They are a feared and dreaded people; they are a law to themselves and promote their own honor.
8 Their horses are swifter than leopards, fiercer than wolves at dusk.
Their cavalry gallops headlong; their horsemen come from afar. They fly like a vulture swooping to devour;
9 they all come bent on violence. Their hordes [a] advance like a desert wind
and gather prisoners like sand.
10 They deride kings and scoff at rulers. They laugh at all fortified cities; they build earthen ramps and capture them.
11 Then they sweep past like the wind and go on— guilty men, whose own strength is their god.”
We read yesterday that God was behind the rise of the Babylonians (Chaldeans). But the Chaldeans don’t sound godly at all. They all come bent on violence. They are powerful and it even says that their own might is their god.
How could God allow a nation like this to punish Israel? We’ll see in Habakkuk’s second complaint that Habakkuk might be wondering these very things. But the fact that God allows a people like the Babylonians, who trust in themselves and not in God to rise to power raises a question: Why?
I know that eventually Babylon would lose its power, just as Assyria did, and later Rome and Greece would also. But why would God allow evil people and evil countries to destroy so much? Could God have stopped the Nazis and the Holocaust in WWII?
I think he could have… but if He did, would we still have free will? Evil actions have awful consequences. If God had a bullet conveniently kill Hitler when he was fighting in WWI how would that have changed history? In this situation God is raising up a people who do not follow Him to discipline a people that has wandered far from God’s will.
How does that work? We know that God disciplines those He loves (Hebrews 12:6). If it weren’t for punishment would Israel ever return to God? Like we read in the book of Judges, Israel wanders away from God, and then they are punished and under occupation, and that is when they cry out to God.
Similarly, sometimes suffering may be a punishment. I’m not saying that all suffering is due to punishment, because you can be punished without having done anything wrong. It says in 1 Peter 4:16 that if you suffer for being a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name.
As Christians, we can suffer without doing anything wrong, or we could suffer because God is disciplining us for making bad choices. I hope that we can suffer blamelessly, continuing to praise God in spite of hardship.