Most of us have been mesmerized by the pictures we’ve seen of our earth taken from space. Those pictures from space reveal the beautiful oceans, the various continents, the perfectly round shape of the earth, as well as the clouds and weather we can see developing on earth. It looks like the most beautiful place in the galaxy. The earth from those pictures looks peaceful, clean, and calm. Those pictures of our world are nothing but majestic.
Yet, while the earth looks so beautiful when you are tens of thousands of miles away, those of us that live on earth don’t see the same beauty. When we live on earth we live in the midst of a different world. When we live on earth we see dust blown up by the wind, violence among animals, pollution from creation, injustice by humans, sadness in our communities, and we see suffering.
In the midst of this we often ask God: Do you know what’s going on? When will you intervene? Why don’t you do something? If you are good why do you allow pain, suffering, and evil?
The Old Testament book of Habakkuk was written 2600 years ago, yet it deals with a modern problem and common questions we all experience. The book of Habakkuk answers our questions because Habakkuk was asking the same questions then that we ask now. Thankfully, we don’t just read about Habakkuk’s questions, we read about God’s answers.
HABAKKUK’S CALL
“The oracle which Habakkuk the prophet saw.” (Habakkuk 1:1, NASB)[i]
The Prophet
His name, “Habakkuk” (חֲבַקּ֖וּק) only shows up two times in the Bible (Hab 1:1; 3:1). But the book of Habakkuk is quoted several times in the New Testament. Habakkuk 2:4 is quoted by Paul (Rom 1:17; Gal 3:11) as well as by the author of Hebrews (Heb 10:38) and Habakkuk 1:5 is quoted by Paul in a sermon that Luke records in Acts 13:41.
While nothing in Scripture describes Habakkuk, we can make some conclusions about him from what we read. Habakkuk likely was an officially ordained prophet who was part of the temple liturgical singing. He appears well educated, deeply sensitive, and based on his literary style he was as much of a poet as a prophet.[ii] He also was probably a composer of music or led worship in the table based on the musical notations of Hab 3:19. Habakkuk likely recorded this book in 606-604 BC, under king Jehoiakim (Jer 22:15-17; 2 Kings 23:34-24:5). This means he lived in the final dark days of the southern nation of Judah.
The Oracle
The word, “oracle” (מַשָּׂא) (NLT, “message”, NIV, “prophecy” or literally “burden”) is “a pronouncement or message from God to people.”[iii] In the Old Testament there are three types of oracles:Judgement, blessing, and salvation.[iv] The book of Habakkuk is an oracle of judgement against the evil of the nation of Judah, its kings, its people, and its rulers.
While most prophets in the Old Testament brought God’s messages to the people, Habakkuk is different. Habakkuk brings the people’s questions to God. And that starts here in verses two and three.
HABAKKUK’S CRY
“How long, O Lord, will I call for help, And You will not hear? I cry out to You, ‘Violence!’ Yet You do not save. Why do You make me see iniquity, And cause me to look on wickedness? Yes, destruction and violence are before me; Strife exists and contention arises.” (Habakkuk 1:2–3)
How Long?
Habakkuk is perplexed by the common wickedness he sees. He wonders why God doesn’t do something about it. Based on these two verses it’s clear he has been asking these questions for a while,[v] but he’s not getting a response. And because he hasn’t received a response he wonders what was going on. Habakkuk is frustrated and exasperated.
Habakkuk has probably been trying to fix the situation. He probably had given sermons, taught classes, held seminars, conducted counseling, sang songs, wrote “letters to the editor,” and possibly conducted PR campaigns to try to get the people to return back to God from their wicked ways.
Why?
In verses two and three we see Habakkuk pile up the synonyms as he describes what was going on among the people in Judah: “violence” (vv. 2, 3), “iniquity” (v. 3), “wickedness” (v. 3), “destruction” (v. 3), “strife” (v. 3), “contention” (v. 3). Charles Ryrie describes that “the strife and contention was between the Jewish people themselves, not with their enemies.”[vi] Habakkuk’s issues were with his neighbors in the city of Jerusalem, his fellow priests, and political rulers under whom he served. Because of this God is going to send a foreign nation to punish them.
We are hearing about the hurting heart of Habakkuk. He has not received an answer from God, he sees wickedness continue in his nation, he feels like God is distant, and he probably feels alone.
Questions of God should occur in the context of trust of God.
Throughout Scripture there are many biblical examples of people asking God questions but not getting answers. David (Pss 13:1-4; 22:1, 11, 19-20), Asaph (Pss 74:1-2, 10-11), and the Sons of Korah (Pss 88) are just a few of the examples from the Psalms.
When we read about Habakkuk and see other examples of people asking God questions but not receiving answers it reminds us that our questions should focus on God’s work, not God’s character. We question what God does, not who God is. We can question God’s actions, but we should never question His deity. Additionally, our questions should be directed toward God. We should talk to God, not about God to others. We should complain to God, not about God to others. It’s okay to ask questions such as: “God, are you doing your job?” “God, if feels like you don’t care?” “God, I wonder if you are paying attention?” “God, are you taking a day off?
I believe we can say these things and still be respectful for who God is even if we question what He does. However, this is a fine-line. A child asking a parent, “Why do you want me to eat all my vegetables?” is very different than the child asking, “Why do I need to do what you say?”
We can trust God because of His character. We know God is omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), and holy (just and perfect). Yet, the more we know Him, the more we trust Him. It is important that we must not believe that God’s silence is a sign of His indifference or inactivity (see Dan 10:12-14 for proof). In the midst of our struggles, sufferings, and problems we need to recognize the long-range plans that God has and that God is putting together even though those long-range plans never make sense at the beginning.
We must remember that God can see the whole picture but that we cannot. We’ve seen Habakkuk’s cry and his questions he asks from a place of trust and next we see Habakkuk’s heart and concern.
HABAKKUK’S CONCERN
“Therefore the law is ignored And justice is never upheld. For the wicked surround the righteous; Therefore justice comes out perverted.” (Habakkuk 1:4)
The Law
The “law” here is the Hebrew word, torah, (תּוֹרָה) which was the authoritative teaching of God’s Old Testament that revealed God’s will and was supposed to direct the life of God’s people in righteousness. “When used in the singular without clear definition, as here, torah signifies God’s covenantal code established with Israel, given through Moses and set forth particularly in the book of Deuteronomy (e.g., Dt 1:5; 4:8; 17:18-19; 31:9; 33:4; Jos 8:31-32)”[vii]
But the law was ineffective.The law, apparently is “ignored.” (NIV translates it as “paralyzed”). In other words, the Law has had no effect on the people. It has literally been “numbed” in the lives of the people in Judah. The people are not respecting the Law or giving authority to it. The Law in the life of the people of Judah was like cold numb hands that try to tie a fishing knot. The Law had been considered pointless.
The Situation
Sin was ruling in the land. The rulers were not administering justice to those that needed it. Corruption and lawlessness were part of the situation they were living under. But how bad was it? Habakkuk lived under King Jehoiakim of Judah. Jehoiakim ruled in Judah 609-605 BC under Egypt’s oversight and 605-601 under Babylon’s oversight. During his rule Jehoiakim killed innocent people who opposed him, refused to pay poor laborers (2 Kings 23:35-37; Jer 22:13-19), he killed Uriah the prophet for prophesying that Jerusalem would fall (Jer 26:20-23), and he burned the prophet Jeremiah’s hand-written prophecy (Jer 36). Furthermore, prophets and priests were known to commit adultery and abuse their authority under his rulership (Jer 23:1-2, 9-11).[viii]
Questions of evil and suffering should acknowledge we live in a fallen world.
One of the modern myths we need to extinguish as Christians is that if we become Christians all our problems will go away. When we become Christians our basic spiritual problem of being separated from God because of sin is fixed, but there’s still the problem that we live in a fallen world. We live in a world that does not follow God’s laws and that is ruled under Satan’s program (John 12:31; 2 Cor 4:3-4). This means life won’t always go as planned for us as Christians. This means we need to acknowledge that the world in which we live in is sinful, and that sinful world pollutes our lives.
When things don’t go the way we think they should we need to remind ourselves that there is injustice in this world. We need to remind ourselves that the sin of the Old Testament still effects us today. In the book of Genesis Adam and Eve committed the original sin (Gen 3), then Cain kills Abel (Gen 4), then God sends the Flood to wipe out the earth because of sin (Gen 6), then God disseminates the people because they were prideful wanting to build a tower to the heavens (Gen 11), then God wipes out Sodom and Gomorrah because of the sin there (Gen 18). That’s a lot of sin for only half of one book of the Bible! And if that’s not bad enough for you, read the book of Judges, 2 Kings, or Jeremiah.
Consider Habakkuk who was probably a priest in the temple, he likely taught the Law, possibly led singing (Hab 3:19), and he likely enjoyed a good and safe life in Jerusalem. But as we will learn from Habakkuk 1:5-11, God is going to send the nation of Babylon to punish Judah for their sins. Habakkuk is going to endure the Babylonians coming simply because of the fallen world, not because of what he did or didn’t do. Nothing Habakkuk has done has caused God’s punishment to come on Judah, yet Habakkuk still has to endure it.
Pain, evil, and suffering are the fault of the world we live in, not God. God gave us the freedom to make choices and a byproduct of that freedom is that sometimes the choices that others make hurt us. Sometimes our choices hurt us, but those are easier to wrestle with because we know who to blame: us. But when other people’s decisions effect us negatively, those are the hard situations to endure.
When I lived in Texas I knew a guy who raised his daughter to love God and follow God. She graduated college and married a man that wanted to be a pastor. She supported him as he went to seminary and served in his first pastor position. But after he had been a pastor a few years he felt like he should be in the Air Force instead of being a pastor. Again she supported him and his decision to leave Christian ministry to join the Air Force and pursue his dream to be a pilot. Soon she found herself alone with their three kids while her husband was flying around the world in the Air Force with his female copilot. It wasn’t too much longer till the man announced he felt he wasn’t supposed to be married to his wife, instead he believed he was supposed to marry his female copilot. The woman I knew found herself divorced, alone, and caring for her three children while the ex-husband was flying around the world with his new wife.
May I say something clearly and directly? Nothing that woman did caused her to have to experience the hurt and pain and shame that she has had to endure. She did everything right. She chose a spouse that loved God, she supported him through Seminary to be a pastor, she supported him as a pastor, she supported his dream to be a pilot in the Air Force, yet she ended up middle aged and divorced with three kids by herself.
When we have questions about suffering like this we need to acknowledge that we live in a fallen world. Sometimes we experience pain and suffering that was not caused by anything that we did. But it’s important we remember that our viewpoint is limited, much like the view of the earth was 100 years ago.
CONCLUSION
For more than a thousand years we knew the earth was round, but we could not prove that the earth was round. We knew it intellectually, but we could not prove it physically. That was until 1931 when Captain Albert Stevens, an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps, took his airplane to 21,000 feet above the earth and took a picture of the Andes Mountains in front of him which are 22,838 feet above the earth. If the earth was flat the Andes Mountains should have been level or slightly above the horizon of his picture which he took 287 miles away. But the Andes mountains were well below the horizon of his picture, thus serving as the first physical evidence that the earth was round.[ix] For years we knew intellectually that the earth was round, but we couldn’t prove it or see it physically. And that’s sometimes how it works for us when we as Christians are in pain and suffering. We know that God is good. We know God loves us. We know God has a plan. But it’s hard to endure because we can’t see His plan. We can’t see the whole picture that God is painting. But we can trust that in the future after we’ve endured pain and suffering, that God will show us the full picture and we will understand his perspective.
[i] Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible, Copyright The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.
[ii] J. Ron Blue, “Habakkuk” in The Bible Knowledge Commentary: Old Testament, edited by John Walvoord and Roy Zuck (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 1985), 1508.
[iii] Leland Ryken, Symbols and Reality (Wooster, OH: Weaver Book Company, 2016), 31.
[iv] Ryken, Symbols and Reality, 32-43.
[v] The phrase, עַד־אָ֧נָה indicates that the wicked conduct has continued for a long time without God stopping it (Carl Friedrich Keil, The Twelve Minor Prophets, vol. 2 [Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1949], 56).
[vi] Ryrie Study Bible (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2012) ,1117.
[vii] Carl E. Armerding, “Habakkuk,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Daniel–Malachi (Revised Edition), edited by Tremper Longman III and David E. Garland, vol. 8 (. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008), 611..
[viii] Adapted from J.K. Bruckner, “Habakkuk, Book of” in Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets, edited by Mark Boda and J. Gordon McConville (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 294-301, specifically p. 296.
[ix] “90 Years of Our Changing Views of Earth,” NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/90-years-of-our-changing-views-of-earth Accessed May 30, 2023.