You Won’t Believe This!

Look around at the nations; look and be amazed! For I am doing something in your own day, something you wouldn’t believe even if someone told you about it.   Habakkuk 1:5

Habakkuk had been waiting for God to act, and now God was ready. Perhaps the prophet thought, Great! What are you going to do, Lord? Are you going to bring a national revival? Will it impact us or the next generation?

What God said next must have left Habakkuk speechless: “I am raising up the Babylonians” (Habakkuk 1:6). I imagine Habakkuk doing a double take at this point: The Babylonians!

If you want to know how Habakkuk must have felt about this, put in a more contemporary name. This would be like God saying, “Yes, I know that there are terrible things going on among my people, so I am going to raise up Saddam Hussein.”

Habakkuk seemed to say, “But you can’t do that, God! I know things are in a pretty desperate state among your people, but nothing like what’s going on with the Babylonians! They deny everything you stand for.” The cure seemed worse than the condition. But God’s answer was clear: he would use the Babylonians to deal with the sins of his people. He would use their evil to accomplish his own purpose.

It is not surprising that Habakkuk asked a second question: “O LORD, our Rock, you have sent these Babylonians to correct us, to punish us for our many sins. But you are pure and cannot stand the sight of evil. Will you wink at their treachery? Should you be silent while the wicked swallow up people more righteous than they?” (Habakkuk 1:12-13).

Habakkuk’s first question (Habakkuk 1:4) was about the sins of God’s people. His second question was about the wider evil in the world. Habakkuk seemed to have accepted that God could use an evil power like Babylon to bring judgment to his own people, but that raised another question: what would God ultimately do with evil powers?

Sometimes the methods God uses to bring about his purposes seem counterintuitive—using a godless nation to punish God’s people, using an instrument of death (the cross) to bring new life—but we can always trust God. His “ways are far beyond anything [we] could imagine” (Isaiah 55:8).

For further reading, see Jonah 4