The righteous shall live by faith: Habakkuk's vision and prayer

Habakkuk is a prophet about whom the book tells almost nothing. His name is given in 1:1, and the only other note of personal detail is that the final prayer is set for the choirmaster with stringed instruments (3:19), which suggests a link with temple worship. The setting is the rise of Babylon. In 612 BC Babylon helped to destroy Assyria's capital Nineveh, and in 605 BC it defeated Egypt at Carchemish. The Chaldeans, the people of Babylon, are announced in 1:6 as the LORD's instrument. Most scholars therefore date the book to the last years of Judah, roughly the reign of Jehoiakim (609 to 598 BC), before Jerusalem fell in 586 BC. Some propose other dates, but the class does not depend on the matter.

The book is unusual among the prophets. It is not mainly a message from God to the people, but a dialogue between the prophet and God. In chapter 1 Habakkuk asks why the LORD tolerates violence and injustice in Judah. The LORD answers that he is raising up the Chaldeans, and Habakkuk is shocked and asks how a holy God can use a nation more wicked than Judah. Chapter 2 opens with the prophet standing at his watchpost to wait for an answer. The passage for this class begins there. It contains the LORD's reply, the five woes against the oppressor and the prayer of chapter 3.

The first hearers were a community in a crisis of faith. The covenant seemed to be failing, since the wicked prospered and a worse enemy was on the way. The book is the Old Testament's most direct treatment of the question of how the righteous should live while God's justice is delayed.

Habakkuk 2 and 3 combine three forms.

• The first is the oracle of answer (2:2-5), in which the LORD replies to the prophet's complaint.
• The second is the series of woes (2:6-20), which are taunt songs, in Hebrew a mashal, sung by the nations against the tyrant who has plundered them.
• The third is the prayer or psalm of chapter 3, which has the marks of temple song: a heading that calls it a prayer of Habakkuk on shigionoth (a term of uncertain meaning, probably musical or literary), the word Selah, and the note for the choirmaster at the end.

The key interpretive principle is to read the central verse, 2:4, in its context. It follows the command to wait for a vision that seems slow, and it contrasts two people: the proud, whose soul is not upright, and the righteous, who will live. The word translated 'faith' is the Hebrew emunah, which means firmness, steadfastness and faithfulness, and the verse should be heard as a statement about steadfast trust in a time of delay. The New Testament's use of the verse, in Romans, Galatians and Hebrews, builds on that sense and draws out its relation to salvation.

The second principle is the theophany of chapter 3. The language is poetic and draws on Israel's earlier history: Sinai, the crossing of the sea, the Jordan, the standing of the sun (3:11, as in Joshua 10). It is not a forecast of a particular battle but a way of saying that the God who acted in the past will act again. Place names such as Teman, Paran, Cushan and Midian point to the southern desert and the Exodus route.

2:1. Habakkuk stations himself like a sentry on a tower to look out and see what God will say. The posture is of a man who expects an answer and intends to listen. He is also ready for a rebuke.

2:2-3. The LORD tells him to write the vision on tablets, plainly, so that a herald may run with it. The vision is a message to be read at speed by a messenger, and so its meaning is simple. It is for an appointed time, it speaks of the end, and it will not prove false. If it seems slow, the prophet is to wait for it, for it will surely come and will not delay. The paradox is deliberate: it seems slow, yet it will not delay, because the timing belongs to the LORD.

2:4. The proud person's soul is not upright within him, but the righteous will live by his faith, or faithfulness. The first person, whose soul is puffed up, is generally taken as the Babylonian oppressor and also as anyone who trusts in himself. The righteous (tsaddiq) is the person who stays loyal to the covenant. To 'live' is to survive and to have life, and the means is emunah, firm trust and faithfulness. The point is stated in the contrast: the proud person relies on his own strength, and the righteous person relies on the LORD and keeps faith until the vision comes. The Talmud (Makkot 24a) records that Habakkuk reduced all the commandments to this one.

2:5-20. The five woes follow in order.

• The first is against the one who piles up what is not his, and who will be plundered in turn by those he has plundered (verses 6-8).
• The second is against the one who builds a secure house by unjust gain, and the stones will cry out from the wall (9-11).
• The third is against the one who builds a town with blood (12-14). It ends with a promise that stands out from the rest: 'the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea', a verse that echoes Isaiah 11:9.
• The fourth woe is against the one who makes his neighbours drunk to expose their shame, and he will drink the cup of the LORD's wrath himself (15-17). The violence done to Lebanon, with its forests, will come back on him.
• The fifth is against the idolater who trusts in a carved image that cannot speak (18-19). The woes are pronounced with a principle of recompense: the nations will do to the tyrant what he did to them.
• The last verse (20) is a hush: 'The LORD is in His holy temple; let all the earth be silent before Him.' The idol is mute, and the living God is present. The right response to the whole dialogue is silence.

3:1-2. The prayer begins with the prophet saying that he has heard the LORD's report, the account of his past deeds, and he fears. He asks that the LORD renew his work in the midst of the years, and that in wrath he remember mercy. The prophet does not ask to be spared the judgment, but for mercy within it.

3:3-15. The LORD comes in glory from Teman and Mount Paran, southern places linked to Sinai. His splendour covers the heavens, light flashes from his hand, and plague and pestilence go before and behind him. The nations tremble, the mountains shake, and the sea sees him. Cushan and Midian are in distress, desert peoples who stand for the nations. The rivers and the deep respond. The sun and moon stand still. The climax is in the words that the LORD goes out to deliver his people and to save his anointed (3:13). The imagery tells the reader that the LORD who defeated Egypt and the Canaanites can defeat Babylon.

3:16-19. The prophet's body trembles, his lips quiver and decay enters his bones, yet he will wait quietly for the day of distress to come on those who invade. Then the confession: though the fig tree does not bud and the vines have no fruit, though the olive crop fails, the fields yield no food, the flock is cut off and there are no cattle in the stalls, yet he will rejoice in the LORD and take joy in the God of his salvation. The Sovereign LORD is his strength, who makes his feet like a deer's and lets him walk on the heights. The faith of 2:4 has become a song. Nothing has changed outwardly, but the prophet has an answer.

Habakkuk teaches that faithful living does not wait until the questions are answered. The prophet asks hard questions of God, about injustice, about the means God uses and about the delay, and the book does not rebuke him for asking. The answer is not an explanation, but an assurance: the vision is certain, the proud will fall, and the righteous will live by their steadfast trust. This sets faith at the centre of how the covenant people live.

It also teaches that God judges the nations that he uses to judge. Babylon is his instrument against Judah, but it is not excused (2:6-20). The principle that God holds all nations to account is as wide as Genesis 15:16 and Isaiah 10:5-19. And it teaches that the end of history is the knowledge of the LORD's glory covering the earth (2:14), the hope that runs from Numbers 14:21 and Isaiah 11:9 to Revelation 21.

The book ends in worship. The theophany of chapter 3 does not remove the threat of invasion; it sets the threat under the LORD. The prophet's final words take the form of a choice, to rejoice in God when everything that sustains life fails. This is the Old Testament's fullest picture of faith when it has nothing to see.

The connection is promise and fulfilment, and it is made through the apostles' use of 2:3-4. Paul quotes the line 'The righteous will live by faith' at the start of his argument in Romans 1:16-17, where the gospel is the power of God for salvation and the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, and again in Galatians 3:11, where he argues that no one is justified before God by the law. In both letters he takes Habakkuk's pairing of righteousness and faith as the pattern for how God saves: by trust in what God has done and not by human achievement. The Letter to the Hebrews quotes Habakkuk 2:3-4 in a different setting: to encourage endurance. It applies the line about the vision that will not delay to the Coming One, who will come without delay, and says that God's righteous one will live by faith (Hebrews 10:37-38). The coming one of the vision is Christ, and the waiting is the church's.

Several other connections are lighter. The promise of 2:14, that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD's glory, lies behind the Great Commission and the vision of the nations in Revelation. The prophet's confession of joy in the God of his salvation is echoed in Mary's song, 'my spirit rejoices in God my Savior' (Luke 1:47), and the name Jesus means the LORD saves. Habakkuk 3:13 speaks of the LORD saving his anointed, and Christians read this as pointing beyond the king of the day to the Messiah. These are echoes, not types. The silence of 2:20 may also be echoed in Revelation 8:1.