“Your eyes are too pure to look on evil, and you cannot tolerate wrongdoing. So why do you tolerate those who are treacherous? Why are you silent while one who is wicked swallows up one who is more righteous than himself?” (CSB – Read the chapter)
The world is not like it’s supposed to be. That is a truth everyone understands. Everyone. No matter what religion they profess or no religion at all, we all have a general sense that the world is broken. Our understanding of exactly why it’s broken and what the solution should be varies, but on the brokenness we all can agree. This is called the problem of evil and it is exactly what we find Habakkuk wrestling with here at the end of chapter 1. Let’s wrestle with him.
“Look at the nations and observe — be utterly astounded! For I am doing something in your days that you will not believe when you hear about it. Look! I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter, impetuous nation that marches across the earth’s open spaces to seize territories not its own.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Have you ever cautioned someone to be careful what they wish for? Why do we do that? Because we generally understand that we don’t know everything and that wanting things to be other than they are may come with consequences we don’t anticipate. Seeing one thing happen that we want at the expense of two or three (or more) things happening that we don’t may not be a worthwhile trade. Habakkuk here reminds us that the same principle applies to the things we ask of God as well.
This past Sunday morning we kicked off a brand-new series called, Answers to Tough Questions. For the next few weeks leading up to Easter, we are going to tackle some of the biggest cultural debates going on around us and into which Christians are expected to be able to speak with grace and poise. With the Scriptures as our guide, we are going to talk about what it looks like to respond to each of these issues as followers of Jesus. Yesterday we started with a bang: The LGBT+ debate. Isn’t God anti-LGBT+? Let’s talk about it.
Wading through a Mess
We live today in a polarized culture. We hear that so often that it’s almost cliché to say, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The old adage about polite conversation is that you can talk about anything but religion and politics. Of the two topics, religion covered the most ground and was the most controversial. Politics had a much smaller sphere of influence. Yes, people could get pretty worked up about certain issues, but on the whole, it was the safer of the two. Today…that reality has reversed itself. Religion covers an ever-shrinking amount of territory as it continues to lose the ground it once held in our culture. Politics, on the other hand, seems to intrude into every aspect of our lives. And this isn’t a left-right issue. The truth is that in the hearts of many, if not their minds as well, politics is increasingly taking the place religion once held as the source to which we turn to find answers for the most pressing questions we face. And indeed, when God is not ultimate, something else has to be. The trend for most human cultures over the centuries is that we give the State that place when we don’t give it to God. This is a tension that has been with the church since its earliest days.
“How long, Lord, must I call for help and you do not listen or cry out to you about violence and you do not save? Why do you force me to look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Oppression and violence are right in front of me. Strife is ongoing, and conflict escalates. This is why the law is ineffective and justice never emerges. For the wicked restrict the righteous; therefore, justice comes out perverted.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Wednesday we started our little journey through the collection of prophecy from Habakkuk. I said then that Habakkuk is perhaps the easiest prophet to understand in terms of the nature of his message. We can all connect to wrestling with the state of our culture. We can all connect with not liking the answers God gives us when we ask Him hard questions. Those two things along with God’s responses to Habakkuk’s questions are the majority of the book. As we started this journey, we talked about the fact that Habakkuk gives us permission to ask God hard questions of our own. I promised you then that today we would talk about how we are to do that such that it proves a profitable experience for us. Let’s do that.
“Then God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
I read a lot of news. Well…I read a lot of headlines. Actually, I read a lot of headlines from the Bing search engine website from Microsoft. I don’t mean this as a commercial, but I signed up to earn Bing points for doing basic internet searches. Every so often I cash in the points for free gift cards. Bing raises their search profile and I get free stuff for my family. And I stay broadly informed of what’s happening in the world. Not a bad deal. In any event, the easiest way to do this is to click through the headlines that Bing posts each day on their main page. Usually I just click from one headline to the next without paying too much attention. On occasion, though, something grabs my attention. This morning I want to share with you about one headline that grabbed and hasn’t let go.
The Nexus 