Friday Faithfuls Two: Habakkuk

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

Y'know, Habakkuk has to be one of my favorites.

Even if I STILL have to look at it every. single. time. to make sure I've spelled it right.

It's a short little book...only three chapters long, and begins with Habakkuk's (imagine hearing me spelling that out to myself as I type it) honest questioning of his faith...and ends with one of the most profound declarations of faith anywhere in the scripture, 3: 17-19, which I selected as the passage from this book the LAST time I did the fly-through-looking-for-the-verse-of-the-week  eleven years ago. So I can't pick that this time, lol.

But what hit me this week was a different verse anyway, God's immediate response to Habakkuk's question

"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." - Hab. 1:5, NIV84

As I read that verse, I thought about how much the whole world has changed since 2011...specifically, how it has changed since the fall of 2019, when we first heard rumors of a new illness breaking out in Wuhan.

Would we have believed, even if we were told, what events were headed our way? I'm not sure I would have...the massive quarantine I think I might have believed, but the continued supply chain issues and the crazy inflation (no political comments, please, that's not the point here) reminds me of the doom-and-gloom Y2K predictions I read back in 1999. How much of that is directly related to the epidemic vs. how much might have happened anyway is nearly impossible to tell.

But I don't know that I would have believed that we would have such confusion over gender, or such mean-spirited political and ideological division (and the mean spirit is on BOTH sides).

I could ask, like Habakkuk, "How long, O LORD...why do you tolerate wrong?  Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds.  Therefore...justice is perverted..."  (from 1: 2- 4), but I think I would get the same answer.  Except...we have been told what God is going to do in the last days. 

IF this is the last days....and, with the threats before us, it certainly seems possible.  If what I have read is true, the only thing that really stands between life and death on the planet is the bee population...and they're threatened. That doesn't even take into account the threat of a pandemic more deadly than the current one, or nuclear attacks, or EMBs.

We are more fragile than we want to believe.

In Habakkuk's day, God was raising up a conquering army to execute judgment on people who had rejected him, even his own people.  He allowed the temple that housed his Name to be robbed and destroyed, which the folks of that time were certain would NEVER happen. 

But it did.

So, what is our take away?  It needs the whole book of Habakkuk...all the way through to the ringing declaration that God is faithful, even through his judgment, to those who trust him.

So hang on.