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Tag: Habakkuk

  • Habakkuk — Day 2: “How Long?”

    1 The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw.

    The Prophet Complains

    2 LORD, how long will I call for help and you not listen?
    I cry out to you, “Violence!”
    but you don’t deliver us.

    Yesterday I read the book of Habakkuk. Today, I went back to slow down and study just the first two verses. Here are a few things that stood out to me.

    • I think sometimes, when things get hard, we assume it’s faith that gets lost. At first glance, that might look like what’s happening here. But when I look closer—when I read this with a magnifying glass instead of skimming the question as a whole—it tells a different story.
      • Habakkuk says, “How long…”
        And those two words actually signal the opposite of a lack of faith:
        • How long means he believes God can and will act.
        • It also means he has asked before, which signals endurance rather than abandonment.
        • He assumes God should hear and can save, and that the frustration exists only because he believes God is who He says He is.
          (See Psalm 13 and Psalm 22.)
    • This is a deeply vulnerable conversation with God. It separates “God, if you’re up there…” from “God, I know You’re there, and I don’t understand this.”
    • The word “violence” (ḥāmās in Hebrew) reflects social collapse, not isolated crime. This isn’t about one bad moment; it’s about a system full of moral collapse.

    Habakkuk is frustrated because he believes. That’s what separates his cry from unbelief. He can’t reconcile who he knows God to be with the fact that God is allowing this collapse.

    Habakkuk is waiting.
    Not patiently, but honestly.
    And he’s waiting for God in a raw, spiritual way.

  • Habakkuk 1: Day 1

    Why does God let his people fall sometimes?

    2025 was rough.
    Not in a dramatic way, but in the small ways no one sees. The kind where you drift further from where you want to be in inches instead of yards. Then one day you look up and wonder how you landed here. It’s never the big decisions that change where you end up. It’s the micro-movements; keeping your head down, watching your feet instead of looking forward, tracking the next step without making sure it actually leads where you want to go.

    Today, I started the Book of Habakkuk. I chose it because it’s different. You don’t hear it referenced often in church, and no one names their child Habakkuk, but it’s thought-provoking.

    In this book, Habakkuk asks God why He allows evil to exist. In this context, he’s referring to the Chaldeans—another name for the Babylonians.

    They are wreaking havoc in Judah, corrupting God’s people, and their siege is only rising. Habakkuk confronts God.

    He wants to know why God seems silent while injustice spreads—and why God would allow His own people to fall so far before intervening.

    If I’m being brutally honest, sometimes I ask God the same questions while looking in the mirror. I’m not evil, but sometimes I lose my character, or at least the person I strive to be. It will be interesting to see how God responds as I read further.

    If you’d like to slow down and look more closely at the text, you can read my reflections on verses 1–2 here.