The Audacity of the Watchman: Text: Habakkuk 1:1-4
Introduction: Arguing with God
We live in an age that is drowning in grievances. Everyone has a complaint. Everyone has a beef with reality, and consequently, a beef with the God who made and governs that reality. The modern mind, when it deigns to consider God at all, treats Him like a celestial civil magistrate who is failing badly at his job. He is summoned to the court of our enlightened opinion and is promptly presented with a long list of charges. Why the injustice? Why the suffering? Why do the wicked prosper? How long will you let this go on?
These are not new questions. They are, in fact, ancient questions. And God, in His wisdom, has seen fit to include a record of one of His prophets asking these very same questions, and with a good deal of heat. The book of Habakkuk is, in many ways, a record of a divine courtroom drama. But the prophet, to his credit, understands who the Judge is. He is not a petulant activist with a picket sign; he is a burdened watchman on the wall, crying out to his King.
And this is a crucial distinction. There is a universe of difference between the complaint of faith and the complaint of unbelief. The complaint of unbelief stands outside the covenant, arms folded, and says, "If there were a God, He wouldn't run the world this way. Therefore, there is no God." This is the argument of the village atheist, and it is monumentally foolish. In order to lodge a complaint about injustice, you must first assume a universal standard of justice. But to have such a standard, you must have a universal Lawgiver. So the atheist saws off the very branch he is sitting on in order to lecture the tree. He must borrow from God's world, using God's logic and God's moral sensibilities, in order to argue that God does not exist. It is high comedy.
The complaint of faith, however, is entirely different. The complaint of faith stands within the covenant. It stands on the promises of God, looks at the chaos of the world, and cries out, "Lord, this doesn't look like the fulfillment of Your promises!" It is the cry of a son to a father, not the insolent backtalk of a rebel. Habakkuk is a man of faith, and his questions are the wrestling of a man who takes God and His Word seriously. He believes God is just, which is precisely why the rampant injustice is so profoundly troubling to him. He is not questioning the existence of God, but rather the administration of God. And God honors this kind of wrestling. He answers it. This book is that answer.
The Text
The oracle which Habakkuk the prophet beheld.
How long, O Yahweh, will I call for help,
And You will not hear?
I cry out to You, “Violence!”
Yet You do not save.
Why do You make me see wickedness
And cause me to look on trouble?
Indeed, devastation and violence are before me;
And there is strife, and contention is lifted up.
Therefore the law is ignored,
And justice never comes forth.
For the wicked surround the righteous;
Therefore justice comes forth perverted.
(Habakkuk 1:1-4 LSB)
A Heavy Word (v. 1)
We begin with the introduction, which sets the stage for everything that follows.
"The oracle which Habakkuk the prophet beheld." (Habakkuk 1:1)
The word for "oracle" here is the Hebrew word massa. It can be translated as "oracle" or "prophecy," but its root meaning is "a burden." This is not a light and breezy thought for the day. This is a heavy word from the Lord. To be a prophet of God was not to be a motivational speaker with a sunny disposition. It was to have the weight of God's own grief and judgment laid upon your shoulders. Jeremiah was the weeping prophet. Ezekiel had to perform all sorts of bizarre and taxing sign-acts. And Habakkuk has been given a burden. He "beheld" it. This was not something he thought up; it was a vision given to him. He is a seer, a prophet. He sees what God is showing him, and the weight of it is crushing.
This is the first principle in coming to God with our troubles. We must recognize that He sees the problem with far greater clarity and feels the weight of it with far greater gravity than we ever could. Our anguish over the state of the world is but a thimbleful of water next to the ocean of God's own holy sorrow and wrath against sin. Habakkuk is burdened because he is seeing a little bit of what God sees all the time.
The Cry of the Unanswered (v. 2)
Habakkuk's burden overflows into a direct, passionate complaint to God.
"How long, O Yahweh, will I call for help, And You will not hear? I cry out to You, 'Violence!' Yet You do not save." (Habakkuk 1:2)
The prophet's complaint has two parts: God's apparent deafness and God's apparent inaction. "How long?" This is the cry of the saints throughout the ages. The souls under the altar in Revelation cry out, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge and avenge our blood?" (Rev. 6:10). The psalmist asks it repeatedly. This is not a question of intellectual curiosity. It is the cry of a heart stretched to its breaking point. Habakkuk has been praying, calling for help, and all he hears is silence.
He is not vague in his complaint. He cries out, "Violence!" The Hebrew is hamas. It means violence, cruelty, injustice, wrongdoing. This is the same word used in Genesis 6:11 to describe the condition of the world before the flood: "the earth was filled with violence (hamas)." Habakkuk sees his own society, the covenant people of Judah, descending into that same antediluvian corruption. And God, the covenant Lord, Yahweh, seems to be doing nothing. "You will not hear... You do not save."
From our vantage point, this is a terrible accusation to make against the God who is all-hearing and all-powerful. But we must feel the force of it from Habakkuk's perspective. When justice is delayed, it feels like justice denied. When rescue does not come, it feels like the rescuer does not care. Habakkuk is not speaking as a detached theologian; he is speaking as a man whose eyes are filled with the bloody spectacle of sin and whose ears are filled with the cries of the oppressed, and the heavens are like brass.
The Agony of Seeing (v. 3)
The prophet's pain is not just that evil exists, but that God is making him watch it.
"Why do You make me see wickedness And cause me to look on trouble? Indeed, devastation and violence are before me; And there is strife, and contention is lifted up." (Habakkuk 1:3)
This is a profound and startling turn. He doesn't just ask why God allows wickedness. He asks, "Why do You make me see it?" He feels as though his eyelids are being pried open, forcing him to behold the relentless horror of his nation's decay. This is the prophet's burden. He cannot look away. He cannot distract himself with entertainment. God has appointed him to be a watchman, and the watchman must see the danger. He must see the "devastation and violence," the "strife and contention."
This is a word for us. We live in a culture that has perfected the art of distraction. We are experts at not seeing. We have a thousand glowing rectangles to divert our attention from the moral rot in our own land, in our own churches, and in our own hearts. But God sometimes, in His mercy, makes His people see. He forces us to look at the trouble, at the strife, at the contention that is tearing our civilization apart at the seams. And the purpose is not to drive us to despair, but to drive us to our knees, to cry out as Habakkuk does.
The Unraveling of a Nation (v. 4)
The result of this unchecked wickedness is the total breakdown of the civil order.
"Therefore the law is ignored, And justice never comes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; Therefore justice comes forth perverted." (Habakkuk 1:4)
Here is the logical conclusion. Because God has not intervened, the moral fabric of society has come completely unstrung. "Therefore the law is ignored." The Hebrew word for "ignored" means to be numb, paralyzed, chilled. The Torah, God's perfect law, has been put on ice. It has no force, no power. It is a dead letter. When God's law is ignored, the foundation of the nation is destroyed.
When the law is paralyzed, "justice never comes forth." The courts are broken. The system is rigged. Why? "For the wicked surround the righteous." This is a tactic. The wicked, through sheer numbers, intimidation, and political maneuvering, encircle the few remaining righteous. They box them in, isolate them, and neutralize them. The result is that even when some semblance of justice does emerge, it "comes forth perverted." It is twisted, bent, and corrupted to serve the interests of the wicked. It is a legal system that calls evil good and good evil.
Does this sound at all familiar? When the law of God is no longer the standard for a nation's life, what is left? Only the raw assertion of power. The law becomes a tool in the hands of the wicked to punish the righteous. We see this when bakers are dragged before tribunals for refusing to celebrate sin, or when parents are labeled domestic terrorists for wanting to know what their children are being taught. This is what happens when the wicked surround the righteous. This is Judah in the last days before the Babylonian judgment. And this is the American republic in our day.
The Righteous Complaint
So what do we do with this? Habakkuk lays his complaint at the feet of Yahweh. He is honest. He is blunt. He is in agony. But he is talking to God. He has not given up on God. His entire argument is predicated on the fact that God is a God of justice, which is why the current state of affairs is so intolerable.
This is the starting point for all true reformation and revival. We must first see the ruin. God must make us see the wickedness. We must feel the burden of it. We cannot be content with a comfortable, private piety while our nation collapses into paganism. We must be troubled. We must be vexed, like Lot in Sodom. And we must take that righteous vexation to the throne of grace.
But we must be prepared for the answer. As we will see in the coming verses, God's answer to Habakkuk's complaint is not what he expected. Not at all. God's answer was, in effect, "You think things are bad now? You have no idea. I am about to do something in your days that you would not believe if you were told." God was about to answer the problem of Judah's wickedness by raising up an even more wicked nation, the Babylonians, to be His instrument of judgment.
This is the central problem of the book, and it is the central problem of God's sovereignty. God governs His world with inscrutable and holy wisdom. We know that He is holy, but part of the reason why His governance is so inscrutable is because He uses so much unholiness to accomplish His holy purposes. He draws straight with crooked lines.
Habakkuk's first complaint was about God's inaction. He is about to have a much bigger problem: God's action. And the resolution to that problem will not be a neat and tidy explanation that satisfies our tidy, rationalistic impulses. The resolution will be a command and a promise that has echoed down through the history of redemption, the very heart of the gospel: "The righteous shall live by his faith" (Hab. 2:4). That is the only place of rest when the world is coming apart. It was true for Habakkuk on the eve of judgment, it was true for Paul in the midst of the Roman empire, and it is true for us today.