Habakkuk 1:15-16 –
<15> Must we be strung up on their hooks and caught in their nets while they rejoice and celebrate?
<16> Then they will worship their nets and burn incense in front of them. “These nets are the gods who have made us rich!” they will claim.
Funny how this was written 2600 years ago and it seems to apply to us today. Habakkuk saw injustice in this world and started to ask God why it went unpunished. Also, how wicked men can seem to prosper while doing wrong things. These seem to be questions we ask today while looking at where we have settled. In this day and age it has become acceptable to compromise God’s laws and justify them for feelings. Business and individuals put their own self-interest over that of the people.
Don’t get me wrong I am not preaching about how people should not succeed, but to do so violating ethics is where the line should be drawn. Unfortunately today the ethical line has been drawn down the letter S to create a “$” sign! This housing debacle is a classic example of what Habakkuk must have been seeing. In today’s mess everyone put the all mighty dollar before ethics. Everyone was rolling on a bubble that seemed to not stop. Housing prices went up, people borrowed more and bought more, banks we happy since they were making money hand over fist. Then 2007 happened and things changed.
The bubble popped, housing prices crashed, people were unable to pay off debt, houses were being foreclosed on and people were losing jobs. It was a mess and times were tough. People suddenly began to see these banks that wrote a ton of “risky” debt get bailed out, yet they were still losing their homes. Then the underbelly got really exposed on how these banks were getting “free” money from the fed and leveraging it on risky loans. Now I don’t mind risky activities that result in failure, it is part of business. What bothers me, like Habakkuk must have felt, is people are getting rewarded for committing out and out fraud while their victims go homeless.
Oh we could go on for days lamenting the injustices we see in this world. We could point out people who have no problem with evil succeeding while Godly people fail and ask God why. We could get upset and occupy some place to protest these injustices, only to be made fools by the fraudsters. Or we could rest in the peace of Jesus’ grace and love, so we could actually pray for the evil in this world. God will eventually deal with them, just not our job worry about it. Maybe we need to accept that will happen in life and we need to focus on the eternal rewards and less on the temporal!