Devotion 25

Habakkuk questioned God in his desperation (Habakkuk 1:2-4). He couldn’t understand why God didn’t answer his prayer, why God tolerated wrong and let the wicked rule all over.

We ask similar questions when we see unrighteousness and/or experience injustice. During these times, are you seeing yourself as the problem of the world or the solution, especially when you feel our God is absent?

How would you feel if God tells you that He’s going to bring justice through your enemy, like how he told Habakkuk that He was going to raise Babylonians and let them ‘sweep past like the wind’?

We want things to be better but sometimes we are still in fear of God's justice, and the very reason why we might frown against it is because we know we are all guilty.

Our God is not slow or absent, He’s just being patient and compassionate with us. Thousands of years ago, He had held the Babylonians back for such a long time, waiting for people to repent, before He brought the punishment to the Israelite.

Besides, God doesn’t just take a look at our condition and get sick of it, He gets into it by sending His beloved son Jesus to the world and allow Him suffer even more, for us.

The whole Bible is following the line of “Perfection – Justice – Patience of God – Final Judgment – Restored Perfection”.

There are a large number of people He still wants to save. Just because we are fed up with the world sometimes, it doesn't mean that He should stop. I bet many people requested the same thing before us, and if God had ever listened to any of them there wouldn't be salvation for us. Therefore, we should be more like Him and help people to the end so that we can all enter God’s kingdom together.

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. – Romans 8:18-25