The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Habakkuk is an unusual prophetic book, unlike all the other Old and New Testament books of the Bible. Why? Habakkuk never addresses the people directly. All the other prophets receive a word from God, turn to either the people of Israel or the people of Judah, or to a king, or to a false prophet, or to a priest, and then reiterate what it is they’ve been given to say to the people. But the book of Habakkuk is different. It consists of a dialogue, written in the form of a conversation. It’s a conversation between Habakkuk and God, and thus written so that people can listen in, so to speak, and learn what the prophet is saying and understand it, and what God’s response to the prophet is.
Now Habakkuk, in history, was probably a contemporary with the prophets Zephaniah and Jeremiah, maybe even a little later, Ezekiel and Daniel. He prophesied no later than at the very end of King Josiah’s reign, which was from 640 BC to 609 BC. Habakkuk was a member of the tribe of Judah, and he was apparently a Levite in the temple — which is why he was familiar with, and makes use in his little book of, the ancient psalms and the ancient liturgy of the Jewish church.
The book of Habakkuk was written to teach Judah that the newly forming monarchy — the Chaldean monarchy, which was a subsection of Babylon — was already rising to power and threatening the greatest military and economic power in the ancient world at the time, the Assyrian kingdom, and that the Chaldeans and the Babylonians were destined to pose a serious threat to the southern kingdom of Judah under a short reign.
You see, King Josiah had led an outward reformation of the kingdom. He was rebuilding and fixing the temple and the walls around Jerusalem. He was restoring to the temple right, orthodox worship — that is, getting rid of the pagan gods and idols that had been set up in there, restoring it to the worship of the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim, and returning to that ancient liturgy which Habakkuk made use of himself. He fixed up the temple, drove the false gods out. But at the same time he was doing these reforms, there was a great spiritual and moral decline among the people of Jerusalem and the nation of Judah. The decline was coming, and increasingly it was obvious: violence, greed, oppression, exploitation were the orders of the day. It’s how people behaved toward one another, and how the government and religious leaders acted toward the people.
Habakkuk saw this rapid moral and spiritual decline, and he was greatly troubled. He saw the people abandon all that was good and reasonable, just and pleasing to God. So he goes to God. He goes to God to do what he and I do in such times of trouble: we complain.
Now Habakkuk’s really only three chapters long. It’s one of the shorter documents in the Old Testament, and it’s ultimately written to bring comfort to believers by reminding them of the eventual redemption of true Israel — that is, of the true church. And the book can be divided, or is divided, into three parts. The first part gives us a picture of the imminent and terrible punishment that will be brought upon the people by the Chaldeans — that is, they’re going to be invaded, they’re going to be conquered, and they’re going to be enslaved. The second contains a five-fold cry of woe — woe upon this, woe upon that — to a proud and idolatrous world that values power over one’s neighbor above all else. The third is a hymn offered by the prophet, praising the majestic God, the God of Israel, for His promises of redemption.
So the question at the heart of the book — it’s as old as the fall into sin and Cain murdering Abel: How could a good and just God allow bad things to be done to and by His very own people? How could a righteous God use an even more evil nation than Judah itself? How could such an evil, pagan nation as Babylon be used to punish a less wicked nation, the nation of Judah?
God makes it clear that both nations are and will be judged, and that all will be appropriately punished in one way or another for their unrepented sins. Although Habakkuk may not fully understand God’s ways, he was, in this conversation, beginning to learn God’s wisdom and God’s justice — coming to see that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will deal rightly, in His good time, with the peoples of the nations. He was coming to see that God is worthy of praise and worship even in the midst of difficult times, even in the face of moral corruption.
Habakkuk is not alone in his confusion. There was, of course, always the faithful remnant who wondered what God was doing. Would He remain faithful to them, though their nation was no longer faithful to Him? Did God even care about what He had promised or done for His people in the past? Did He care about their suffering and their anguish now? In the conversation between God and Habakkuk, God was reassuring both him and all the people that He would deal with them, that He is a gracious and patient God while at the same time delivering justice. He was reassuring them that He was in control, and He would deal with the nations of the world appropriately in His time.
Sounds like today. As we survey both the visible church, the people, the governments of our nation, we can understand and share in Habakkuk’s uneasiness and his questions about God’s disposition toward us, toward our church, and toward our nation. See, Habakkuk saw much that was wrong in the nation. Worse yet, though, God didn’t seem to care. That was an even greater confusion and a struggle for Habakkuk: God wasn’t listening to his prayers, or to the prayers of the faithful people — so he thought.
That, folks, is a common problem for believers. It goes with the territory of believers. We often wonder if God’s listening to us in our most terrible moments. Does God even care about us? Does He actually act like the heavenly Father that we believe in? We watch things in our own family go from bad to worse. We watch our children leave the church and make terrible decisions. We’ve watched family and friends — good, decent people — suffer painfully from deadly illnesses that take their physical lives. We watch our nation call bad things good and good things bad, and now punishing those who practice righteous things. Violence and corruption are everywhere around us. It’s on the news every night. So we wonder, like the faithful in Habakkuk’s day: why does our heavenly Father permit such things? Why doesn’t He do something about it?
But as we listen in on the conversation between the Lord God and the prophet Habakkuk, we not only learn that God does in fact hear our cries, we learn that He cares, and He provides still — in the midst of all this — our daily bread. He creates still, in the midst of all the struggle and sin, true Christian faith. And He reassures us time and time again throughout that little book that He will keep His promises — the promises all the way through the end of time. It speaks of the end. The prophet wrote: “It will not prove false.” That is: God is in it for the long haul, even though we may question our participation in it too.
Habakkuk began this section: “How long, Lord, must I call for help, but You do not listen? Or cry out to You, ‘Violence!’ and You do not save?” The questions are about the very character and nature of God — that He’s just sort of a distant watcher of the affairs and the conduct of His people and the conduct of the nations of the world. But Habakkuk presses the case. He wants to make sure that God understands and knows what’s going on in the world and in the church: “Why do You make me look at injustice? Why do You tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds. Therefore the Law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.”
Boy, that description fits our day and age like a glove, doesn’t it? It not only fits the conditions of Habakkuk’s time — it’s ours as well. The Law is paralyzed, and justice is perverted. The Law is paralyzed by those who know the Law but refuse to do the Law. Thus no justice, because no peace, no safety for the people. Violence and oppression everywhere. We have laws — most of them are right and just — and when they’re followed, they curb evil, as our catechism teaches, and they hold evil at bay. They create order and peace and prosperity. But today, those who are responsible for administering the Law and punishing evildoers reward the evildoers and punish the victims. They ignore the Law, as many self-identified Christians ignore the Ten Commandments and the very words of both the Old and the New Testaments.
Our appointed lesson for this morning skips over some of the historical references in the context of the book, but the rest of the chapter — chapter 1, verses 5 through 17 — tell us that in Habakkuk’s mind, things are about to go from bad to worse on account of God. They will become instruments — these evil Babylonians, these Chaldeans — of justice. “For behold,” verse 6, “I am raising up the Chaldeans, that fierce and impetuous people who march through the earth to take possession of dwelling places that are not theirs. They are terrifying and feared. They fly like an eagle swooping down to devour.”
That’s who God is sending to discipline Judah. God was raising up an even more wicked people than the people of Judah in order to punish Judah — that is, to do justice to them.
Then we come to the second complaint. Now God has responded. He’s responding to the questions and to the prayers and to the cries of Habakkuk. But it seems like God’s got it all wrong. He’s using the worst case in order to punish the lesser case. God answers Habakkuk and tells him to write it down: “The Lord replied, ‘Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets, so that the herald may run with it.'” He wants to make sure that the people of Judah hear: the judgment is coming, the justice will soon be upon them, and they’re going to get what it is they deserve for their unrepented sins. The Lord is going to come to judge the living and the dead. He will deal with the peoples of this world. He’ll deal with the people of the false church. He will do it in His good time, according to His divine providence.
He says in chapter 2, verse 3: “Though it lingers, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay.” That is: He has set a day. We don’t know it. We know not when it comes, but it will come.
When someone is suffering — be it spiritual or emotional or physical suffering — the last thing he or she wants to hear from the mouth of a pastor is “be patient.” When you’re suffering, you want it to be done. In his commentary on Habakkuk, Luther wrote: “In temptation, the flesh is neither able to believe in God nor trust that God is reliable and certain to keep His promises.” So at this point, Habakkuk fights against the doubt of the flesh.
Imagine: like all the prophets that came before him, and those who followed after him, he struggled between faith and unbelief too — between trust and distrust. Every prophet of the Old Testament raised his voice to God, wanting to know why and how long. Habakkuk himself says: “I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what He will say to me, and what answer I am to give to this complaint.”
Well, the answer that he got was one word: faith. God has Habakkuk speak the faith — faith to the people and to us. God speaks to Habakkuk the words that would later comfort St. Paul and Luther and us and all true believers in Christ in the midst of suffering and temptation. And what are those words? “The righteous shall live by faith” (2:4). “See, the enemy is puffed up; his desires are not upright — but the righteous person will live by his faithfulness.” The righteous one shall live by faith.
Again Luther: “It is Habakkuk’s desire, or aim — this is true of all prophets — he seeks to keep people in faith, to strengthen them with much comfort and with the declaration of the will of God, on the strength of His promises that God has made, so that people in affliction might not doubt, but rather give glory to the God of truth.” So he comes finally to the climax of the matter. He comes finally to the climax of the man: that is, to strengthen and sustain those who are weak in faith.
See, faith looks to what God has done in the past and is doing now. Hope is faith toward the future. We cling to the promises that He will in fact come to judge both the living and the dead. The Lord will deal with violence and injustice, immorality, corruption, idolatry, in His good time. He will save His people, because His people live by faith. Sinners though they be, they hold on to the words of God, even when it appears that God isn’t paying attention to them, or He’s taking His sweet time in answering the prayer. God will deliver you — He promises — for He already did it in the person and the work of Jesus Christ, proving that His promises are not hollow. He fulfilled the promise to Adam and Eve that He would send a Savior who would crush the head of the serpent.
Our Lord suffered His own violence. He suffered corruption at the hands of government and religious officials, for He bore our sins to be our Savior. It has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel. The Lord God knows what He’s doing. We’re the ones that don’t.
When the time was right, He sent His Son in the flesh. He crushed the head of the evil one. The people of the Old Testament thought that God was taking way too much time in sending the promised Messiah — and then when He came, so few of them believed. But Galatians 4:4-5: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons and daughters.”
The same God who knew what He was doing in the flow of human history and salvation history is the same God that knows what He’s doing in your life. It might not be fast enough for you or for me. It might not be what we would have chosen for ourselves. But the Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. Hear that: He’s patient with you too. The same patience that He applies to our enemies, to the weak in faith — though sometimes the lost and confused church — is the same patience He applies to you and to me. He is patient with those who don’t even believe. How much more so with you who do?
God has posted, you see, watchmen — pastors, as it were — to ensure that His Word of Law and Gospel are proclaimed, for faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ. That’s why God told Habakkuk to write down their conversation: so that generation after generation, a thousand generations, could listen in on the conversation and receive the same comfort Habakkuk did, and reply in the same way.
Thus chapter 3: a hymn of majesty and glory, praising God for His patience — the very thing that first frustrated and confused the prophet. Finally, again Luther: “The godly people are waiting for the Lord. Therefore they live. Therefore they are saved. Therefore they receive what has been promised. They’ve received it by faith, because they give glory to the God of truth, because they hold the hand of the Lord.” And so the prophet is looking not only to this promise, but to all the other promises about the preaching of the Gospel and the revealing of grace. See, embracing the big promise — the Gospel, the forgiveness of sins, life and eternal salvation in our heavenly home — see, that’s just the first promise. All the other promises: all things work together for good to them that love the Lord. “I consider the present sufferings to be nothing compared to the future glory that is to be revealed to me in Christ Jesus,” St. Paul wrote from a prison cell.
Okay, here’s Habakkuk’s hymn of majesty, a hymn praising God: “Yet I will triumph in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation. The Lord is my strength. He has made my feet like a deer’s feet, and has me walk on high places.”
God is not slow, as we call it slow. He will deliver you as He’s promised. And here in this place, each week until then, He forgives your sins. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.