Reflections on the Book of Habakkuk

The book of Habakkuk starts strangely; it starts with a question: “How long?” The prophet agonizes. The questions seem all too familiar in our secular age: God does not listen, does not save, lets violence and injustice continue so that the law and the righteous seem to be ever losing.

God doesn’t give us the Sunday-school answer we might be expecting, at least not at first. What does He say? Babylon is going to take over everything. They hardly seem human, these Babylonians, “they are a feared and dreaded people; they are a law to themselves . . . ” but the section ends with a queer little phrase, calling them a “guilty people, whose own strength is their god.”

One hardly feels this is an answer. Habakkuk: “Hey God, what gives?” God: “You think the nations are bad? There’s going to be one that will terrify them all.” Habakkuk, recognizing this as a judgement on the unjust nations, is still unsatisfied: Why does God tolerate the treacherous? is silent while the wicked swallow the righteous? The unjust is likened to a fisherman with a dragnet, the people like fish without a ruler, and Habakkuk asks: “Is he to keep on emptying his net, destroying nations without mercy?”

Yet the prophet, unlike so many voices of our age, is not some cur wagging his tongue against God with these inquires, for he “will look to see . . . what answer I am to give to this complaint.”

And God answers.

Have it ready for a herald to run with, God advises (err, commands). God is about to give Habakkuk a revelation, a promise for the future, but a faithful promise. “The enemy is puffed up; his desires are not upright—but the righteous person will live by his faithfulness.” So, this Babylon which God raises over the nations, a nation better at being a nation than all the others, fails, not by its weaknesses, but by its strengths, for the very thing it is, the very good it wants, the success it wins, makes it an object of scorn and ridicule. There is no satisfaction for its greed. Now it is not God but this nation which is questioned: How long? What about your creditors? The cycles continue, and now Babylon will fall also, be plundered and destroyed as it plundered and destroyed. Woe to the individual and woe to the nation which builds upon such means; he made Drunk, and now will be made drunk.

This theme of idolatry, of misplaced worship, returns as the revelation concludes. Babylon worshiped its own strength, worshipped its net, but these are things covered in gold without breath that cannot wake. Opposed to this, “The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him.”

The book concludes, then, with a prayer, something like a psalm. Habakkuk praises God, and he is awed. He describes God’s approach and how the very earth, the mountains and rivers, are all overwhelmed by the presence. Not just the earth, but the heavens too are made to take notice. And God appears angry. O boy! “In wrath you strode through the earth . . . You came out to deliver your people.” God isn’t messing around. As we saw earlier, the power of the wicked one is turned on him, “With his own spear you pierced his head.”

The song continues, and the singer is like a dead man, and yet, though dead, he waits for this promised calamity to come. He lists his absences, no budding tree, no grapes, no olive crop, no sheep, no cattle, and yet “I will rejoice in the Lord.”

Though his legs trembled, God has made the singer’s feet like the deer’s.