The Message Remix (276 page)

INTRODUCTION HABAKKUK

 

Living by faith is a bewildering venture. We rarely know what’s coming next, and not many things turn out the way we anticipate.
It is natural to assume that since I am God’s chosen and beloved, I will get favorable treatment from the God who favors me so extravagantly. It is not unreasonable to expect that from the time that I become his follower, I will be exempt from dead ends, muddy detours, and cruel treatment from the travelers I meet daily who are walking the other direction.
That God-followers don’t get preferential treatment in life always comes as a surprise. But it’s also a surprise to find that there are a few men and women
within
the Bible who show up alongside us at such moments.

The prophet Habakkuk is one of them, and a most welcome companion he is. Most prophets, most of the time, speak God’s Word
to us
. They are preachers calling us to listen to God’s words of judgment and salvation, confrontation and comfort. They face us with God as he is, not as we imagine him to be. Most prophets are in-your-face assertive, not given to tact, not diplomatic, as they insist that we pay attention
to God
. But Habakkuk speaks our word to God. He gives voice to our bewilderment, articulates our puzzled attempts to make sense of things, faces God with our disappointment with God. He insists that God pay attention to us, and he insists with a prophet’s characteristic no-nonsense bluntness.

The circumstance that aroused Habakkuk took place in the seventh century B.C. The prophet realized that God was going to use the godless military machine of Babylon to bring God’s judgment on God’s own people—using a godless nation to punish a godly nation! It didn’t make sense, and Habakkuk was quick and bold to say so. He dared to voice his feelings that God didn’t know his own God business. Not a day has passed since then that one of us hasn’t picked up and repeated Habakkuk’s bafflement: “God, you don’t seem to make sense!”

But this prophet companion who stands at our side does something even more important: He waits and he listens. It is in his waiting and listening—which then turns into his praying—that he found himself inhabiting the large world of God’s sovereignty. Only there did he eventually realize that the believing-in-God life, the steady trusting-in-God life, is the full life, the only real life. Habakkuk started out exactly where we start out with our puzzled complaints and God-accusations, but he didn’t stay there. He ended up in a world, along with us, where every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.

 

 

From:
Jeremiah was telling anyone who would listen that God was going to use the vicious Babylonians against God’s self-important but soul-empty people. Habakkuk was one of the few who listened. Almost everybody else tuned out the warning as unpatriotic. Habakkuk took his confusion to God.

 

To:
We don’t know whether Habakkuk made his wrestling public before the Babylonians did their worst. But certainly, after the carnage was over and God’s people were prisoners of war in Babylon, they shared his confusion and horror. Their nation was demolished. Had God abandoned them? Was he defeated? They desperately needed Habakkuk’s hard-won and never-sugarcoated trust.

 

Re:
About 626-600 B.C. Far away, Greece was on the rise. Sparta was the largest of the Greek city-states. While Athens admired philosophy, music, and art, Sparta admired good soldiers. At age seven, boys went to military training camps, where they stayed (isolated from girls and women) until age twenty. Then they took a test of bravery and skill. If they passed, they became full citizens with voting rights but continued to live in barracks, visiting their wives only periodically to produce more baby soldiers. If they failed the test, they were disgraced. To Spartans, a real man could take a load of pain without a word of complaint. (They’d have thought Habakkuk was a whiner.) Meanwhile, girls were raised to be strong and athletic so they could someday bear healthy sons. Spartan men didn’t think much of girls.