When the Lord tells Habakkuk and Judah what he is going to do about the problem of violence and injustice in Judah, it is a surprising thing. It is not exactly what Habakkuk was looking for. Martin Lloyd Jones has pointed out in his book, From Fear to Faith, on this passage in Habakkuk, that that is frequently the way God seems to work—his answers to our prayers are often very unexpected, and sometimes the way in which he answers our prayers creates more mysteries for us than we had when we could not understand why he did not seem to be involving himself in doing anything. Lloyd Jones makes the following point, which I think is instructive: We all tend to prescribe the answers to our prayers. What does he mean? It means something like this: that we do not just lay out the need and the petition, but we also either state or have in our mind the way we think God ought to answer that request and petition. We all tend to prescribe the answers to our prayers.¹

Ralph Davis