Proclaimer Blog
Habakkuk
I kid you not. Peter Adam (pretty senior and conservative) has just done a rap on Habakkuk. Truly. No, really. When the video is uploaded, it’s worth its weight in gold. But not as good as the teaching from the book.
I preached my very first sermon on Habakkuk. The whole of it. Literally. I had moved to a church and university where the Bible was actually preached and I loved it. So, when the church asked me to preach, I over-reached significantly. I still have my notes which I keep for humility. It means that Habakkuk is close to my heart and reasonably well-known but even so I’ve found this week’s highlights wonderfully alive.
Take chapter 3. Out of Habakkuk’s desperate prayer of ‘How long?’ comes the beautiful song for Israel to sing that Habakkuk wrote, inspired by the Spirit. And at the head of this song is a wonderful response to what we see in the world. ‘Lord, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, Lord. Repeat them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath remember mercy.’
If it is true that praying ‘How long, Lord’ is a good prayer for Christians to be praying – at all times – then it also follows that Hab. 3.2 is a song we should always be singing. For our longing needs to be expressed in terms of what we long that God might do. Ultimately, this means longing for the mercy of Christ: a mercy our world does not even realise it needs. But as we reflect on the judgements God has wrought in the past and as we call on him to bring justice today, we must pray this prayer asking him to remember mercy.
It’s rather easy for us as Christians to ask God to bring justice. That is a good prayer, but – in one sense – it is a terrible prayer. If God came today in wrath, we can hardly even begin to imagine what that might mean. So, all we as Christians can pray is ‘in wrath, remember mercy.’