Among the twelve Minor Prophets in the Old Testament is the book of the prophet Habakkuk. His book is not “Minor” because it is unimportant; it is “Minor” because, as many modern readers will appreciate, it has only three brief chapters, which take about ten minutes to read—that is, if it doesn’t make you stop to think!
When it comes to obscure Old Testament books with funny names, we may be tempted to say the circumstances are so distant in time and space that they will have very little relevance to us. The truth, though, is that we are far closer than we realize when it comes to thinking about the moral and the spiritual conditions of the people of God as Habakkuk describes them. Few who have paid any attention to our modern world will not resonate with the prophet’s opening words:
O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not hear?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see iniquity,
and why do you idly look at wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law is paralyzed,
and justice never goes forth.
For the wicked surround the righteous;
so justice goes forth perverted. (Hab. 1:2–4)
Those of us who are troubled by violence and injustice in the world today will do well to read the book of Habakkuk and consider how God answers the prophet and addresses his problem.
The Prophet
You won’t find anything about Habakkuk anywhere else in the Old Testament. All we know of him personally—which is not much—we derive from these three chapters. Of course, as with all true preaching, the significance of the prophet is to be found not in who he is but in what he says. His biography is subservient to his “burden” (Hab. 1:1 KJV)—that is, his “oracle” (ESV).
Despite our preoccupations in twenty-first-century America with personalities, the message is always more significant than the man. We know more about some biblical prophets than others, but even when we do know, we don’t know much. What we know for certain is that when God spoke through them, their words were powerful and true.
Habakkuk had witnessed the kingdom of Judah, ruled from Jerusalem by King David’s heirs, degenerate from its godly origins and embrace myriad evils. Its northern neighbor, the kingdom of Israel, had already followed the same path, and it was ultimately overrun by the Assyrian Empire; its people were deported, and its future was blotted out. Now, as Habakkuk preached, Assyria’s day in the sun had passed, and another Near Eastern empire had arisen to take its place.
Habakkuk’s Problem
The problem that Habakkuk addressed was the discrepancy between revelation and experience. How could he reconcile what he knew of the character and purpose of a good and powerful God with all the evil he saw around him? He asked, in effect, “How can it possibly be that You, O God, are good and powerful, and yet violence, moral ineptitude, and chaos confront us at every point?” Where is God in the face of a collapsing economy, diminishing productivity, food shortage, violence, social injustice, and a wholesale disregard for God’s law? (“Wow!” someone says. “Maybe this isn’t as far removed from where we live as I thought.”)
This wasn’t an external problem but an internal one. Habakkuk saw that it was those who were within God’s family who were causing the trouble. When God had called them out of Egypt and established them, He’d intended to make them “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6). They were far, far away from living up to this ideal!
Given the bad things happening and God’s apparent inaction, Habakkuk asked, “Why do You make me look at injustice?” and “Why do You tolerate wrong?” These are questions that will be on the lips of every thoughtful believer today. “How long will this go on?” we ask. “And why is it that this good, moral, all-powerful God that we serve tolerates declension and moral rot among those who profess to be the followers of His Son?”
God’s Answer
God’s answer to Habakkuk was not what the prophet expected. God was not idly watching Judah descend into chaos. He was already at work, raising up the powerful and ruthless Babylonians to bring judgment upon His rebellious people (Hab. 1:5–11). The events that seemed to Habakkuk to be spinning out of control were actually unfolding under God’s sovereign hand.
That answer only raised another question: How could a holy God use a nation even more wicked than Judah to accomplish His purposes? Again, God assured Habakkuk that He remained in control. Babylon’s violence, injustice, and idolatry would not go unanswered. In time, the proud would fall, “the righteous” would “live by his faith” (Hab. 2:4), and “the earth” would “be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (v. 14).
Habakkuk received no promise that his circumstances would immediately improve. Instead, he received something better: a clearer vision of the God who ruled over His people and His world. And that changed his posture entirely. The prophet who began by crying impatiently, “How long?” ended by declaring that even if the crops failed and the fields produced no food, “yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation” (Hab. 3:18).
God’s Eternal Purpose
The history of Habakkuk’s era was under God’s control—and that is true in every age. The events of our world are all tied to God’s eternal purpose in relationship to His kingdom. If we will keep our gaze there—focused on the Gospel, focused on King Jesus—then all of our cares and cancers, our disappointments and failures, our heartaches and heartbreaks and confusions may be brought under the all-embracing security of God’s sovereign purpose.
God understands when, like Habakkuk, we cry out, “How long, and why?” And the answer of His Word is finally given to us expressly in Jesus and in the triumph of revelation. On a Monday morning in our morbid world, we can sing with the hymn writer,
God is still on the throne,
And He will remember His own;
Though trials may press us and burdens distress us,
He never will leave us alone.
God is still on the throne,
He never forsaketh His own;
His promise is true; He will not forget you;
God is still on the throne.1
This article was adapted from the sermon “How Long and Why?” and the series A Study in Habakkuk by Alistair Begg.
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Kittie Louise Suffield, “God Is Still on the Throne” (1929). ↩︎