What Do You Do When God’s Answer Wasn’t What You Expected?

A message from Habakkuk 1:5–12

Photo by Maria Lin Kim on Unsplash

Sometimes, you ask for something and you get something—but what you get isn’t at all what you expected.

But then again, if you’ve ever pre-ordered your groceries and checked the box that says “Allow Substitutions,” you already know that. When someone else is making the choices, what you get may not be what you ordered. A few very real life examples: Cat food is not the same thing as dog food, stew meat is not the same as ribeye steaks, and chicken nuggets are not interchangeable with pork chops.

And, once in a while when someone else is in charge of the choices, you get something you didn’t ask for at all.

A few weeks ago, our family was unpacking our monthly groceries, and we discovered one of the store’s scanners buried in our grocery sack. When I discovered it, I first began thinking about all the things I could do with it that would be legal; then, I began wondering what I could do with it that’s illegal. And then, I decided we’d better take it back to the store before I did something I shouldn’t do.

We put in the order, but someone else was in charge, and we ended up with something we never asked for at all.

Sometimes, that’s what seems to happen when we cry out to God, especially in those moments when justice tarries and we ask God to change what we see around us. We bring our requests to God. And yet, what we receive in response to our request is nothing like what we actually asked for. We put in our order, but someone else is clearly in charge of what’s actually delivered.

You asked for transformation in your world but every change that happened seemed to run in the wrong direction.

You begged for clarity about the next step you should take in your life but all you got was more confusion.

You prayed for relief from the injustice you saw around you but what came next was another setback.

You put in your order, but nothing that you ordered actually got delivered.

If you’ve ever felt that way, these verses in the opening chapter in the book of Habakkuk are for you.

Habakkuk is God’s prophet in the kingdom of Judah sometime around the year 605 B.C. He knows that God is infinite and sovereign, holy and just. And yet, he looks around him at the people of Judah—at the very people who are supposed to follow God’s law—and he sees nothing but rebellion and oppression. Even in the temple in Jerusalem, where God reveals his presence among his people, there is injustice. Yet God doesn’t seem to be punishing the rebels and the oppressors. In fact, those that defy God’s law seem to prosper while the righteous suffer. This leaves Habakkuk’s spirit wounded, and he responds by crying out to God, “How long, LORD, must I call for help and you do not listen?” (1:2).

And what happens to Habakkuk is something that happens only rarely, even in the Bible.

Habakkuk receives an instant response. But the answer that Habakkuk receives isn’t the answer he wanted.

The answer Habakkuk receives is, in fact, so awful that the answer turns out to be worse than the silence. All Habakkuk wanted was a pint of ice cream and somehow what got delivered was turnips and liver.

God’s answer doesn’t cultivate relief; instead, God’s answer brings conflict and anxiety. And so, Habakkuk ends up in the same place where you and I spend so much of our lives: Habakkuk trusts who God is, but he can’t make sense of what God is doing. What Habakkuk does is what God calls you and me to do as well: Habakkuk takes his complaint to the God he trusts, and he turns his anxieties into prayers.

If you’re new to Christianity, maybe you thought the Bible was a book of simple solutions and easy answers. Or maybe you’re considering Christianity, and you thought the Bible demands blind faith. If that’s you, first off, I’m so glad that you’re here with us, wrestling with these questions. Here’s one of my hopes for you today: I hope you see clearly that the God of the Scriptures is a God who welcomes your questions. There are no easy answers here or simple solutions. There is only a prophet who doesn’t understand what his God is doing but who also recognizes there’s nowhere better to go than to his God. And thus Habakkuk’s faith isn’t blind, it’s refined—refined by his struggle to reconcile the sovereignty of his God and the injustice that he sees in his world. As I read this text, what I learn from Habakkuk’s life is that, in times when justice tarries, I may not understand what comes next, but I can take my complaints to the One who goes first.

The God we worship doesn’t run from our questions. Instead, he meets us in our questions, our complaints, our doubts. As I read this text, I see three truths to hold close in those times when justice tarries:

1. Even if I knew what comes next, it wouldn’t make my waiting any easier.

2. Even when I can’t comprehend what God is doing, I can trust who God is.

3. Even if I don’t see God’s goodness yet, I will.

1. Even If I Knew What Comes Next, It Wouldn’t Make My Waiting Any Easier (Habakkuk 1:5–11)

“If I only knew what’s coming next, I could rest so much easier.”

“If I knew the future, it would be easier to face what’s coming.”

“If I only knew what God’s going to do about this situation, I could trust him more.”

Have you ever felt that way—as if knowing more about what’s coming could make us less anxious about it?

But it’s not true, and that’s what Habakkuk learns here.

Remember what Habakkuk cried out to his God: “How long, LORD, must I call for help?”—“Look! Don’t you see all of this injustice and sin among your people? How long until you do something about it, Lord?”

And God answers: “Look among the nations,”—“Yes, Habakkuk, I looked and I saw, now you look and see!”—“observe well and be utterly astounded; for a work is being wrought in your days which you would not believe if it were told!” (1:5).

For a moment, Habakkuk is both delighted and confused.

He’s delighted because God is going to deal with the injustice and iniquity of Judah in some amazing way very soon: “in your days” (1:5).

But he’s also a little confused, because God said, “Look among the nations” (1:5). What would possibly require him to look “among the nations”—among the Gentiles, the non-Jewish peoples of the earth—to solve the problem of the rulers of Judah who care nothing for the poor and who are not devoted to God’s ways?

When God answers his question, Habakkuk discovers that knowing what comes next doesn’t make it any easier to wait: “Look!” the Lord says, “I am raising up the Chaldeans” (1:6). And suddenly, all of Habakkuk’s hope turns to confusion and fear.

“Chaldeans” is another way of describing the Babylonians. What God is saying is that he will bring Babylon to fix the injustice of Judah.

Most of us have no idea how shocking this statement was to Habakkuk.

Suppose we spent the next three days of prayer pleading with God that every member of our church would be led to repent of their sin so that a renewed passion for justice and righteousness dawns in this church. And then, suppose that—after these three days of prayer—God said, “Sure thing! Look, I am answering your prayers. I am sending the Church of Satan over right now to take care of that. The pentagrams and goat’s heads are on the way.”

Your first thought is probably be something like, “That doesn’t even make sense”—and that’s pretty much what Habakkuk thought too. Habakkuk put in his request, but nothing he thought he ordered actually got delivered.

Let’s pause for a moment and understand what’s happening in the world at this time: For more than a century, the Assyrian Empire has been the dominant superpower in the Ancient Near East, but Assyria’s power is unraveling. Around the time that Habakkuk writes these words, the Babylonians have defeat the last remnants of the Assyrian army at Carchemish along the Euphrates River, on the border between modern Turkey and Syria. Now, there is anxiety about whether the Babylonians might turn south, toward Judah, and whether God will prevent the Babylonians from taking Judah and its capital Jerusalem. What God informs Habakkuk here is that, yes, the Babylonians are coming and, no, he won’t prevent the fall of Judah to the Babylonians—and, somehow, this is how God plans to deal with Judah’s injustice.

From any human perspective, God’s answer doesn’t even make sense.

It doesn’t seem like God is delivering anything that Habakkuk put in his order.

What’s worse, God makes it clear to Habakkuk that he knows exactly how bad the Babylonians are. God describes them as an empire intent on conquering other nations (“to seize territories not its own,” 1:6) who make their own rules when it comes to justice (“their views of justice and sovereignty stem from themselves,” 1:7).

These verses even describe Babylonian military tactics: The Babylonians fought using horses ridden by soldiers with spears (1:8), and they “pile up the earth and take” every fortress (1:10). This may seem confusing at first, but it accurately describes Babylonian siege tactics. When movies today depict invaders taking a walled fortress, they almost always show the invaders trying to climb over the walls or to break in through doors in the walls. We know from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers that these tactics sometimes do work but we know from Monty Python and the Holy Grail that they don’t always work¹—but the Babylonians didn’t try to go over the walls or through walls. Instead, they used a technique that they learned from the Assyrians: they built a massive ramp out of dirt almost as high as the wall and sent their entire army straight up the ramp and over the wall.

But none of this is what is most important about Babylon. Here’s what matters most: “Their strength is their god” (1:11). Yes, they made sacrifices a deity named Marduk, a god of cosmic forces and magic. But their true god, the actual object of their devotion, was their own power.

And God is using them to bring justice in Judah.

That’s God’s response to Habakkuk’s complaint.

It’s so easy to suppose that, if only we knew what’s coming next, our waiting would be easier.

That’s why, after making an appointment with your doctor about something that’s wrong with you, you get online and start trying to diagnose yourself instead of waiting until you see the doctor. An hour later, you’ve moved on from WebMD and you’re reading blogs that have you convinced that you have a rare form of leprosy and that both of your arms are going to fall off in the next seventy-two hours. What’s going on? You’re trying to find out what’s coming next because you think that will make the waiting easier. But speculating about what’s next doesn’t make it any easier to face what’s happening right now. What Habakkuk discovers is that it doesn’t make the waiting any easier even if you know exactly what’s coming next.

It’s not wrong to consider what could be—there are times when that’s useful. But it’s also easy to turn knowledge into an idol and to think that, if only I knew more about how my circumstances will turn out, I would stress less. But why do we think that? Tim Keller once said that our anxieties are like streams of smoke that we can trace back to the altars where we’re making our sacrifices to false gods. So what’s the false god to which this stream of smoke traces back?

It’s a delusion that, the more I know about what’s going on, the more I am in control.

It’s a lie, but it’s an appealing lie.

And so, we scroll constantly through social media to stay on top of everything that’s happening in people’s lives, we constantly check the news to know everything that’s going on in politics and world events, and we can’t sleep because we’re constantly running scenarios inside our heads of all the possible outcomes. The more we live this lie, the more anxious we become, and the more information we think we need. The result is ceaseless activity and a lack of presence here and now, because we’re always thinking about what might be.

Here’s the truth that I see in Habakkuk’s life: I am not the one in control no matter how much I may know. I can’t know it all, and even if I did know it all, I can’t control it all. Trying to know everything about what might be doesn’t give me more control over what will be; it only steals the joy of here and now.

Habakkuk knows exactly what’s coming next, but it doesn’t make his waiting any easier. So what does he do when he discovers that the answer God is giving is not the answer Habakkuk wanted or expected?

2. Even If I Can’t Comprehend What God Does, I Can Trust Who God Is (Habakkuk 1:12)

Are you not from of old, LORD my God, my Holy One? You shall not die.

LORD, you have marked them for judgment, and you, O Rock, have established them for punishment. (Habakkuk 1:12)

This single verse summarizes the tension of living as the people of God in a fallen world. In the first half of the verse, Habakkuk recalls the truth about who God is. But then, in the second half of the same verse, he cries out to God because he can’t comprehend what God is doing.

Here’s how we might paraphrase the first half of this verse: “LORD my God, you’re infinite, right? And you haven’t stopped being holy and deathless, have you?” Habakkuk doesn’t stop trusting that Yahweh of Israel is his God, infinite in holiness and power, but he can’t reconcile how this fits with the future that God has promised. “You are our Rock, the one who is supposed to protect, yet you’re using the Babylonians to bring justice to us”—“you have marked them for our judgment” (1:12).

Habakkuk cries out to God, protesting what God is going to allow—but he never gives up on who God is. If the God that Habakkuk trusted was like the gods of the nations—gods who could be defeated, gods who could turn against you, gods who never claimed to love their people—none of this would be surprising. What God was allowing seemed shocking because of who God is—a covenant-making God of infinite holiness and love. Habakkuk brings his complaint not in spite of who God is but precisely because of who he believes that God is.

Sometimes, when faced with suffering or disappointment or injustice, we’re tempted to question who God is or even if God is. And yet, what we miss in that is that, if there is no just and righteous God, there is no reason why we should be bothered by injustice or unrighteousness in the first place. In the movie Project Hail Mary, there’s a moment in which Ryland Grace asks the head of the task force, “You believe in God?” to which she replies, “It beats the alternative”—and that’s what Habakkuk recognizes here. It may be difficult at times to comprehend what God is doing, but where else is there to go, really? And so, even though he can’t comprehend what God is doing, he still trusts who God is.

But where do we go from here?

Justice still tarries, and Habakkuk still has no resolution for his complaint. Neither do we, most of the time. Throughout most of our lives, we keep confessing who God is, but we still have no idea what God is doing. And so, we keep doing what Habakkuk does here, continually turning our complaints into prayers.

A few years after Habakkuk prays this prayer, the Babylonians arrive, and Jerusalem surrenders in the year 597. The prophet Jeremiah warns the people and their kings to live peacefully under the rule of Babylon, but they don’t listen. One of Judah’s kings leads a revolution, and in 587, Jerusalem is burned and the Jewish temple is destroyed. And, just as in many areas of our own lives, we’re left wondering what God was doing.

There is an answer to this question, but I want to pause long enough to sense the tension that Habakkuk that felt—because Habakkuk never saw the answer, and you may not understand what God is doing in your lifetime on this earth either. But your life on this earth and mine isn’t the final word in the story of the universe. Remember what Habakkuk said? “Are you not from eternity, LORD my God?” Because God is from eternity and will not die, he will bring goodness, even if we don’t see it yet.

3. Even If I Don’t See God’s Goodness Yet, I Will (Habakkuk 1:5; Acts 13:39–41)

The words of Habakkuk show up later in the Bible, in a sermon that Paul preached in a Jewish synagogue in the city of Antioch in Asia Minor. What Paul says in that synagogue reveals that God was saying far more to Habakkuk than the prophet knew. Here’s what Paul said in Antioch:

Through [Jesus] everyone who believes is set free from every sin, a justification you were not able to obtain under the law of Moses. Take care that what the prophets have said does not happen to you: “‘Look, you scoffers, wonder and perish, for I am going to do something in your days that you would never believe, even if someone told you.’” (Acts 13:39–41)

When Habakkuk said that Judah would fall to the Babylonians, not everyone believed him—but history proved God’s Word true. And yet, there’s more going on here than simply the fact that Judah really did fall to Babylon. Paul is making a connection between the gospel and God bringing justice to Judah through Babylon.

Remember, God has claimed that he will bring justice to his people by bringing the Babylonians. And he did.

So what possible connection could there be between the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Babylonians?

Well, when the leading citizens of Judah were taken to Babylon in the sixth century B.C., the Babylonians allowed them to remain together in their communities, to keep their laws and worship their God. As a result, the Jewish people learned how to be faithful to their God on the basis of a text instead of a temple, on the basis of Scripture instead of sacrifices. The result was eventually synagogues—houses of study and prayer—scattered throughout the known world. Even after the Jews rebuilt their temple, synagogues thrived. And it wasn’t only Jews that attended these synagogues; Gentiles—non-Jews—who were interested in the God they proclaimed were also connected to some of these synagogues.

This was the world into which Jesus was born. And, in the land of Judah, on a hill outside Jerusalem, justice no longer tarried. The punishment for all of humanity’s injustice fell on Jesus. On the dawn of third day, he rose from the dead, and his resurrection is God’s promise that he will one day remake the world in perfect justice and righteousness. But what’s even better is that God gives his perfect righteousness to anyone who trusts this Jesus. That is the gospel.

And those clusters of Jews and God-fearing Gentiles that were scattered throughout the world because of the Babylonians? Those communities became the places where this gospel was first proclaimed. The churches that were birthed out of these communities stretched from one end of the Roman Empire to the other, and because they weren’t tied to a temple or a nation, they multiplied quickly and grew into multiethnic churches. In time, the message that these churches proclaimed changed the world. If you’re a follower of Jesus right now, at some point, that message came to you. And yet, none of that would have happened if Babylon hadn’t conquered Judah. And, although Habakkuk didn’t see this in his lifetime, he saw it from eternity, and he rejoiced.

Even if you don’t see God’s goodness yet, you will.

“How can you use this to bring justice to us?”—that’s the question Habakkuk wrestled to answer in these verses. “How can God possibly use Babylon to save us?” And yet, in time, that is precisely what God did.

I want to end with a simple question: What’s your Babylon? What is it in your past or in the possibilities you see in your future that it seems like God could never use for anything good? Habakkuk saw what seemed like a horrible and unredeemable future, and he cried out to God because he couldn’t see how God could possibly do good through this. And yet, even though he didn’t see God’s goodness yet, he eventually did. What’s your Babylon?

Even if you don’t see God’s goodness yet, someday—somehow—you will. So don’t give up on who God is simply because you can’t comprehend what he’s doing.

Sometimes, you ask for something and you get something—but what you get isn’t at all what you expected. And, once in a while when someone else is in charge of the choices, you get something you didn’t ask for at all. That’s what’s happening constantly in your prayers and mine—a wise and sovereign God is at work, not always sending what we expected but always delivering what we need. Sometimes, it’s blessings; sometimes, it’s Babylon—but, whatever he sends, he will someday redeem.

1. I misspoke in the sermon and suggested that King Arthur and his knights tried to go over the wall on ladders in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when, in fact, they tried to enter by going up a set of stairs and opening a door. I acknowledge and regret this error in my recollection.