Habakkuk climbs before he writes. The prophet opens with a complaint about the news of his day: violence before his eyes, strife on every side, a slack law, and the wicked hemming in the righteous. He cries out to God for an answer. God’s first answer troubles him more: the Chaldeans, Babylon’s armies, on the march.
So Habakkuk stops arguing and takes a post. “I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me.” The Hebrew verb behind “watch to see,” tsaphah, describes a body at work. Strong’s concordance defines it “to lean forward, i.e. to peer into the distance.” Ezekiel’s watchman draws his title from the same root. Habakkuk leans out over the wall, eyes on the horizon, and waits for a voice.
The voice answers with a writing assignment.
Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.
I carry that verse as my personal mission for this hour: watch for the vision, write it plain, and publish it where a person can read it on the run. Read one verse back, and the mission starts on a tower, with a man leaning toward the horizon.
01Thirty years of mornings
For thirty years I read mornings for a living. I founded Kaieteur News in Guyana, built newsrooms in Guyana and Canada, and wrote a Stabroek News column called Ways of Looking and Feeling. In that column I tried to step back from the day’s quarrel, find the wider picture, and search for solutions. A newsroom drills one posture into a reporter: lean over the morning and ask what happened.
Bible college classrooms, and later study toward a Master of Divinity at Tyndale in Toronto, set a second question beside the first: what did God already say about this? I keep both questions on one desk.
I read those decades now as preparation. Scripture shows God training a person long before the hour that person serves. Moses kept his father-in-law’s flock for forty years before a bush caught fire on Horeb. Esther went through twelve months of preparation, six with oil of myrrh and six with sweet odours, before she stood before King Ahasuerus. She then lived five years in the palace before Haman’s men cast the lot against her people and her cousin Mordecai sent word: “for such a time as this.”
God still calls emissaries to the world for such a time as this, and he trains them first, often in rooms nobody would connect with the work. I stake my remaining years on that conviction. An emissary carries the Sender’s message under the Sender’s name. The honour runs up to the Sender. The liability runs down to the messenger.
02Every clock in the room
Last month, at sundown on Friday, 11 September, the Hebrew calendar turned to the year 5787, a count rabbinic tradition runs from the creation of the world. In 1650 James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, published his own count. His Annales Veteris Testamenti set the beginning of time at nightfall before 23 October, 4004 BC.
On 27 January 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight, the closest setting since the clock first appeared in 1947. The Bulletin’s board pointed to nuclear arsenals, artificial intelligence and biological threats.
A common sermon line says a secular world reads the news as random noise. The scientists’ clock contradicts that line. People with no Bible on the desk read the headlines I read and set a countdown by every front page. Nobody in this room trusts chaos. Everybody in the argument keeps a clock.
The argument turns on three other questions: who wound the clock, who holds it, and what waits at midnight. The Bulletin answers the third with a catastrophe of human making. Jesus answered it with a wedding. In his parable of the ten virgins a cry goes up at midnight, and the cry announces the groom: “Behold, the bridegroom cometh.”
The world keeps plenty of clocks. It still hunts for a keeper it trusts and a reason to hope when the hands meet.
03The night of 22 October
A countdown tempts a preacher the way a scoop tempts a reporter. In 1844, followers of William Miller, a Baptist preacher, worked through the prophecies of Daniel and fixed a date for Christ’s return: 22 October. The day came. The night came. Hiram Edson, a Millerite farmer in New York State, later set down that night in eight words: “We wept, and wept, till the day dawn.”
Ussher’s chronology, counted on the old Julian calendar, put the world’s first nightfall on that same calendar evening. One date now carries a claimed first night and a failed last night.
Jesus closed that door before anyone tried the handle: “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” Habakkuk heard the same discipline on his tower. The vision runs to an appointed time, God told him, and then: “though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.” God promised the arrival and kept the hour in his own hand. I hold no date, and I will print none.
Here the newsroom and the tower share a temptation. The bigger headline pulls at every editor. A date pulls at every watchman: a chart of seals and trumpets with the year pencilled in, a sermon series that packs the hall. A watchman who names the hour stops watching and starts forecasting. One failed forecast teaches a whole town to sleep through the next horn.
04The watchman’s contract
Ezekiel 33 sets out the post in terms a lawyer could follow. The people of a land “take a man of their coasts, and set him for their watchman.” When “he seeth the sword come upon the land, he blow the trumpet, and warn the people.” The Hebrew for that trumpet, shofar, names a ram’s horn, the instrument synagogues sound for the new year.
Then the contract bites. Suppose the watchman sees the sword, keeps the horn at his side, and the sword takes a life. God holds one man to account: “but his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand.”
God gave Ezekiel the order of the work in the same breath as the title.
Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me.
Hear first. Warn second. The watchman carries a message he received, never one he invented to fill a silence.
The two charges on my desk now fold into a single charge. Habakkuk leans out from the tower to receive. Ezekiel stands on the wall to warn. One Hebrew verb names both men, and one post holds both duties: receive the word, then sound it. The emissary God calls for such a time as this carries a pen and a horn, and the blood clause binds the pen and the horn.
Scripture hangs the weight of the calling on that clause. The post offers no medal and no stage; it hands the watchman a liability. I accept the weight with the post.
05The morning and the night
Isaiah records the question every watchman hears. A voice calls out of Seir: “Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?” The watchman answers: “The morning cometh, and also the night.” He reports both the dawn and the dark.
Jesus gave the same two-sided report on the Mount of Olives. He warned of wars, famines, pestilences and earthquakes, and he called them “the beginning of sorrows.” Matthew’s Greek word for sorrows, ōdin, names labour. Thayer’s lexicon renders it “the pain of childbirth, travail-pain, birth-pang.” A contraction hurts toward a delivery. Every true warning in this age carries news of a birth.
So the watchman leads with the gospel, and fear walks at the rear. Habakkuk shows the order. His book closes over empty fields: no blossom on the fig tree, no fruit in the vines, no herd in the stalls. Then the prophet sings: “Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.” Between the complaint and the song he hands the church its spine: “the just shall live by his faith.”
A watchman also answers to a city. Ezekiel’s people chose “a man of their coasts,” one of their own. A man who climbs a wall nobody built, for a town that never sent him, ends up shouting from a ladder. My post stands on the church’s wall, among believers who can test every page I write. Paul aimed his first alarm at a church: “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”