But you can’t be serious!
You can’t condone evil!
So why don’t you do something about this?
Why are you silent now?
This outrage! Evil men swallow up the righteous
and you stand around and watch!
Habakkuk 1:13
The boxes in our attic are ordinary enough. A mix of old, dusty cardboard boxes and plastic tubs. Some of them house my journals, years and years worth of innocuous spiral notebooks and speckled composition books filled with my deepest thoughts and prayers. No one but me has ever read them. That’s a relief because they also contain plenty of edgy questions for God, too.
Raw questions about why he allowed our newborn baby to suffer. Hard questions about why good people are punished for doing what is right. Uncensored questions about why God doesn’t stop airplanes from flying into skyscrapers. Not stuff I want other people to see. Except perhaps our kids once I’m gone, so they can see the real me–a woman filled with more doubts than faith when exposed to the grimy, gritty side of life.
A quick read through Habakkuk makes me wonder if the prophet intended for anyone to read what what he wrote after his vision of the invasion of Judah.
- God, how long do I have to cry out for help before you listen?
- How many times do I have to yell, “Help! Murder! Police!” before you come to the rescue?
- Why do you force me to look at evil, stare trouble in the face day after day?
- So why don’t you do something about this?
- Why are you silent now?
Would Habakkuk have written down these questions if he’d known his words would be read for several millenniums? Or would he have toned things down a bit?
I don’t know. But this I do know. We can be thankful Habakkuk recorded his questions, undiluted and uncensored. We can be more thankful that God saw fit to make Habakkuk’s raw, pain-filled words part of his holy Word. Because their presence in the canon of Scripture means our God welcomes our questions when life gets grimy and gritty.
In the rest of Habakkuk, God shows that he is big enough to handle our hard questions. Furthermore, he demonstrates that when we ask hard questions, he will give answers. Not always as quickly as we’d like. And not always the answer we want. Instead, he consistently gives the answers we need when we need them. And by his sovereign wisdom and power, he uses those unexpected, untimely, and sometimes unwanted answers to fill our hearts with more faith than doubt and to shape us into the real people he created us to be.
