EU•AN•GE•LION (YOO-AN-GEL-EE-ON) · εὐαγγέλιον — Good News
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EU•AN•GE•LION (YOO-AN-GEL-EE-ON) · εὐαγγέλιον — Good News
A prophet accused God of not listening, climbed a tower, and waited for the reply. What he got back was not an explanation. It was a word that means firmness — the same word used for a pair of tired arms held up by two other men until sunset.
Psalm 22:1-2; Habakkuk 2:2-4
Opening
My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Why are You so far from saving me, so far from my words of groaning? I cry out by day, O my God, but You do not answer, and by night, but I have no rest.
Psalm 22:1-2 (BSB)
Two minutes with the part of the Bible that says the quiet part out loud.
Someone prayed this and no answer came. That is the situation the psalm describes, and the psalm was not edited afterward to soften it.
Notice what has happened here. This complaint was written down. It was set to music. It was assigned to a choir director, copied by scribes for centuries, and carried into the worship of the people of God. A prayer that says “You do not answer” was preserved as something to be sung out loud, in company, on purpose.
That tells you something before it tells you anything else. The silence of God is not a subject Scripture avoids or apologises for. It is in the songbook. Somebody decided that people would need these words, and they were right.
So the question this week reaches on its third day is the honest one. Not what to do when the promise arrives, but what to do in the stretch before it does — when you have sought first, and prayed, and given thanks, and nothing has visibly changed.
The psalm does not answer that question in its first two verses. It just refuses to pretend. That is worth something on its own. Whatever you are carrying today, you are not carrying it somewhere the Bible has never been.
REFLECT
What have you stopped bringing to God because you got tired of hearing nothing back?
A Two-Minute Prayer
God, I have been talking into what feels like an empty room. I am not going to pretend otherwise today. Keep me here anyway. Amen.
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
How long, O LORD, must I call for help but You do not hear, or cry out to You, “Violence!” but You do not save? Why do You make me see iniquity? Why do You tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me. Strife is ongoing, and conflict abounds.
Habakkuk 1:2-3 (BSB)
A book of the Bible that opens by accusing God of not listening, and never takes the accusation back.
Habakkuk is a short book with an unusual shape. Most prophets carry a message from God to the people. Habakkuk carries a message from the people to God, and it is a complaint.
He opens by asking how long. He has been calling for help. He says plainly that God is not hearing and not saving. He is looking at destruction and violence, and he wants to know why the God he believes in is watching it happen and doing nothing.
This is in the Bible. Not as an example of a bad attitude to be corrected later, but as the first thing the prophet says, in a book that carries his name.
And God’s first reply makes it worse. He tells Habakkuk that He is raising up the Babylonians. The answer to “why is there violence” is that a more violent nation is coming. Habakkuk, understandably, files a second complaint.
What he does next is the reason this book sits at the centre of this week. He does not walk away, and he does not pretend to be satisfied. He goes up somewhere high and he waits.
“I will stand at my guard post and station myself on the ramparts,” he says. “I will watch to see what He will say to me, and how I should answer when corrected.”
Read that last clause again. He is expecting to be corrected. He has just accused God twice, he is standing his ground, and he is also fully prepared to be the one who turns out to be wrong. Both of those are true at once, and neither cancels the other.
That posture has a name in this book, and the name arrives two verses later.
His arms stayed up because two men held them there. That is what the Bible’s word for faith looks like in its most physical use.
Then the LORD answered me: “Write down this vision and clearly inscribe it on tablets, so that a herald may run with it. For the vision awaits an appointed time; it testifies of the end and does not lie. Though it lingers, wait for it, since it will surely come and will not delay.” Look at the proud one; his soul is not upright— but the righteous will live by faith—
Habakkuk 2:2-4 (BSB)
בֶּאֱמוּנָתוֹ יִחְיֶה
The reply Habakkuk climbed a tower to receive. Read it slowly — it does not answer his question.
Habakkuk asked why. God does not tell him why.
What God gives him instead is a timetable with no dates on it. There is a vision. It has an appointed time. It is not lying to him. It may linger. Wait for it.
If you came to this passage looking for an explanation, that is a poor return on a complaint filed twice and a night spent on a wall. Habakkuk asked a question about justice and got told to write something down and be patient.
But look at what is actually being handed over. God does not defend Himself, and He does not explain the Babylonians. He tells the prophet that there is an appointed time, and that the delay is not evidence of a lie. Those are two different claims, and the second one is the one that does the work.
Because that is the real damage silence does. It is not the waiting itself. It is what the waiting starts to suggest — that nothing was ever coming, that the promise was a misunderstanding, that a person who keeps praying is a person who has not yet accepted the obvious. Silence makes a case, quietly, and it makes it every day.
God’s reply goes straight at that. It testifies of the end and does not lie. Though it lingers, wait for it.
And then the line the New Testament will not leave alone: the righteous will live by his emunah. His steadiness.
Which brings the definition back into view at exactly the right moment. If faith were mainly a feeling of certainty, then this instruction would be cruel, because a feeling of certainty is precisely what a person in Habakkuk’s position cannot manufacture. He has looked at the evidence. The evidence is bad.
But emunah is not first a feeling. It is firmness. It is holding position. It is Moses’ arms at sunset — and Moses’ arms were not held up by Moses’ conviction. They were held up by Aaron on one side and Hur on the other, and by a stone somebody found for him to sit on.
That is the answer to how a person is supposed to do this. Not by generating belief out of nothing while the evidence argues the other way. By staying in place, and by being held.
Delay Is The Test, Not The Failure
John Calvin lectured on Habakkuk in 1548 and read verse 3 as deliberate rather than accidental. He calls it “a remarkable passage.” His reason is that it forbids a certain narrowness with God. “We are not to deal with God in too limited a manner, but room must be given for hope.” Then he says why the delay exists at all. “His purpose is to prove our patience, and the obedience of our faith.” And he names the thing that makes waiting hard, without scolding it. “He reproves here that immoderate ardor which takes hold on us, when we are anxious that God should immediately accomplish what he promises.”
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Commentaries on the Twelve Minor Prophets, on Habakkuk 2:2-3, Calvin Translation Society edition (Edinburgh, 1848).
There is an objection sitting under this whole day, and it deserves to be said out loud rather than managed.
This week opened on a promise. Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. That is not a hint. It is a sentence with a guarantee in it.
So what about the people who did seek first, and went hungry anyway?
Any honest reading has to slow down here, because Christians have done real harm at exactly this point. The shortcut is to decide that anyone still lacking must not have sought properly — which turns a promise into a test the sufferer has failed, and hands them a second burden on top of the first. That reading has been used to explain why the poor are poor. It should be refused outright.
Start instead with what the passage says the promise covers. It is not vague. Four verses earlier, Jesus lists the things He is talking about: what shall we eat, what shall we drink, what shall we wear. Food, drink, clothing. Then He says your heavenly Father knows that you need them.
So “all these things” is not a category that expands to fit whatever a person wants. It is the short list of what a body requires to keep going. The passage defines its own phrase, and the definition is much smaller and much more physical than the way the verse usually gets quoted.
That matters for two opposite reasons. It closes the door on reading this as a promise of prosperity — Jesus is not guaranteeing margin, comfort, or a good year. And it also means the promise is real, and specific, and about actual bread.
The second thing is harder, and Scripture does not resolve it. Paul knew what it was to be hungry, and said so. He wrote the letter this week reads on Fridays from a prison. The same man who wrote about the peace that guards the heart also wrote about being in need. Whatever “added” means, it evidently did not mean he was never without.
Which leaves the promise standing and the timing unspecified — which is precisely the position Habakkuk was left in. The vision has an appointed time. It may linger. It is not lying to you.
That is less than an explanation. It is also considerably more than nothing, and it has the advantage of being what the text actually says.
Where This Day Sits in the Story
ANCIENT TRUTH
Habakkuk writes in the last years before Babylon comes, most likely in the late 600s BC. He is watching his own nation come apart and being told the remedy is an invasion. The vision he is handed does not arrive in his lifetime.
This week began with a command and a promise — seek first, and all these things will be added. The third day is where that promise meets the person for whom it has not yet visibly happened. If the week skipped this, it would be worth nothing to the people most likely to be reading it.
MODERN APPLICATION
The gap between a promise and its arrival is not a malfunction in the Christian life. It is a described, named, canonised condition, and Scripture gives it a posture rather than a fix.
NEW TESTAMENT ECHO
Habakkuk 2:4 is quoted three times in the New Testament — in Romans 1:17, in Galatians 3:11, and in Hebrews 10:38. A line first spoken to a man standing on a wall waiting for an answer that had not come became one of the foundation texts of the entire Christian gospel.
Habakkuk is not alone in the record, and the company he keeps is not the company of the faithless.
Job loses everything and then goes looking for God to argue the case, and cannot find Him. “Behold, I go forward, but he is not there,” he says, “and backward, but I cannot perceive him.” He tries left and right. Nothing. The whole search comes up empty in four directions.
And then Job says the thing that holds the passage together. “But he knoweth the way that I take.”
He cannot locate God. He does not conclude from this that God cannot locate him. Those are two separate claims, and the entire weight of the passage rests on keeping them separate.
The psalms do the same. “How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” That is Psalm 13, and it is not a psalm of unbelief. It is addressed to God, by name, with a complaint about His absence — which is a strange thing to do if you have concluded He is not there.
Elijah gets a version of this on a mountain. There is a great wind that breaks rocks apart, and God is not in the wind. There is an earthquake, and God is not in the earthquake. There is a fire, and God is not in the fire. Then, after the fire, a still small voice.
The pattern in that story is worth sitting with. The spectacular events were not the delivery mechanism. A person watching for God in the wind would have concluded, three times over and with excellent evidence, that God was absent.
Eleven Weeks Before Oslo
In December 1979 she stood in Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and told the world that radiating joy is real, because Christ is everywhere.
Eleven weeks earlier, in September 1979, she had written privately to a priest she confided in, the Rev. Michael van der Peet. The published text of that letter reads:
“Jesus has a very special love for you.”
Then this. “[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak …”
And then the request. “I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand.”
The bracketed words there are the editor’s, not hers.
And this was not one bad season. In March 1953, decades earlier, she had written to Archbishop Ferdinand Périer asking for prayer that she would not spoil the work, and saying that there was such terrible darkness within her, as if everything was dead. She added that it had been like that, more or less, from the time she started the work.
In 1955 she wrote to him again: “The more I want him — the less I am wanted.”
There was one break. After Pope Pius XII died, she recorded that the long darkness had disappeared. About five weeks later she was, in her own word, back in the tunnel. It did not lift again.
She kept the work for another thirty-nine years.
This is the strongest available case that God’s silence is not a verdict on the one hearing it. Whatever the darkness meant, it did not mean absence of faith, and it did not stop the work. She did the thing Habakkuk did: she stayed at the post, and she said so honestly to the people she trusted.
She Told Someone
One detail in that account does more work than the darkness itself. We know about any of this because she wrote it to specific people, by name, over decades — to Archbishop Périer, to Rev. Michael van der Peet. She did not resolve it privately and she did not perform resolution publicly while carrying it alone. She kept telling somebody the true version. Which is the same shape as Moses on the hill. The arms stayed up because two other men were standing there.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The letters were published in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. (Doubleday, 2007). The September 1979 letter is cited here by recipient and date rather than page, because the pagination could not be independently confirmed. The bracketed insertions are reproduced as the published text prints them.
Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him: But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.
Job 23:8-10 (KJV)
Four directions, no God in any of them — and then a sentence that does not follow from the search, and does not need to.
The Rock and the Steadiness Are the Same Verse
There is a detail in the Hebrew worth carrying into tomorrow. The word for the steadiness a person is asked to live by — emunah — is also used of God Himself. And the place it appears is the same sentence where Moses calls Him a rock. Deuteronomy 32:4 reads: “He is the Rock, His work is perfect; all His ways are just. A God of faithfulness without injustice, righteous and upright is He.” Two Hebrew words are doing the load-bearing there. The first is tsur, rock — a cliff, a boulder, the immovable thing, used of God about thirty-three times in the Old Testament. The second, four words later, is emunah. So the steadiness Habakkuk is told to live by is not a quality he has to invent and then sustain on his own. It is first a description of God, and only then a description of the person leaning on Him. The same word covers both ends.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Verified word by word against the Deuteronomy 32:4 interlinear: haṣṣūr is Strong’s H6697, and ‘ĕmūnāh four words later is Strong’s H530. Both are in the verse. The song is traditionally placed at the end of Moses’ life, addressed to a people about to enter a land he would not see — which is its own comment on waiting for a promise that lingers.
REFLECT
Job could not find God anywhere and still said “he knoweth the way that I take.” Where are you currently treating your inability to sense God as proof of something about God?
A Practice for Today
Today’s practice is physical, and it is meant to be slightly uncomfortable. It takes about two minutes.
Raise them
Stand and hold both arms straight out from your sides, level with your shoulders. Say nothing. Just hold them there.
Wait
Keep them up. Somewhere past the first minute your shoulders will start to complain. Do not lower them yet. This is the part of the exercise that is doing the work.
Notice
Feel the exact moment when holding position stops being about willingness and starts being about capacity. Moses reached that moment too. The battle did not turn on him being stronger.
Lower them
Put your arms down. Then say out loud the name of one person who could hold yours up, and one thing you have not told them.
From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
Matthew 27:45-46 (BSB)
The psalm this day opened with, quoted from a cross, in the mother tongue, at the ninth hour.
The words this day started with are not only David’s.
At the ninth hour, in the dark, Jesus cried out in a loud voice and quoted the first line of Psalm 22. My God, my God, why have You forsaken me. The exact sentence. The one that was written down, set to music, and kept.
Sit with what that means for a moment, because it is easy to move past too quickly.
The cry of abandonment is not something the Bible describes happening to weak believers on the outside of the faith. It is inside the life of God. The Son said it. Out loud, in public, at the worst hour there has ever been. If there were something faithless about that sentence, it could not have come from that mouth.
So when it comes out of yours, it is not evidence that you have fallen out of the faith. It is evidence that you are quoting it.
And there is one more thing, in the same chapter, six verses later. Jesus cries out again and yields up His spirit, and at that moment the veil of the temple is torn in two from top to bottom. The barrier comes down at the exact point where the silence is deepest.
That is not a resolution to the problem of God’s silence, and this day is not going to pretend it is. Habakkuk still waited. Job still could not find Him in any direction. The psalm still says You do not answer, and it was still kept.
What it means is narrower than an explanation, and more useful. Whatever God is doing in the silence, He is not absent from it, and He is not unfamiliar with it. He has been on the inside of that hour. Tomorrow this week asks what it means that He is also a rock — and that there is now nothing standing between you and Him.
The Novel The Silence Is Named For
In 1966 the Japanese novelist Shūsaku Endō published a book called Silence. It follows a Portuguese priest in seventeenth-century Japan during the persecution of Japanese Christians, and its subject is exactly the subject of this day: a God who does not speak while people suffer.
Part way through, the priest says the thing out loud.
“Have you just remained silent like the darkness that surrounds me? Why? At least tell me why. We are not strong men like Job who was afflicted with leprosy as a trial. There is a limit to our endurance. Give us no more suffering.”
The book’s central moment comes when the priest is made to choose. To save others from torture he is told to step on a fumie — a bronze image of Christ, used by the authorities to force a public renunciation.
He raises his foot. And the silence, at last, breaks.
In the standard English translation the voice says: “Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”
What is worth knowing is that the English is sharper than the Japanese. Endō did not write a command. The Japanese is permissive — closer to “You may trample.”
The translator Van Gessel has argued this for years, and the author’s widow, Junko Endō, has said she was shocked to find the English and French editions using the imperative. A permission and an order are different things. The permission is the harder and better one, because it does not tell a broken man what to do. It tells him he is already known, and already loved, at the exact point where he is about to fail.
The novel is where God’s silence finally speaks, and what it says is not an explanation. It is the same answer Habakkuk got, in a different key: nothing about why, and everything about who is present in it. And the voice speaks from an image being stepped on — which is to say, from the place of the cross, where this day has already been.
A Note On The Translation
The wording quoted above is William Johnston’s, from the standard English edition, and it is what almost every reader has encountered. The mood dispute is real and documented, not a piece of internet lore — Gessel, the scholar Mase-Hasegawa, and Endō’s widow have all pressed the point, and Mase-Hasegawa renders the passage: “You may trample. You may trample. I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot.” Both are given here because the difference is the theology. An imperative makes God the author of the man’s failure. A permission makes Him the one who absorbs it.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Shūsaku Endō, Silence, trans. William Johnston (New York: Taplinger, 1980), p. 171 for the fumie passage and p. 96 for the priest’s earlier cry. The novel first appeared in Japanese as Chinmoku in 1966. Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film adapts the same novel; everything quoted here is from the book.
Prayer
God, I have asked and heard nothing back, and the not-hearing has started to make its own argument. I am telling You about it instead of drawing the conclusion. You said the vision would not lie even when it lingers. I am standing here on that, because I do not have anything better and I am not sure I need anything better. Hold my arms up. Send me people who will. And if today is a day for waiting rather than answers, make me steady in it. Amen.
BREATH PRAYER
In: though it lingers — Out: I will wait for it
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
Today's Commitment
I will stop treating God’s silence as a verdict, and I will tell one person the true version of what I am waiting for.
LEAVING AT THE CROSS
RECEIVING FROM THE CROSS
One Question
What does God actually give Habakkuk in reply to his complaint?
The Voice Behind Today
Judah, most likely the late seventh century BC, shortly before the Babylonian invasions
A prophet who is named in his own book and almost nowhere else. Nothing certain is known about his life beyond what the three chapters contain. Scholars generally date him to the years just before Babylon came west, which would place his complaint in the last stretch of Judah’s independence.
I will stand at my guard post and station myself on the ramparts. I will watch to see what He will say to me.
LESSON FOR US
Habakkuk is the prophet who argues. He is also the one who ends his book saying he will rejoice even if the fig tree does not blossom and there are no cattle in the stalls. Those two things are in the same short book, by the same man, and neither one is a phase he grew out of.
Sources & Further Study
Hebrew lexicon: emunah, Strong's H530
Sense order verified at BibleHub: literally firmness, then figuratively security, then morally fidelity. The physical sense comes first, and Exodus 17:12 is its clearest occurrence. Every Hebrew claim in today’s reading was checked against the interlinear rather than a commentary.
Hebrew lexicon: tsur, Strong's H6697
Rock, cliff, boulder; used figuratively of God roughly thirty-three times, emphasising support and defence. Confirmed present in Deuteronomy 32:4 alongside emunah.
Scripture texts
Psalm 22 and Habakkuk quoted from the Berean Standard Bible; Job 23 and Psalm 13 from the King James Version. Translation choices are documented in the series brief.
RELATED SCRIPTURES
Psalm 13:1-2 (KJV)
“How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” A complaint about God’s absence, addressed directly to God.
1 Kings 19:11-12 (BSB)
Wind, earthquake and fire, and God in none of them — then a still, small voice. The spectacular was not the delivery mechanism.
Lamentations 3:22-26 (BSB)
“It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.” Written by someone looking at a destroyed city.
Romans 1:17 · Galatians 3:11 · Hebrews 10:38
The three New Testament quotations of Habakkuk 2:4 — the line handed to a man on a wall became a foundation of the gospel.
Exodus 17:12 (BSB)
Moses’ hands held steady by Aaron and Hur until sunset. The plainest use of emunah in the Old Testament.
Finished reading? Mark this day read.
BEFORE YOU GO
Anything you want to keep from today?
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