The Lutheran Hour
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"Habakkuk’s Question, God’s Answer"
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Text: Habakkuk 1:2; 2:2-4
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Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
The whole life of a Christian is a life of grace. The follower of Christ lives by grace, in grace, and for grace. By grace, because God alone is the source of the Christian life, who forgives you freely and draws you to Himself by working faith in your heart. In grace, because God sustains the life of Christ in you through the working of the Holy Spirit in His Word, and in Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. For grace, because we live in Christ to share the grace of God with others.
The grace of God is the central and defining fact of the lives of the people of God. By it we understand that our salvation depends entirely upon God’s character, and not upon our character or our deeds. In the gray nights of our lives, when trouble and sorrow, and frustration and hopelessness burden our hearts with an unbearable weight of despair, the light of God’s grace remains a sure foundation upon which we stand in confidence. However much we fail and disappoint ourselves and others, however much those around us fail and fall short of our hopes and expectations for them, God does not fail.
Six hundred years before the time of Christ, the prophet Habakkuk looked about him at a society crumbling in corruption. He saw the courts of law perverting justice. He saw the powerful crushing the weak and the rich abusing the poor. He saw the wicked prosper and the good suffer. In that dark night he cried out to God for relief and begged the Almighty, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and You will not listen?” (Habakkuk 1:2).
You know that prayer. You have prayed that prayer, haven’t you? Yes and I have, too. Habakkuk’s prayer is every man’s prayer, sooner or later. I am lonely and heartbroken. O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and You will not listen?” I have lost my job and I don’t know how to support my family. “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and You not listen?” There is so much evil and injustice and suffering in the world. “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and You will not listen?” My husband … my wife … my child … has died. “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and You will not listen?”
Habakkuk’s prayer is the litany of our lives. “Then,” Habakkuk writes (Habakkuk 2:2-4), “the Lord answered me: ‘Write down [the contents of this] vision in plain letters on tablets so that a herald can run [to proclaim] it. [The contents of this] vision will certainly endure until the appointed time. It speaks about the end, and it does not lie. If it [seems to] take a long time, wait for it, for it will surely come [at the right time]. It will not delay. The unrighteous is bloated [with his desires]; his soul in not right within him, but the righteous lives in faith.'”
God’s answer stuns us. Like our brother Habakkuk, we want an immediate fix. We want our short-term problem solved and we want it solved now. But God says, “Wait for it.”
Wait for it? How can God expect us to wait for it? Doesn’t He love us? Doesn’t He say in His Word He is like a good Father who longs to give good gifts to His children when they ask for them? Doesn’t He want to bless us? Hasn’t He promised to bless us?
Yes. God does love you. God is like a father who longs to give good gifts to His children when they ask. God wants to bless you. He has promised to bless you. God wants you to prosper, be happy and healthy and to have all the good things He has provided in His creation.
God also remembers something of which we often lose sight. “Man does not live on bread alone” (Deuteronomy 8:3). All the good things of this life — things we need and desire and that God wants us to have — are not enough. God wants something even better for you than health and wealth and happiness: God wants you to be His own.
God wants even more than that. God wants the rescue of all that He has made and all that has become corrupted by sin and death through the deceit of the devil. Sometimes God’s pursuit of these greater goods conflicts with what we perceive to be our own short-term interests.
Our brother Habakkuk had trouble with that. When he saw the evil and injustice around him, he prayed for God to make things right. God promised to do just that by sending the Babylonians to punish Israel. This answer shocked Habakkuk. This was a case of the cure being worse than the disease. The Babylonians were far worse than the evil Habakkuk wanted God to fix. It didn’t make any sense. It couldn’t possibly make any sense until you find out it was part of God’s plan to lead to the cross of Jesus Christ.
The death of Jesus on the cross was God’s ‘yes’ to Habakkuk’s prayer. God asked Habakkuk to trust that God knows what He is doing, that His faithfulness and constancy of purpose will not be distracted or delayed, and to walk in faith — to walk in the certainty of God’s ‘yes’ in Jesus Christ — however long it may seem to be taking.
When you join with Habakkuk and pray, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and You will not listen?” God wants you to know He has heard your prayer, too. And God’s answer to you is always yes:
- Yes, in Jesus Christ, God’s Messiah born of Mary.
- Yes, on the cross.
- Yes, in the empty tomb.
- Yes, in His ascending into heaven.
- Yes, in the giving of the Holy Spirit.
- Yes, in your baptism.
- Yes, in the body and blood of the Lord’s Supper.
- Yes, in His coming again.
- Yes, in the people of God gathered around His throne in eternal celebration.
Yes, in Jesus Christ, your Savior, through whom God has made you His own today and forever; yes — in Him through whom God embraces you with a love whose steadfastness and certainty overcomes all the hardships, all the trials, all the pain, and all the suffering that remain in this twilight hour between the defeat of sin and death and the devil on the cross and the full revelation of God’s victory when Christ comes again in glory.
When you pray Habakkuk’s prayer, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and You will not listen?”; when God answers you as He answered Habakkuk by saying that His ‘yes’ points to the end, that it does not lie, that if it seems to take a long time, wait for it, for it will surely come at the right time. It does not delay, and the righteous live in faith; then, be at peace in the certainty that God’s grace is sufficient to see you through every circumstance (2 Corinthians 12:9).
The whole life of a Christian is a life of grace. The follower of Christ lives by grace, in grace, and for grace. Our hope for today and our hope for eternity do not lie in ourselves and in our deeds. They rest confidently in the certainty that the love of God is revealed in Jesus Christ. God’s character and God’s determination to save us are the foundation of our hope.
In Christ we walk in faith, not merely believing that what will be, will be. We do not accept whatever might come our way with a sense of resignation born of our helplessness to change the course of a vast and uncaring cosmos. No! We are not fatalists. We embrace every moment — the good and the bad alike — because we trust in a loving God who works all things together for our good (Romans 8:28) and for the good of His purpose; to rescue those who still do not know that trusting in Jesus Christ is the only way God has provided for a dying humanity to be made alive forever.
In Christ we walk in faith, undaunted by hardship and struggle, “for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” And because we live in God’s grace walking in faith (2 Timothy 1:7) we “consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed” (Romans 8:18) in His coming.
In Christ we walk in faith, boldly living by grace, in grace, and for grace, because in Christ we know God has “called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace” (2 Timothy 1:9).
In Christ we walk in faith, and with St. Paul we declare “I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that He is able to guard until that day what I have entrusted to Him” (2 Timothy 1:12). Jesus Christ, God’s ‘yes’ to Habakkuk and God’s ‘yes’ to you. Amen.
LUTHERAN HOUR MAILBOX (Questions & Answers) for October 21, 2001
ANNOUNCER: How does God exercise His rule over the world and in the church? Is there a difference? I’m Mark Eischer. Joining us to talk about these issues is Pastor James Gullen of Trinity Lutheran Church in Centralia, Ill. Pastor Gullen is also a former pastoral advisor to the International Lutheran Laymen’s League. Pastor Gullen, there seems to be some confusion here. We talk about the separation of church and state. Yet we have government officials urging us to pray and people in the church are urging the government to turn the other cheek. What are we missing here?
GULLEN: Mark, you just gave us enough material to talk about for six hours. Let’s try to condense what you brought forth. The first thing we’ll mention is the separation of church and state. We’ve heard that phrase so often — the wall of separation. In Lutheran theology we cannot begin to say there is a total separation between the church and the state. That is because God is in charge of the whole thing. A major theme throughout all of Paul’s letters is that Christians, as simple and redeemed people, live under the rule of both Adam and Christ. And while we all share in Adam’s fall, the new Adam of Jesus Christ has begun His reign and we look forward to the end times when the rule of Christ will be complete. Dr. Luther in his treatise of 1523, “Secular Authority and to What Extent it Ought to be Obeyed,” talked about two kingdoms. He talked about what some people have called the left-hand kingdom and the right-hand kingdom. This isn’t the church and the state in that relationship. The one realm includes the whole world of the secular, which means this-aged world — politics, commerce, culture, etc. The other is the realm of faith, where the Gospel is proclaimed and the Spirit brings to people this truth so they can believe in the all-availing sacrifice of Jesus Christ on Calvary’s cross for the forgiveness of sins by His death and by His resurrection. So I think what we talk about is the two worlds. That’s what you are bringing up. Then you say the government should just turn the other cheek. Here we have a problem, because we have to remember that the government was given to us by God.
ANNOUNCER: God has ordained the powers that be and has given them the sword for a purpose.
GULLEN: Exactly. And I think it’s necessary to hear what God’s Word says in Romans 13. It says that everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted. And those who do so will bring judgment upon themselves.
ANNOUNCER: Let me understand this, then. God has established secular authority and given it the sword for a purpose. What is that purpose?
GULLEN: That purpose is so we can live in peace and in order. Sometimes punishment has to be executed when someone has done something wrong. Does that mean they can’t be forgiven? Oh, they can be forgiven when they repent, but they still get punished. Parents do that all the time with little children. Little children don’t say I’m sorry just to get out of getting punished. They say I’m sorry because they really feel it. That may be a motivating factor. But that’s not how God sees our heart. When we repent, God fully forgives us, but doesn’t mean punishment won’t happen.
ANNOUNCER: Is it the purpose of government to create order and peace so that the church can proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ?
GULLEN: Exactly.
ANNOUNCER: Well, obviously there is much more to be said on this subject and we’ll pick up this topic again next week with Pastor James Gullen. Thanks for joining us today. The next Lutheran Hour message is “The Bondage Breaker.”