Habakkuk: The Long Defeat

Most people in my generation were raised with assumptions about the basic nature of the world. We believed in the Rule of Law, honesty is the best policy and crime does not pay. What goes around comes around and people eventually get what they deserve. The prophet Obadiah said, “As you have done, it will be done to you.” We understood Greek tragedy as the best way of explaining the moral world. People do eventually reap what they sow even if it takes a very long time. Pride goes before a fall. Hubris is fatal. After all, God is sovereign and has established rules that apply to everyone. It’s a Newtonian view of the world. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. There is such a thing as being on the right side of history - eventually.

But what if the arc of the moral universe bends another way? What if the world does not operate according to honesty is, in fact, the best policy? What if the moral predisposition of the world, the law of moral gravity, bends in just the opposite direction and while God is ultimately sovereign there is another ruler of our world? What if we have overlooked Paul’s teaching about the god of this age and Satan’s sway over the present, fallen world? What if what we are seeing in the victories of corruption is not abnormal at all? We simply have a mistaken view of what the rules of the game really are. What if the overall tendency of history is not up but down? That is what J.R.R. Tolkien described as the long defeat. The slope of the world is down with periodic but short-lived episodes of good. I liken it to the physics of flight. The force of gravity does not require any energy or thrust. It operates at no expense and is only overcome by the sizable and necessary expense of lift and thrust. There is no natural way to fly. It is always in opposition to the more fundamental force of gravity. It is unnatural. The odds are always in the favor of gravity. Lift is always fighting the odds. Gravity is past, present and future. Lift is sporadic  

Is that Habakkuk’s complaint? “Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous so that justice is perverted…Why then do you tolerate the treacherous? Why are you silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves?”

All of us ask this of God because we want him to fix the wrongs in the world; to punish injustice and corruption; to make the world a better place for us. But that is not God’s reply, is it? No. Instead he tells Habakkuk that things are only going to get worse for a killing machine, the Babylonian army, is headed toward them. Mere injustice and strife will be nothing compared to what they will be facing shortly. If they cannot live in the reality of the uncomfortable and unfair sin of the world then how will they face the coming onslaught of a feared and ruthless people who will devour them? 

So, for those of us who grew up thinking of sovereignty as things will work out and people will eventually come to their senses and the world will - like a rubber band - snap back into place, we are going to have to adjust. For those of us who grew up singing, “And though the wrong seems oft so strong God is the Ruler yet,” are going to learn to sing something more descriptive of the world’s reality. What we are seeing in what is vile being honored and lies being taken as truth is not exceptional. It is normal. It is the way of the world and what the world will always revert to unless it is countered - at great expense - by the forces of lift and thrust. 

Yes, there will eventually be judgment and a day of calamity for those who are a law unto themselves having built their realm by unjust gain, destroyed lands and cities, plotted the ruin of many people and established a town by crime. Yes, the stones will cry out and the beams of the woodwork will echo it. But not now. For now, we must learn to wait patiently and sometimes in silence while, like Habakkuk, making the Sovereign Lord our strength.

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Art by Einar Olafsson 

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