AP

Habakkuk 1:5-7  “Look at the nations and watch – and be utterly amazed.  For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told. I am raising up the Babylonians, that ruthless and impetuous people, who sweep across the whole earth to seize dwellings not their own.  They are a feared and dreaded people; they are a law to themselves and promote their own honour.”

I’m sure the prophet Habakkuk had as much difficulty writing his prophecy as we have in reading it.  It certainly doesn’t fit comfortably with what we would like to read about our Sovereign God’s plans for his world!  On second thoughts, I think Habakkuk would have had more difficulty than us because we now have a much clearer picture of the whole story than he had.

If I was Habakkuk, I think I might have started to get quite excited and encouraged when I heard the LORD, my Sovereign, faithful, compassionate, loving, Covenant-making, Covenant-keeping God say to me: “Look at the nations and watch – and be utterly amazed.  For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.”  I would be thinking: “Great news – the time has come, at last, when we will see our promised Messiah-King cone to conquer all our enemies and make us the dominant powerful nation we had been under Solomon, and even more so!”

But instead, the unimaginable bombshell: “I am raising up the Babylonians, that ruthless and impetuous people, …”!  What on earth is going on here?  Does my all-knowing, all-wise God really know what he is doing here?

I am encouraged by the way this humble man of God pursues his ‘argument’ with his God, and especially by the way he sums up his case: “Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity to come on the nation invading us.  Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Saviour” (3:16b-18).

– Bruce Christian