Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Ask Away (Habakkuk 1:1-2:1)
Date: November 2, 2024
Have you ever asked God a hard question? Maybe a better way to ask that is like this: When was the last time you asked God a hard question? There were a lot of people asking God hard questions in 1755 and the next decade or so. Just three days ago in 1755 there was an earthquake in Lisbon, Spain. A big earthquake. A deadly earthquake. The total loss of life was somewhere between 40,000-50,000 people. The thing so many people struggled so much with in the wake of that particular earthquake was that Spain was a really Catholic country. Spaniards were on the whole faithful Catholics. It seems like that should have earned them some points with God. At the very least a whole lot of folks were thinking they should have been spared from the worst of it. But, no, the epicenter was there, and it was bad.
What’s more, the earthquake happened on a Sunday morning when tens of thousands of Spaniards were in churches across the region; churches that subsequently collapsed on them when the earth started shaking. So, not only did this deadly earthquake happen in a very faithful country, but it happened at a time when the death toll was primed to be even higher than it might have otherwise been. Like I said: hard questions.
Sometimes we ask God hard questions. These frequently come in the wake of major natural disasters like, say, Hurricane Helene. They also come in the wake of far more personal circumstances like a loved one fighting a long battle with some variety of dementia or the news of cancer that has returned or not responded to treatment like we had hoped. Sometimes a relational storm causes us to ask them. They could be prompted by the loss of a job or an injury. Sometimes we ask God hard questions.
Today, many followers of Jesus are asking God hard questions about the state of the culture. I’ve had many folks come to me concerned about the moral degeneracy of the world around them and wondering when God is going to do something about it. Interestingly, Christians aren’t the only ones who worry about the moral state of the culture and the world more broadly. I was interacting with an unbeliever on my blog the other day. After he had tried several times to make the case that the Gospels aren’t reliable and so Jesus couldn’t possibly have risen from the dead and thus Christianity is a farce, I asked him what his goal was as that was not something he was going to be able to convince me of. He told me that he considers himself to be part of one of the most important movements in history: debunking religious superstition so we can rid the world of the division, discrimination, violence, and wars it causes. Everybody is worried about the amount of evil and brokenness in the world even if they don’t think about it in the same ways we do. We want someone to blame for it, but also someone to bring about a solution for it.
Let’s get even more timely than this. We will finally go to the polls in just two days (unless you already have) to cast our votes in what has been a tremendously acrimonious election season. We are finally going to find out who the President will be for the next term. More importantly than that, the political ads will finally stop running. Everywhere. All the time. People on all sides of the aisle are worried that the outcome of this election could spell the beginning of the end…or even just the end…of our nation as we know it. If you’ve accidentally found your way onto a fundraising list for either party, you have no doubt received more than a few pleas to give your dollars because our very democracy is at stake if the other side wins. So, no pressure, but if you make the wrong choice on Tuesday, your vote could spell the end of America. Sleep tight until then. And all along the way, we are all asking why things are the way they are.
Well, it will perhaps be of some comfort to you to know that we are not the first to wonder this. People have been concerned with the state of the world for a very, very long time. In fact, some of the most piercing questions about why things are a mess and what God plans to do about it were asked by one of the prophets of Israel named Habakkuk. Habakkuk asked God some really hard questions, got some answers, and then started to ask even harder questions because he didn’t like the answers he got. In the end, he landed somewhere good, but all of his tensions were not resolved. His collection of prophecy is a good reminder that sometimes a result of living in a world broken by sin is that we are left with tension we don’t want and can’t fix. For the next few weeks, I would like for us to explore this tension with Habakkuk in a brand-new teaching series called Asking God Hard Questions. And I say “explore this tension” and not “resolve this tension” because the Scriptures don’t resolve it for us. That’s life, and the Scriptures are honest about how life actually works. What we are going to find in this journey won’t always be comfortable, but it will be honest. And, I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have honesty than a merely comfortable delusion any day of the week.
We’ll get started today by taking a look at a question and answer session with God that did not go the way the prophet expected. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy, find your way with me to the Old Testament document that bears our prophet’s name: Habakkuk. It’s tucked away at the back of the Old Testament in the parade of short books that can make it tricky to find without your table of contents. If you see Micah or Nahum, keep going. If you get to Haggai or Zechariah, you’ve gone too far.
As far as prophets go in the Old Testament, we know very little about Habakkuk beyond his name. He doesn’t get mentioned by any other prophets who might have been contemporaries with him. Given the context of his prophetic record, we assume that he wrote sometime before the beginning of King Josiah’s reign at a time when the nation of Judah had gotten way, way off track in their relationship with God, but also before Josiah instituted the sweeping spiritual and moral reforms that pulled the nation back from the brink for another few years. Another option would put his prophecy after Josiah’s death when Babylon had already come to town once and was threatening to do so again. This would have potentially put him as a contemporary of guys like Zephaniah and Jeremiah, or maybe even Ezekiel and Daniel. The other thing that makes him so interesting is that his prophecy isn’t really focused on anyone in particular. He’s not calling down judgment on anyone or calling anyone to dramatic moral reforms. It’s just the record of a conversation between him and God. And it’s not a pretty conversation. That’s actually one of the things that makes this little book so powerful. It gives us permission to do the same. Let’s dig into this conversation starting right at the beginning.
The first verse tells us that what we are about to read is a “pronouncement that the prophet Habakkuk saw.” In other words, he had a vision of some sort, and in this vision, he had a conversation with God. I want you to imagine someone who has sought his whole life to be faithful to God. He’s tried to do the right things, live the right ways, make wise choices, live out of the character of God faithfully. And yet, as he looks at the world around him, he is distraught by what he sees. He feels a bit like he’s the only one in the world who is taking such a path. Everyone else is taking their cue from the end of the story of Judges. They were just all doing what was right in their own eyes. Injustice and evil are flourishing. Oppression and violence are everywhere. His society is a mess, and the God he has followed so faithfully doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it. He’s so fed up with the whole thing that when he has a vision in which he is standing before God he doesn’t experience any of the normal worries and woes about being not fit for God’s presence we see when other prophets have a similar experience. Instead, he starts right in with his complaint.
“How long, Lord, must I call for help and you do not listen or cry out to you about violence and you do not save? Why do you force me to look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Oppression and violence are right in front of me. Strife is ongoing, and conflict escalates. This is why the law is ineffective and justice never emerges. For the wicked restrict the righteous; therefore, justice comes out perverted.”
That’s quite an opening salvo. This is not some polite or academic or holy-sounding inquiry as to the negativity perceived in the world. This is a passionate, angry even, tirade thrown right in the face of the one person he thought should be the one to care the most about it all and to do something meaningful to fix it. But no. Apparently He’s too busy doing His God stuff to care about His world falling to absolute pieces. This is why the law is ineffective! Because you won’t do anything to stop all of this. People see the law, get away with flagrantly violating the law, and naturally assume the law is a joke. They can do as they please. What are you going to do about it, God?
Ever been somewhere like that? It’s a dark place to be. We get angry and bitter and cynical and more than a little self-righteous (because at least I’m not like all these other moral degenerates). Maybe we respond to this by going all Pharisee on the people around us, judging them like crazy because God seems too busy to do His job. We’ll just have to do it for Him. Since His hands-off approach is clearly a disaster, we’ll be a bit more hands-on. Ever experience a church like that? My guess is that unless you had some sort of a guilt complex or else were born or married into it, you didn’t stay around for a second longer than you had to. At the first available opportunity, you bailed on that place and didn’t look back. In fact, an experience like that may have pushed you to react in the opposite direction to this moral tension. You responded by walking away from the faith entirely. A God who can’t fix all of this is clearly a God who is not worthy of our time and attention. In fact, that’s probably not a God who really exists in the first place. Maybe there’s just no gods at all. We really are on our own.
Asking God hard questions like these sometimes feels like throwing rocks into the ocean. They make a splash, but then nothing comes of it. The waves keep rolling on like they always have. There’s no response that we can discern. Well, for whatever reason, when Habakkuk threw his questions and accusations in God’s face, he got a response. It just wasn’t the response he expected. God essentially says, “You know, you’re right. I am going to do something about all of this.”
Stay with me in the text at v. 5 now: “Look at the nations and observe—be utterly astounded! For I am doing something in your days that you will not believe when you hear about it. Look! I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter, impetuous nation that marches across the earth’s open spaces to seize territories not its own. They are fierce and terrifying; their views of justice and sovereignty stem from themselves. Their horses are swifter than leopards and more fierce than wolves of the night. Their horsemen charge ahead; their horsemen come from distant lands. They fly like eagles swooping to devour. All of them come to do violence; their faces are set in determination. They gather prisoners like sand. They mock kings, and rulers are a joke to them. They laugh at every fortress and build siege ramps to capture it. Then they sweep by like the wind and pass through. They are guilty; their strength is their god.”
Now, of all the things Habakkuk might have expected God to say in response to his complaint about the moral state of his own people, this was not it. Did you understand what God was saying there? Sometimes it’s hard to see the point through the fog of poetic language. God’s response to Habakkuk’s complaint about the injustice and violence in the culture around him is that He is going to raise up the Babylonian army to come and bring judgment against them. He then goes on to describe for Habakkuk what a terrifying proposition this was for anyone on the sharp end of this particular stick. This was probably not a description Habakkuk needed. He was likely perfectly aware of the threat the Babylonians represented to his nation. Everyone in that part of the world at that time was aware of it. The Babylonians were an expansion-minded empire who were greedily gobbling up all of the nations around them with impunity. No one could stand before them. Anyone who tried became little more than another notch in their victory belt.
Did you catch the other thing God emphasized in His response? He’s perfectly clear that He’s not raising up the Babylonians because of their moral purity. This was not going to be a morally superior nation bringing righteous judgment to a morally inferior one. He describes the Babylonians as bitter and impetuous. They are terrifying. They are committed to no sovereignty but their own, to no moral law higher than what they have determined is right for them. They are horribly guilty of their own sin. They worship their strength. They are the epitome of worldly self-righteousness. This is the nation God is going to use to bring judgment to Israel for their many, many sins.
Habakkuk didn’t merely get an answer he didn’t like in response to his hard questions for God, he got the worst answer he could possibly imagine. God’s answer was essentially, “You don’t like how things are right now? When I set about addressing the issues, they’re going to get way worse.” Be careful what you wish for. You might not like how it gets delivered.
Habakkuk certainly didn’t. This was almost the exact opposite of what he was asking God to do. I mean, yes, he wanted God to do something about the rank injustice and immorality of his people, but not this. In a bit of a fit of understandable self-righteousness, Habakkuk looks back at God and essentially says, “But they’re way worse than us! How is this fair?!?”
Verse 12 now: “Are you not from eternity, Lord my God? My Holy One, you will not die. Lord, you appointed them to execute judgment; my Rock, you destined them to punish us.” My translation phrases all but the first sentence there as statements rather than questions, but they all carry the sense of rhetorical and incredulous questions from the prophet. The force here amounts to Habakkuk’s saying, “But aren’t you God? How could you possibly use them to judge us?”
I should also note that if you have a translation other than mine, the second sentence probably reads as some version of, “We will not die,” instead of, “you will not die.” There’s some genuine scholarly debate over which is correct. There are good textual arguments for both. One version (the one in the translation I’m using) emphasizes God’s holiness and immortality. The other heightens the fearful tone of Habakkuk’s response: “We’re not going to die, are we?” Ultimately, while one option is correct and the other is not, we don’t know for sure which is which. Thankfully, either option fits comfortably within the larger tone of Habakkuk’s response and his questioning how God could possibly respond like this.
“Are you not from eternity, Lord my God? My Holy One, you will not die. Lord, you appointed them to execute judgment; my Rock, you destined them to punish us. Your eyes are too pure to look on evil, and you cannot tolerate wrongdoing. So why do you tolerate those who are treacherous? Why are you silent while one who is wicked swallows up one who is more righteous than himself? You have made mankind like the fish of the sea, like marine creatures that have no ruler. The Chaldeans pull them all up with a hook, catch them in their dragnet, and gather them in their fishing net; that is why they are glad and rejoice. That is why they sacrifice to their dragnet and burn incense to their fishing net, for by these things their portion is rich and their food plentiful. Will they therefore empty their net and continually slaughter nations without mercy?”
Can you feel the tension here? God actually answered Habakkuk’s hard questions about the state of his nation, but His response only served to generate more hard questions. God agreed with Habakkuk on the nature of the problem. And, He was going to bring a solution to the problem. The trouble was that the solution felt worse than the problem itself, leading Habakkuk to ask even more hard questions. He was mired in this tension and it didn’t feel like there was a way out of it.
Can I be uncomfortably honest with you this morning? Sometimes that’s how life feels. But then, I probably didn’t need to tell you that. You already knew that. You’ve experienced that firsthand. You found yourself in terrible circumstances, prayed for them to get better, and then things got worse. You got the diagnosis, did the treatments, and they didn’t work. You lost your job, couldn’t find a new one, and then the unexpected bills started showing up. Your kid rebelled against everything you had ever taught her was right and true about how to live, you extended an olive branch in hopes of creating space for conversation, and then she took a hard turn further away from your faith. Sometimes that’s how life goes. It’s terrifying. It’s infuriating. And it leaves us asking God really hard questions. Sometimes we ask God hard questions. Habakkuk understands. He did too.
This actually brings us to one of the real points of worth of Habakkuk’s collection of prophecy more generally. Habakkuk asked God some really hard questions and he wasn’t particularly gracious or holy-sounding in how he did it. He wasn’t proper. He didn’t worry about using the right words. He just laid it all out there. And not once does God ever scold him for it. He doesn’t correct his tone. He doesn’t tell him to try again, but this time with a more deferential approach. None of that. Instead, He answers him. He lets him be angry and confused and frustrated. Listen, if God did this with Habakkuk, He’ll do it with us too. What Habakkuk does here is to give us permission to ask God hard questions. He gives us permission to be emotional in our interactions with Him. We don’t have to worry about choosing the right words or getting ourselves into the right posture. We can be raw and honest with Him about whatever it is we are struggling with. God can take our hardest questions. We just need to know, though, that we may not like His answers. God can take our hardest questions, but we may not like His answers.
And I know this is the part of the sermon where I’m supposed to start bringing some resolution to the tension I’ve spent the last few minutes creating for you. I’m not really going to do that this morning, though. I’m going to tell you to come back next week. In fact, come back for every week of this series because while Habakkuk does finally deliver us some relief from the tension, it doesn’t come until the very end of his little book of prophecy. Even then it’s not fully what we would like it to be if we were the ones writing the story. God can take our hardest questions, but we may not like His answers, because sometimes His answers don’t resolve the tension for us, they invite us to sit in it with Him.
Those last two words are key. With Him. The reason God invites our hardest, most emotional questions, and doesn’t put on any kind of airs with us even though He absolutely could since He’s God and we’re not, is that if we are asking Him hard questions, we are at least looking in His direction. We are reaching out for a relational connection. If we are willing to sit in that space, that uncomfortable space, we will eventually find what we are really seeking. But we have to be willing to sit in that space with all the tension just hanging in the air around us. God can take our hardest questions, but we may not like His answers. If we will sit with Him and continue wrestling with Him over those answers, we just may be surprised by what we come away with in the end.
That sitting with God in the tension is where we find Habakkuk at the place we are going to stop in the text for today. Look at one last verse with me: Habakkuk 2:1. “I will stand at my guard post and station myself on the lookout tower. I will watch to see what he will say to me and what I should reply about my complaint.” In other words, Habakkuk was going to continue to pray. He wasn’t going to take the route of the angry coward who throws out hard questions and then refuses to wait around for an answer. He is going to sit in the midst of the tension and keep sitting there. He is going to keep pursuing God because He understood what the apostle Peter would much later acknowledge to Jesus: You have the words of life; where else would we go?
God can take our hardest questions, but we may not like His answers. If we will keep waiting on Him, trusting in His character, holding fast to the hope of our faith, we will find more than we imagine. The apostle Paul would later capture the heart of this idea for the Philippian believers: “Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” That’s the asking hard questions part. Listen to what he says next, though, because this captures the results. “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” There is a peace to be found in waiting on the Lord even after asking Him our hardest questions that goes beyond what we can fully explain. It surpasses all understanding. People who haven’t experienced it will react to the idea with derision and cynicism. But for those who have, you know. And anyone can experience this. You simply have to be willing to sit with Him long enough to receive it. Habakkuk was, and I can’t wait to experience that moment with you in a couple of weeks. You won’t want to miss that.
For today, if you are sitting in that place of tension and it seems to be increasing the more you pray rather than going the other way, don’t give up. You are sitting with a God who is good even when things are not. He is a God who keeps His promises, and He has promised that His goodness will yet be revealed in and through the lives of those who are willing to wait on Him and keep doing life His way in the interim. If you are following Jesus, you are living for a kingdom that is eternal. It will last far longer than this world will. Even if you have to wait for that revelation of God’s goodness until then, what’s a momentary season of tension now in comparison with an eternity of goodness and grace? Now, if you have hard questions along the way, ask them. God can take our hardest questions, but we may not like His answers. If we will be willing to trust that they are for our ultimate good, though, and keep pursuing Him, He will yet bring us to the place we need to be. He will yet bring you to the place you need to be; the place where you can see Him through the fog of your circumstances. That’s a very good place to be. That’s the place where real hope is found.