After the long back-and-forth between Habakkuk and God, and after Habakkuk finally receives the guidance he had been pleading for, he breaks into song, a prophetic prayer that gathers up everything he has heard about God, everything he has been taught about God, and everything he himself has come to feel in God’s presence. It opens with a confession that many of us would have prayed or at least thought in our hearts.
LORD, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, LORD. Repeat them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath remember mercy.
Habakkuk 3:2 (NIV)
Evidence Based Faith
Why does Habakkuk ask God to repeat the works that he heard about?
Habakkuk sounds like a second-generation believer, someone who has known God mostly through the wisdom passed down from his elders. He has heard of the exodus, of the great deliverance from Egypt, the one event that people still talk about even today. But hearing about it is not the same as having lived through it, and so Habakkuk’s request is really the same request every generation makes after the first: you did this in the past, could You do it again, in my lifetime? We ask the same thing when we wonder whether God will move as visibly in our day as He is said to have moved in the days of Jesus and the apostles.
There is a real difference between hearing about God and knowing God. Until we have our own encounter with Him, we cannot understand what we are told about Him. That lack of experience is what makes us long for God to act again in our own time, so that we, too, can see and trust. And there is nothing wrong with bringing that doubt to God directly, rather than to people who will only explain Him to us secondhand. Every doubt honestly placed before God draws us closer to Him. Everyone we read of in the Bible who encountered God’s presence stopped asking their questions and their petitions and simply worshipped. We ask for a blind man to receive his sight, for the demon-possessed to be delivered, and these things have happened, yet they have not moved us the way we expect. If nothing else has stirred our hearts, God appearing in power would only produce fear or momentary shock, not a lasting change of heart.
Thomas is the clearest picture of this. He told his fellow disciples that unless he touched Jesus’ wounds himself, he would not believe. But when Jesus actually stood before him, He did not even have to say “touch me.” Thomas never reached out his hand. He simply said, “My Lord and my God.” His demand had been made to his peers, not to Jesus. In the very presence of Christ, the demand for proof simply dissolves. That is the pattern for us too, once we are actually in His presence, we will stop asking and simply start worshipping.
God came from Teman, the Holy One from Mount Paran. His glory covered the heavens and his praise filled the earth.
Habakkuk 3:3 (NIV)
Habakkuk pictures God as one who comes from the southernmost edge of Judah, from Teman in Edom, from Mount Paran beyond Beersheba. His glory fills the sky, his praise fills the earth. But plague goes before Him and pestilence follows His steps. Mountains crumble, hills collapse, the rivers themselves feel His anger. Habakkuk describes Him almost like the angel of death, sanctifying the earth by force wherever He walks.
Like Habakkuk, why do we still attribute natural disasters to God’s wrath being manifested on His people?
Even today, natural disasters are called, quite literally, acts of God. An earthquake, a flood, a tsunami, and we say a nation is being punished, we call one another to pray and fast. Science has now given us understanding of most of these phenomena, why the ground shakes and where the rain comes from. We laugh at the tribes who dance to bring rain, yet we still behave the same way, still treat every calamity as evidence of divine anger. Even when God told Noah plainly that He would never again destroy the earth this way. Why do we do this?
There may be something in us that prefers an angry God to a chaotic universe, because an angry God at least gives us something to do. If disaster is simply natural, there is nothing we can control. But if disaster is God’s anger, then holy living becomes the mission, the fix, the thing that keeps us busy and gives us a sense that our obedience decides the outcome. That is how we have made God, whatever name a culture gives Him, into little more than the boogeyman: behave, or he will get you. Every one of us has a far better example sitting right in front of us, the relationship of a parent and child. A child gets bad grades, and there is still food on the table and love in the house. A child skips church, and the love does not leave with them. That is the closest thing we have to understanding God’s love, and yet we still cannot bring ourselves to amplify it and apply it to God.
Treating God as Our Personal Avenger
Habakkuk goes on describing God’s wrath poured out on the nations, on Midian, on the surrounding peoples, in language full of natural upheaval and trembling.
I heard and my heart pounded, my lips quivered at the sound; decay crept into my bones, and my legs trembled. Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity to come on the nation invading us.
Habakkuk 3:16 (NIV)
Even in this state, worse off physically and emotionally than Job at his lowest, Habakkuk’s takeaway is that God is tremendous and terrible, and all he can do is wait for His judgment to fall on the enemy nation that is coming against them. This is the same posture as the servant in the parable who buried his one talent because he believed his master was harsh and unforgiving. Habakkuk called that harshness God; afraid of God, he waits eagerly to watch his enemies destroyed.
Why do we treat God as our personal avenger?
Throughout the Bible, from David down to Habakkuk, this same misunderstanding surfaces again and again, that God exists to take our side against whoever has wronged us, a personal hitman we can hide behind. We quote “if God is for us, who can be against us” as though it were a promise of victory over our enemies, when the deeper truth of those words is that no one can stand against the love of God, a love that is drawing all people, including our enemies, to Himself. Because we lack a real grasp of that love, we assume He shares our appetite for revenge. Only when our own hearts are filled with His love does the fear drop away, and only then can we begin to understand how God intends to treat our enemies: not with our vengeance, but with His forgiveness. It is worth noticing that if avenging ourselves were not against the law, we would simply do it ourselves. It is precisely because we cannot take revenge personally that we ask God to take it on our behalf.
We quietly assume that once we are behaving well, we are part of God’s inner circle, safe, while everyone else remains outside, subject to His discipline as the enforcer, the warden of heaven. What we forget is that our enemies are also His children. No parent, hearing one child accuse another, sides completely against either one; both are loved, and the parent’s heart, if anything, aches more for the child who has drifted away and stopped calling. If we simply applied what we already know from human relationships, we would see that God is not scheming how to destroy those who oppose us, but how to bring them home. If destruction were His goal, He would not have needed to send a redeemer; He could have simply sent the flood again. Instead, He sent His Son to save all of us, our enemies included. That His purpose is that none should perish, that all His children should be gathered in and not filtered out, is a truth we resist because it costs us the satisfaction of wanting to see judgment fall on the people who have wronged us.
Even If God Does Not Bless Us, Will We Rejoice
Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign LORD is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to tread on the heights.
Habakkuk 3:17-19 (NIV)
Every source of food, every measure of security, is gone in this picture, and yet Habakkuk says he will rejoice in the Lord regardless. Like the Daniel’s friends told the king come what may, even if God does not deliver them from the furnace, they will still worship Him. That was the posture of the Old Testament writers at their best: I will stand for You even if You never bless me.
What has changed between that stance and ours?
Somewhere along the way, our songs and prayers became almost entirely about what God has done for us and what He will do in the future, rather than about rejoicing in Him regardless of outcome. Try naming one popular worship song built entirely around “even if You never bless me, I will rejoice in You.” It is difficult, because we have quietly equated God’s goodness with material blessing, and until we outgrow that equation, we cannot recognise spiritual blessing that He has to offer. Part of this shift may simply be distraction, so many competing claims on our attention that God becomes an afterthought squeezed in among everything else. We treat God almost like a life insurance rather than a having a real relationship with Him.
But part of it, too, traces back to how the New Testament writers and the leaders who followed them framed the promises of Christ. Jesus never promised His disciples ease or guaranteed outcomes; He could not even promise James and John where they would sit, only that His Father was in charge of that. Yet somewhere the message shifted toward certainty of blessing if we simply believe and ask, and that shift, amplified over centuries, has left us unable to say what Habakkuk said standing on the wreckage of his own harvest.
This belief comes from knowing the Shepherd Himself, not the pasture. Whatever comes, whether the fields fail or the enemy is at the gate, the call is the same one Habakkuk gives himself: to say, come what may, the Sovereign Lord is my strength, and I will tread on the heights with Him regardless of what lies in the valley below.
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