Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk, the 1st chapter, verses 12-17.
Are you not from of old,
O Lord my God, my Holy One?
You shall not die.
O Lord, you have marked them for judgment,
and you, O Rock, have established them for punishment.
13 Your eyes are too pure to behold evil,
and you cannot look on wrongdoing;
why do you look on the treacherous
and are silent when the wicked swallow
those more righteous than they?
14 You have made people like the fish of the sea,
like crawling things that have no ruler.
15 He brings all of them up with a hook;
he drags them out with his net;
he gathers them in his seine,
so he rejoices and exults.
16 Therefore he sacrifices to his net
and makes offerings to his seine,
for by them his portion is lavish,
and his food is rich.
17 Is he then to keep on emptying his net
and destroying nations without mercy?
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Friends, we listened to Habakkuk’s first complaint to God, a complaint not brought solely by this one prophet, but rooted in a communal cry over a justice system that had collapsed from the inside. Last week, we heard God answer, but not in a way the people and their complaining prophet wanted. The answer was a mighty and growing empire which had been content to largely ignore the Hebrew kingdoms until they attempted to conquer Egypt. Now the Chaldeans had their gaze fixed on the Hebrews as their next target for imperial expansion and conquest. Tonight we hear Habakkuk’s answer back to God. It’s a sharper statement than his first complaint, because now he’s not arguing with silence. God has spoken and Habakkuk finds himself in the difficult position of arguing directly with God and still feeling compelled to counter an answer he won’t accept.
Habakkuk’s Second Complaint
Habakkuk doesn’t accuse God. Rather he confesses who God is in the form of a rhetorical question: “Are you not from of old, O Lord my God, my Holy One?” And the prophet adds a confession of who he is in relation to this God, “You shall not die.” Habakkuk reaches first for what he knows to be true. God is everlasting, God is holy, and God doesn’t pass away the way humans and their strength do.
Not only does that statement acknowledge the difference between God and himself, but it also positions the god of the Chaldeans as ultimately perishable. Remember, last week we heard that for the Chaldeans their strength, their might has become their god. But their strength is mortal strength and therefore it has an expiration date. Empires come to power and empires fall from power. Anyone who bases their strength and its divine mandate on the strength of an empire will learn that strength will lessen and disintegrate. But strength found in God has no such lifespan.
But Habakkuk goes on to acknowledge that God did indeed appoint the Chaldeans. “You have marked them for judgment,” he says to God, “and you, O Rock, have established them for punishment.” Last week’s answer stands. Habakkuk understands where God stands, but he still disputes what comes next, because if this Rock, this Holy One, is who Habakkuk says God is, then something doesn’t fit. “Your eyes are too pure to behold evil, and you cannot look on wrongdoing.” So why, he asks, does God keep looking at the treacherous and stay silent while the wicked swallow up people more righteous than they are?
The chapter closes on provocative image. Habakkuk describes his own people as fish in the sea, crawling things with no one to rule or protect them. The enemy hauls them up with a hook, drags them out with a net, gathers them into a seine, and rejoices while doing it. Worse yet, the enemy sacrifices to that net, makes offerings to it, because it’s brought in such a rich catch. The Chaldeans have turned their own instrument of conquest into an object of worship. It’s the same move Habakkuk already named last week, when he said their own strength had become their god, except now we see what that idolatry looks like in practice: figuratively bowing down to the tool that did the killing.
We might wonder why nets are presented as so terrifying and so often associated with violence in the Bible. As people who rarely if ever catch our own food, we’ve lost the experience and mechanics of the net, particularly for something like fish. Once a fish is in the net, the struggle is over. Sure, the fish may flop instinctually, but its time is limited once it meets the net.
We may have lost familiarity with rope nets and the mechanics of catching our own food, but we know proverbial nets, some near as terrifying. Churches and worship dressed up so that we ignore the violence and deception their rhetoric enables and in which their leaders participate. Candidates for office who shout, promise all manner of illusions, and approve ads which flat out lie about the world in which we live and about the conduct of their opponents. We know those nets far too well. And, yet, this chapter ends exactly where it began, unresolved, with a question hanging in the air: is this conqueror going to keep emptying his net, destroying nations without mercy, forever?
Complaint, answer, second complaint, that’s the arc of chapter one, and we’ve now walked through all three movements. Habakkuk asked why injustice was allowed to stand inside his own community. God answered with an empire from outside. And now Habakkuk asks the harder question underneath both of those: if God is who Habakkuk says God is — pure, holy, unable even to look at wrongdoing — how can God preside over this destruction at the hands of an unrighteous nation? How can God seemingly sit still while justice is perverted and the law, the defining structure of Hebrew society, is twisted from within?
Is There Anything God Can’t Do?
Habakkuk’s statement that God’s eyes are too pure to behold evil and that God cannot look on wrongdoing, is profoundly theological, particularly if we hold a doctrine which says that nothing is beyond the power of God. To be clear, Habakkuk isn’t just describing God’s preference for actions. He’s naming something of which God is incapable. And that idea, that there are things God genuinely cannot do, is one the church has taken seriously for a very long time.
Classical Christian doctrine has always held that God cannot sin. Not merely that God chooses not to, the way a person might resist a temptation, but that sin is actually impossible for God. That impossibility is built into the definition of who God is. Later Scripture will say it plainly: God cannot lie, and God cannot deny God’s own self without ceasing to be God. Theologians have argued for centuries about exactly why that’s true and what it costs to say so, but the substance of the claim goes all the way back to time immemorial, long before Habakkuk wrote it here and even longer before any of the theological language was formalized. It is neither a matter of divine willpower straining against temptation nor a way that humans attempt to limit God. It’s a matter of divine nature, which makes certain things simply unavailable to God the way falling up is unavailable to a stone.
We often throw around the word “omnipotence” without thinking through what it means. Classical Christian theology has never claimed that God can do absolutely anything, including things that are contradictions in themselves. God can’t make a square circle. God can’t make two plus two equal five. Those aren’t failures of power; they’re just nonsense, not real possibilities at all. Sin works the same way, in this account. Sin isn’t a display of strength. It’s a falling short, a corruption, a failure to be fully what something was made to be. When we say God can’t sin, we’re not describing a God with a hole in God’s power. We’re describing the character of God which is so complete that acting against it isn’t an option. Put it this way: the strongest person you know isn’t the one who could betray every friend they have and simply chooses not to each morning. The strongest, most trustworthy people we know are the ones for whom betrayal genuinely isn’t on the table, whose integrity runs so deep it’s no longer a daily contest of willpower. God’s inability to sin isn’t a cage. It’s closer to what perfect freedom actually looks like: the freedom to be fully, consistently, unshakably who God already is.
But here’s where this gets genuinely hard, and I don’t want us to rush past it: knowing that God can’t sin doesn’t answer Habakkuk’s actual question. His question isn’t whether God personally sins. His question is why a God who can’t sin keeps watching other people sin without stopping them. Those are two different questions, and it would be a cheap, dishonest move to let the first answer quietly answer the second.
God’s own purity doesn’t automatically explain God’s patience with humanity’s impurity. There’s a real gap between what God can’t do and what God, for reasons Habakkuk doesn’t yet understand, hasn’t done. That gap is exactly where Habakkuk is standing at the end of this chapter. That’s exactly where we spend much of our lives standing too.
What Comes Next
Once again, we’re not going to close that gap tonight, because the text doesn’t close it either. Chapter one ends with Habakkuk’s question still open: is the net going to keep filling forever? But he doesn’t walk away from the question, and he doesn’t stop addressing it to God. Next week, we’ll watch him do something with that unresolved question, something worth the wait and it’ll take him to a place we haven’t seen him go yet in this book, a place where waiting itself becomes the practice.
For now, it’s enough to know he doesn’t let go of it, and he doesn’t let go of God either. We leave him there tonight: certain of who God is, uncertain of why God allows what God allows, and still, somehow, waiting for whatever comes next.