Habakkuk 1
Ask Honest Questions!
Good morning! This is Pastor Jerry Ingalls from New Castle First Baptist Church and today is Saturday, September 28.
I’m not sure who the first person was to teach children that there is no such thing as a stupid question, but it may have been the prophet Habakkuk who tested the theory on God. After the fall of the Assyrians (read Nahum), the Babylonians had become the dominant power in the region, and by the end of the seventh century they were knocking on Jerusalem’s door. The prophet cries out to God in Habakkuk 1:2-3, “How long, O Lord, will I call for help, and You will not hear? I cry out to You, “Violence!” Yet You do not save. Why do You make me see iniquity, and cause me to look on wickedness?” What profound questions to begin this short prophetic work by Habakkuk, a contemporary of Jeremiah.
After his introduction, the prophet records a troublesome revelation from God to the people of Judah in verses 4, “For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans [Babylonians].” Why is God orchestrating calamity upon the surviving southern tribes of Israel after Assyria destroyed the northern ten tribes? For eight verses, God describes the Babylonians, then, in response to that, the prophet braves a series of honest questions to God in verses 12-17:
Are You not from everlasting, O Lord, my God, my Holy One? … [Then] Why do You look with favor on those who deal treacherously? Why are You silent when the wicked swallow up those more righteous than they? Why have You made men like the fish of the sea, like creeping things without a ruler over them? Will they therefore empty their net and continually slay nations without sparing?”
Seize the moment and ask God honest questions – “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8).
God bless you!
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YOUTUBE:
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