Habakkuk
Author: Habakkuk
Habakkuk questions the violence in Judah and then the violence of the Chaldeans the Lord raises to punish it.
Outline
The first complaint (1:1–11)
The prophet asks how long he must cry about violence, and the Lord answers with the Chaldeans.
The second complaint (1:12–2:20)
Habakkuk asks how a holy God can use a more wicked nation, and he is told to wait for a vision.
The prayer (3)
A psalm remembers the Lord’s march and ends with joy when the fig tree does not blossom.
Key verses
Habakkuk 1:2
The book opens with a question about how long the prophet must cry and not be heard.
Habakkuk 2:4
The proud soul is not upright, and the just shall live by faith.
Habakkuk 3:17–18
When the crops fail, the prophet says he will still rejoice in the God of his salvation.
Habakkuk is a conversation. The prophet does not begin by accusing a foreign city. He asks the Lord how long he will cry about violence inside Judah and not be saved. The law is slack. Justice never goes forth. The wicked surround the righteous. The complaint is the one Amos and Micah had already named, and Habakkuk wants to know why the cry has not changed the court.
The answer is harder than silence. The Lord says he is doing a work in Habakkuk’s days that he will not believe though it is told him. He is raising the Chaldeans, a bitter and hasty nation that marches through the breadth of the land to possess dwelling places that are not theirs. Their horses are swifter than leopards. They scoff at kings. Their own might is their god. The answer to Judah’s violence is an empire whose violence is plainer. Habakkuk does not treat that as a solution he can simply accept. He asks a second question. Are you not from everlasting, O Lord my God, my Holy One? Your eyes are too pure to behold evil. Why do you look on those who deal treacherously and hold your tongue when the wicked devours a man more righteous than he? He compares the people to fish and the Chaldean to a fisherman who sacrifices to his net. The prophet who complained about the slack law now complains about the instrument sent to enforce it.
He takes his stand on the watchtower to see what the Lord will say. The answer is a vision that should be written plainly so that a reader may run with it. It is for an appointed time. Though it tarry, wait for it. It will not lie. The proud soul is not upright in him, but the just shall live by his faith. The woes that follow describe the empire that gathers what is not his, builds a town with blood, makes his neighbor drink shame, and says to the wood, awake. The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. The Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before him. The vision does not deny the delay. It tells the righteous how to live inside it.
The last chapter is a prayer set to music. Habakkuk has heard the report and fears. He asks the Lord to revive his work in the midst of the years and in wrath to remember mercy. The theophany is the old march: Teman, Mount Paran, pestilence, the tents of Cushan, the rivers, the sun and moon standing still, the Lord threshing the nations to save his people and his anointed. The prophet’s body trembles. Then he states the faith the vision required, in the language of a failed harvest. Though the fig tree does not blossom, and there is no fruit on the vines, the olive fails, the fields yield no food, the flock is cut off, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet he will rejoice in the Lord and joy in the God of his salvation. The Lord God is his strength, and he makes his feet like hinds’ feet. Habakkuk leaves the reader with a question that was answered by a harder providence, and with a faith that does not wait for the fig tree to recover before it sings.