"i Am With You In The Silence" Series

I don’t know exactly when … it was about four or five years ago … I came across an interesting documentary while I was surfing the web. I wish I had written the title down … I probably did and lost it. Anyways, I don’t remember the title but I do remember the documentary. It was a fascinating series of interviews with scientists and experts of various kinds … biologists, ecologists, sociologists, psychologists, and others … who were all basically saying the same thing … that there was something wrong … that something wasn’t quite right in the world … that something was off in the universe. They all had a gut sense that something huge, something cataclysmic was heading our way. They weren’t sure what … it was just an unsettling feeling that they all shared. They didn’t know when it was going to happen but it seemed like it was looming larger and larger on the horizon and was about to burst upon the world.

Boom! Here we are. Racial tension at an all time high. Rioting … not just in our country but England, France, and Hong Kong. A world-wide pandemic. People shooting the police. Police shooting people. Republicans versus Democrats. Progressives and liberals against conservatives. Socialist and Marxist and Communist verses capitalists. Conservationists versus industrialists. A government divided. A country divided. A world divided … and it keeps getting more violent and crazier and upside-down by the week, amen?

According to the scientists and experts that I watched in the documentary, their sense of discord, their sense of growing unrest and tension wasn’t limited to this planet. They were talking about a sense that there might not only be something wrong with the world but with the whole universe. All of them spoke about a growing uneasiness in the universe … a growing tension that feels like it’s going to come to a head … soon … and explode … and bring this whole universe to a screeching halt. This wasn’t the opinion of some basement conspiracy theorists wearing tin-foil hats in their basements. These were top scientists and experts in their fields.

Now … here’s what caught my attention. Even though I’m not a top scientist or expert in any field … and, for the record, I’m not some conspiracy nut job wearing a pyramid for a hat … what got my attention is that I felt what they were talking about … in my gut … in my heart … in my bones … and I suspect that some of you know what I’m talking about and feel it too … can I get a witness?

Two thousand six hundred years ago, a prophet by the name of Habakkuk had the same feeling in his gut … in his heart … in his bones. “How long,” he cried out to God, “how long must I call for help and You do not listen? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife and conflicts abound. Therefore the law is paralyzed and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted” (Habakkuk 1:1-4).

Wow! Destruction … violence … strife … conflict … wrongdoing … lawlessness … injustice. Sounds like the nightly news or the internet, am I right?

Habakkuk was a contemporary of Jeremiah and Zephaniah who lived in Jerusalem somewhere around 600 bc. You can tell from his writings and prayers that he lived during time much like our own today, amen? The people of God had moved far, far away from the godly principles upon which their nation had been founded. He stood in the midst of increasing moral decay and cried out against the sin of his generation. His heart was broken by what he saw happening in and to his beloved people and his once great country. We can certainly relate to Habakkuk’s pain and concern today, can’t we?

Habakkuk pleads with God to help him understand. “How can You, O LORD, a holy God, look upon such evil among us, Your people, Your children, and do nothing? How can You watch what’s happening and stand idly by? This is crazy. This doesn’t make sense.”

Habakkuk cries out to God in his grief over what’s happening, and it seems to him that God is not listening. Things just keep rolling along. Wickedness … crime … deceit … injustice … and suffering seem to keep getting worse and worse … with no end in sight. “I tell you about the problem,” the prophet laments, “but You don’t appear to be listening. I know that You see what’s going on … that You know what’s happening to us, Your beloved children.”

The cause of all this wickedness, all this injustice, all this pain and suffering is not only the result of the people’s indifference to the laws of God but their open defiance of them. “Why,” cries Habakkuk, “do You look on the treacherous and are silent when the wicked swallow those more righteous than they? You have made people like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler” (Habakkuk 1:13b-14). Again, how much does that resonate with what we’re experiencing today, amen?