The Oracle to Habakkuk, Part 8: The First Woe - Economic

Imagine the cry of a mother who has just lost a child in a sudden and unexpected way.  Her voice fissures open into a gaping maw of grief as the very soul seems to be torn out of her body.  A wail pierces the air with a scream that seems almost inhuman due to the incredulity of such a sound echoing from a person’s throat.  We imagine the poor woman’s vocal cords shredding inside her neck as her voice fragments and shatters into a million pieces that crash against our eardrums like an avalanche.  The howling stretches on for what seems to be an eternity before guttering out like a spent candle as the breath in her lungs is finally exhausted.  She continues to mourn silently with her mouth wide open, body unable to produce any further aural indicators of torment.  But the eyes tell a tale of anguish that summits the highest peak of human misery.  Many of us have read descriptions of this type of heart-breaking occurrence.  Perhaps we have seen and heard these horrors on live television.  In some cases our life experiences may have brought us into direct contact with such a disaster.  Or, if we have been personally visited by death, our own history may be called to remembrance by this description.

The Bible is no stranger to depictions of grief and human suffering.  The book of Lamentations echoes across history as one man’s encounter with sorrow.  The prophet Jeremiah lived through both the two and a half year siege as well as the complete destruction of the city of Jerusalem at the hands of the conquering Babylonian army.  He recorded his experiences to serve as a record of what it means to drink the cup of God’s fury to the dregs.  Lamentations 4:4 says “the tongue of the infant cleaves to the roof of its mouth because of thirst” and verse 10 reveals “the hands of compassionate women boiled their own children; they became food for them”.  Isaiah prophesied of this event in 51:17 of his book: Arise, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the Lord’s hand the cup of His anger; the chalice of reeling you have drained to the dregs.  Jeremiah goes on in chapter 5 of Lamentations to describe the fullness of the experiences of the Jews who endured this punishment:

Remember, O Lord, what has befallen us;
Look, and see our reproach!
Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers,
Our houses to aliens.
We have become orphans without a father,
Our mothers are like widows.
We have to pay for our drinking water,
Our wood comes to us at a price.
Our pursuers are at our necks;
We are worn out, there is no rest for us.
We have submitted to Egypt and Assyria to get enough bread.
Our fathers sinned, and are no more;
It is we who have borne their iniquities.
Slaves rule over us;
There is no one to deliver us from their hand.
We get our bread at the risk of our lives
Because of the sword in the wilderness.
Our skin has become as hot as an oven,
Because of the burning heat of famine.
They ravished the women in Zion,
The virgins in the cities of Judah.
Princes were hung by their hands;
Elders were not respected.
Young men worked at the grinding mill,
And youths stumbled under loads of wood.
Elders are gone from the gate,
Young men from their music.
The joy of our hearts has ceased;
Our dancing has been turned into mourning.
The crown has fallen from our head;
Woe to us, for we have sinned!

At the end of his lament the prophet utters the phrase “Woe to us”.  This was an expression of deep anguish.  The Hebrew for woe is ‘owy.  It literally means “a passionate cry of grief or despair” and the pronunciation, o’-ee, even sounds like a wail or lament.  The view here is of the mother mentioned previously, who has lost her child, and whose senses are overwhelmed with sadness.

‘Owy has an alternate form, howy.  It is pronounced very similarly to its cousin.  But where ‘owy is typically directed internally at deep emotion experienced by oneself, howy is often sent in the direction of another.  An example of this can be found in 1 Kings 13:30.  An unnamed prophet from Judah has come north to prophesy against Jeroboam king of Israel.  God commanded him to “eat no bread, nor drink water there; do not return by going the way which you came.”  But the prophet disobeyed the Lord’s instructions and stayed with a fellow prophet and ate with him.  As punishment God caused a lion to attack and kill him on the way back to Judah.  And when his brother Israelite prophet discovered the body he uttered this epithet: “Alas, my brother!”  This is the sense of the Hebrew howy.  And this is the choice of words, translated in most English versions as “woe”, which God points in the direction of the Babylonians as He reveals to Habakkuk the future doom that will befall them.

God has already set the stage for His judgment with a prologue in verses 2 through 5 of chapter 2 of the book of Habakkuk.  We have seen how He applies against the Chaldeans a description of a proud and haughty man, distorted and corrupted, an aberration of nature itself.  This man is like a drunk, always seeking hopelessly for his next fix, continually consumed by his addiction, but like death itself never satisfied.  And God identifies the Babylonian conquests as the item at issue here when He says that this drunkard will “gather to himself all nations and collect to himself all peoples”.  It is important to clearly identify Babylon as the target of God’s description.  Without that context in mind the meaning of verse 6a would be unclear:

                        “Will not all of these take up a taunt-song against him,

                        Even mockery and insinuations against him

“Will not all of these” refers to all those people who have been “gathered and collected” by Nebuchadnezzar and his minions.  The Lord says that these victims of the Babylonian conquests will have occasion to rise up against their oppressors.  The idea is that in the due course of time those who have fallen under the dominion of Babylon will have their opportunity to turn the tables.  They will taunt, mock, and ridicule their former masters.  But this is not to be seen as literal.  Rather it is a symbolic word picture of divine discipline, continuing the image the Lord has already begun in verse 5.  In effect, it is God Himself who is taking up a taunt-song against the Chaldeans.

And what a taunt it is.  The language used by God here is repeated in Ezekiel 14.  In this passage a warning is being given to idolatrous Israel.  Verse 6 says they are to “repent and turn away from your idols and turn your faces away from all your abominations”.  Then in verse 7 the Lord targets anyone who, rather than obeying this command, “separates himself from God, sets up idols in his heart, puts before his face the stumbling block of his iniquity, and then comes to the prophet to inquire of Me for himself”.  He says of such a person in verse 8: “I will set My face against that man and make him a sign and a proverb, and I will cut him off from among My people.”  This cutting off and making a sign and a byword is the same phrasing used in Habakkuk 2:6.

But the full force and impact of God’s condemnation here cannot be seen unless we look more closely at just how He described the future of Israel itself in Deuteronomy 28 and Jeremiah 24.  In the former passage Moses warns the children of Israel against disobedience.  He says in verse 15 that if they do not obey the Lord their God then a series of curses will come up them and overtake them.  These curses run the gamut. They will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.  Their baskets and kneading bowls will be cursed.  Their offspring and their produce will be cursed.  They will be cursed when they come in and cursed when they go out.  In all, from verse 15 to verse 36 Moses lists 31 different cursed examples of the judgment of God upon His people if they should choose to disobey Him.  And then in verse 37 He says: You shall become a horror, a proverb, and a taunt among all the people where the Lord drives you.  Far from paying attention to these warnings the successive generations of Israelites grew worse and worse as they delved deeper and deeper into wanton gratification of their sinful godless desires.  Finally, after the northern kingdom of Israel has long since been destroyed and Judah, all that remains of the nation state of Israel, is teetering on the brink of destruction themselves, the Lord utters the following painfully explicit prophecy through His mouthpiece in Jeremiah 24:8-9: ‘But like the bad figs which cannot be eaten due to rottenness – indeed, thus says the Lord – so I will abandon Zedekiah king of Judah and his officials, and the remnant of Jerusalem who remain in this land and the ones who dwell in the land of Egypt.  I will make them a terror and an evil for all the kingdoms of the earth, as a reproach and a proverb, a taunt and a curse in all places where I will scatter them.’ 

The concept in God’s mind here is that He will so utterly destroy, scatter, exile, and torture Israel that their punishment will transcend the historical time period it occurs in and become legendary.  They will become such an entrenched example of the complete and utter destruction of a people that it will echo across human history and become “a byword”, or a notorious example or embodiment of something.  Judas Iscariot became a byword for traitors and betrayers and Jezebel became a byword for malicious and evil women, to the point that even in the 21^st century their names are a part of the vernacular of the world.  Similarly, God is saying here that the Jews themselves will become a byword for a people who were crushed so utterly that their plight would become synonymous with horror and genocide.  Consider how accurate the Lord’s prediction was.  Ever since the final destruction of their homeland in 586 B.C. the Jews have become a homeless vagabond of a race.  They have flitted from country to country, enduring anti-Semitism from every corner, ultimately resulting in the Holocaust of World War 2 in which some six million of them were systematically exterminated in 4 years through the medium of Hitler’s Nazi death machine.  And to this day, although back in their homeland, they continue to bear the brunt of unbridled aggression across the world.  It is this idea of utter condemnation, comprehensive punishment, and historical illustration that God now directs against the Babylonians.

                       

He does so by painting a series of five detailed examples, or taunt-songs, or woes of how His punishment will be played out against this godless nation.  There will be some level of overlap and parallelism across the five woes, as each deals with a sinful rebellion against God and His response to it.  But as we will see each of them touches on a different aspect of the nature of God and His creation.  So although broadly they can all be identified simply as sin on the surface, if one takes the time to look deeper variations of this theme begin to emerge that ultimately traverse a wide spectrum of reality.

The first of these taunts is what I will refer to as the economic woe.  It is the sinful human practice of operating contrary to God’s designation of personal responsibility and culpability in one’s own crimes.  He reveals the substance of it in Habakkuk 2:6b-8:

                        And say, ‘Woe to him who increases what is not his –

                        For how long –

                        And makes himself rich with loans?’

                        “Will not your creditors rise up suddenly,

                        And those who collect from you awaken?

                        Indeed, you will become plunder for them.

                        “Because you have looted many nations,

                        All the remainder of the peoples will loot you –

                        Because of human bloodshed and violence done to the land,

                        To the town and all its inhabitants.

There are two primary themes to be seen in this woe.  The first is the sin of money worship.  God pronounces a curse upon those, such as the Babylonians, who profit from theft.  They take what does not belong to them to increase their personal portfolio of wealth and/or possessions.  He applies a rhetorical question to these people.  “For how long” is not a question at all.  Rather, it is a statement.  The Lord is saying “they will not do this for long.”  Now, with the framework of Biblical pre-eminence that America was founded on, it is probably a no-brainer for most people reading this to affirm what God is saying here.  From our earliest days of church based childhood we were taught the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20; number eight of which is “You shall not steal.”  Even for those not raised in a church, the cultural stigma associated with theft and its associated laws of punishment is usually enough to warn people of the evil of this action.  Beyond that, God Himself has offered no respite to a humanity which typically seeks to rationalize the rightness and marginalize the wrongness of their sins.  He makes clear in Romans 2:15 that even were someone to be completely ignorant of any other source of information spelling out the immorality of their choices, they are still without excuse because “they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them”.  God has left no back door for humanity to sneak out of in an effort to avoid His fiery wrath and condemnation.

But again, most people will fall into the first two groups who do in fact have outside influences coordinating with the morality God has ingrained into them to teach them that stealing is wrong.  But be that as it may, as already stated, we are notorious as a race of beings for explaining away that which we choose to ignore about ourselves.  In this case, and as it relates to thievery, we are quite capable of building a web of arguments that result in being convinced of a lie; namely, that certain activities that we enjoy engaging in, although in reality a form of theft, are not really wrong after all.  To illustrate this point, allow me to relate a personal experience.  I once spoke to a prominent Christian leader in the church I was attending.  We were discussing the types of popular entertainment we enjoyed, one of which was a British television show that we both shared an interest in.  This person revealed that they often downloaded episodes of this show prior to their release here in the United States.  File sharing services were utilized for this process, which are web sites or software applications through which unrelated Internet users across the world can upload digital media files for the purpose of sharing them with others of like mind. 

The idea is that if one person obtains a legal copy of the song, movie, television show, etc. in question then they can make it available so that others would not have to procure said item legitimately.  This has been an ongoing war for over a decade now, as the various entertainment industries, with U.S. and international copyright laws on their side, do battle against the Internet public who rail against the restrictions of governmental laws and demand that they be given access to whatever they want whenever they want it.

So the fellow Christian I was speaking with was quite happily right in the middle of this circus, grabbing copies of his beloved show for free.  Although he was not profiting from these acquisitions, copyright laws are very well defined.  It is illegal to engage in these activities, whether an individual thinks such restrictions are fair or not.  And Romans 13:1 makes it crystal clear that we Christians are to be in obedience to the governing authorities who are in charge of us.  The person I was speaking with even went so far as to argue that they had researched the law and found that what they were doing was perfectly acceptable.  The rationalization of sin was running rampant and Satan was giggling quietly in the corner.  Although this particular example may not apply specifically to your life I am quite sure you can see the point and connect the dots of the overarching truth here in order to highlight these sorts of gray areas (which really aren’t gray at all) in your own patterns of behavior.

In addition to this category of sinners, notice the other side of the coin here.  Those who take out loans to make themselves rich rather than earning their profits through work are lumped right in with the thieves.  Now this one really stings.  Here in the U.S. with our multi-billion dollar per year credit card industries where the name of the game is instant gratification, we have a national fascination with charging in order to acquire the goods we want with immediacy rather than working diligently to save the money to make our purchases.  Only the heart of God knows, and probably weeps, over the millions of professing Christians who sacrifice their cheerful giving to the Lord’s work in favor of paying off enormous and out of control credit card debt, unnecessary vehicle loans, extravagant home mortgages, and the like.  And the Lord says that such people are no better than thieves in the grand scheme of things!

Note that the Bible is not enforcing a complete moratorium on loans or credit here.  The idea we should keep in our minds is “irresponsible debt”.  This is debt owed that cannot easily be repaid and places oneself into a cycle of paying off creditors that threatens to bury us under the weight of our own short sightedness.  Notice the phrasing of Psalm 37:21: The wicked borrows and does not pay back.  It is not the borrowing that is expressly classified as wicked.  Rather, it is the failure to pay back the loan.  The Apostle Paul in Romans 13:8 says to “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another”.  His point is expounded by the previous verse: “Render to all what is due them”.  The point is not to never owe money.  It is to pay back what is owed in a timely manner so that you are free to express love and by so doing fulfill the Law.  Unpayable debt or irresponsible debt makes us a slave to that debt.  It distracts us and chains us to stress and obligation.  Instead of this model of behavior we are to be clear minded and freed to express love and the gospel of Christ. 

Another aspect of this issue is the warning found in James 4:13-14: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.’  Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow.  You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.  We ought not to live on borrowed time, as it were.  We should not assume anything about our lives in the next minute, let alone in six months or six years.  And the assumption of debt is in principle right in league with that type of mindset.  So while not being a black and white, cut and dried error of behavior, it is also not in lock step with the biblical model presented here. 

A third scriptural angle to view this issue in is very simply the love of money and wealth.  Look at the way verse 6 is phrased: “And makes himself rich with loans”.  Unsatisfied with what is currently possessed, the sinner acquires more and greater quantities of lucre via the medium of debt.  He mismanages what he has and places himself in a precarious financial position in a self-serving addiction to monetary gain.  In Matthew 19:23 Jesus said “Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.  Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  And in Luke 16:13 He made the following statement: “No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and wealth.”

So then, we have ample evidence in the Bible of the wrongness of thinking behind thievery and irresponsible debt.  But now the question must be asked and answered, “Why are these two linked the way they are?”  In the context of this woe against the Babylonians, why does God lump irresponsible debt in with thievery in His condemnation of sinful behavior?  The answer is the second major theme of this taunt-song and the key is in the link formed by the warning against debt.  Picture verse 6b on one side of a chasm.  On this cliff stands the woe against stealing; ‘Woe to him who increases what is not his’.  Across the gap stands verse 7a; ‘Will not your creditors rise up suddenly, and those who collect from you awaken?  Creditors and collectors have nothing to do with theft.  The two by themselves are unrelated.  But when we insert the end of verse 6 as the structure bridging the gap it suddenly makes sense.  The sin of stealing is linked and carried along with the sin of the love of money and its visible evidence, irresponsible debt, across to the other side of the pit where the creditors rise up and the collectors awaken.  God’s point is that just as when we take out loans we cannot repay and face the consequences of repossessions and collection agencies, so also those who engage in theft will face inevitable consequences.

The plunderers will become the plundered.  The looters will become the looted.  The tables will ultimately be turned because of the human bloodshed and violence done to the land, the town, and the inhabitants.  I am going to place myself on a precarious theological limb here and call this “Biblical karma”.  To be clear, karma in its raw form and definition is most assuredly not a concept which comes from the Bible.  Rather, it is sourced in Hinduism and Buddhism.  It is the idea of the sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence which come together and decide their fate in this and future existences.  If that sounds confusing, consider this practical example.  A cruel and selfish man becomes enraged when he is accidentally cut off in traffic by a mother driving a carful of children.  His road rage consumes him and he follows the offending woman to her destination; a department store.  After the man watches her and her gang of offspring leave their vehicle and enter the location he gets out of his car, slashes all four tires, keys both sides of the car, and leaves a nasty note under the windshield wiper filled with hateful language.  Smugly self-satisfied, he drives home and relaxes for the evening.  The next day, out for a walk near his home, he is struck and killed by a city bus.  A follower of eastern religion would say that was karma at work.  Here is a key point though.  In eastern philosophy karma is tied to a belief in reincarnation.  That is, the teaching which says when a person dies their soul is reborn into a new body.  Each time this happens the quality of the new existence is directly impacted by the moral pattern of behavior in the previous existence.  In other words, if you are an evil person in this life you will wind up in a less privileged position in the next life.  This is the significant differentiator that makes the notion of karma completely unbiblical.  Nowhere in the word of God is such a notion of death and rebirth supported.  So it is a very precarious approach to even mention the notion of karma in relation to biblical truth.  In spite of that fact, I am knowingly doing it anyhow purely for the purpose of illustrative example.

With those caveats out of the way, my contention here by calling what God is describing in His woe against the Babylonians “biblical karma” is this.  The idea of karma, although warped and twisted by idolatrous mankind in their distorted religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, has its roots in the absolute reality of how God designed the universe.  It is a biblical principle present everywhere in scripture that man is held accountable for his actions, either immediately or in the due course of time.  From the very beginning of recorded history, in Genesis chapter 3, we see God causing consequences to come into being for the choices and actions of Satan, Eve, and Adam.  Both Adam and his wife attempted to place blame for their rebellion on the shoulders of another.  But God was having none of it.  He handed down individual punishments for each person that fit their crime.  Further on in the historical biblical record, Exodus 17:8-13 records an incident in which Amalek attacked the Israelites, apparently without provocation.  In verse 14 of that chapter God delivers a decisive ruling against the Amalekites: Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write this in a book as a memorial and recite it to Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”  Repeatedly throughout the book of Leviticus God says that for each type of crime given description, the one who has sinned “will bear his guilt” or “he will be guilty”.  There is no concept of a passing of the buck in the mind of God as He considers His creation.  What goes around will come around, but only under the direct supervision of the Lord Himself.

So I believe that the nucleus of what has come to be known as karma was miss-appropriated by the human inventors of Hinduism and Buddhism.  They observed the world around them and how things operated; the natural laws if you will that govern the existence of life.  These natural laws were obviously designed and implemented by God long before Buddha and his contemporaries developed their set of truth claims.  Then they took what they saw that God had already super-intended, modified it to fit their own agendas, and slapped a fancy moniker of “karma” on it.  In a sense we might say “God was there first”.  In light of that truth, it is the Lord who has the authentic rights of ownership to the philosophical concept behind the idea of karma.  That is the sense in which I am using the terminology here.  And that is the over-riding concept behind this first woe that He is sending in the direction of the Babylonians in response to Habakkuk.  The prophet is being given a sneak peek if you will, a glimpse into the future that, although lacking details educates him on exactly what will ultimately come to pass in regard to the perplexing usage of the Chaldeans for divine discipline of Judah.

Now then, is there any particular way in which this all relates to us in our present day?  I think the implication is obvious.  We have already seen how God warns against thievery and irresponsible debt.  As stated before, this prohibition probably seems rather obvious.  But beyond the evident there is an overriding truth that God will orchestrate repercussions against those who choose to defy His decrees and engage in evil.  In the case of a non-Christian, Revelation 20:13 states that at the final judgment: the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged, every one of them according to their deeds.  Whether it seems that you have skated free and clear for your misdeeds in this life or not, know that ultimate judgment is coming one day.  For the Christian, although our sins may be forgiven, remember that we are now adopted into the family of God.  He is our heavenly Father who is perfectly just.  As such, He will not hesitate to discipline His children when necessary.  Hebrews 12:6 makes this abundantly clear: For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.  So remember this warning before you consider following after the world in theft that you convince yourself is not really theft or irresponsible debt designed to gratify your lust for money that you convince yourself is not really wrong because the Bible doesn’t specifically say you can’t incur debt.  Instead, follow after the example given to us by Jesus, whose every thought and intention of the heart was to do the will of His Father.  Because “He is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15) and “the exact representation of His nature” (Heb. 1:3) the qualities of Christ’s character are in perfect alignment with everything we have discussed here from Habakkuk.  Therefore by studying the example left by Jesus we will place ourselves in the best position to also be in alignment with the will of God.