, if we finally are caught up in the wonder of what Christ has done for us, we will surely live by faith. The more that we live by faith in our actual experience, the more we will pray. It is fitting that the final chapter of this book records the prophet’s prayer and song to God.
He had once sought God for a more aggressive justice against the wicked among the covenant people. Now He has been brought to a different kind of plea: that in His wrath the Lord would remember His great mercy for His people. The prophet has encountered God in a way that we may not fully understand. It is ours to meet the Lord in this prophetic Word, to hear His fearful speech in such away that we know that it is more than just a report about God. It must be a Word from Him. If we hear Him speaking rightly we will be afraid and we will pray.
How could this fear be the experience of those who know that our salvation has surely come to us through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ? How could we still be afraid? The fact is that we are still in this place of instruction and discipline. Do we want more trouble here? The way to get it is by ignoring God’s Word. While we cannot understand the Lord’s hand of correction entirely, nor can we fathom the distribution of His acts of discipline comparatively among His children, we should all be able to appreciate that there is much in us that demands correction, and that it is very foolish for a child under his Father’s discipline to continue to ignore the clarity of His Word. We do need God’s mercy for eternity. This we have perfectly in Christ. Yet don’t we also need His mercy in this age now? It will come to us from the same source. Through Christ we will have the provision of mercy and joy that we need to grow in obedience and love. This way is surely the right way for us. To imagine that we don’t need more mercy because the question of our eternity has been solved through our Redeemer is to live in a strange world of make-believe, where the god of that world is easily satisfied with our daily living and not very concerned about our growth in holiness. These assumptions are wrong.
In such a time of trouble as we face, it is important for us to look at the Lord again as He is presented to His people of old through the prophets. It is time for us to look at the real God, at His splendor and His majesty in His coming judgment. Though He veils His power in the works of nature, He is very impressive when He scatters the mountains and creates the valleys. His wrath is displayed upon the stormy seas and impresses the mariners as they cry for help, and even the villages of the coastlands are brought to fear the One who rules over the wind and the waves. The heavens declare His glory as the lightening flashes across the breadth of the skies. His anger against sin and His curse upon the land where the sons of Adam dwell should be known by all men.
The Lord uses His mighty power not in meaningless displays of impressive might like so many tyrants among the nations. He is a God of purpose, and He is patiently and deliberately working out His sovereign will. Within the eternal counsel of the triune Godhead, He is keeping promises that were made before the ages began. We are caught up in those eternal promises because of our union with Jesus Christ. He is the anointed King over His people. He will send His arrows against our enemies at just the right time. We can have no doubt regarding His love, for He Himself took the most devastating arrow of His judgment against us when Jesus died for us.
How can we react to such a great salvation? How can we serve such a mighty and loving God? We quake before Him at the expression of His discipline against us, but our fears are finally calmed by the assurance of His eternal love. Therefore we will patiently wait for Him in the day of tribulation. We can be quiet as a weaned child who trusts that food will come in due time. His vengeance will come against those who trouble us. Our deliverance is not as far away as it may appear.
Therefore, we will trust in the One who has displayed His love so perfectly for us. We will believe in His promises of the fullness of eternal life; ancient promises made long before we were born, even before the creation of the earth. Because of these great promises we will live by faith, though the crops fail, and though the animals die. Though enemies may seem to prosper and though our generations may seem to be cut off, we will worship God through Jesus Christ. And we will rejoice in the Lord always, for He has given us a new strength from above, and we are glad in our holy Redeemer.