Thought For The Week 2 November 2025

Welcome to our service today. We have the wonderful privilege of presenting the Boys Brigade King’s Award to Eamon Carson, who has worked hard over the past five years to meet the requirements of this high honour. Eamon will travel to Wellington in early December for the formal presentation at Government house. Well done to Eamon and all those who have supported him in this journey.

I’m drawn to the reading in Habakkuk today as I think it really speaks to our situation and the turmoil of geopolitics and international relations. We don’t know when this little book was set but the best guess is around the time of the fall of Assyria and the rise of Babylon. This was a time marked by violence and uncertainty and the competing power plays of great empires. But really it could be anytime; nations have always competed for dominance, and we seem to be at a time when the old order of international rules is breaking down and a new, scarier and unpredictable (dis) order of competing spheres of influence seem to be emerging.

Habakkuk asks, where is God in all this turmoil? Why doesn’t God do something? He even goes as far as to suggest God’s word isn’t working: “Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails.” (1:4) It’s a bold accusation bordering on heresy and yet God is not so thin skinned that he cannot handle the complaints of his people. It is the nature of our faith that God often seems absent at those times when we most need his presence. Yet Habakkuk was able to finish his prophecy with the most profound statement of faith amid doubt:

Though the fig-tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the sheepfold
and no cattle in the stalls,
¹⁸ yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will be joyful in God my Saviour.

Nga mihi nui,

Brent