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My God and My Neighbor is a “Bible talk show” that looks at religious issues, Christian living and world events in light of the Word of God to give hope. This podcast is a ministry of Tennessee Bible College. TBC offers a bachelor's in Bible studies, a master of theology, and a doctorate of theology in apologetics and Christian evidences. TBC also provides Christian books, audio recordings on the Bible, and free Bible courses in English and Spanish. Tune in to My God and My Neighbor to experience the educational content that TBC has been delivering for nearly five decades!
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Hi, I’m Kerry Duke, host of My God and My Neighbor podcast from Tennessee Bible College, where we see the Bible as not just another book, but the Book. Join us in a study of the inspired Word to strengthen your faith and to share what you've learned with others.
Why does God allow evil? Why does he let evil people continue to oppress other people? Today we're looking at an Old Testament book that talks about this. You may have never read this book of the Bible. Many Christians know little about it. Some hardly recognize its name, but this short Old Testament book written long ago can help you bear the burden of living in a world where wicked people seem to have the upper hand.
That book is Habakkuk. It was written before the Babylonians invaded Jew to beginning in 605 B.C.. The Jews at that time were very sinful. Government officials were very corrupt. Habakkuk saw all this evil. He had prayed and prayed to God about it, but nothing changed, and that's when he became frustrated just like Jeremiah, just like we, become frustrated today.
This time in this book of Habakkuk, he prays to God, but now he's feeling agitated. As always with the problem of evil, it all seems so simple. There's great evil in the land. God has the power to put an end to it, and it would be good for the righteous if God put down these evil people now, but that's not happening.
At least not yet. How can this be right? How can this be fair? That's when he cried out to God with two simple and yet profound questions. Why and how long? Let's begin reading in Habakkuk chapter one, verse two, and read through verse four. “O Lord, how long shall I cry and you will not hear? Even cry out to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save. Why do you show me iniquity and cause me to see trouble? For plundering and violence are before me. There is strife and contention arises. Therefore, the law is powerless. Justice never goes forth, for the wicked surround the righteous, therefore perverse judgment proceeds.”
What was it that Habakkuk saw that led him to be so upset? Well, in verse two, he said violence was everywhere. Remember that this is more than physical violence. It includes that, but it's much more. When you see the word “violence” in the Bible, think of someone who violates other people by taking advantage of them by swindling and stealing, by lying and slandering, by using the law in their position to run over people—even the poor, the widows and orphans. These Jews were unjust and unfair in what they did, and they just seemed to be getting away with it. In verse three, Habakkuk said they plundered. That is, they stole from other people. He says they caused strife and contention. They caused a lot of hard feelings. They caused division.
They were tearing families and communities and even the nation apart. And regardless of how much Habakkuk and other prophets preached against it, they couldn't stop it. Now this reminds me of what Solomon said back in Ecclesiastes chapter four verse one. He said this about all the oppression that he had seen himself. In Ecclesiastes four verse one, Solomon wrote, “Then I returned and considered all the oppression that is done under the sun, and look, the tears of the oppressed, but they have no comforter. And on the side of their oppressors there is power, but they have no comforter.” Even Solomon, the wisest and the most powerful man on earth couldn't put a stop to all the oppression and the injustice that he saw. That's how the prophet Habakkuk felt.
You might be thinking, but didn't they have the law? Didn't they have judges and the legal system to punish people like this? Well, yes they did, but laws are only as effective as the people who are supposed to enforce them are upright. You can have all the laws on the books that you want, but if the people who handle those laws are wicked, those laws are not going to do any good.
That's why he says in verse four that the law had no power to curb all this evil. It wasn't being applied. And as a result, he says that wicked people surrounded the righteous and the law was being twisted to serve the wrong kind of people. Does that sound familiar? Does that sound like today? This is what bothered this man of God.
He cried out “How long, O Lord” in verse two. That is exactly what David of old cried out in Psalm 13. He said in verse one, “How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? How long will my enemy be exalted over me?”
Jeremiah the prophet asked God the same thing. In Jeremiah chapter 12, beginning in verse one; “Righteous are you, O Lord, when I plead with you. Yet let me talk with you about your judgements. Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why are those happy who deals so treacherously? You have planted them. Yes, they have taken root. They grow, yes, they bear fruit. You are near in their mouth, but far from their mind. But you, O Lord, know me. You have seen me. You have tested my heart toward you. Pull them out like sheep for the slaughter and prepare them for the day of slaughter. How long will the land mourn and the herbs of every field wither? The beasts and birds are consumed for the wickedness of those who dwell there because they said he will not see our final end.”
The saints who had died for the Lord in the last book of the Bible say this in Revelation chapter six, verse 10. “They cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”
And here is yet another verse in the Bible that raises this same question. This is interesting. It's in the book of Zechariah. Zechariah is talking about the Jews who lived after the Babylonian captivity. They've already endured that and he's trying to encourage them. So in Zechariah chapter one, verse 12, the Bible says, “Then the angel of the Lord answered and said, O Lord of hosts, how long will you not have mercy on Jerusalem and on the cities of Judah against which you were angry these seventy years?”
I realize that we've looked at most of those passages before. I'm repeating them here because we need to be reminded of how common this feeling is even among the prophets of God in the Bible. So Habakkuk sees all these bad things happening around him. He has two questions for God. The first one is in verse two: How long? The second one is in verse three: Why?
Let's see what God has to say about those two questions. God is the One who is speaking in your Bible in verses five through 11. Habakkuk cries out to God in verses one through four, and then God responds in verses five through 11. Let's read what the Lord says. “Look among the nations and watch, be utterly astounded, for I will work a work in your days, which you would not believe though it were told you. For indeed, I am raising up the Chaldeans, a bitter and hasty nation which marches through the breadth of the earth to possess dwelling places that are not theirs. They are terrible and dreadful. Their judgment and their dignity proceed from themselves. Their horses are swifter than leopards and more fierce than evening wolves. Their chargers charge ahead. Their calvary comes from afar. They fly like the eagle that hastens to eat. They all come for violence. Their faces are set like the east wind. They gather captives like sand. They scoff at kings and princes are scorned by them. They deride every stronghold, for they heap up earthen mounds and seize it. Then his mind changes and he transgresses. He commits offense, ascribing his power to his God.”
In verse five, God answers the question, How long? Remember that Habakkuk begins by asking that question: how long Lord? In verse two, he says, that is, God says, he's about to do something that will astonish everyone who sees it in verse five, and he tells us when.
He says, I will do it in your days. In the Hebrew language, this is actually in the plural. He's talking to the nation of Jews here, but that would certainly include Habakkuk the prophet. Habakkuk wanted to know how much longer God was going to tolerate this evil. Now he has his answer. It will happen in his lifetime.
Many times God foretold calamities. That would happen long after the death of a prophet, but not this time. God said you will live to see it. When you do, God said, it will be so horrendous that you'll find it hard to believe. Now, this is like us saying today, “You won't believe what's about to happen.”
Verse six tells us how God will punish these evil Jews. He will send the Chaldeans against them. These are the Babylonians. Babylon was the capital of the Chaldean empire. God told Jeremiah the same thing, and Jeremiah warned the Jews that the Babylonians were coming. But they didn't believe it. They paid a heavy price for their stubbornness. Here's what Jeremiah wrote in Jeremiah chapter 25 verses eight through 10.
“Therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts, because you have not heard my words, behold, I will send and take all the families of the north, says the Lord, and Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, my servant, and will bring them against this land, against its inhabitants and against these nations all around, and will utterly destroy them and make them an astonishment, a hissing and perpetual desolation.”
“Moreover, I will take from them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones and the light of the lamp. And this whole land shall be a desolation and an astonishment, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years.”
Again, that is Jeremiah 25 verses eight through 11. The description of the bloodshed and devastation of the Jewish people in Habakkuk chapter one is a frightening image of a people who are about to reap what they have sown. God will use these Chaldeans to put down all the evil that was tormenting the prophet Habakkuk.
That would be the answer to his prayer. So how did Habakkuk feel now that God finally told him that he was going to do something about all this evil? You would think that he would've said, “Thank you, Lord. Thank you that you've heard my prayer, or forgive me, Lord, for being impatient and doubting You.”
But that's not how he reacted. God's answer doesn't satisfy Habakkuk. In fact, it confuses him. Now he has even more questions about God's justice. That section begins in verse 12. Now beginning in verse 12, Habakkuk is talking. He has a problem with what God said He was going to do. He treads carefully when he brings this up to God. In verse 12, he says, “Are you not from everlasting, O Lord, my God, my Holy One? We shall not die. O Lord, You have appointed them for judgment. O rock, You have marked them for correction. You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness.”
So notice that he acknowledges God as the eternal one here in verse 12. “Are you not from Everlasting. O God?” And in a sense, he thanked God that the righteous Jews would be spared because he said “we shall not die.” He also understood that God was going to punish all these evil people that he was so upset about because he said, you have appointed them, that is, these evil Jews, for judgment. He was talking about those wicked Jews.
In verse 13, he even acknowledges God's justice and says God cannot really tolerate evil because he says “You cannot look on wickedness,” that is, look on it in an approving way. But then he comes back to the same old question we've been looking at in this study. He says in verse 13, “Why?”
Look at verse 13. Why do you look on those who deal treacherously and hold your tongue when the wicked person devours a person more righteous than he?” Who's he talking about? He's talking about the Chaldeans. He's saying to God, I understand that you're about to punish the Jews. That's a good thing. That's a just thing because they deserve it. But why and how can you use people that are worse than these Jews are? They need punishing more than the Jews.
You see, Habakkuk can't figure this out and he seems to have a problem with how this could be fair. So glance again in your Bible in verse 13 and underline the word why. Here we've come full circle back to chapter one verse three, where Habakkuk the prophet asked God why.
Then God answered him, but the prophet was not satisfied. So now he's gone from having a problem with God not doing anything about evil to having a question about how God does something about that evil. Isn't that amazing? You see, even if God were to speak from heaven today and answer some of our questions about why things happen the way that they do, we would just have more questions like the prophet Habakkuk.
Let's read the rest of the chapter. Habakkuk proceeds to tell God how evil these Chaldeans were. He says in verse 13, “You are of purer eyes that to behold evil and cannot look on wickedness. Why do you look on those who deal treacherously and hold your tongue when the wicked devours a person more righteous than he? Why do you make men like the fish of the sea, like creeping things that have no ruler over them? They take up all of them with a hook. They catch them in their net and gather them in their dragnet. Therefore, they rejoice and are glad.” Again, he's talking about the Chaldeans and what they did to other nations.
“Therefore, they sacrifice their net and burn incense to their dragnet because by them,” that is, by the power of the Chaldeans, “their share is sumptuous and their food plentiful. Shall they therefore empty their net and continue to slay nations without pity?”
Then we come to chapter two. And Habakkuk basically says here, that's my case. That's what I've been struggling with. I presented my case to you, Lord. Now I'm ready to hear what you have to say to me. That's what he says in verse one. He says, “I will stand my watch and set myself on the rampart and watch to see what He,” that is, what God “will say to me and what I will answer when I am corrected.”
So Habakkuk is saying, I've made my case and now I'm going to listen to you, God. He's not as bold as Job was in Job chapter 23. You'll remember that Job said that he wished he knew where God was so that he could talk to him and Job made the claim that he would understand what God would say to him and he'd be able to answer all of God's questions.
Habakkuk doesn't go that far, but he does believe that he has a point. So God speaks beginning in verse two. Almost all of chapter two is God talking about the Babylonians, and the first thing he says in verse two and three is that their time is coming too. Just because the Lord used them to punish Judah did not mean that they were off the hook and weren't going to be punished.
Let's read verses two and three. “Then the Lord answered me and said, Write the vision and make it plain on the tablets that he may run who reads it.” This vision is not Habakkuk seeing into heaven. It's not him seeing angels or chariots of fire like you would normally perhaps think of a vision. This vision means that God is speaking, that God is decreeing something.
Here, God is pronouncing his judgment. That's the idea of the vision here, and Habakkuk is told to write it. He's told to make it plain on tablets so that he may run who reads it. This is for readers for years to come. To run simply means to listen to it and obey it. Be prepared. Make sure that your life is right, especially when it happens.
In verse three, he says, “For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it will speak and it will not lie.” In other words, God is assuring the prophet here that he will deal with these Babylonians. He's going to use the Babylonians to punish Judah. But years later, God will punish those same Babylonians.
That's what he means when he says this is for an appointed time. God's divine wisdom had already decided when this is going to occur. He says even though it's going to be sometime in the future, when it comes, it will not tarry. He says at the end it will speak and will not lie. That is the vision about the punishment of these Babylonians.
When it does happen, it will not lie. It's coming. Though it tarries, wait for it. So what he says about the Chaldeans coming into Judah and punishing them is going to happen in the near future, but the punishment of the Babylonians is going to be somewhere off in the future. And he says you're just going to have to wait for it because he says it will surely come, it will not tarry.
In other words, when it does happen, it's going to happen swiftly. It will not tarry. Then there is something here that I need to point out about verse three, and that is this vision about this appointed time and how that when it comes, it will not tarry is not about the end of time. This is not about the Lord's coming.
This is not a verse about the day of judgment. A lot of preachers take this completely out of its context. The context is God's judgment upon these Chaldeans. This is not about the end of time, but God is saying in this chapter, I will deal with these people. You see, the whole problem is the problem of evil.
The prophet wants to know how much longer it's going to be until God punishes these people of Judah. And God says, I'm going to do that. I will send the Chaldeans upon them. And then the prophet says, but they're worse than we are. What are you going to do about them? And God is answering in chapter two of the Book of Habakkuk, he says, I will deal with them.
What were these Babylonians guilty of? How sinful were they? How evil was this nation? You see, Habakkuk has told God some things about what they had been doing. That's in chapter one. God is saying in chapter two, Habakkuk, I know how evil they are. As a matter of fact, I know more about them than you do. Let me tell you some things that I see in these people in Babylon.
So beginning in verse four, he says, “Behold the proud.” He's talking about the Babylonians. “His soul is not upright in him.” Remember that many times in the Old Testament, when a prophet talks about a nation, he addresses or speaks about that nation in terms of a singular individual.
He talks about him or he or his. That's what you have in verse four. This is not an individual. It's not just the king of Babylon here. This is the nation. And the first sin that God points out in the Babylonian empire was the sin of pride. As you read the prophets in the Old Testament and you find them condemning these nations, whether those nations are the nations of Judah and Israel or the Gentile nations around them, you will find that pride is one of the main things that they talk about because these nations were powerful. They had money. They had accomplished many victories through war, and their heart was lifted up. They'd become very prideful from the king on down. So the Bible says here that God is saying you may be prideful. You may think that your kingdom is going to last forever, but it will not.
God says in verse four that he is proud. “His soul is not upright in him. The just,” however, he says, “shall live by his faith.” That's quoted in Romans one 17 and in Galatians three, verse 11 in the New Testament. In verse five, you find another common problem in the Old Testament as well as today, and that is drinking alcohol.
“Indeed, because he transgresses by wine, he is a proud man, he does not stay at home because he enlarges his desire as hell” or Hades. He's like death and cannot be satisfied. He gathers to himself all nations and heaps up for himself all peoples. What he describes here about the Babylonians is what nations have done for thousands of years.
First of all, he talks about drinking. He transgresses by wine. We're going to read more about that later in this chapter. So let me go back to what he says about being a proud man. This pride of the nation means that the nation is not satisfied. They have to have more land. They have to conquer more countries. They have to have more power and more control. That's what he means when he says here: he's like death and cannot be satisfied. He cannot be satisfied with the money and the power and the land that he has as a nation. So he gathers to himself all nations and heaps up for himself all peoples. The Bible says in verse six that people are going to talk about the Babylonians when they do fall.
“Will not all these take up a proverb against him,” that is, the Babylonians, and “a taunting riddle against him and say, Woe to him who increases what is not his. How long…? So even the people around these Babylonians were looking at their power, their hunger for more land and more power and more wealth. And they say this: “Woe to him who increases what is not his! How long?” they're asking—the same question that Habakkuk said: How much longer are these people going to get away with their oppression of other nations? “To him who loads himself with many pledges. Will not your creditors rise up suddenly? Will they not awaken who oppress you and you will become their booty?”
In other words, the Babylonians who had taken advantage of and conquered all these nations will be conquered themselves. Isn't that what always happens though? That's what these other nations are going to say about them. In verse eight they're saying “because you have plundered many nations, all the remnant of the people shall plunder you, because of men's blood and the violence of the land and the city and of all who dwell in it.”
In verse nine, he talks about how that they're covetous. This was a problem of the Babylonian people. “Woe to him who covets evil gain for his house, that he may set his nest on high, that he may be delivered from the power of disaster.” This is something that happens to individuals today. They want to be secure and they end up with a false sense of security.
They want to have enough money and enough power and control in their lives so that they're free from danger, as he says here, so that he may be delivered from the power of disaster. They want to be so secure in life that they won't have any troubles. They want to have their nest set on high. That was true of the entire Babylonian nation and especially the king and the government.
God describes how sinful these Babylonians were even more in verse 12. He says, “Woe to him who builds a town with bloodshed, who establishes a city by iniquity.” Oh, sure the Babylonians built a great empire. But how did they do that? They did it by lying, by taking advantage of other people and by killing other people.
That's how they built up the empire. And God says payday is coming. The Bible says in verse 14, “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” Then he goes back to the problem of drinking alcohol in the Babylonian nation. He says in verse 15, “Woe to him who gives his neighbor drink, pressing to him your bottle, even to make him drunk, that you may look on his nakedness.”
This shows that it's not only a sin to drink, but it's also a sin to give drink to someone else, and that is a very important verse to remember when you read John chapter two. There are many people that think that Jesus made alcoholic wine in John chapter two. If Jesus made alcoholic wine in John chapter two, He would've made between 90 and 120 gallons of alcohol to give to people who had already been drinking that wine.
That would've made them very drunk. If Jesus had made alcoholic wine in John chapter two, he would have violated Habakkuk chapter two, verse 15. Now, there's much more to say about that and we've got resources on that very question, but I just wanted to point that out as a side note here. The main point of course in the chapter is that these people are guilty of this.
They have all these sins that are in their country, and God is saying to Habakkuk, this is how sinful they are. I will take care of them. But he's not finished because in verse 18 God says, “What profit is the image…?” So now we're talking about idolatry. “That its maker should carve it, the molded image, a teacher of lies that the maker of its mold should trust in it to make mute idols. Woe to him who says to wood, ‘Awake!’ to the silent stone, ‘Arise, it shall teach.’ Behold, it is overlaid with gold and silver. Yet in it, there is no breath at all.” He's talking about the idols they made, the idols that they worshiped, the idols that they prayed to. This was common in Babylon as it was in many of these other Gentile nations.
The chapter ends with these famous words in verse 20, “But the Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before Him.” What a passage of Scripture that is for us to read and think about today. But here in Habakkuk chapter two, God is responding to what Habakkuk said. Habakkuk said, Lord, don't you know that these Babylonians are worse than the people of Judah? How can you let this go? How can you not punish them? And God is saying in Habakkuk chapter two, I know how sinful they are. I know much more about their situation than you do. And I have a plan. I will punish them. But, and here's the point. When we think about the evil that is in the world, and we ask God, why, Lord, why do you allow that to happen and how much longer will you let that happen? God is saying here to the prophet what he says so many times in other Old Testament books: I will take care of these evil people, but I will decide when it happens, not you, and I will do it in my way, not the way that you think I should do it. I will do it in my own time and in my own way.
That's chapter two. That brings us to chapter three here. Habakkuk is talking and what did he say after God put him in his place? How did he feel about that? He humbled himself before God, just like Job did. He was afraid when he heard what God said. In chapter three, verse two, he said, “O Lord, I have heard your speech and was afraid. O Lord, revive your work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make it known in wrath. Remember mercy.” So now he's acknowledging the great power of God. Now he's acknowledging, he's admitting, that God knows what He's doing. God has power over the nations. God has power over the natural world.
God has power to deliver His people, and he ends this book with a different outlook, a different perspective. This is one of the great statements of faith anywhere in the Bible. Notice the change in this chapter since the book opened before. When the book started, he's frustrated, he's anxious. Now he's calm and happy. Before he had questions. Now he has gratitude. Before he questioned God's justice. Now he praises God's mercy. Before nothing satisfied him. Now, nothing dissatisfies him. Before he relied on his thinking and now he trusts in God. Many times this journey is repeated in the Bible, and today a man thinks that God's not running the world like he should, and he becomes frustrated and he becomes critical.
That's what we saw in Job. That's what we saw in Asaph, and now we're seeing it in Habakkuk the prophet. They had a change of mind because they had a change of perspective. He began by saying, why Lord and how long, and toward the end of this book, you find one of the greatest faith statements in all the Bible.
It's in chapter three, verse 17 and 18. “Though the fig tree may not blossom nor fruit be on the vines, though the labor of the olive may fail, and the fields yield no food, though the flock may be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I will joy in the God of my salvation.”
Thank you for listening to My God and My Neighbor. Stay connected with our podcast on our website and on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. Tennessee Bible College, providing Christian education since 1975 in Cookeville, Tennessee, offers undergraduate and graduate programs. Study at your level. Aim higher and get in touch with us today.