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Habakkuk 2: Your Life is Futile (And God Approves)

by James Barringer  
8/08/2010 / Bible Studies

Have you ever been reading the Bible and suddenly spotted a verse that you couldn't make any sense of? A great example is Habakkuk 2:13, where the prophet says, "Behold, is it not from the Lord of Hosts that peoples labor themselves merely for fire, and nations weary themselves for nothing?" It sounds like Habakkuk is saying that God designed life to be hollow, empty, and unsatisfying, and that he's quite happy with this state of affairs.

What exactly is the end, or goal, of your life? Or, if you want a slightly more provocative version of the question: how do you justify your continued existence and consumption of resources? What exactly is the point of you being here?

If you look around at the rest of the world, it's pretty easy to come away with the impression that the point of us being here is to enjoy "being here" as much as we possibly can. The verses leading up to Habakkuk 2:13 are an indictment of the Chaldeans, a nation surrounding Israel who would stop at nothing to live the good life. One of the chief things he criticizes them for, in 2:6, is loading themselves up with debt in order to spend more money on themselves. That sounds an awful lot like the United States today, doesn't it?

Think about what we call "entertainment." There's an entire television channel celebrating food, which seems vaguely blasphemous in an age where roughly 1/3 of the world's population does not have enough to eat. We, on the other hand, spend untold gobs of money treating ourselves to nice meals out and investigating new ways to prepare tasty things at home. When someone reminds us of the global poverty problem, we often become dismissive, and when someone suggests that we curb our extravagant spending in order to help with global poverty, we often get downright antagonistic.

But food is obviously not the end of life. If you spend a thousand dollars and eat the best food in the world, you're still going to be hungry in a few hours anyway. If you spend ten thousand dollars on the best vacation of your life, you still have to come home and go right back to work in a few weeks. All that money is forever gone, used for temporary things, and in the end you have neither the money nor the thing. In the end you die, and have no money and no things. And Habakkuk says that all this is from the Lord.

Why might this be? I think the answer is that it underscores the temporary and unreliable nature of creation. We can't place our trust in wealth if, in a single moment, everything we have might be gone. We can't trust our own health, our families, our social status, our jobs, or even our own personal emotional satisfaction, because at any given moment those things could be stripped from us. They're all temporary. God causes this to be so, in order to prove that the only thing worthy of our worship is him.

He says so himself at the end of Habakkuk 2. "What profit is an idol when its maker has shaped it?" the prophet asks rhetorically. "Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, 'Awake,' or to a silent stone, 'Arise!' But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silent before him." You see there the contrast between things which are not worthy of worship - coincidentally, all of these are man-made - and the only thing which is worthy of worship, that being an eternal, unchanging God. Habakkuk says one thing here which is really fascinating. The difference between the idols and God is not merely that he is God and they are not, but that God actually communicates with us, whereas the idols do not. The personal, relational nature of God is what makes him the one being in the universe worthy of worship.

If you think about life honestly, you will find that you work your fingers to the bone your whole life in order to find security, comfort, happiness, and peace, and you never find these things, and then you die. What's the point? How do you justify your decision to get out of bed this morning and face that kind of existence? It's easy to look at this situation like Solomon did in Ecclesiastes, throw up our hands in frustration, and say, "It's all chasing after the wind - totally meaningless." But Habakkuk says that life is this way for a reason, because God designed it to be so. Habakkuk also gives us two clues as to the correct way to react.

The first is Habakkuk 2:20, where the prophet says, "Let all the earth keep silence before him." One proper response is simply to worship him, to respect and admire him for the fact that he is unchanging, and thereby different from everything else in the world. The second, found at the end of Habakkuk 3, is to rejoice. The prophet writes, "Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation." The correct response is to acknowledge that life, with its wildly fluctuating circumstances, has no power over you. Things that are going well could be disastrous tomorrow. Things that are catastrophic now could be looking up tomorrow. We can't trust in circumstances, because they're temporary, just like everything else. We choose to rejoice in God anyway, because it's the right thing to do, regardless of our circumstances.

Your life is futile, and God approves. He designed it to be that way in order to draw you to him, because when you think about how short and how empty life is, you find like Solomon did that there's really no point to living it unless there is some bigger meaning and bigger purpose. That's how all of us, even those who claim to disbelieve in God, are brought face to face with our need for him. How do we explain the hollow emptiness of life? Why are we alive, and why do we keep choosing to get out of bed every morning? Because we have a higher purpose: to praise and rejoice in the one eternal and unchanging God. That's a purpose which will always stand the test of time.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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