Habakkuk is one of those Old Testament books that many Christians either skim through or skip entirely. It’s not very long – just three chapters with a total of only 56 verses – and if anything, many people remember it only because the name “Habakkuk” is so funny-sounding and so doggone hard to say.
Even if you do actually sit down to read Habakkuk, you’re immediately hit in the face by words that are unrelentingly depressing. Habakkuk begins not only by complaining to God, but by seemingly complaining about God – complaining about the fact that God seemed to be sitting back and doing nothing about all of the evil that was taking place in Israel. Listen again to the first verses of today’s reading: “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.”
Pretty gloomy words, aren’t they? They’re words expressing a lot of disappointment and even no small amount of anger. After all, Habakkuk knows that God hates sin and injustice and evil. He knows how many times in the past God has punished evildoers with death and destruction. He knows that the Northern Kingdom of Israel has already been conquered and exiled and permanently destroyed because of their great evil and unfaithfulness to God. Hundreds of years later St. Paul would write that “the wages of sin is death,” but that’s something that Habakkuk already knew and expected. Habakkuk saw himself surrounded by nothing but evil and injustice, and he was waiting for God to take action. He was waiting for God to do something. But he just … kept … waiting. And so he cries: “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save? For the wicked surround the righteous ...”
It is generally believed that Habakkuk lived roughly 2,600 years ago, but his words really don’t sound that old, do they? In fact, they sound a lot like some of the same things that Christians still say today. How long will you let this go on, Lord? Why do the wicked prosper? Why do the bad guys always seem to come out on top? Why do bad things happen to good people?
Those are generalized statements, but every one of us can apply them to our own lives and experiences. Why did this person have to lose her job? Why did that person have to lose his home or his business? Why did this person have to get sick? Why did that person have to die at such a young age? Why do some people hurt other people? Why do we have accidents and fires and floods and famines? Why, Lord, why? Why don’t You just put a stop to it all? If You really hear my prayers, Lord, then why don’t You answer them?
In the second part of our Old Testament lesson, God not only answers Habakkuk – but He gives him an explanation. We read: “And the Lord answered me: ‘Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it. For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.’”
Those words about “seeming slow” and “waiting” aren’t ideas that we really want to hear, because let’s face it, we’re pretty impatient people. When we want something, we want it now. The restaurant may be crowded, but I don’t want to wait for a seat or wait to be served or wait to get my food. I don’t want to wait and save up enough money to buy something, so I’ll just put it on the credit card and figure out how to pay for it later. When I’m sick, I don’t want to wait for the medicine to make me feel better or relieve the pain – I want to feel better now. Keep your sermon short, Pastor, because I have lunch to get to or a ballgame to watch and I don’t want you keeping me here at Church any longer than usual.
That reference may sound like a joke, but it’s not. I personally know of pastors – Lutheran pastors – who were reprimanded if the Sunday service went longer than 60 minutes. Sometimes parts of the Divine Service are simply “skipped over,” and it’s not unheard of today for baptisms to be administered outside of the worship service so that the service doesn’t run too long. We are impatient people. We don’t like to be kept waiting. We don’t like to wait on others. And we don’t want to wait on God.
The plain fact of the matter is that God’s timetable is not our timetable. We can never understand God’s ways. We often refer to them as inscrutable – they are mysterious, they cannot be analyzed and they cannot be understood with our feeble human understanding. This is exactly what Habakkuk was wrestling with and it’s what we wrestle with, too.
But then we hear the final words of today’s Old Testament lesson, when God tells His prophet: “The righteous shall live by his faith.” And now Habakkuk understands. When we live by faith, we trust in God’s promises while we wait – while we patiently wait – for the Lord to act. Martin Luther wrote extensively on the book of Habakkuk – his Commentary on those 56 verses runs a total of 132 pages! – and he summarized chapter 2 verse 4 by saying: “The godly people are waiting for the Lord; therefore they live, therefore they are saved, therefore they receive what has been promised. They receive it by faith, because they give glory to the God of truth, because they hold the hand of the Lord.”
In verse 5 of today’s Gospel lesson, St. Luke writes: “The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’” There’s that word again – “faith.” I suspect that at one time or another all of us have doubts about how strong our faith may be. We feel inadequate. We feel that we should be doing more. We think that we should be able to move mountains and we’re disappointed when we can’t. And once again, we get impatient. We think that we need to do something to make our faith stronger.
This is where the apostles had a better understanding of faith that we probably do. They understood that faith comes only from God – not from anything that they might do or say. They ask Jesus to increase their faith because they know that on their own they can do nothing.
Ultimately, faith isn’t something that you measure. You either have it or you don’t. Because when you have faith in Christ, you have everything. Luther once compared the strong faith of one person with the weaker faith of another by this example, when he wrote: “Two persons may hold a purse full of money: one with a weak hand, the other with a strong hand. Whether the hand is strong or weak, please God, it neither increases nor decreases the contents of the purse.” Luther himself often said that he was ashamed because his faith was weak. But he was wise enough to realize that it is not the strength of the faith that saves. What saves is the object of that faith. What saves – the only thing that saves – is faith in Jesus Christ.
I recently heard the Christian life described in terms of a game I used to play as a child – the game of dodge ball. Picture yourself standing in the center of a ring, surrounded by people who are throwing balls at you from every possible direction. You jump one way to avoid one ball and you jump another way to avoid another ball. But so many balls are being thrown at you from so many directions that you can’t avoid them all. Eventually you get nailed by one ball and by another and by another. You’ve been hit. You’ve been defeated. It’s a lot like Habakkuk said: “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.”
As long as we remain on this sinful earth, we will continued to be hit from every possible direction by forces of evil, forces of sin, forces that want to weaken and even destroy our faith. We may even feel just like Habakkuk when he cried: “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save” But thanks be to God, we have been brought to faith in Jesus. We have been brought to faith in the lifesaving truth that Jesus died on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins. Christ’s righteousness has become our righteousness, so that God sees us not as rebellious sinners but as his own beloved children. We have been given His precious promise that “the righteous shall live by his faith,” and even if that faith is no larger than a tiny little mustard seed – something no larger than the head of a straight pin that many of you use for your sewing – it is enough. It is a precious gift of God that is ours to treasure. Because even when things during our lives can’t seem to get any worse, we patiently wait with the vision before us of eternal life in heaven that most certainly will come true for everyone who has faith in Jesus. The promise that God makes to Habakkuk is a promise he makes to us as well. “For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.” Indeed, we do “live by his faith.” Truly, always, and forever.
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