When I first became a follower of Jesus, one of the most
difficult things I had to learn to do was to pray. It is not that I needed to
learn how to pray, or that prayer
required some specific skill that I did not have, but I simply needed to learn
of the necessity of prayer in my life. I had become accustomed to dealing with
my problems and my needs with my own resources, and what I had to learn was
that God was available to me, and desired for me to bring my concerns to Him
and to dialogue with Him in the intimate fellowship of prayer. And of course,
as I began to develop a discipline of prayer in my life, I began to encounter
some challenges. The most seemingly insurmountable one was this: that though I brought
my concerns to a God whom I believed heard my prayers, and was all-knowing,
all-powerful, and all-good, my prayers seemed to often go unanswered. The
problem of unanswered prayer became a great hindrance to my spiritual growth
until I eventually learned that there is really no such thing as an unanswered
prayer. God answers every prayer that we pray, but His answer is not always,
“YES!” Just as a good and loving parent knows that the best thing for a child
is to sometimes say “no” to the things the child asks for, I had to learn that
my Heavenly Father was showing His lovingkindness and goodness to me in saying
“NO!” to some of the things for which I prayed. But I also learned that there
are times when God’s answer to our prayers is neither “yes” nor “no,” but “NOT
YET!” Far from being an outright denial,
God’s answer is sometimes merely a delay
for a variety of reasons. There are times when we are not yet ready to receive
God’s answer and situations in which God’s timing requires a delay. And then
there are times when His divine delay is because we have not yet persisted in prayer.
Jesus told the parable of the persistent widow in Luke 18:1-8,
who came repeatedly to the unjust judge in her town, pleading for justice in
her cause. Eventually, the unjust judge gave the widow what she asked for in
order to get her off of his back. But the point of Jesus’ parable was not that
we are able to wear God down to give in to us if we persist long enough. His
point was that, if an unjust and unrighteous judge can eventually succumb to
the persistent cries of a person in need, how much more willingly and eagerly
will our Heavenly Father answer His own children when we cry out to Him. Luke
tells us that Jesus told this parable “to show that at all times they ought to
pray and not to lose heart.” In other words, an immediate “no,” or a prolonged
delay in the answer to our prayers does not mean that we should cease praying
about the matter, but that we should persist
in prayer and not give up! Jesus concluded the parable by saying, “However,
when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” Will He find that
we have, by faith continued to persist in prayer for the concerns of our hearts,
or will He find that we have given up on crying out to Him?
It is not that persistence in prayer makes God more willing
to answer us, but it is often the case that persistence in prayer helps us grow
in our understanding of who God is, how He is at work, and what it is that He
desires to do in our situation. And persistence in prayer also helps us to
clarify in our own hearts and minds what it is that we are really longing to
see God do. Persistence in prayer is essential, and we learn that throughout
the Bible.
The book of Habakkuk is really all about one man’s
persistence in prayer. Unlike most of the other prophetic writings, Habakkuk is
not filled with the prophet’s words from God
to the people of his own or
surrounding nations. Rather, Habbakuk is filled, for the most part, of the
prophet’s words to God on behalf of his people. He has, if you
will, invited us into his prayer closet, or perhaps left his prayer journal
laying open for us to read. And as we observe Habakkuk in prayer, we find him
wearing out his knees in persistent prayer to God. We learn from him a pattern for
persistent prayer that will help us as we beckon God to come to our aid as
well.
As we eavesdrop on the prayers of the prophet, we find first
of all …
I. The circumstances that give rise to our prayers
There are times, I suppose, when we pray because we know we
are supposed to pray. But then there are times when we are driven to prayer
because of the desperation of our situation. This is where Habakkuk found
himself long before he took up a pen to chronicle his prayer journey. The days
in which he lived were the darkest days of Jewish history until that point. The
righteous king Josiah, who had instituted a sweeping moral and spiritual reform
and turned the nation of Judah
back to the Word of God, had died tragically in the opening salvos of a battle
with the Egyptians on the plain of Megiddo. His son Jehoahaz took the throne,
but his reign was short lived. After only three months, the Egyptian Pharaoh
Neco flexed his geopolitical muscle and deposed and deported Jehoahaz into
exile. In his place, Neco installed another son of Josiah – Eliakim – as king
of Judah .
Eliakim was Neco’s puppet, and to prove it, Neco forced upon him a new name:
Jehoiakim. If Jehoiakim had inherited any of Josiah’s spiritual or moral
uprightness, he expediently suppressed it in the name of political power and
personal profit. Corruption and injustice filled the land like a plague.
What troubled the prophet most was that all this was taking
place among a people and a nation that was set apart for the Lord’s own purpose
and called to be His own people. His outrage over the moral degradation that
was unfolding before his eyes was surpassed only by the flagrant disregard for
the glory of God that he was forced to behold. God had, quite literally, made
that nation and carried it through history, delivering them from otherwise
certain destruction time and time again. And this nation had turned its back on
God, exchanged His glory for idols, and forsaken His word repeatedly. Jeremiah
was a contemporary of Habakkuk, and the Lord spoke through him to the wicked
king Jehoiakim, “your eyes and your heart are intent only upon your own dishonest
gain, and on shedding innocent blood and on practicing oppression and
extortion” (Jer
22:17). The wickedness flowed from the throne through all the governing
officials, judges and even the prophets and priests whom Jeremiah accused of
performing their wickedness even in the house of the Lord (23:11).
Habakkuk had gone time after time to the only place he could
go with his concerns – he took it to the Lord in prayer. Six words in verse 3
describe the circumstances in which Habakkuk found himself: iniquity,
wickedness, destruction, violence, strife and contention. These things did not
take place in the back-alleys and dark corners of society. They were flaunted
in public. Habakkuk says that he sees iniquity;
he looks on wickedness; violence and
destruction are before him. There is
no shame or secrecy about it, and the parade of sin marches its way into the
halls of justice in the land. The Hebrew word translated strife is a word that was used for lawsuits. Because of the
systemic injustice, the wicked could plead their cause against the righteous in
courts of law and come out on top. “Justice,” the prophet says in verse 4, “is
never upheld,” and “comes out perverted.” The wicked had surrounded, or hemmed
in, the righteous, because the righteous had become an oppressed minority.
All of these deplorable conditions are symptoms of an
underlying cause stated in verse 4: “the law is ignored.” By “law,” the prophet
refers to the entirety of the divinely inspired Word of God. That law, which
Jehoiakim’s father Josiah had rescued from the rubbish pile in the temple, and
which fueled the revival and reformation of the land under Josiah’s leadership,
had been once more discarded. When Jeremiah wrote out a prophecy directly denouncing Jehoiakim and sent
it to him by way of a messenger, the king cut it to pieces and threw it into a
fire. Another prophet named Uriah was bold enough to preach directly to the
king, and paid for it with his life (26:20-23). “Of all Judah
These
were the circumstances which gave rise to Habakkuk’s prayer. One writer has
said that he was “a man with open eyes, and because he was a man with open
eyes, he was a man with a burdened heart.”[2] As we rehearse the sorry
circumstances in which this man of God found himself, if our eyes are open we
cannot miss the parallels with our society today. Iniquity and wickedness,
destruction and violence, strife (and the litigious manifestation of it) and
contention are the headlines in our daily news. Immorality is on public display
and celebrated openly. Corruption and injustice have become commonplace, and
the righteous minority have seemingly no safe haven toward which to flee for
their cause to be upheld. The underlying reason is also the same: the Word of
God has become paralyzed because it has been frozen into numbness in our day.
Walt
Chantry lists some of the besetting sins of our own day: “abortions, violent
euthanasia, battering of wives and children, shootings in schools by fellow
students … sexual predators, bombings, riots … road rage … drug trafficking.”
Sadly that list is far from exhaustive. And then Chantry draws the comparison:
“In [Habakkuk’s] nation, as in ours, the legal system worked in behalf of the
wicked rather than the righteous. With us, governmental laws and the judges who
interpret them defend the rights of pornographers and rebuke any who would deny
them freedom to promote their vices. The system protects sexual perverts at
great cost to public health. Courts threaten parents who correct and discipline
their children. State education inculcates unbelief and skepticism and silences
biblical opinions.”[3]
The
foundations have been destroyed, and we ask like the psalmist did, “If the
foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” Habakkuk shows us what
we can do. We can turn to the Almighty God and pour out our hearts to Him in
prayer!
From
the circumstances which give rise to our prayers, we turn secondly to …
II.
The words that give voice to our prayers
Time
and time again, Habakkuk had come before the Lord to pray about the condition
of his nation. How do we know that? Why else would he say, “How long, O Lord,
will I call for help…?” He has been calling and calling … and calling! And now,
as though exasperated and in despair, he says at last, “How long am I going to
have to keep praying about these same things until You do something?” Those
little words, “How long,” indicate to us that Habakkuk is composing something
that the ancient Hebrews called a lament.
In a lament, the speaker voices agony over a situation, coupled with a spoken
or implied plea for help. The Psalms are full of lament – about one third of
them contain this kind of language -- and one entire book of the Bible is even
called Lamentations. Job is filled
with the language of lament, and even Jesus speaks with words of lamentation.
Therefore, if we allow the language of the Bible to inform our prayers (as we
should), we will find that there are times when a cry of lamentation is
entirely appropriate. The prayer of lament is “God’s gift to the believer”
which provides “a pathway of honest faith and faithful conversation with Him in
horrible times.” Lament gives us a language for “being honest with God about
our situations.”[4]
There
are some who believe that Habakkuk was wrong to come before God with a question
like this one, and who believe that it is likewise wrong for us to do so. One
writer says that Habakkuk “was quite presumptuous to demand an answer from God.
I would not suggest that the average person attempt such a complaint. … The
Lord could have taken his breath away without a moment’s notice. God could have
stopped the beat of his heart in an instant.”[5] In my opinion, that is an
awfully small view of God. If God is who He says He is, then He is big enough for
us to bring Him our most perplexing questions, and He is neither threatened nor
offended when we do, for He already knows the content of our hearts and minds.
We might as well voice it. Habakkuk does, and so must we.
Notice
the words that the prophet uses in his cry of lament. “How long … I call … I
cry out (the Hebrew word means literally something like scream) … Why?” These are the words that give voice to his prayer.
But his is not an irrational diatribe against the God of heaven. No, in fact,
the prophet is bringing God’s own truth about His own nature back to Him.
Habakkuk has learned from God’s Word what evil
is, and he sees it on display around him. He calls it what it is. He has
learned who God is – that He is holy, righteous, and just – and he proclaims
that he has not forgotten this about the Lord. He has learned from the
Scriptures that God is the Judge who is gracious and compassionate, slow to
anger and abounding in lovingkindness, but who will by no means leave the
guilty unpunished. Habakkuk’s prayer is merely a recital of these biblical
truths before the throne of grace. He is on fire with zeal for the glory of the
Lord, and he hates what God hates, and calls sin what God calls sin, and calls
upon the Lord to do what He has promised to do and to act according to His very
own nature.
The
words that gave voice to Habakkuk’s prayer were words of grief and lamentation
as he witnessed the name of the Lord being sullied and trampled underfoot by
the Lord’s own people. He was angry as he prayed, but not angry at God. He was
angry at sin, and perplexed as to why God would allow it to go unchecked. Have
we reached this point? Have we bombarded the courts of heaven with repeated
prayer about the defaming of God’s name and glory in our culture? Have we cried
out with incessant requests for God to vindicate His name and His truth in our
midst? Have we implored the King of heaven to rescue the righteous from the
peril of an unjust and crooked society? Have we found on our lips words like,
“How long?” and “Why?” for reasons beyond our personal discomforts and
inconveniences?
I
wonder, if we were to come before the Lord with words such as these, what His
response might be? If we were to ask, “How long, O Lord, must we pray for you
to respond to the evils of our age?” might the Lord say to us, “How often have
you prayed for that?” Chantry writes,
Is it not a modern complaint of God’s people
today that our western culture is descending to ever-lower moral and religious
disgrace? This is something we grumble about to one another. Are you expressing
your heartache over these matters to God? … So many prayer meetings are filled
with petitions about sickness and asking for God’s blessing on our future
plans. Should we not cry to God against the evil of the times and persist in
it?[6]
Are
we perplexed by the condition of our society? Are we at a loss for what to do
about it? Let us not merely grumble amongst ourselves, but let us pray! And how
shall we pray? Persistently! We must pray until we have earned the right to say
to God, “How long, O Lord, will we call for help?” I suggest that we have not
yet persisted in prayer to that degree. When we have, we will perhaps find
ourselves facing the third piece of this pattern of persistent prayer.
III.
The problem that gives challenge to our prayers
The
conditions surrounding Habakkuk were only a part of the problem he faced in
prayer. In comparison, they were a relatively small part of the problem. The
bigger problem he faced was God’s seeming disinterest, unresponsiveness, and
inaction on the concerns for which the prophet prayed. His cry in verse 2 is
that the Lord has not heard his persistent plea, and the Lord has not responded
to his cries. I imagine that most of us have prayed at length for something,
and been tempted to conclude that God is either not listening, not interested,
or not willing to do anything about it.
It
is a great challenge to us in our prayers. After so long without an answer, we
may become persuaded that prayer is nothing more than a colossal waste of time.
Why bother, if no answer is to come? In 2008, the Los Angeles Times published a list of 10 magazine covers that shook
the world. One of them was the April 8, 1966 issue of Time – the first cover that the magazine ever published without a picture.
Instead, on its jet-black cover where the large red words, “Is God Dead?” What
gave rise to the question? It was because people had concluded that if God was
real and active in the world, things would not be as they are. But, Habakkuk
was not convinced that God was dead,
but he was beginning to wonder if God was deaf.
Maybe you can relate to his crisis of faith.
As
C. S. Lewis languished in grief following the death of his wife, he wrote in
his private journal (which was later published as A Grief Observed), “Meanwhile, where is God? … When you are … so
happy that you have no sense of needing Him … if you … turn to Him with
gratitude and praise, you will be … welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when
your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A
door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the
inside. After that, silence.”[7] That is how Habakkuk felt
and how we feel at times.
Habakkuk
asked God two questions in verses 2 and 3: “How long?” and “Why?” The first
deals with God’s timing, the second with His purpose. Will God ever answer, and
if so, when? And does God have a reason for not
answering when I cry out to Him? The two questions are related. His timing
is rooted in His purpose. We have a privilege that Habakkuk did not have. We
have “the prophetic word made more sure” (2 Pe 1:19) in the completed
revelation of the New Testament. Here we find the promise that “the Lord is not
slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not
wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Pe 3:9). We also
find that the first wave of God’s judgment on a people is to leave them to
themselves and the consequences of their own actions. In Romans 1, Paul speaks
of those who have suppressed the truth in unrighteousness, saying that God has
given them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies
would be dishonored among them. He has given them over to degrading passions,
that through their indecent acts, they may receive in their own persons the due
penalty of their error. And He has given them over to a depraved mind, to do
those things which are not proper (Rom 1:18-32). What appears to us as a
silence from heaven may actually be the initial unleashing of His judgment to
let men destroy themselves in their sin, in order that man may come to the end
of himself and turn to God for mercy in repentance and faith.
So
He has a purpose, and His purpose sets His timetable for acting. How long will
things go on this way? Why does God act as though He has all eternity to
accomplish His purpose and complete His plans? Because He actually does![8] Peter reminds us that with
the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day (2
Pe 3:8). In light of eternity, it will not be long. But until the final day of
judgment comes, there is the offer of redemption for all who will turn from
their sins on the basis of what Christ has done.
Habakkuk
said, “I cry out to you … yet you do not save.” But we who live on this side of
Calvary can say that God has acted to save us
in Jesus Christ. In His coming into the world, by His life and death and
resurrection, He has not rid the world of the corruption of human sin, but has
made a way for those who trust in Him to be delivered ultimately and eternally
from that corruption. He has defeated sin at its root, though the fruit of it
still hangs in abundance on the vines that entangle this fallen world. When He
returns in glory, He will trample the fruit in the winepress of His wrath and
usher in an eternal kingdom in which there will be no more tears, no more
death, no more mourning, or crying, or pain (Rev 21:4). Until that day, though
it may seem at times that heaven is silent to our cries, we must persist in
prayer. And this brings the pattern of persistent prayer full circle as we see
finally …
IV.
The faith that gives fuel to our prayers
There
is a detestable heresy that fills the airwaves of so-called Christian radio and
television and the pages of so-called Christian books that we call “the
prosperity gospel.” The prosperity gospel says that if you have enough faith,
you can expect that God will always give you health and wealth, and always give
you exactly what you ask for when you ask for it. So, if you ask and do not
receive, or if you suffer in any way, the preacher of that satanic lie can
accuse you of lacking faith, and dare you to prove your faith by giving your
money to him. That, my friends, is not a gospel (not good news), and it is not faith that they are preaching. It is
psychological and emotional manipulation, and witchcraft under the veil of a
Christian vocabulary.
Faith
is found when we pray persistently to God from the depths of our suffering.
Some have accused Habakkuk of a lack of faith because of the questions that he
brings to God. They could not be more wrong. Habakkuk’s persistence in prayer
is fueled by a great faith that has heard, believed, and become convinced of
the Word that God has spoken about Himself and His purposes in the world. Habakkuk
can pray over and over again about the conditions of his society because he
believes that there is a God on the listening end of His prayers who will
accomplish His purpose, who will vindicate His name, His truth, and His glory, and
who will uphold the cause of His righteous saints. It may not look like that at
the present time, but faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the
conviction of things not seen (Heb 11:1).
It
is a lack of faith which stands in the echo of an unanswered prayer and
declares, “Well, that’s that, and I guess God is not there after all.” A lack
of faith walks away from God when one’s own way is not received and speaks of
God in the impersonal and abstract: “How could God do this and such? And if God
were there, why would He not do things this way?” But faith continues to bring
the questions to God on personal and concrete terms: “God, how long? God why?”
As F. F. Bruce writes, “Many ask such questions among themselves; some, like
Habakkuk, take the questions to God and challenge Him to answer them, for it is
His reputation that is at stake. … When the man or woman of faith cries out
like this, it is from a fundamental conviction that God is all-righteous and
all-powerful.”[9]
How
can we continue to pray when our prayers seemingly go unanswered? Our
persistence is fueled by faith. By faith we believe that even if there is no
answer now, there will be one day, in God’s perfect timing and according to His
perfect purpose. Meanwhile, we cry out, “How long, O Lord? Why?” But it is
because we believe that He is there, that He cares for us, and that He is able
and willing to answer that we continue to cry out. What will become of our
nation? How deep will the moral degradation in the world grow? How desperate
will the days become? These things have been hidden from us beneath the shroud
of God’s unrevealed providence. Will
there be revival or ruin? We must confess that we do not know. But if there
will be a revival, it will be as God works through the persistent prayers of
His people who never cease crying out to Him from the depths of our despair in
this fallen world, beseeching Him to uphold His own honor and glory and to
further the agenda of His Kingdom in the world. He is our only help, and He
must be the rock on which all of our hopes are anchored. And so we cry our
persistently in prayer to Him!
[1] Waylon
Bailey, “Habakkuk,” in Kenneth L. Barker and Waylon Bailey, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah (New
American Commentary, vol. 20; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1998), 297.
[2] Warren
W. Wiersbe, From Worry to Worship (Lincoln,
Neb.: Back to the Bible, 1983), 15.
[3] Walter
Chantry, Habakkuk: A Wrestler With God (Carlisle , Penn.
[4] James
Bruckner, Jonah, Nahum, Habakkuk,
Zephaniah (NIV Application Commentary; Grand Rapids : Zondervan, 2004), 215.
[5] J. R.
Church, They Pierced the Veil (Oklahoma
City: Prophecy Publications, 1993), 131.
[6] Chantry,
5.
[7] C. S.
Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York:
Seabury, 1961), 9.
[8] David
Nettleton, Meet the Minor Prophets (Schaumburg , Ill.
[9] F. F.
Bruce, “Habakkuk,” in Thomas E. McComiskey ed., The Minor Prophets: An Exegetical and Expository Commentary (Grand
Rapids: Baker, 1993), 844-845.
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