The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever. | Isaiah 40:8
This week, we started a sermon series on the minor prophet Habakkuk. In the first chapter, we hear the prophet’s frustrations over the increased corruption in the Promised Land. God’s people are oppressed, violence and injustice reign; those who should know better have become corrupted, so that: justice goes forth perverted. As the prophet looks around, he is angry that this is happening and that God doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it.
All of this sounds familiar. We live in a time when (as Habakkuk complains): the wicked surround the righteous and strife and contention arise. It is easy to get overwhelmed by the brokenness of the world and the way that sin has destroyed God’s good creation. Like the prophet, we want it to be fixed NOW. Even if we do not declare it out loud, we feel the same way as he does: God should be doing more.
In a sense, God’s answer to Habakkuk is that He will do more; only the more comes in the form of more judgment. God points to the fact that the Assyrian reign is part of His work and that the Babylonian rule will also be under His control. All that is happening is His work.
On second thought, we don’t want God to do more, we want Him to do more for us. Our measurement of God’s effectiveness is usually limited to whether or not it makes our life better. We assume that God is working when we feel blessed and benefited and we conclude that He is not there when things don’t go our way.
God doesn’t work like that. He is not your own personal blessing machine. He is working to reveal His glory and complete the redemption of the whole world. Sometimes you and I will feel the benefit of this. Sometimes, God is going to show His power through our weakness and suffering. Either way, He is at work. God is no less there when things aren’t going your way. Our current mood is not a great measure of what God is doing.
This complicates God, because it means that our trust in Him is not related to our circumstances. We can’t categorize God based on our limited perspective. Instead, our trust is related to the fact that He is omnipotent, immortal, and sovereign. All that He does is good, not because we deem it so, but because it flows from His perfection. When we look for God, we don’t have to look very far. We shouldn’t assume that He isn’t there when things aren’t going well. Instead, we should learn to trust all that God brings, as Job reminds us:
The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord (Job 1:21).