God Uses Even the Wicked For His Glory - Habakkuk

Habakkuk 1:12-13 (ESV)

Habakkuk’s Second Complaint

Are you not from everlasting,

O LORD my God, my Holy One?

We shall not die.

O LORD, you have ordained them as a judgment,

and you, O Rock, have established them for reproof.

You who are of purer eyes than to see evil

and cannot look at wrong,

why do you idly look at traitors

and remain silent when the wicked swallows up

the man more righteous than he?

Habakkuk is a prophet with a few complaints about how God is conducting His business.   In the previous verses we read that God’s answer to the wickedness in Habakkuk’s nation was to send the Chaldeans nation to punish them.   The Chaldeans are not nice people.  In fact in Job 1, they are the people Satan used to destroy Job.   They are very wicked.   This is where Habakkuk has a problem.   He simply asks in this complaint toward God, “How can you use a people more wicked than his own nation to punish his nation.   This seems like a logical argument.   

What Habakkuk doesn’t realize is that God rose up the Chaldeans and allowed their wickedness for this very purpose.   God chose the nation of Israel for Himself.  They were turning their back on their Father, Yahweh.   God requires more from His people than He does from those who come to power only because they are wicked.  God does use wickedness in this world to be a tool to correct His people.  God does not create the wicked.   They are just a people absent God’s grace.   But God will move these people into His service to correct and discipline His children.  Note what the prophet Isaiah says about God and how He rises up wicked men to do His work:

Isaiah 45:5-7 (ESV)

I am the LORD, and there is no other,

besides me there is no God;

I equip you, though you do not know me,

that people may know, from the rising of the sun

and from the west, that there is none besides me;

I am the LORD, and there is no other.

I form light and create darkness;

I make well-being and create calamity;

I am the LORD, who does all these things.

God will and does use even the wicked in this world for His ultimate glory.