Every other prophet in this series has carried God’s message to the people. Habakkuk opens his book doing the opposite — carrying the people’s own hardest question straight to God, and refusing to stop asking until he gets an answer.
A study in Habakkuk 1 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 15 min read
O LORD, How Long Shall I Cry
“The burden which Habakkuk the prophet did see. O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save! Why dost thou shew me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance? for spoiling and violence are before me: and there are that raise up strife and contention. Therefore the law is slacked, and judgment doth never go forth: for the wicked doth compass about the righteous; therefore wrong judgment proceedeth.”
Habakkuk 1:1-4
Habakkuk’s book opens with almost nothing about the prophet himself — no genealogy, no hometown, no reign of any king to date the vision by. What it opens with instead is a complaint, and an unusually candid one: he has been crying out to God about violence and injustice in his own nation, and God has not, as far as he can tell, been listening. This is not a foreign empire’s cruelty Habakkuk protests here — it is Judah’s own courts, where “the law is slacked” and “wrong judgment proceedeth,” almost certainly during the wicked closing years of Manasseh’s reign or the brief reign of Jehoiakim, when covenant faithfulness had collapsed from the inside.
Behold Ye Among The Heathen
“Behold ye among the heathen, and regard, and wonder marvellously: for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told you. For, lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, which shall march through the breadth of the land, to possess the dwellingplaces that are not theirs. They are terrible and dreadful: their judgment and their dignity shall proceed of themselves.”
Habakkuk 1:5-7
God’s answer is not the one Habakkuk was hoping for. Rather than promising reform inside Judah, God announces that He is about to raise up the Chaldeans — the rising Babylonian empire — as the instrument of correction, a nation whose own “judgment and dignity” answer to nothing but their own ambition. Verse 5 warns that this news will be almost impossible to believe even once it is told plainly, which is precisely the response Habakkuk is about to have.
“Their horses also are swifter than the leopards, and are more fierce than the evening wolves: and their horsemen shall spread themselves, and their horsemen shall come from far; they shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to eat. They shall come all for violence: their faces shall sup up as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand. And they shall scoff at the kings, and the princes shall be a scorn unto them: they shall deride every strong hold; for they shall heap dust, and take it.”
Habakkuk 1:8-10
The Chaldean cavalry described here moves like predators from every direction at once — leopards, wolves, an eagle diving to eat — and their contempt for fortified cities is total: they “heap dust, and take it,” treating a siege ramp as a trivial formality against defenses their victims had trusted completely.
We Shall Not Die
“Then shall his mind change, and he shall pass over, and offend, imputing this his power unto his god. Art thou not from everlasting, O LORD my God, mine Holy One? we shall not die. O LORD, thou hast ordained them for judgment; and, O mighty God, thou hast established them for correction.”
Habakkuk 1:11-12
Habakkuk’s own reasoning moves quickly here: the same Chaldeans God is raising up will themselves grow arrogant, crediting their conquests to their own gods rather than to the true God who actually ordained them as an instrument. And then, in the middle of describing an approaching disaster, Habakkuk makes his own declaration of faith — “we shall not die” — not because the invasion will be avoided, but because the God who is “from everlasting” cannot be reduced to merely one nation’s temporary fortunes.
“Confident that even in this terrible judgment the purpose of God for His people would in some way be fulfilled, Habakkuk bowed in submission to the revealed will of Jehovah. ‘Art Thou not from everlasting, O Lord my God, mine Holy One?’ he exclaimed. And then, his faith reaching out beyond the forbidding prospect of the immediate future, and laying fast hold on the precious promises that reveal God’s love for His trusting children, the prophet added, ‘We shall not die.’”
Ellen G. White · Prophets and Kings, p. 386
White reads this one short exclamation as the pivot of the entire book — not the moment Habakkuk understands why God would use a wicked nation to judge His own people, but the moment he decides to trust God’s character even without that explanation. This becomes, in her account, the pattern for the two chapters still to come: Habakkuk keeps asking hard questions, but he asks them from inside a faith that has already settled the one question that matters most.
“Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he? And makest men as the fishes of the sea, as the creeping things, that have no ruler over them? They take up all of them with the angle, they catch them in their net, and gather them in their drag: therefore they rejoice and are glad. Therefore they sacrifice unto their net, and burn incense unto their drag; because by them their portion is fat, and their meat plenteous. Shall they therefore empty their net, and not spare continually to slay the nations?”
Habakkuk 1:13-17
Having accepted that Babylon will be God’s instrument, Habakkuk immediately raises the harder follow-up question: how can a God “of purer eyes than to behold evil” use a nation more wicked than the one being judged? The image of a fisherman dragging nets full of helpless catch — and then worshiping the net itself, crediting his own tools rather than God for the abundance — pictures Babylon’s own idolatrous self-sufficiency exactly. The chapter ends unresolved, on a question with no answer yet: will this net simply keep emptying itself onto nation after nation, forever? Chapter 2 opens with Habakkuk determined to wait for a real answer.
