So how are things going with our Old Testament Jesus Freak prophet/musician, Habakkuk? Not too well, actually. He’s pretty depressed over the state of the church. He doesn’t see that Christians are much different than the pagan world they dwell in. They seem to exhibit all the same characteristics — they argue and fight among themselves, they engage in violence with society to get their way, and they paralyze the law by taking over the courts and perverting justice. So he complains about this to God and what does God say? “Look around at the nations; look and be amazed! For I am doing something in your own day, something you wouldn’t believe even if someone told you about it” (Hab. 1:5).

Now Habakkuk is confused because that sounds a little like good news (doesn’t it sound like that to you?), but it turns out to be very bad news. To punish them, God is raising up an enemy army to come against them filled with terror no one can imagine. “On they come, all bent on violence. Their hordes advance like a desert wind, sweeping captives ahead of them like sand” (Hab. 1:9). This is not what Habakkuk was hoping for, so he complains again to God that His solution is worse than the problem; He has only made things worse. “Will you wink at their treachery? Should you be silent while the wicked swallow up people more righteous than they” (Hab. 1:13)?

Do you ever feel like this? Do you ever feel like God’s solution is worse than the problem? That’s because He has to purge the wickedness from us. Like Eustace in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, He must tear off the dragon scales that attach to us through our sinfulness and selfishness. In many ways we have become more like the world than how Jesus wants us to be. We have picked up so much from our culture. We’ve become mean and argumentative, and proud, insisting on our way and on being right all the time. God has to humble us, and this is what Habakkuk has to find out the hard way, by going through it.

This has to happen to each of us individually, but it needs to happen to us together as the body of Christ. Christians are not acting in the world with humility. We are loud and forceful and trying to influence the world on its terms through politics, media, and culture wars, none of which is compatible with the gospel of welcome and grace turned outward. It’s a humbling process to know grace and impossible to turn outward if you haven’t first been brought low yourself. Habakkuk is finding out what it means to be humbled.