Having complained to God about the violence and injustice he sees around him, Habakkuk reaches a point of worshipping and finding his joy in God, even amid impending invasion from Babylon. This is the kind of faith that every Christian is called to.

Guest speaker Duncan Sills takes us through Habakkuk, specifically looking at how it relates to the rest of the Bible through intertextuality and how this makes a difference to how we read and apply it.

Click here to view the PowerPoint slides.

Though the five ‘Woes’ of Habakkuk chapter 2 we can learn much about God’s view of the powerful exploiting the weak and see how unlike earthly justice systems, God’s justice is timeless and ultimately perfect.

Judgement will come to the corrupt Babylonians as described in the five woes. Yet God’s mercy is clearly revealed as Habakkuk describes the image of the future kingdom.

We often split the world into different kinds of people. We see in Habakkuk that God does so with those who live by faith and those who do not, but not as we would expect.

‘The righteous shall live by faith’ is mentioned several times in the Bible, but what does it really mean? How can what you believe possibly make you righteous? The Bible is clear that it’s the object of our faith that matters, not just faith itself.

God tells Habakkuk to write down an eternal truth that there are two types of people in the world – those who, like Babylon, trust in themselves, and those who trust in God. The righteous are those who put their faith in God the righteous shall live.

There is a lot of upheaval happening in the world at the moment and our political scene was similar to Habakkuk’s time. He asks God the same questions we do: where are you, God? Why? So, how we handle these questions as faithful Christians?

Habakkuk saw the injustice in his nation and had questions for God. God sometimes exercises his sovereignty in baffling ways and yet he doesn’t want us to deny the injustice we see around us. In his mercy, he invites us to bring our questions to him.

Our devotion to Jesus grows as we grasp the extent of all that He has done for us.