On the backside of the Old Testament, while you are flipping your pages to get to a Gospel message, you have passed by lots of Minor Prophets. One of those short books is Habakkuk. You may not have a lot of passages highlighted or bookmarked there. I don’t. I even had to look to get the correct spelling of his name. We can find within those poetic three chapters a wonderful teaching nugget for our lives.

Habakkuk was a prophet to the Southern Jewish kingdom of Judah. In his book in the Old Testament he is complaining/asking God why He is allowing the evil Babylonians to invade and destroy Judah. In His infinite patience and grace God answers Habakkuk’s complaint. Habakkuk then throws out another complaint/question (is this sounding like anyone we know yet? I know it sounds like me) and once again God answers. In the final chapter of the book, Habakkuk prays a beautiful prayer that is filled with a wide range of emotions but ends with confidence and joy. Check it out for yourselves. It won’t take you very long to read it.

The nugget I want to key in on is found in chapter 2, verse 1 (which comes right after his second complaint before God has answered). “I will climb up to my watchtower and stand at my guardpost. There I will wait to see what the Lord says and how He will answer my complaint.” (NLT) As tentative seekers or seasoned believers, we all watch things going on in the world and in our own lives and question God. Is He real? Is He loving? How can He just watch what is going on and not do anything about it? Habakkuk did the same thing. He couldn’t understand why God would allow such an evil people to destroy a less evil people. He was questioning everything about God.

Habakkuk did a great thing in the middle of his questioning that we can learn from. He climbed up into a watchtower over the city and waited. He waited because He knew that God would answer. And of course God did answer and it is the same answer we would get if we climbed our towers and waited for God to speak. God uses things that we don’t understand to bring about a bigger and greater result because He knows the whole story and He sees the whole picture.

We like to complain and question the goodness and Godness of God but we don’t like to wait and we don’t like to trust in what we cannot see. We want God to move in our ways and in our time. If we could learn to ask and then wait, He longs to speak to His children. He isn’t afraid of our questions and He doesn’t get mad that we ask questions. He’ll answer. I can’t tell you how He will do it or how long you will wait but if you seek, He will find. Along the way you will learn that His ways are not our ways. His ways are always higher and purer and more productive than what we could produce. If we could become a people that wait before the Lord, knowing that He will answer in His time and in His way, we might just find ourselves praising Him in joy by the end of the book!