July 18, 2010
Habakkuk 2:6-14
We are now in the second week of looking at God’s answer to Habakkuk’s second complaint. Even though Habakkuk was upset that evil people seemed to be running things in Judah, he was just as upset at God’s plan to use the even more wicked Babylonians to be the instruments of His justice. We saw last week that God wants us to know what He is up to, finding that in God’s command to write down His words and get the message ready to be carried by runners. We also saw that God said the righteous will live by faith. This morning’s text Follow God’s statements there.
God is speaking of the wicked as the text begins. God has mentioned their arrogance and the trust in things of this world instead of the things of God. The Babylonians were never satisfied and sought domination of the whole world, capturing the people around them on the way.
With verse six we see a shift in the fortunes of the Babylonians. Until now, even though God was opposed to their attitude, the prophecy was one of success in their goal. God was using them to punish the nation of Judah, and so they were to be allowed temporary success, but their greed and desire to rule over those around them were not to have the last word. Indeed, those they had taken captive will taunt them and ridicule them.
This shift is marked by five woes which the captives will declare against the Babylonians. We will look at the first three today, and then the other two next week. The first woe is to those who pile up stolen goods and who build their wealth simply by taking from others. There are two ways to become wealthy. You can apply your mind, time, and talents to hard work and creating a service or product that was not there before, or you can merely take the fruit of another’s labor. God rewards the first, as Jesus pointed out in the parable of the talents. God despises the second as theft and thuggery.
One of the principles of scripture is that we usually end up having to live with the consequences of our decisions. Since the Babylonians had chosen to make enemies out of everyone, then they would eventually pay the price. Those who owed them would get their payback. The people who had been run over by the Babylonian military machine would rise up and make them tremble in fear. Then, God said, the situation would be reversed. Because they had plundered many, they would be plundered. They would be plundered because they had killed others and destroyed the nations around them for their own glory and power.
The second woe is pronounced against those who build their realm on unjust gain. Again God refers to arrogance. The goal in this for them was to escape the fate of those they had attacked. They wanted to be in a safe place free from the harm of attack.
God said, however, that the plotting they had done against others had already led to shame for their house and the forfeiting of their lives. God had not missed anything they had done. Even the stones and beams of their houses, purchased with loot stolen from others, testified to God against them.
The third woe is to one who builds a city with bloodshed and establishes a town with crime. The Babylonians had put themselves in a position where all they had was the result of the work of others and had been stolen from them through unjust practices and outright theft. God says that He has already determined that the work of the people is merely fuel for the fire, it is tinder that is smoldering at the foundations of all that they had. All the work that the Babylonians were requiring of the people around them would amount to nothing because it would all go up in flames. As Solomon had discovered centuries before, it was a chasing after the wind.
As I studied this text I was reminded of its similarity to part of the history of our nation early in the last century. I was born in the Philadelphia area, but I was raised in West Virginia. When I was a child in that state there were still people who remembered living and working in the old coal towns.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the mining companies would buy large tracts of land in order to mine coal. They would hire miners, build them homes, and build a general store. The company owned everything. The men who worked the mines and their families received their paychecks from the same people from whom they rented their homes and bought their groceries. The men in charge of all this set the salaries of the miners, the amount of the rent, and the prices of the items in the store (charging a premium for the convenience of having the store close even though there wasn’t an alternative). The numbers were carefully adjusted so that things cost a little bit more than the men were paid. Of course, the company was happy to let the men borrow money since they knew the men had jobs. The end result really was that each day the men worked they ended up owing the company a little more money. It was a new form of slavery. I had a teacher in school whose father was a miner. As a boy this man joined the Navy, even though he couldn’t swim, just so he wouldn’t have to work in the mines.
Just as God had warned the Babylonians, the debtors rose up and the ones who had been living off of them trembled. For a time Logan county in West Virginia had the highest murder rate in the nation as the miners rebelled against the practices of the mining companies. The result was the labor union movement.
