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!
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 21st
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.
