Jump Start # 1239

Habakkuk 1:13 “Your eyes are too pure to approve evil, and You can not look on wickedness with favor. Why do You look with favor on those who deal treacherously? Why are You silent when the wicked swallow up those more righteous than they?”

  Throughout the Bible, in multiple places, the unfairness of life is dealt with. The book of Job addresses it on a personal level. Why does a righteous man suffer? Ecclesiastes looks at it in theory. There is one fate for the righteous and the wicked, Solomon saw. The disciples asked Jesus about a blind man they saw. Who sinned, they asked, that he should be blind. The Psalmist in chapter 73 saw the wicked prospering. It nearly caused his faith to slip. And here in the tiny book of Habakkuk, this question is again raised. God was going to bring the Babylonians to punish His people. The Babylonians were described as a fierce and dreaded people. They were wicked. They would trash Jerusalem, storm the temple and carry off the articles used for worship. The temple would be burned. The walls around Jerusalem smashed. Many of the citizens were either killed or carried off to captivity. Habakkuk takes place right before all of this happens. He is puzzled. This doesn’t make sense to him. How can God use foreign people to be His instruments? How can God use people more wicked than His people to punish them? If Babylon is more wicked, why aren’t they punished?

Questions, questions, questions. We try to iron all these deep thoughts out in our minds and make sense of these things but we can’t fully. They trouble us. Preachers give reasonable answers but still the mystery of why and how God does things lurks within our hearts. Skeptics use things like this to trounce the faith of the weak. They mock a God who doesn’t seem to be in control. What happens is that we look for one common answer to all of these things. We want a simple explanation and often there isn’t.

Consider some thoughts:

• God is always on the throne and in control. Even when it seems that He isn’t, He is.

• God’s ways and thoughts and plans are higher than ours. How we expect and want things to be are often not what God wants. He doesn’t answer to us, but we to Him. Our plan A in life may not be God’s plan A.

• God can and will use anything to accomplish His will. His will is righteous followers who will be in Heaven. Our happiness, safety, prosperity and peace are secondary to His will. God will allow wars, trials and hardships if it will bring about His will. He will use wicked people to stir up His people.

• This isn’t Heaven. It never will be. Because of sin, there is pain, sorrow and consequences. The innocent suffer because of others.

• It is appointed unto man once to die. This is the consequence of Adam’s sin. This death comes in many forms. Sometimes crime, violence, storms and wars are the means this comes about. Sometimes the young die.

• Satan is alive and well on planet earth. He tempts. He influences for bad. His wicked means are a cause for suffering and hardships.

• As Solomon observed, the race isn’t always won by the swift. Time and chance are a part of life. Life is unpredictable.

• Our faith will be tested, tried and sometimes the object of persecution.

• God disciplines those He loves. This comes in many forms and is not pleasant at the moment.

God witnesses His children going through these hardships. It’s not easy. I can only imagine what God felt when He saw the glorious Temple, where the holy of holies and the ark of the covenant were, which only one person, the high priest, once a year could enter, being violated by the pagan Babylonians. God watched. He saw. I wonder if tears came to His eyes. He knew that this was necessary to bring His people around.

In the unfairness of life and the suffering of God’s people, I think we often forget about what God experiences. He witnesses all these things. He watched His Son die upon the cross for sins. I think too often, we think we only, experience the pain and the suffering of life. God sees what is going on.

From this, we learn that we must always trust God. We must walk by faith. While these things are hard upon us, they are not an indication of God’s lack of love. Nothing, the Romans were told, shall separate us from the love of Christ. These difficult times are when we need to pray hard, lean upon one another and have that foundation built upon the rocks. The storm that toppled one house, built upon the wrong foundation, will be severe, but we can stand.

We often make mistakes trying to figure God out. We must believe Him, trust Him, obey Him, and follow Him.

Roger