"HOW LONG, LORD?": A WORD OF HOPE TO THOSE WHO SUFFER FROM EVIL

How long, LORD, will I cry, and you will not hear me? I will shout to you: Violence! And won't you save? Why do you show me iniquity and make me see oppression? For destruction and violence are before me; there are contentions, and litigation arises. (Habakkuk 1:2,3)

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Habakkuk was a prophet of the Lord, who lived at the time of the rise of the Chaldeans in the century. VII-VI BC From the point of view of geography, the Chaldeans lived in southern Babylon, which would be the southern part of Iraq today. The land of the Chaldeans was the southern portion of Babylon or Mesopotamia. It is generally understood that it was an area about 400 miles long and 100 miles wide along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

The Chaldeans were an intelligent and often aggressive warrior people, spreading violence and destruction across many nations of the time. We must not forget that it was the Chaldeans who influenced Nebuchadnezzar's decision to throw Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego into the fiery furnace (Daniel 3:8) and were known as wise men and astrologers during the time of the Jewish captivity in Babylon (Daniel 1: 4; 2:10; 4:7; 5:7, 11). See the description of the Chaldeans in Habakkuk: "For behold, I raise up the Chaldeans, a bitter and impetuous nation, who march throughout the breadth of the earth, to take possession of dwellings that are not theirs. They are fearful and terrible, and they themselves create the their right and their dignity. Their horses are swifter than leopards, fiercer than wolves at dusk, their riders spread far and wide; yes, their riders come from far away, they fly like an eagle that rushes to devour. They all come to do violence; their face sighs to go forward; they gather the captives like sand. They mock kings; princes are the object of their laughter; they laugh at all strongholds, because, heaping up earth, they take it." (Hc 1:6-10)

This historical context brings to mind the absurd escalation of violence that we are currently faced with. The world today has more than ever an inclination towards violence, which becomes more and more intense and cruel every day. Violence - the physical or moral constraint exerted on someone, to force them to submit to the will of others; the curtailment of justice and law, coercion, oppression and tyranny - is spreading more and more throughout the world. See, for example, how world leaders are increasingly distant from peace. Peace has long ceased to be a state and a virtue to be sought and preserved, becoming something unthinkable in the modern context. Wars, military tests, threats, hatred, disregard for human life... violence. It is not the scope here to go into matters of geopolitics, but the fact is this: the leaders of nations, in their comfortable presidential residences surrounded by the best and the best, mobilize their armies against each other in investments of trillions of dollars, hating each other with their petty and self-centered interests; Thus, wars are happening and violence only grows.

I ask: what do these leaders expect to happen? Do they hope to emerge victorious in their wars against each other? In a war, no one really wins: everyone loses. They lose their lives, literally and subjectively: thousands die to fulfill someone's baseless whims. Those who survive leave scars on their bodies and souls for the rest of their lives. And what about children who lose their parents, parents who lose their children, wives who lose their husbands and vice versa? The destroyed dreams and homes? The hunger, the diseases, the rapes, the murders of innocent people?

Parentheses: If you believe in Christ and read this post, I ask you the following question: if your nation is at war with another, do you approve of it? Do you approve of all this violence against anyone, anyone? Do you agree with the killing of children, the rape of women, the forced deportation and repatriation of people whose lives were destroyed? Do you agree to destroy someone just because your "heart leader", full of arrogance and megalomaniacal desires, decided that the other country is your enemy? And before fallacious arguments arise, know now: God has never approved the war of one nation against another! The wars involving Israel, in the Old Testament, only happened because the nations wanted to destroy Israel at all costs and God would never allow such a thing. Don't think for a minute that God loves violence; on the contrary, Jesus is called the Prince of Peace in the Bible! It is absurd that evil is practiced and, on top of that, using God as justification! Not just nonsense, but blasphemy!

Yes, the Chaldeans were a terrible and cruel people. But Habakkuk presents his complaints to God in the form of lamentation over the wickedness, injustice and rampant violence of... Judah! Yes, that's right: the prophet's complaint focused on that nation that comprised God's people in the Old Testament, those whom God had adopted as His people, who had strayed from God to such an extent that they had become a cruel people. and evil. Here we have an important lesson: there can only be goodness, justice, truth, mercy, light and love if there is real and true communion between God and man. Only when man submits himself to His Creator in a humble and voluntary way, recognizing his gigantic need for God, does it become possible for the virtues of God to be generated in human life. The deeper the distance from God, the more we manifest the worst in each of us. Make no mistake about yourself: every human being has the capacity to do evil and, to make matters worse, our entire inclination is to do evil. Without God, we become as cruel and evil as Hitler, Mengele and many others. 

Parentheses: Never, at any time, confuse God with religion. Religion is a human invention of men who supposedly proclaimed themselves "experts on God". In the same way, communion with God does not mean religious adherence and activism, nor much less approval from your religious leader. God has nothing to do with religion nor has he ever ordered anyone to create a religion about Him. In fact, reality shows that although we have many, many religions, of the most different types and systematics, there is very little relationship with God, which demonstrates the ineffectiveness of religions in reconnecting man to God.

Habakkuk therefore expresses all his disappointment and inability to accept the deplorable state of Judah. In fact, it is really difficult to accept when someone who claims to know God expresses precisely the opposite with his attitudes. He then asks, "Lord, how long?" "How long will I violate my own soul by contemplating the evil that Your people and my people have been committing? How long will they not listen to You, Supreme God and Lord, to repent of their sins and turn to You?" "How long, Lord, will there be no judgment against wickedness and injustice?" This question is based on both human reality and the nature of God:  

1. Human reality: “Why do you make me see iniquity and oppression? For destruction and violence are before me; there are also contentions, and litigation is aroused. For this cause the law is relaxed, and justice never manifests itself; for the wicked surrounds the righteous, so that justice is perverted.” (vv.3,4)

2. Nature of God: “You who are so pure of eyes that you cannot see evil, and you cannot behold wickedness.” (vv.13)

For the prophet, God would be inactive and indifferent in the face of evil, witnessed not only by the prophet, but by God himself. How could God, who is Holy, look at malice and do nothing? This question from the prophet was not motivated by a lack of faith, but by a lack of understanding regarding the harmonization of two distinct realities; he did not understand the way of God.  

It's one thing to not understand God's way, it's another thing to doubt God. Not understanding God's path is a reality that is often present in the Christian journey. We do not always understand how God acts or will act in specific situations (Is 55.8,9). The biblical requirement for a relationship with God is not placed on the intellect, but on faith (Heb 11.6). Many times we will not understand why something happened, but as Christians we must be sure that God loves us and so we must trust Him! There is much that God does that is too great for us to understand: “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; high it is, I cannot reach it.” (Ps 13.6). THERE ARE MATTERS TOO GREAT AND WONDERFUL FOR US. We must believe in God above all things, even if these things seem strange and contradictory to us. Every contradiction comes from ourselves, from our inability to understand things that are far above our understanding!

The answer that God gave to Habakkuk was even more incomprehensible to the prophet: "I raise up evil to judge evil"! To the prophet Habakkuk's first questions, God responded by saying that he would raise up an evil and violent nation – the Chaldeans – in order to judge the wickedness of his people, Judah. (1: 5-11). This answer upset the prophet even more! Will God use an instrument worse than evil in Judah for judgment? Will the wicked have even more prosperity? How can God in His holiness tolerate evil and allow evil to prosper? The prophet then waits patiently like a sentinel to see how the Lord will answer him (2:1).

What the prophet had no way of knowing is that God's response needs to be analyzed in light of the revelation of the entire Bible, which includes the New Testament. God, permissively, allows the evil sown by man to return to man himself as a harvest for all evil (Gal 6.7,8). Whatever a man sows, that he will reap. We, the human race, reap the evil that we sowed since the day we chose the greatest evil, which was moving away from God in Eden. There too we doubt God; we doubt that the Lord had good intentions toward us when he forbade us to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The seed that the devil planted in our hearts was distrust of God, motivating the transgression of the divine order and hence the fear of God and all the evil that has been and has been committed and accumulated since then. This "hereditary malignancy" can only be reversed by the conversion of the human soul to God and this is only possible through faith in the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus. Dear reader, pay close attention: WITHOUT JESUS, THERE IS NO ESCAPE! WITHOUT JESUS, WE ARE DEAD IN OUR CRIMES AND SINS AND, AS THE LIVING DEAD, WE WILL INEVITABLY EXHALE THE STELL OF OUR SPIRITUAL AND MORAL DECOMPOSITION. And this is independent of philosophies, science, moralism, religions, etc. Nothing but faith in Christ can change our state. Evil will always produce evil, malice will always produce malice, violence will always produce violence, sin will always generate more sin and distance from God, which can dangerously lead us to an irreversible spiritual situation (Ps 42:7).   

Parentheses: It's been more than 2,000 years since Jesus became flesh, died crucified and rose again on the 3rd day and we, the human race, don't care about Him! He came and died for us. God, out of His goodness, sent us His beloved Son; On the cross He died for the sins of all who believe in Him. God left us the written Word of God. He gave us the Church (not religious organization, but living organism). He left the Holy Spirit on Earth to convince man of his life of sin and the consequences of this way of living. Even so, many do not accept God's truth about the real nature of their lives. They fight against the truth. They resist the Holy Spirit with every sermon, with every appeal. They love the lie they live more than the truth they hear. A lie, action or way of living, will always generate more lies. God, then, allows them to continue believing and living in the lie: “And for this reason God sends them the operation of error, so that they believe the lie; so that all may be judged who did not believe the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness.” (II Ts 2.11,12) In truth, the fact is that we want to live our way, according to what comes into our heads! We want to live in this world not in the way that God established, not following His Will, but following ourselves. We become our own god, with our own truths and judgments! In the end, if we stubbornly insist on this path of total rebellion from God, without recognizing and accepting God and His Will, we can expect the worst and we will have nothing to complain about when the consequences come. Evil is, therefore, only the consequence of evil experienced and practiced (Rm 6.23). The salary of sin is death. However, God's free gift is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. What do you choose: life or death? The gift or the salary? 

God ordered the prophet to write the answer, in order to guide whoever read it and to prove compliance. The prophetic vision that God gave to Habakkuk had time for fulfillment: “For the vision is to be fulfilled at the appointed time, but it hastens to the end, and will not fail; If it delays, wait for it, because it will certainly come, it will not delay.” Bringing it back to the New Testament, the fulfillment of the vision that God gave to Habakkuk will have no final fulfillment in the end times. Evil is not eternal, nor will it be a constant in the human race. Those who were purchased by the Blood of Jesus, whom He made kingdoms and priests from among all tribes, languages, peoples and nations, will live in a new reality forever alongside the good Savior. They will live in a reality where there will be no more wars, where the weapons that were once used by men as instruments of war will now be used as instruments of cultivating the land: "And he will judge between many peoples and will punish powerful nations even far away; and they will convert the their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation will not lift up a sword against another nation, nor will they learn war any more. But they will sit each one under his vine and under his fig tree, and there will be no one to be amazed, for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken it.” (Micah 4:3,4)  

Yes, dear reader: That time will come, when the dead in Christ will rise first and those who are alive will be caught up by the Lord and meet Him in the air! The time will come when the Lord Jesus will return to this Earth once again and rule over all the peoples of the Earth! Death, hunger, illness, pain and all kinds of suffering, all evil and injustice, all lies and sin will come to an end. The devil and all those who insisted on doing evil will forever be thrown into the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, the second death (Rev 20:10,14,15).

It is in this promise of God, based entirely on His immeasurable love for us, that we must renew our faith and our hope! God responded to Habakkuk saying that the righteous would live by his faith (Hab 2:4). Today someone is only righteous because they were justified by their faith in Christ and it is based on this faith that this person must live. Not based on human circumstances. What to do if everything around us seems hopeless? What to do in the face of evil? What to do if we are involved in a desperate situation? Do this: trust in God. This was God's response to Habakkuk, "trust in Me," which led the prophet to exclaim, "For though the fig tree does not blossom, nor is there fruit on the vine, the produce of the olive tree lies, and the fields do not produce food; the sheep of the meadow be taken away, and there are no cows in the pens; yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will exult in the God of my salvation. JEHOVAH the LORD is my strength, and he will make my feet like the feet of hinds, and will make me walk on my heights." (Hc 3:17-19) God loves you and that is enough! 

Luther, the Protestant reformer, composed the hymn "A Mighty Fortress" on the occasion of his call to the Diet of Worms, where there was the danger of being condemned to the stake exactly as John Huss had been about 100 years earlier. The music was composed in Wittenberg, Germany in 1529. The last verse of this hymn says:

Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also
The body they may kill; God’s truth abideth still
His kingdom is forever

Those who belong to the Lord Jesus are His, whether in life or in death. Nothing, not even death, can separate from Jesus the one whom Jesus purchased with His blood! The time to meet Our Lord is coming! Have faith in the Lord, don’t give up in the face of the evil in this world! Have faith in the Lord even in the face of your suffering or the suffering of those you love!

Therefore do not reject your confidence, which has a great and great reward. Because you need patience, so that, after having done God's will, you may obtain the promise. Because there is still a little time, And what is to come will come, and it will not delay. But the righteous will live by faith; And if he retreats, my soul has no pleasure in him. (Hebrews 10:35-38)

Grace, mercy and peace be multiplied to you!