Habakkuk’s message is a definitive response to the problem of sin that so troubled the prophet. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ reveal both the certainty of God’s final victory over evil and the possibility of salvation through His Messiah. In light of these truths, we can celebrate God’s patience in withholding judgment and do our utmost to bring the gospel to the ends of the earth until His return (2 Peter 3:9).

Habakkuk’s deep desire for God-honoring justice and his strong negative reaction to its absence make his book all too relevant to contemporary readers. Inundated as we are with disturbing news and images from around the world, the sheer scale of the problem will appear overwhelming if we do not view it in light of the gospel. Furthermore, Habakkuk’s awareness of his own moral shortcomings and those of his compatriots show that the problem of sin is deeply rooted in human nature, and so includes all of us. But despite the gravity of the situation in Judah and beyond its borders, God’s answers to the prophet’s exasperated prayers bring him from a state of doubt and despair to one of firm faith and joy, even before anything has changed in Judah or abroad.
Three elements of this short book stand out for both their contribution to the prophet’s spiritual reorientation and their potential to guide our attitudes, actions, and expectations in a world that seems as unhinged and self-destructive as the ancient Near East in the late seventh century BC.
1. God is not indifferent to injustice in Judah.
This truth amounts to a direct rebuttal of what seems to be Habakkuk’s assumption at the beginning of the book. He does not go so far as to accuse God of injustice, but unless God does something, that conclusion appears to be inevitable (Hab. 1:2–4). God’s response to the prophet is patient and instructive. His commitment to bring judgment against sinful Judah (Habakkuk’s initial concern) shows that His covenantal commitment to His people does not guarantee their immunity to sin’s consequences. God is not indifferent to injustice.
But when God reveals to the prophet that He will use the Babylonians to punish Judah, Habakkuk is again mystified. Presuming that Judah is “more righteous” than Babylon (Hab. 1:13), he implies that if God were to allow this, this too would be to countenance evil (Hab. 1:13).
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None of this is to defend the cruelties associated with slavery. It is simply to say that Brown’s response was the wrong one, and that we should neither approve it nor celebrate him. Brown was celebrated for his militancy, and he seems to have regarded such militancy as the proper fruit of the Christian faith.

In 1860 a newspaper called The Christian Watchman and Reflector published a series of letters from Charles Spurgeon, in one of which he denied rumors that the American publishers of his works excised material that might be offensive to slaveholders. Highly perturbed at the suggestion, Spurgeon said, amongst other things, that “any slaveholder who should show himself in our neighborhood would get a mark which he would carry to his grave, if it did not carry him there.” He finished the letter in view by saying that “John Brown is immortal in the memories of the good in England, and in my heart he lives.” Here we have a minister of the gospel with a high reputation and wide influence expressing his opinion with such fervor as to descend into talk of his neighbors possibly murdering foreign citizens and praising an insurrectionist.
This is of interest because the statement in view is cited as proof that many evangelicals condemned slavery at the same time that many southern Protestants were defending it. It is certainly proof of that sober truth, though there are plenty of other sources that make the same point that lack the regrettable character of Mr. Spurgeon’s statement here. To be sure, he did not say that he would approve such lawless violence, much less that he would participate; and it is conceivable that Victorian era Englishmen were not quite as prone to waylaying foreigners as Mr. Spurgeon suggests. It could be that he was so caught up in a fit of high dudgeon that he wrote more boldly than was warranted, and that the talk of lawless violence was idle banter.
Whatever the case, it was not in accord with the duty of his office to speak in such a manner, and it is a point of curiosity that contemporary critics of 1800s southern evangelical attitudes about slavery so readily latch upon examples such as this. Such critics are quick to point at the perceived hypocrisy of claiming Christ while at the same time defending a civil institution that oppressed its participants and was often attended by great physical cruelty. And so in finding grounds to condemn the violence and hypocrisy of slaveholding they . . . . latch upon examples of evangelicals mentioning violence approvingly.
This is a strange method, surely, and it goes far to undermine the critics’ own moral authority. Why, pray tell, do we consider slavery wrong? Is it not because it does violence to the dignity of its unwilling participants, holding them in bondage and subjecting them, in many cases, to harsh punishments for flight or disobedience? Is it not because of the chain and the lash, the separation of families and the prohibition of literacy, and because of all the other things that denied equal protection and rights under the law and reduced slaves to being a permanent under caste? Is it not because the whole institution denied them their rights as human beings whose nature is no different from that of people of other classes and ethnicities? Why then would it be any less evil to do similar things to other people, including slaveholders or people who are citizens or public officials of places where slavery was legal? Mistreatment is wrong regardless of who does it or why, and our Lord forbids vengeance (Lev. 19:18; Deut. 32:35; Rom. 12:19; Heb. 10:30) and prohibits former victims of oppression oppressing others in turn (Ex. 22:21; comp. Deut. 23:7).
It is here that John Brown enters the question. Many people in his day regarded him as a hero with few equals, and after his death he was hailed as a martyr and prophet, Henry David Thoreau saying that he had become “an angel of light” and a popular camp tune saying that he was “John the Baptist of the Christ we are to see.” That enthusiasm has not dimmed, it seems, for Christianity Today has published an article urging the glad acceptance of Brown as an evangelical hero.
John Brown was hanged for treason and murder for leading the seizure of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) as part of a scheme to forcibly abolish slavery in the southern states. Brown’s plan was to use his action to incite slaves in the surrounding areas to flee their masters and join his forces, after which they would march southward, collecting men and materiel as they went. Ostensibly his forces would fight only in self-defense if accosted.
That last bit makes for a large claim to swallow when we remember that Brown had already attained national notoriety for organizing private militants in the Bleeding Kansas crisis earlier in the 1850s. Brown had presided over the Pottawatomie Massacre, in which five men had been hacked to death in what can only be considered cold-blooded murder. The other facts are also against interpreting his plan and actions as a scheme of fomenting an armed-but-purely-defensive insurrection, such as that two of the five men his band killed at Harpers Ferry were unarmed. One was the mayor, the other a free black man who was the first victim and who was shot in the back. If these killings were against Brown’s intentions, as has been suggested, they nonetheless suggest that he had poor control over his force that he had trained for his occupation of the arsenal; and it is hard to imagine that he would have had any better control over the multitudes of strangers whom he expected to rally to his standard.
It is likely that arming large numbers of escaped slaves, whatever Brown’s ostensible intention, would have led to aggression and even the wanton taking of vengeance on their part. Virginia’s earlier slave revolt 28 years before (Nat Turner’s) had been attended by the killing of civilians, including women and children. It is simply not human nature for spontaneous mobs to act only in self-defense and to eschew all criminal and vengeful tendencies. And notwithstanding that Brown attempted to give legitimacy to his efforts by establishing a ‘provisional government’ replete with offices and constitution, what Brown actually attempted, whether he realized it or not, was to foment an enormous mob, probably the largest in the history of the country. Had he succeeded he would have been culpable for any excesses that such a mob committed, but as it was he gained very little support.
There is another fault with such an argument, which is that it is generally a principle of law that one cannot provoke resistance by threats or assault and then use force to repel the violence that ensues: the initial provocation makes one the aggressor, so that every subsequent action is a furtherance of the aggression and cannot be justified as defensive. Brown was the aggressor in the Harpers Ferry affair, for he started it by seizing the arsenal, and then continued it by taking hostages and preventing the lawful authorities from repossessing it or rescuing them. When it was then claimed that his subsequent fighting with state and federal forces was in self-defense (as his defense attempted at his trial), the claim is null – and more than a little brazen and absurd.
One cannot break into someone’s house and take him captive, and then say that he acted in self-defense by firing at the police when they surrounded the house. All notion of self-defense goes out the window when one first commences his criminal venture. And yet that is essentially what Brown did, except that he acted not merely against a single private individual and domicile, but against an entire commonwealth and its populace.
I have no desire to impugn the faith or integrity of those who have lionized Brown through the decades. Indeed, anyone who would allow that Spurgeon remark above to dissuade him from reading Spurgeon appreciatively would be doing himself an enormous disservice, for flights of indignation notwithstanding, Spurgeon was greatly used by God and is well worth reading. Remarks like that above are drowned out by the enormous quantities of edifying material he produced: it is as a flake of chaff in an ocean of grace.
But I do think that such people, be they past or present, are sorely mistaken on this point. There is nothing in the New Testament that justifies fomenting armed rebellion. Romans 13 says, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities” and “whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.” Granting the institution of southern slavery was evil, it does not follow that it should have been countered by violent force. “Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all” (Rom. 12:17). Evil must be opposed righteously; and fomenting rebellion that was likely to lead to widespread bloodshed cannot be deemed righteous. It is in direct contradiction of the commands to “live peaceably with all” and “overcome evil with good” (12:18, 21).
And in the outcome of Brown’s misadventure at Harpers Ferry we see the wisdom of our Lord’s instructions on this point. Brown’s insurrection failed utterly. He gained only a handful of supporters among the local slave population; succeeded in getting himself, many of his men, and several citizens killed; and further aggravated the already tense relations between North and South, ultimately playing an important role in provoking secession and the subsequent war that killed more than 620,000 men.
Over against all this we must remember that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, and that he did not come to establish it by means of force (Jn. 18:36). When someone mentioned an example of Pilate’s cruelty toward the Jews (including sacrilegious murder), Christ declined to cry aloud for temporal justice and instead urged his hearers to take heed for their souls and repent while they had time (Lk. 13:1-3). His way is not the way of social revolution, but of patient long-suffering (Matt. 5:39) and of repaying evil with good (Lk. 6:28; Rom. 12:14, 20; 1 Pet. 3:9). Those who, like Brown, attempt to find in Christ’s message a justification for armed revolution contradict the essence of that message, and many of its particulars (2 Tim. 2:24; Tit. 3:1-2; Heb. 12:14; Jas. 3:17).
None of this is to defend the cruelties associated with slavery. It is simply to say that Brown’s response was the wrong one, and that we should neither approve it nor celebrate him. Brown was celebrated for his militancy, and he seems to have regarded such militancy as the proper fruit of the Christian faith. In his speech at his conviction he appealed to Scripture as justifying his actions:
Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction.
When someone celebrates Brown he is therefore celebrating a man who contradicted the teaching of Scripture under the guise of fulfilling it. Against this, consider these words and ponder whether John Brown’s behavior accords with them: “Whoever says he abides in him [Christ] ought to walk in the same way in which he walked” (1 Jn. 2:6). Christ walked in the way of works of mercy and witness, and his death redeemed the souls of many. Brown walked in the way of the sword and came to the end which Christ predicted of those who do so (Matt. 26:52), and his death brought not peace but division and strife and a war that consumed multitudes. It is no part of our faith to honor such a man, and the scriptural data abundantly point the other way.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation. 
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A church not in friendly cooperation with the SBC cannot seat messengers. What must a church do in order to be in “friendly cooperation” and thereby to seat messengers? Among other things, such a church must have “a faith and practice which closely identifies with the Convention’s adopted statement of faith.”

I just read a helpful thread by Bart Barber, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), about cooperation and non-connectionalism in Southern Baptist life. Among other things, he writes:
This local-church non-connectionalism simply says that two churches can do something together without taking on any responsibility before God for the other church…
This idea is woven into Article XIV (“Cooperation”) and Article XV (“The Christian and the Social Order”) of The Baptist Faith & Message. Those articles remind churches that it does not compromise a church’s faith to cooperate with other churches who differ theologically.
Quoting from the Baptist Faith & Message, he elaborates:
“Christian unity in the New Testament sense is spiritual harmony and voluntary cooperation for common ends by various groups of Christ’s people.”
“Cooperation is desirable…when such cooperation involves no violation of conscience or compromise of loyalty to Christ and His Word as revealed in the New Testament.”
Thus, so long as the ACTIVITIES do not violate conscience, the mere cooperation does not do so.
Let me say, first of all, that I agree with all of this. But as I was reading it, I also thought there might be one false implication worth warning against. This is not an implication that Bart embraces in his thread. It’s just one that some readers might be tempted to draw themselves. Here it is. While it is true that Southern Baptist churches in friendly cooperation may have many theological differences among them, it does not follow that all theological differences are therefore a matter of indifference to our cooperation.
Article 4 of the SBC Constitution has something profound to say about cooperation among our churches. Here it is:
While independent and sovereign in its own sphere, the Convention does not claim and will never attempt to exercise any authority over any other Baptist body, whether church, auxiliary organizations, associations, or convention.
There are two parts to this, and both are crucial. Let’s take the second part first. The second part guarantees the autonomy of local churches. The SBC does not have authority over any Baptist church (or any other church for that matter). Those churches really are independent and may run themselves how ever they see fit. Hopefully, they will order their congregations under Christ’s Lordship as revealed in Holy Scripture. But even if they do not, the SBC has no authority over those churches to make them do or believe anything.
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