v 5. The Lord replied,
“Look around at the nations; look and be amazed.
For I am doing something in your own day,
something you wouldn’t believe even if someone told you about it.
God’s answer to Habakkuk is realistic, but hardly helpful to be quite frank! Effectively, God tells him that the complete answer is probably too hard to understand or even believe! So just how helpful is that to poor old Habakkuk!
Here lies a very basic human problem; we expect to be able to understand the whole range of God’s purposes! Just how arrogant can you get. The human brain is a pretty powerful tool. It enables women and men to work at putting an electric vehicle on the surface of Mars, to devise useful vaccines against Covid; and even build a machine that has a powerful form of artificial intelligence. But just how trivial all that seems when compared with the mind of God who constructed from nothing a universe with billions of galaxies and physical laws that still baffle the greatest of human minds.
In God’s place I’d want to say to Habakkuk ‘Come on man, you are only human. I AM active in the world around you, it’s just that your finite mind is incapable of grasping the scope of what I am doing on your tiny planet Earth.’
The call is to exercise patience and humility as we wait for God to act.
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