Most prophetic books carry a message from God delivered to a nation, calling it to repent, explaining why judgment has come or is coming. Habakkuk carries no such message. It is not addressed to Judah or any specific group of God’s people. It is a personal conversation between a man and God, where Habakkuk questions and God’s replies.
Habakkuk prophesied before the Babylonians invaded Judah, so he was probably a contemporary of Jeremiah and Zephaniah, writing after the northern kingdom of Israel had already fallen but before Judah followed it into exile.
Questioning God
While the prophets around him were occupied with the message—what should be conveyed to the people, why judgment had come, what Judah needed to learn from watching its neighbor to the north fall—Habakkuk instead questions God’s logic. He questions what he perceives as an absence of justice. It is not a national concern he is raising but a personal one, the way Job’s complaint was personal, the way our own complaints still are.
How long, LORD, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save?
Habakkuk 1:2 (NIV)
This is not some new freedom that Jesus gave us to bring our complaints to God—people have been questioning how God carries out His plans since the beginning. From Abraham to the prophet Jonah, all have questioned God’s plan and suggested their own edits. So what makes us think we have the right to question Him at all?
We do it because, from where we stand, His plan often looks like a bad plan, an unjust plan, something we cannot make sense of. Habakkuk cannot believe what he is seeing. It is the way a journalist presses a politician: how is this happening on your watch, under your control? Habakkuk believes God is sovereign, that nothing unfolds outside His authority—and that is exactly why the question presses on him so hard. If God is truly in control, why does He tolerate wrongdoing?
Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds.
Habakkuk 1:3 (NIV)
So why does God tolerate wrongdoing? If He didn’t, the earth’s population would fall to zero. It is precisely because He tolerates wrong that any of us are still standing. But our idea of what counts as wrongdoing is a narrow, self-serving one. We call it wrong only when it touches us. Someone can be unkind to everyone in the office and we will overlook it entirely, right up until the day that meanness turns on us—and only then does it become injustice worth addressing. That is how selfishly we measure wrongdoing: not by what is actually wrong, but by what has personally cost us something.God does not measure it that way. He is patient with us and ready to redeem us. Look at Cain. After his sin, God does not strike him down but marks him and warns that anyone who kills him will suffer vengeance sevenfold.
But the Lord said to him, “Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.
Genesis 4:15 (NIV)
That mark was time—a grace period, an opportunity to repent and draw near to God. Cain’s line did not use that grace, and by Noah’s time judgment came for it. There is a grace period given to us too, and if we do not use it for God’s purpose in our lives and in others’, wrath eventually follows. Peter says the same thing to those questioning why Christ’s return is delayed.
The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
2 Peter 3:9 (NIV)
Habakkuk had no window into God’s redemption plan. With that short-sightedness, he laments and questions, just as David did, just as Abraham did. These are not only Habakkuk’s own questions but the questions of God’s people everywhere, placed in his mind so that his exchange with God could answer them for us as well.
When the Law Is Paralyzed
Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.
Habakkuk 1:4 (NIV)
No one in Judah is following God’s law, as far as Habakkuk can see. Wickedness is rising, justice is being perverted, and this has, in one sense, been true since the creation of mankind. But the question presses now because Judah is on the verge of falling. This is the question arriving right at the edge of judgment: why are You allowing this? Why is justice not prevailing? Why are people so corrupt?
But why do we keep blaming God when it is human beings carrying out the injustice?
God created people and gave them the freedom to choose, and we keep choosing evil, then blame Him for having allowed the choice at all. It is the child given complete freedom by a parent—study at your own pace, we won’t hover over you—who comes home having fluked his final and the blames the parent for giving him that freedom. We are given free will, we use it badly, and then we blame God. Human beings slaughter each other, conquer each other, build the very weapons that annihilate each other, and still the question comes back to God: why did You allow this?
There was, in fact, a specific reason Babylon’s shadow fell over Judah—the failures of Judah’s own king, who is told plainly what would come of his mistake.
The time will surely come when everything in your palace, and all that your predecessors have stored up until this day, will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord.
Isaiah 39:6 (NIV)
Habakkuk either did not know this history or had forgotten it, and so he lays the blame on God rather than on the specific failure that invited judgment. This is what happens when we are not walking closely with Him—we become ignorant of what He has already decided and why, and out of that ignorance we question Him.
The LORD Answers
Look at the nations and watch—and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.
Habakkuk 1:5 (NIV)
God goes on to describe Babylon’s strength in vivid, frightening detail: a feared and dreaded people, a law unto themselves, horses swifter than leopards and fiercer than wolves at dusk, riders swooping in like eagles to devour, armies that sweep past like the wind—guilty people whose own strength is their god.
Then they sweep past like the wind and go on—guilty people, whose own strength is their god.
Habakkuk 1:11 (NIV)
Habakkuk is already anxious, already afraid. Why would God respond to a question about justice with a description of the very army about to overrun everything Habakkuk cares about? Because it is God’s way of saying: this is not chaos. This is not randomness, but He is raising up the Babylonians. Nothing is hidden from His jurisdiction. He knows every detail of the nation Habakkuk fears because He Himself is the one lifting it up. It is not an answer to soothe Habakkuk—it is an answer to establish that God is in full control, even of what looks, to Habakkuk, like the very absence of control.
Why is there so much resistance against the kingdoms of the world when we know it is God who has brought them to power?
Like Habakkuk, we also struggle to understand how God can work with people like the Babylonians. It is because we associate God only with righteous people, and we are not able to accept that God can use an evil nation—an immoral and ungodly one—to carry out His will. That resistance is still in us. Watching two nations go to war, we will freely pray for the side whose cause looks more familiar to us and stay silent for the other, less because of who the aggressor was than because of we share common ideologies with one of them. We know the theory. We can say it plainly when we study Ezekiel, Habakkuk, and Jeremiah—God can use Babylon, everyone is under Him, Israel only needed to be still and let Him work. But when faced with the modern equivalent of Babylon, and that same conviction disappears. We are, in that moment, standing exactly where Habakkuk stood.
Citizens of an Everlasting Kingdom
There have been monarchs and oligarchs, and now democratic rule seems to be the fashion of the age, with diplomatic solutions to war that save lives, money, and time compared to what came before. But all of this is still passing. Every one of these systems will fade, the same way every system before it faded. We don’t belong to any of these systems, and we don’t belong to any country. This is not a call to anarchy—Jesus was not an anarchist, though He did travel with some who were. He did not interfere with the rulers of the world because He came to help us look past the things of the world and look towards god’s kingdom. Ours is an eternally everlasting kingdom, and we don’t elect our ruler. Our Ruler seats us on His own throne and lets us rule with Him—a thing no ruler of this world can ever offer.
We waste too much time worrying about the current rulers of this world—the ones God Himself has appointed. Whether we are supporting them or revolting against them, both pull us away from what God actually wants for our lives. Jesus never took part in a single rally. There was poverty in His day as there is now, and He never set out to abolish it, or reduce inequality, or raise a wage, or fight for the common man in the way the causes of every age promise to. We are too engrossed in our own world and its systems to grasp the beauty of the eternal kingdom Jesus has already given us access to. Like Habakkuk, let us not turn to God only to question our perceived injustices, but to understand the plans He has for us, to be the grassroots workers for the extension of His kingdom.
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