drawing by Annie Vallotton, Good News Bible
Habakkuk was troubled. To put it mildly. His nation was full of corruption. Injustice. Abuse of power. The good people, like Habakkuk, prayed. God didn’t answer.
Chapter 1 of the book of Habakkuk records his lament:
How long, O Lord, must I call for help,
but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
but you do not save?
Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
there is strife, and conflict abounds.
Therefore the law is paralyzed,
and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous,
so that justice is perverted.(Habakkuk 1:2-4)
Then God did answer. Literally. He answered Habakkuk and shared with him the plan: God was going to raise up Babylonia, a “ruthless and impetuous people” (1:6), to punish Judah.
Habakkuk didn’t like that answer at all. He tried to be respectful, but he knew that God must be overlooking the fact that Babylonia was evil. They were the bad guys. Could God possibly use evil people to punish “the good guys”?
O Lord, are you not from everlasting?
My God, my Holy One, we will not die.
O Lord, you have appointed them to execute judgment;
O Rock, you have ordained them to punish.
Your eyes are too pure to look on evil;
you cannot tolerate wrong.
Why then do you tolerate the treacherous?
Why are you silent while the wicked
swallow up those more righteous than themselves?(Habakkuk 1:2-4)
God later reassures Habakkuk that the Babylonians themselves will be punished for their misdeeds. But the short answer is yes, God uses the wicked to punish people, even people more righteous than they.
In fact, if we look at the biblical record, God rather consistently uses bad people as instruments of judgment. It’s the rare exception when he uses the righteous.
Yesterday we talked about telling God what to do. About how simple solutions usually aren’t simple and rarely solve anything. Here’s today’s question:
How will you react if God chooses to use evil people today to do his will?
Tim, God routinely uses bad people (the Dallas Cowboys, San Antonio Spurs, Dallas Mavericks, Texas Rangers) to beat the good people (Minnesota Vikings, Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Dodgers), but somehow I don’t think that is what you had in mind. :-)
David Lipscomb made this point exactly when he argued that God can use any government or government official to do his will. This does not mean that God approves of the government or the official, only that He can and does use any tool He finds beneficial at the moment.
Should give us pause to think about being God’s “chosen” people!
Maybe the evil people just respond faster. The good people have to meditate and debate the effects and consequences for so long that sometimes it doesn’t even get done. Getting something through a men’s business meeting, a board of elders, or a church committee would try the patience of Job. If God has a job he wants done this week, he probably should give it to somebody that would do it this week.
Could you imagine trying to convey the message that God was going to use Islamic terrorism to fix the moral problems in our country. Habakkuk must have been completely shocked. I wonder how he spread the word, or if he just wrote it down and hid it. Jeremiah preached it, but it certainly wasn’t well received.
Jay, that would come close to the same emotional impact.
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ahhh…what if the good ol’ US of A are the “bad people” used by God to spank other nations.