Our Everlasting Savior God
God is truly an everlasting Savior. This gives me comfort every day. Take a read through Habakkuk 1:12 today.
O LORD, are you not from everlasting? My God, my Holy One, we will not die. O LORD, you have appointed them to execute judgment; O Rock, you have ordained them to punish.
In this verse from the minor prophet Habakkuk, he is recounting the battle against Israel by the Chaldeans. The Chaldeans are winning, mostly due to the sins that Israel has wrought against God. Habakkuk is lamenting and trying to understand which is worse: the sins that they have committed, or the punishment that has resulted from them. While Habakkuk realizes that they have brought this upon themselves, he wonders aloud if God is still on the side of the Israelites or not. The Chaldeans themselves were wicked warriors in their own right, who did not honor God, but worship other idols.
You might be wondering what the significance of this verse is, written by a lowly minor prophet. First of all, just because Habakkuk isn’t as well known as the Major Prophets like Jeremiah or Isaiah, God used the ordinary among the Israelites, as he does still today to deliver important messages. God’s ways are higher than our ways. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:9. That characteristic of God has never changed and is the same today as it was back then.
When Habakkuk makes reference in the first part of the verse, he is asking God about his everlasting nature. The eternity of God’s nature is valid; if he is from everlasting, then he will be to everlasting for the Israelites and also for us today. The importance of that fact is that God will see to it that, unlike the Chaldeans, His children will still sit beside Him in heaven, no matter what ordeal they might go through. The Chaldean idol worshipers will have a future of eternal strife. This is a crucial promise that God has made to all Christians.
The second part of this verse provides an even greater comfort to us. Habakkuk is reaffirming that God is his Holy One. Because he believes that, and holds it in his heart as truth, Habakkuk will not die, but will in fact be with God in the end. He is reminding the Israelites how important this is, to love God with all their hearts above all else. Again, this is the same truth for Christians today. As we profess our complete love for God just as Habakkuk did, and that God is our savior and not attribute the goodness in our live as from idols, then God will truly deliver us from the eternal torment of hell.
