Habakkuk Part 2 – Waiting for Answers

 "yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength."

Habakkuk 3:18-19 (ESV)


A saving faith comes with accepting God's answers, but it also comes with waiting for those answers.

I wonder how long the time difference is between Habakkuk 2 and 3. I wanted to wait a bit to close this one out to emphasize the potential space between the two chapters – between answer and acceptance. That's why. Definitely not because I just didn't feel like finishing Habakkuk until now.

Genuinely though, it's hard to tell just how long Habakkuk had sat with the Lord's answer, or how long he waited for it to happen. Waiting any longer than a few weeks sounds like ages to us now, but during these times, people waited years for things. The Babylonian invasion of Judah happened shortly after it was prophesied, but it could have taken years for Habakkuk to see the full plan for Judah – and even then, he knew that the answer was for it to be destroyed. It could've not taken long for him to accept God's answer. If anyone understands more of the background than I do, I'd love to hear about it. But I choose to believe that the end of Habakkuk 2 wasn't the end of his struggle with the injustice that he saw. I think that between these two chapters, he was really having a hard time knowing what Judah's fate was. But chapter 3 is still not the type of "happy ending" that we want to see at the end of a movie. It feels like an alternate ending of a movie we've seen a thousand times, that just doesn't play out how it did when we watched the movie the other 999 times. God didn't prevent Judah from being destroyed – He let it be corrected. He didn't strike down the Chaldeans at Habakkuk's command – He allowed them to prosper for a while. Real Psalm 73 vibes. But Habakkuk didn't just hold onto this delusion of the "good ending" he originally had in his head. He saw God's "ending" for that chapter and simply accepted that it was good. Not necessarily happy, or pleasant, or even easy to bear – just good. It probably took a minute for him to get there, but he did. How can we get to the point of rejoicing in that like he did?

I think a lot of the times, when we struggle with staying faithful, the difficulty doesn't come from dealing with God's "answer" for our lives. We just hate waiting for it. If I knew exactly when I would get to certain places in my life, it would probably make waiting/preparing for them a lot easier. Because at that point, I've seen the future – I have full confidence that my prayers are going to be answered. What's the difference between seeing that for myself, and being promised a good plan and salvation by the only One capable of giving it to me?

I feel like we're getting close. Close to what makes waiting so difficult. We're doubting that God really does have set in motion what He says he does in Jer. 29:11. Plans for "peace, and not for harm" – for "hope, and a future." Timing's not revealed to us, and the circumstances of that peace aren't revealed to us. Yet, we know what's in our own power to get there – staying faithful. So what's the only piece left? We're worried that, for whatever reason, God won't fulfill His promise to us. That's it. We find trusting ourselves to hold up our end of the deal, more comfortable than trusting God to hold up His – even when we know how many times we've failed to stay faithful! Our struggle with waiting is ultimately the distrust from our flesh in God's promises. But if God is good, then He has to fulfill His promises. Logically. Either God fulfills His promises, or He's not good. It's not possible for both to be true.

All anxiety really is, is the doubt of whether or not God is who He says He is – whether God really is good. Obviously, our doubts could never change the Truth. They only change our (impressionable) understanding of it. That's not meant to guilt or condemn anyone that has trouble with waiting – everyone struggles with it, because we're creatures made to doubt. But it helps diagnose exactly where it's coming from.

Do I really believe God is good?

"You're good. So You fulfill your promises. Make my heart believe that."

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