It was a warm Texas morning in August 2001, and at the Prairie Chapel Ranch, a CIA agent was on hand to discuss with the president today's top-secret daily brief. The heading of one portion: “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” He'd been trouble for years. In February 1998, Osama bin Muhammad bin Laden had released a declaration of war, complaining that “for over seven years, the United States has been occupying the most sacred of the Islamic lands, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors...”1 Later that year, he gave an interview tarring Americans as “a people whose votes are won when innocents die, whose leader commits adultery and great sins and then sees his popularity rise – a vile people who have never understood the meaning of values.”2 And he argued for a religious obligation to “hate Americans, hate Jews, and hate Christians.”3 And now, the briefing explained to the president, “after US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington. … FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”4 Unbeknownst to American intelligence, nine months after having given that interview, Bin Laden heard news coverage of an angry pilot who, in October 1999, crashed his airplane deliberately off the New England coast to spite his boss; and Bin Laden's immediate thought was to imagine the statement it would've made if the pilot had targeted a financial complex.5 From there... the rest is tragic history.
Nearly two thousand miles west of Bin Laden's Afghani hideaway and over twenty-six hundred years earlier, September approached as another man stood amidst the devastation he'd rained down on the greatest city in the world. That man was Nabopolassar, a Chaldean who fourteen years earlier had managed to lay claim to a throne in Babylon. Babylon and its surrounding region, historic Akkad, had long been held down by Assyrian rule as part of their empire, and had been nearly destroyed by the Assyrian king Sennacherib six decades before Nabopolassar took power. Not unlike Bin Laden's declaration in 1998, Nabopolassar too issued a declaration, saying that “the city of Sennacherib..., plunderer of Babylon, its roots I shall pluck out and the foundations of the land I shall obliterate.”6 And, again not unlike Bin Laden, Nabopolassar saw himself as a deeply religious man, describing himself as “Nabopolassar, the humble, the reverent, the one who worships the gods.”7
“When I was young,” he'd said, “although I was the son of a nobody, I constantly sought the sanctuaries of my lords Nabu and Marduk,” two of the chief Babylonian gods. And they “called me to the lordship over land and people. … The Assyrian, who had ruled Akkad because of divine anger and had oppressed the people of the country with his heavy yoke, I – the weak one, the powerless one... – chased them out of the land of Akkad, and I had them throw off their yoke.”8 Nabopolassar led an uprising to liberate his land from the Assyrian presence.
But in the end, it wasn't enough to push the Assyrians out. They had to be terrorized in their own land. That, Nabopolassar believed, wasn't his own idea – it was a divine inspiration, a religious mission: “On the orders of Nabu and Marduk, who love my kingship..., I killed the [Assyrian] and turned his lands into tells and ruin heaps.”9 And to cap it off, Nabopolassar – with his Median allies from the east – had besieged the Assyrian capital of Nineveh for three months.10 “They laugh at every fortress, for they pile up earth” in a siege ramp “and take it” (Habakkuk 1:10). And so they did. Breaking through Nineveh's wide gates, they massacred men young and old, women, even children; they toppled stone from atop stone; they set fires, leaving a thick layer of ash in the wreckage.11 It was there that Nabopolassar sat in triumph, enthroned over the ashen rubble.
He thought of his sons – “Nebuchadnezzar, my firstborn son, beloved of my heart,” and “Nabu-shum-lishir, his close brother..., the younger brother, my darling” – and their needs and futures.12 Babylon's infrastructure and economy had been shattered by decades of foreign rule and war. The plunder taken from Nineveh was a start, but not enough. Babylon would need tribute and resources to thrive. So too, Nabopolassar couldn't risk that rival powers like the Urartians would fill the vacuum led by the Assyrian collapse.13 And so, alongside cleaning up the remains of Assyria's government-in-exile, Nabopolassar and his troops set their minds to “march through the breadth of the earth and seize dwellings not their own” (Habakkuk 1:6). But again, it wasn't for purely secular goals. Nabopolassar believed he was on a mission from his gods: “When the great lord Marduk gave me land and people to rule over, he ordered me to plunder my enemy's land.”14 To him, that terrorism is justice.
And so the Babylonians marched quickly back and forth between home and the field – year after year “they fly like an eagle swift to devour,” with “their horses swifter than leopards, more fierce than the evening wolves” (Habakkuk 1:8), burning and plundering cities in the Urartian mountains and capturing cities on the banks of the Euphrates.15 These were small states, hardly able to put up a resistance like the great world powers could. Nabopolassar was practically mocking them: “At kings they scoff, and at rulers they laugh..., then they sweep by like the wind and go on” (Habakkuk 1:10-11).
It was during all this that the temple musician Habakkuk had been praying to the LORD, the God of Israel, with a focus on Judah's society and Judah's woes – the local injustice, the local violence, the local misrule. We heard last Sunday about all the problems Jeremiah and Habakkuk were noticing in these years, after the swift collapse of King Josiah's reforms after his death, and the return to practical Egyptian slavery under King Jehoiakim. In trying to minister to God's people in song and prophecy, Habakkuk gathered all the tears and fears of the downcast and downtrodden and poured them as burning question marks at God's feet (Habakkuk 1:2-4).
In response, the LORD calls on not just Habakkuk alone, but all the scoffing and prideful of Judah who will hear the words he passes on, to lift up their eyes from their own internal affairs and consider the world beyond themselves. “Look among the nations, and see; wonder, and be astounded! For I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation … They are dreaded and fearsome; their justice and dignity go forth from themselves” (Habakkuk 1:5-7). And God goes on, in the verses that follow, to detail in vivid pictures just how ferocious and hungry the Babylonians will be for captives, dwellings, and plunder (Habakkuk 1:8-11).
And I wonder if Habakkuk can see, as God speaks to and through him, what's to come. Because at the moment, the Babylonians don't seem like a major concern. It's Egypt that killed King Josiah, it's Egypt that kidnapped King Jehoahaz, it's Egypt that put King Jehoiakim on the throne – Egypt's the problem, and the Babylonians are far away, only meddling in a few petty cities to the distant northeast. But in a year or two at most, Nabopolassar will get sick, sick enough to send his eldest son Nebuchadnezzar to go face the Egyptians and Assyrians in battle at Carchemish. It'll be Babylon's greatest victory, chasing Pharaoh back to Egypt. Not long after the battle closes, Nebuchadnezzar will hear word of his father's death, and rush back to Babylon to be crowned king on September 7.16 Just like his father, Nebuchadnezzar sees himself as a deeply religious man on a mission: “the reverent servant who is very attentive to and mindful of the will of the gods, true heir of Nabopolassar king of Babylon, am I,” he says.17 Turning right around, he'll promptly head west, and before you know it he'll be on Jehoiakim's doorstep, squeezing Judah and all her neighbors for tribute and plunder, and setting in motion the chain of events that will lead to Judah's greatest national catastrophe of the era – something like their 9/11.
The message God brings to Habakkuk, then, is an unexpected one. Presidential briefing aside, no one saw 9/11 coming. On September 10, an artist working at the World Trade Center mused to herself, “Nothing can happen to this building.”18 When hijackings were reported, people in the Federal Aviation Administration wondered, “How could a hijacker force the pilot... to fly into the building?”, since “there had never been a situation where hijackers ever flew the plane.”19 And when the Pentagon was hit, the assistant secretary of defense remembers: “I thought there must have been a car bomb. What's extraordinary to me is that we knew that two commercial air liners had hit the World Trade Center, a terrorist attack, and smart people were guessing it was al-Qaeda. Yet when something bad happened here, it didn't occur to us that it was another airliner.”20 In much the same way, God was briefing Judah, but “you would not believe if told” (Habakkuk 1:5).
The message God brings to Habakkuk is also a devastating one. We all have a sense of the horrible, immense evil brought to our shores twenty-one years ago today by those who believed themselves divinely authorized to terrorize us. And just the same, the Babylonians were poised to bring a horrible, immense evil to Judah. First they'll come and demand submission, and when the Philistine city of Ashkelon – closest to Egypt – refuses, Nebuchadnezzar will make an example of it: “He marched on Ashkelon, he took it..., seized its king, pillaged and plundered it; he reduced the city to a heap of rubble.”21 A few years later, Nebuchadnezzar will besiege Jerusalem, and after three months he'll take the young new king Jeconiah, his family, the elite, and skilled laborers captive, and leave Josiah's other son to rule as King Zedekiah. But when even Zedekiah reigns in unrighteousness and rebellion, Nebuchadnezzar will come again and besiege the city a year and a half or more, leading to mass starvation, before finally breaking in, wrecking everything, and burning even God's holy temple (where Habakkuk works) to ashes – just like Nineveh, so even Jerusalem and her temple.
And in light of that, it disturbs Habakkuk that God is taking credit for what's to come. The LORD is clear about at least one thing: “I am doing a work..., I am raising up the Chaldeans” (Habakkuk 1:5-6). With this mental picture of exactly what the Chaldeans were planning, you can understand why Habakkuk and his hearers would be upset! Can you imagine a prophet shouting in Manhattan in August 2001 that God said, “I am raising up al-Qaeda”? How would people have reacted? How does the hypothetical feel even today? And yet that's much the equivalent of God's message in these verses.
Now, God himself describes them as “guilty men whose own might is their god” (Habakkuk 1:11). And so too, Habakkuk has to concede: “O LORD, you have ordained them as a judgment” (Habakkuk 1:12). It was Judah's choices that got them into this situation of suffering – Judah's behavior had given them no grounds to claim a special exemption. But Habakkuk does have an objection. Habakkuk's been complaining about Judah being a violent place, and God turns his attention to the Babylonians, who “all come for violence” (Habakkuk 1:9). Is violence plus violence really going to equal peace? And if the LORD God of Israel is really the one raising up the Chaldeans, still Nabopolassar sure doesn't think so – he's acting in the name of his idols (Nabu, Marduk, and the rest of their crew). Theirs are pagan religious motives, not an act of service to God. If God chooses them as his tool, doesn't that run the risk of endorsement or confusion? God, Habakkuk says, “cannot look at wrong,” so how can God tolerate it when Nabopolassar or his wicked son “swallows up the man more righteous than he” (Habakkuk 1:13)? What sense does it make to try writing straight with crooked lines – for a righteous God to fix human injustice by bigger human injustice, or for a pure God to wash Judah's stains clean with mud?
That's what Habakkuk wants to know. It's what we'd like to know, too, especially today. This is not the passage that gives us those answers. But it is a passage that calls for a response. Habakkuk is understandably disturbed. And many in Judah are scoffing. God has spoken of something truly dreadful. But he invites us to view it as a wonder – not something wonderful, in our modern sense of excellent and good, but something astonishing that yet ought to be believed because we've been told (Habakkuk 1:5). As unexpected and devastating and morally troubling as the message might be, it challenges Judah to believe the unbelievable, to respond to events before they happen, and to behold the dreadful wonder as God's work with a claim on their lives.
This dreadful wonder is yet God's work, God's plan that – despite all appearances to the contrary – is a plan to bring peace and not evil, to yield a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29:11). For if Jehoiakim's government was evil and corrupt, well, Jehoiakim will die during the first Babylonian siege. If Judah's society privileges the wealthy, Babylon will drain some of that economic inequality away by taking tribute. If Judah's elites oppress, many of those same officials will be among the first captives taken away to Babylon. There are potential answers in this mess to what was ailing Habakkuk's nation – but Judah can either seize the solution or resist until more radical treatments are required. Sadly, she picked what was behind Door #2 again and again.
God's word about raising up the Chaldeans was an astounding message to Judah's scoffers, a call to respond to a God dreadfully and wonderfully at work in a world beyond their borders, in a way that shook their safety but would be made good in time. I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet – I cannot say if, twenty-one years ago, God was working a dreadful wonder in what happened, with a similar message for America's scoffers. But while I may not be a prophet, I am a preacher of the gospel. And in those Gospel books, I read how Jesus began among his own disciples to teach about God's dreadful wonder whereby he'd be rejected and killed and rise again (Mark 8:31). In response to that, just as Judah's scoffers wouldn't believe if told, Jesus' own disciples didn't believe when told (Mark 8:32). Jesus comes across as plenty disappointed when Peter tries to rebuke him. He points out: “You are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. … If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:33-34).
It was a dark image, the cross. To Jewish eyes, crucifixion was a kind of penalty earned by magicians, bandits, and blasphemers. To Roman eyes, crucifixion was a tool of the state for making an example of criminals and rebellious slaves. To think of a cross as a pathway to wisdom was repulsive and nonsensical, “for the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing..., a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:18, 23). This word of the cross – that a man crucified by Rome as a criminal has thereby been qualified to rise from the dead, present himself as God, invite us to follow him to the cross, and pledge to return to rule the world – is certainly not a word that anybody expected. Even Jesus' first disciples didn't expect the crucifixion although they were told; and when it happened, they were as devastated and traumatized by it as those who watched the towers fall. So too, its preaching was offensive to the worldviews of Jew and Gentile alike. To Gentiles, it required accepting that the LORD God of Israel – not Mars or Marduk, nor Nero nor Nebuchadnezzar – turned the wheels of history, and that the cross of Christ was the crux around which it turns. To Jews, it meant admitting a liberty greater than the Law had come, injustice inverted in the curse of a cross, and that persecutors as pagan as Nabopolassar could be washed and welcomed in to the new Israel of God.
With a message so surprising, devastating, and offensive, it's no wonder that Paul ended a sermon by quoting God's words to Habakkuk as a warning: “Beware, therefore, lest what is said in the Prophets should come about: 'Look, you scoffers, be astounded and perish, for I am doing a work in your days, a work that you will not believe, even if one tells it to you'” (Acts 13:40-41). The word of the cross foretold for them a dreadful wonder: that God's work for their hope and their future passed through the cross, was shaped like a cross. And so to us now. We live beneath the dreadful wonder of the cross, and God yet makes the cross manifest in his Church in ways that often strike the world, and ourselves, as dreadful: lukewarm water, sticky oil, fragile bread, stinging wine, repetitive words, confessed sins, wounded bodies, tear-stained cheeks, dreamy hopes. The gospel can be frightful and devastating and offensive and laughable, to those whose mindset is shaped by the things of man. “But to us who are being saved, it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). Where the cross confronts us with a dreadful wonder here and now, will we scoff? Will we sidestep? Or will we seek salvation? Let us not shy away from the wonder that God has chosen to give salvation such a dreadful shape as a cross, and that he unexpectedly founds his Church nowhere else than on this. Amen.
1 Osama bin Laden, et al., “World Islamic Front Statement Urging Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” 23 February 1998, reprinted in Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Mileli, eds., Al-Qaeda in Its Own Words (Belknap Press, 2008), 53-54.
2 Osama bin Laden, interview with Al-Jazeera, December 1998, in Bruce B. Lawrence, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (Verso, 2005), 70.
3 Osama bin Laden, interview with Al-Jazeera, December 1998, in Bruce B. Lawrence, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (Verso, 2005), 87.
4 President's Daily Briefing, 6 August 2001, in Stephen E. Atkins, ed., 9/11: The Essential Reference Guide (ABC-CLIO, 2021), 199-200.
5 Osama bin Laden, “The Birth of the Idea of September 11,” handwritten note from September 2002, quoted in Nelly Lahoud, The Bin Laden Papers: How the Abbottabad Raid Revealed the Truth about Al-Qaeda, Its Leader, and His Family (Yale University Press, 2022), 16-17.
6 Nabopolassar, BM 55467 7'-8', in Pamela Gerardi, “Declaring War in Mesopotamia,” Archiv für Orientforschung (1986): 36.
7 Nabopolassar, Euphrates Inscription (C21), in Rocio Da Riva, The Inscriptions of Nabopolassar, Amel-Marduk, and Neriglissar (De Gruyter, 2013), 69.
8 Nabopolassar, Imgur-Enlil Inscription (C32), in Rocio Da Riva, The Inscriptions of Nabopolassar, Amel-Marduk, and Neriglissar (De Gruyter, 2013), 96.
9 Nabopolassar, Etemenanki Inscription (C31), in Rocio Da Riva, The Inscriptions of Nabopolassar, Amel-Marduk, and Neriglissar (De Gruyter, 2013), 88.
10 Babylonian chronicle for 612 BC, in Jean-Jacques Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles (Society of Biblical Literature, 2004), 223.
11 Marc Van De Mieroop, “The Sack of Nineveh in 612 BC,” in Lucas Petit and Gabriele Bonacossi, eds., Nineveh, the Great City: Symbol of Beauty and Power (Sidestone Press, 2017), 244.
12 Nabopolassar, Etemenanki Inscription (C31), in Rocio Da Riva, The Inscriptions of Nabopolassar, Amel-Marduk, and Neriglissar (De Gruyter, 2013), 89.
13 Oded Lipschits, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem: Judah under Babylonian Rule (Eisenbrauns, 2005), 30-32.
14 Nabopolassar, Etemananki Brick Inscription (B6), in Rocio Da Riva, The Inscriptions of Nabopolassar, Amel-Marduk, and Neriglissar (De Gruyter, 2013), 43.
15 Babylonian chronicles for 612-606 BC, in Jean-Jacques Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles (Society of Biblical Literature, 2004), 223-227.
16 Babylonian chronicle for 605 BC, in Jean-Jacques Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles (Society of Biblical Literature, 2004), 227-229.
17 Nebuchadnezzar II, cylinder inscription C200/C213, at <http://oracc.iaas.upenn.edu/ribo/babylon7/Q005485/html>.
18 Monika Bravo, quoted in Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (Avid Reader Press, 2019), 6.
19 Ben Sliney, quoted in Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (Avid Reader Press, 2019), 90.
20 Torie Clarke, quoted in Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (Avid Reader Press, 2019), 97-98.
21 Babylonian chronicle for 604 BC, in Jean-Jacques Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles (Society of Biblical Literature, 2004), 229.
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