Habakkuk

Purpose & theme

Habakkuk is unique among the prophets: instead of speaking God’s word to the people, he speaks the people’s questions to God. The book is a candid dialogue between a troubled prophet and his God, and it gives voice to the anguished cry of every believer who has ever looked at a world full of injustice and asked, “How long, O LORD?” Habakkuk’s first complaint is about the violence and corruption within Judah — why does God tolerate it? God’s answer is staggering: He is raising up the Chaldeans (Babylonians), a fierce and ruthless nation, to bring judgment. This only deepens the prophet’s distress, for it raises a harder question: how can a holy God, whose “eyes are too pure to see evil,” use a nation even more wicked than Judah to punish His own people?

God’s reply lies at the heart of the book and at the heart of the gospel. He tells Habakkuk to wait for the vision, for it will surely come, and He announces the principle by which the faithful must live in the meantime: “The righteous shall live by his faith” (2:4) — the verse the apostle Paul would later quote as the foundation of justification by faith. The proud Babylonian will fall, for his soul is not upright, but the righteous will live by trusting God. God pronounces five woes on the arrogant oppressor and promises that “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (2:14). The book ends not with all questions answered but with the prophet at peace, in one of Scripture’s greatest confessions of faith: though the fig tree does not blossom and the fields yield no food, “yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation” (3:17-18).