Not the answer you were expecting
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.
"Look at the nations and watch—
and be utterly amazed.
For I am going to do something in your days
that you would not believe,
even if you were told.I am raising up the Babylonians,
that ruthless and impetuous people,
who sweep across the whole earth
to seize dwelling places not their own.They are a feared and dreaded people;
they are a law to themselves
and promote their own honor.Their horses are swifter than leopards,
fiercer than wolves at dusk.
Their cavalry gallops headlong;
their horsemen come from afar.
They fly like a vulture swooping to devour;they all come bent on violence.
Their hordes advance like a desert wind
and gather prisoners like sand.They deride kings
and scoff at rulers.
They laugh at all fortified cities;
they build earthen ramps and capture them.Then they sweep past like the wind and go on—
guilty men, whose own strength is their god."
Habakkuk brings a fairly lengthy complaint in prayer to God, about the politics and corruption of his country. God's answer isn't what he was expecting to hear. It almost sounds worse than the problem.
In our made-by-Disney expectations of how an answer to this sort of prayer would go, the corrupt people in Israel all receive visitations from an angel in their sleep. This angel touches them with a kind of magic wand, which changes their hearts and causes them to awaken like a post-visitation Ebenezer Scrooge. They spend the ensuing days righting the injustices they caused, giving back the money they embezzled, and so on, until things are all set straight. The princess marries the plucky beggar boy and a talking dog provides laughs as they live happily ever after.
In God's version, bloodthirsty armies smash through the city walls, and come raping, pillaging and burning their way through Israel. Thousands upon thousands die or are taken into lifelong slavery. There is no Israel anymore, only an occupied territory of the Babylonian Empire. Jerusalem is no longer the center of worship and communication with God, but is a sort of "green zone" for the Babylonians to use in consolidating their power over the region. Nobody lives happily ever after, except for the Babylonian nobility and their soldiers.
What would you do if you did some serious prayer and got that kind of response? Imagine if you prayed "I don't like how my car is running, and coworkers are a pain to work with, can you please fix my car and get me a better job?" and the response was "Everything you own will be stripped from you, and you will lose your job and not be able to find another here." How do you prepare for something like that? How do you react in anything but shock? Nobody's going to say "That's great! I love walking everywhere in the rain, and sleeping under cardboard is so cool! It's like having my very own play fort every single day!"
Sometimes the road from point A to point C doesn't pass through scenic point B, but is routed via a grueling construction detour to horrific point X, with guys standing around burning trash cans, giving you hard looks. It doesn't look at all like the plastic suburban utopia you were expecting, so you give up hope in the directions and look for any way you can to get out of there before you get shot. If you do that, you'll lose your way. Sometimes that point X is the only way to get from point A to point C.
The disciples got a similar disappointment when they wanted to know how God would triumph over the injustices of their day. The answer of Jesus being nailed to a cross and dying a pretty terrible death probably wasn't what they were expecting. Still, if that didn't happen, we'd all be hellbound right now.
In Habakkuk's time, God used Israel's bloodthirsty imperialist neighbors to clean house so that they could continue as a nation, corruption-free. If Israel was a person, it would have been major surgery, with a couple generations of "anesthesia" in the form of exile. (Imagine someone who knows nothing about medical science talking with a doctor who is proposing triple bypass surgery: "What?! You mean you're going to cut holes all over my body, chop up perfectly good veins, saw my chest open, take my blood, shove the veins into my chest and stitch them around my heart, and then sew it all back together, all while you've got me drugged into a freaking coma? How on earth could that possibly help me in any way, you sick, depraved maniac?!") Still, the nation had become so sick that it needed that drastic of a procedure for them to survive as a culture.
God loves us. If we ask for help and get something that seems a bit drastic, it's probably for the best. All we can do is go along with it and continue the dialog. In the end, Habakkuk ends up praising God for what he's about to do, even though it seems horrible. Sometimes the answer we're not expecting is the one that will save us.
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