Passage Read: Nahum 2 - Habakkuk 2
Meditation Verses: Habakkuk 1:2-3
Thought
What is God's response to our cry for justice? What is God's response to our cry against injustice and our pleas for Him to fix things? It is to do what we and our leaders should have done all along: It is to judge and condemn and destroy from the land those who do wrong. Habakkuk is looking on his own people and their wickedness, their perversion of justice, their violence and conflict. So the Lord promises to raise up the Babylonians, to execute God's justice and vengeance on the wicked of His own people. But who wants that? We would rather have God change everyone's heart, that they repent of their evil deeds and turn to do what is good and loving and right! That's actually what God wants too. And He gave us the means and direction to ensure wickedness never took root, but we ignored Him. We thought carrying out justice right away was too cruel. People deserve chances, more chances to change and do right. So evil persisted in the land, multiplied, and the people became unafraid of justice. There was no justice, there was only compassion, and that led to injustice. So now God must go to extreme lengths to correct His people, yet they still won't understand, they still will consider Him cruel and wrathful. It is we who have created the circumstances of our own destruction.
Application
We want justice only when wickedness overwhelms us and threatens our personal existence. We're free with our compassion when the consequences are far from us, when they fall on other people far away. But justice requires punishing the guilty sufficiently that they would not dare to do their evil again, sometimes that means death. We balk at that, because we think people are more valuable than justice and godliness. We're not willing to send to Hell those who disregard God and His commands. We would rather sink further down in sin and wickedness, than clean up our society at the cost of the rebellious. Better many suffer injustice than one of us die for his sin. We cry out for justice until we realize what it means, then some of us fight with the righteous to defend the life of the wicked. How messed up is that? The soul who sins must die; his only hope is repentance, and if his sentence still requires death, then he'll have nothing to fear. If he will not repent, he only confirms the correctness of his condemnation. If I want justice in big things, I need to want it in small things too. If I want justice, I need to accept that men determine their own eternal fate by being responsible for their choices in this life, whether to sin or repent.