The Telescope Nobody Wanted to Look Through

In 1847, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis made a discovery that should have changed medicine overnight. Working in a Vienna maternity ward where one in ten mothers died of childbed fever, he noticed something stunning: when doctors simply washed their hands between the autopsy room and the delivery room, the death rate plummeted to barely one percent. The answer had been hiding in plain sight — on their own unwashed hands.

The medical establishment refused to believe it. Colleagues mocked him. Journal editors rejected his findings. The idea that distinguished physicians were themselves the carriers of death was too offensive, too disruptive to accept. Semmelweis died in obscurity in 1865, and it took another twenty years before germ theory vindicated everything he had tried to tell them.

God told Habakkuk something similar: "Look among the nations and watch — be utterly astounded! For I will work a work in your days which you would not believe, though it were told you." The Almighty was about to use Babylon — violent, pagan Babylon — as His instrument of correction for Judah. It was the last thing any faithful Israelite wanted to hear.

Yet this is how the Most High often works. His answers arrive in packaging we would never choose, through instruments we would never select. The question Habakkuk forces us to ask is not whether God is working, but whether we have the courage to believe Him when His work looks nothing like what we expected.