I call out to you, “Violence!”
But you do not deliver!
Habakkuk 1:2
Two Fridays ago was meant to be when 9-year old Evelyn Dieckhaus was to sing “What a Wonderful World” in a play at her Nashville school. Instead, her life was cut short by a bullet from an AR-15 carried by a young woman with a demonic grudge.
A bullied thirteen year old Indiana boy recently ended his life. Before committing suicide he left a video in which he named his tormentors. They made fun of his size, his haircut, and his clothes. The seventh grader dreamed of playing for the St. Louis Cardinals someday. Tragically, all he leaves behind is a void.
Why do you force me to witness injustice?
Why do you put up with wrongdoing?
Habakkuk 1:3
In the Netherlands, a television show had transgendered adults appearing naked in front of an audience of impressionable children. Unashamedly exposed, each expressed to the 10- to 12-year olds how “euphoric” they felt about their sex change surgeries. Grooming and pedophilia aren’t even masked anymore.
You are too just to tolerate evil;
you are unable to condone wrongdoing.
So why do you put up with such treacherous people?
Habakkuk 1:13
Habakkuk speaks for all of us. How much news do we need to watch before we say, “Make it make sense, Lord!” Just when I think it’s safe to open up Twitter, I find myself needing to log off for my own emotional health.
Habakkuk, like us, reacted to the news cycle of his day. And, like many of us, he wasn’t exactly subtle with his objections:
- HOW LONG, LORD? (v2)
- YOU DON’T LISTEN! (v2)
- YOU DON’T DELIVER! (v2)
- WHY? (v3)
- WHY DO YOU PUT UP WITH THESE PEOPLE? (v13)
- WHY DO YOU SAY NOTHING? (v13)
- ARE YOU GOING TO LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS FOREVER? (v17)
I can sing about a heavenly home and enjoy for a moment the stirrings it evokes, but a land in the “sweet by-and-by” feels a long stretch of road and many miles away. I know everything will make sense then, but how do we make sense of things now?
That was Habakkuk’s dilemma. Isaiah, a hundred years before him, lamented, “We wait for light, but see only darkness.”
What hope is there for a young mother who vomits from her second round of chemo or the college coed showering off her sexual assault or a parent standing over the grave of a child who was struck down in a drive-by? Where was God when all of this was happening to me?
In today’s world the inmates are running the asylum. We, on the other hand, are plagued with “headline stress disorder” and weighed down with laments in the key of heavy. Society is twisted and dark and getting darker by the day. A growing number believe the world has long passed its expiration date. Hope, for them, is a folly.
If you stick it out with the young prophet you’ll begin to heal, whatever your situation. While his opening remarks are freighted with anger and frustration, by chapter 2 he sees a glimmer. By the 3rd chapter, the glimmer becomes a fiery sunrise.
I will stand at my watch post; I will remain stationed on the city wall…
Habakkuk 2:1
If chapter one asks the question, “WHERE ARE YOU, GOD?” Habakkuk gets his answer in the last verse of chapter two:
the LORD is in his holy temple.
Habakkuk 2:20
The smoldering prophet gets this epiphany when he says, “I’m too worked up. I’m going to stop, watch, and listen.” I can’t tell you how many times in my journey I’ve had to take counsel with those words. Habakkuk takes a sabbath day and starts to see and think and, yes, feel differently. By the time our guy closes in prayer (chapter 3) you’re of a mind to start unlacing your shoes.
David saw the same thing. He was battling an inner urge to fly away, to flee, to find a cave and hide from everything and everyone. But he knew a few things about his God: he knew God was eyewitness to all that troubled and provoked David (Psa 11:4) and was on his side (Psa 11:5); he also knew God was “just” (Psa 11:7) and would vindicate and bless David in the end. And while all those destroyers of the foundations (Psa 11:3) suffer brimstone and fire and reap the whirlwind (Psa 11:6), he would gaze upon the beauty of the LORD.
Habakkuk leaves us with two watchwords to aid us in trusting God to make sense of our nonsensical world. He invites us to (1) remain at our post (Hab 2:1-4) and (2) go to our knees (Hab 3:1-16).
“Our post” is the place where we can do the most good in the Kingdom:
- It is where we walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor 5:7).
- It is where we hold fast the confession of our hope (Heb 10:23).
- It is where we keep ourselves in the love of God (Jude 21).
“On our knees” is where we confess our reliance on the immutable God who works all things together:
In music theory notes that aren’t part of the harmonic chords in an arrangement are said to create “tension.” To move those notes back into alignment with the whole theme is called “resolution.”
Today’s headlines and clickbaits draw attention to drama that doesn’t belong in the desired intent of God’s Story. Nevertheless God knows how to bring resolution from the tension. He’s done it before; he’ll do it again.
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
—Frederick Buechner
Good and bad. Horrifying and glorifying. Take it all…and put it in God’s great hands.
Selah, beloved. Peace. Be still.
