The Righteous Shall Live by Faith

Scripture: Habakkuk 1–2 (with Romans 1:17, Galatians 3:11, and Hebrews 10:38)

Before this session, read Habakkuk 1–2: the prophet’s two honest complaints, the LORD’s two answers, and the great word at the heart of the Reformation (2:4), which Paul quotes as “The righteous by faith will live.” Then read how the apostles take up that one verse (Romans 1:17, Galatians 3:11, and Hebrews 10:38) and set the gospel of justification by faith upon it. Keep your Bible open, and ask: how can a holy God use a wicked nation as His rod, and how did a single line spoken to a troubled prophet become the hinge on which the whole doctrine of grace turns?

Look, the one whose desires are not upright will faint from exhaustion, but the person of integrity will live because of his faithfulness.
(Habakkuk 2:4)

How Long Must I Cry?

Most of the prophets bring us the word of the LORD to His people. Habakkuk does something different and rarer: he brings us his own words to the LORD, and they are the words of a man at the end of his patience. The book opens not with This is what the LORD says but with a raw complaint flung up at heaven. How long, LORD, must I cry for help? But you do not listen! I call out to you, “Violence!” But you do not intervene! (1:2). Habakkuk looks around at his own nation of Judah and sees violence, strife, injustice, the law gone slack and powerless, the wicked hemming in the righteous so that justice comes out crooked; and he has been crying to God about it, and as far as he can tell, God has done nothing. How long? It is the cry of the psalms, the cry of every believer who has watched evil flourish and prayed against it and seen no answer come.

We should pause on the very fact that this complaint is in the Bible, for it tells us something the comfortable religion of our day badly needs to hear. Habakkuk is not rebuked for bringing his hard questions to God. He is not struck down for asking how long and why. The book preserves his protest as Holy Scripture, which means God Himself thought it worth keeping. Faith is not the absence of hard questions; faith is what you do with them. The unbeliever takes his why and walks away from God with it; the believer takes the same why and brings it to God, and waits. Habakkuk’s wrestling is the wrestling of faith, not of rebellion; he argues with God the way a son argues with a father he trusts, not the way an enemy curses one he has abandoned. There is enormous pastoral comfort in this. The God of the Bible is not too fragile for our questions, and He does not require us to pretend a serenity we do not feel. He invites the honest cry, and He answers it.

Habakkuk stands in a long and honorable company. Fully a third of the psalms are laments: songs of complaint, of How long, LORD (Psalm 13:1), of My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? (Psalm 22:1). They are not the psalms of unbelievers but the prayer book of the people of God, sung in the temple, placed by inspiration in the canon. The Scriptures do not give us only songs of triumph and serene contentment; they give us, in equal measure, a vocabulary for protest, for grief, for the honest hard question hurled heavenward in the dark. This is a mercy we too often forget. When our own faith is reeling and we can manage nothing but how long?, we are not falling out of the company of the faithful; we are joining the prophets and the psalmists, who taught us that the cry itself can be an act of faith, for a man only cries how long to a God he still believes is there, and still believes is good, and still expects to act.

I Am About to Empower the Babylonians

And God does answer, but the answer is more unsettling than the silence had been. Look at the nations and pay attention! You will be shocked and amazed! For I will do something in your lifetime that you will not believe even though you are forewarned (1:5). God has not been idle after all; He is at work, and the work is so staggering that Habakkuk will scarcely credit it. Look, I am about to empower the Babylonians, that ruthless and greedy nation. They sweep across the surface of the earth, seizing dwelling places that do not belong to them (1:6). The Hebrew calls them the Chaldeans, the people who ruled Babylon. The answer to the corruption of Judah is the Babylonians. God will deal with the injustice Habakkuk has complained of by sending a fierce, swift, terrifying empire to sweep down and judge it.

The description of this Chaldean army is meant to chill. Their horses are faster than leopards and more alert than wolves in the desert; like a vulture they swoop down to devour their prey; they mock kings and laugh at every fortified city, building siege ramps and taking prisoners as easily as one scoops up sand. And then the telling note: But the one who considers himself a god will be held guilty (1:11). The Hebrew is more pointed still: this is the one whose own strength is his god. The Babylonian credits his own strength as his god; he worships his own might. Here is the hard mystery of providence that the rest of the book will wrestle with: that the holy LORD would raise up a godless, self-worshiping empire and use it as the rod of His own discipline. This is what the older theologians, following Isaiah, called the LORD’s strange work (Isaiah 28:21 NET: his strange task): the way the hidden God accomplishes His purposes even through wicked instruments who know nothing of Him and intend only their own glory. God is not the author of the Chaldean’s evil; the Chaldean will answer for every drop of it, as the five woes of chapter two will make plain. But God is sovereign over it, bending even the malice of empires to serve His just and hidden ends. That is a truth to steady faith, and, as Habakkuk is about to show us, a truth that can also stagger it.

Luther had a way of speaking about this that helps us here. He taught that God works in the world largely through what he called masks: the ordinary and sometimes terrible instruments behind which the hidden God accomplishes His will. The farmer’s labor is a mask behind which God feeds us; the magistrate’s sword is a mask behind which God restrains evil; and, more darkly, even a Babylon can be a mask behind which God disciplines His people. Faith learns to distinguish between the mask and the face: to trust that behind the frightening instrument stands the God who is good, and whose revealed will toward His people in His word is mercy, even when His hidden working in history is past all our understanding. This does not make the instrument good; the Chaldean is wicked and will be judged as wicked. But it does mean that the believer is never simply at the mercy of blind events. Behind the rod is a Father’s hand, and faith clings to the hand it cannot see by trusting the word it has heard.

From Ancient Times

For the answer troubles Habakkuk more than the problem had. If the sins of Judah were grievous, the sins of Babylon were worse; and now Habakkuk must somehow square the holiness of God with God’s use of a nation filthier than the one being punished. He frames the difficulty by clinging, first, to what he knows of God. LORD, you have been active from ancient times; my sovereign God, you are immortal (1:12). Behind the NET’s my sovereign God stands the Hebrew my God, my Holy One; the older English versions read, Are you not from everlasting … ? He anchors himself to God’s eternity and God’s holiness and God’s covenant (my God, my Holy One) before he dares to press the question. That is the right order: faith holds fast to what it knows of God precisely so that it can bring to Him what it cannot understand.

And then the question, as sharp as any in the Bible. You are too just to tolerate evil; you are unable to condone wrongdoing. So why do you put up with such treacherous people? Why do you say nothing when the wicked devour those more righteous than they are? (1:13). How can the God who is too just to tolerate evil (the Hebrew says, too pure of eyes to look on evil) stand by in silence while a more wicked nation swallows a less wicked one? The Babylonians, Habakkuk complains, treat human beings like fish: they drag up the nations in their net, and then they worship the net, offering sacrifices to their throw net and burning incense to their dragnet, because by them they have plenty to eat (1:15–16). Are they to be allowed to keep filling and emptying their net forever, destroying nations and sparing none (1:17)? It is the ancient and agonizing question of why God permits the wicked to prosper, and why His justice so often seems to sleep. Habakkuk does not pretend it away. He lays it before God in all its force, and then he does the one thing that turns a complaint into faith. He waits for an answer.

It is worth noticing what kind of question Habakkuk is asking, and what kind of answer he finally gets. His is not the cool question of the skeptic, who raises the problem of evil as a weapon to be rid of God; it is the anguished question of the lover, who cannot bear the gap between the God he believes in and the world he sees. It is Job’s question, and the question of every believer at a graveside or a hospital bed. And the striking thing is that God does not answer it with a philosophical proof. He never explains to Habakkuk the metaphysics of how a good God permits evil. Instead He gives the prophet two things: a promise, that the proud will fall and the vision will certainly come; and Himself, the assurance that He is from everlasting, the Holy One, in His holy temple. Faith, in the end, is not given a solution to the problem of evil that would satisfy a philosopher; it is given a Person to trust through it. And that, it turns out, is enough to live by.

At My Watch Post

I will stand at my watch post; I will remain stationed on the city wall. I will keep watching, so I can see what he says to me and can know how I should answer when he counters my argument (2:1). Having flung his hardest question at heaven, Habakkuk does not storm off; he climbs his watchtower like a sentry and posts himself to wait for the reply. There is a whole theology of faith in that single verse. Faith brings its questions to God and then takes up its station to listen, expecting that God will speak. And notice the humility in it: he waits to learn how I should answer when he counters my argument (the Hebrew speaks of God’s reproof or correction); he is prepared to be corrected, to discover that the fault in his understanding is his own and not God’s. This is not the posture of a man demanding that God justify Himself at the bar of human reason; it is the posture of a servant who trusts that the Master has an answer, and who will wait on the wall, however long the night, until it comes. The believer who has prayed his hardest prayer and seen no answer is invited to do exactly this: not to abandon the watch, but to keep it.

The watchman was a familiar and serious figure in Israel. Ezekiel was made a watchman over the house of Israel, charged to stay awake on the wall and sound the trumpet at the first sign of danger; the watchman’s whole calling was vigilant, expectant waiting. So when Habakkuk takes up that station, he is not sinking into passive resignation, throwing up his hands until something happens. Waiting on God in the biblical sense is among the most active things a soul can do: it is the strenuous discipline of staying at one’s post, eyes fixed on the horizon, refusing both despair and distraction, expecting the word to come. Isaiah promised that those who wait for the LORD’s help find renewed strength (Isaiah 40:31). This is the waiting Habakkuk models, and the waiting faith is called to in every long night: not a slump of the shoulders, but a watchman’s vigil, leaning into the dark toward the coming dawn, certain that the One who promised to speak will not finally be silent.

Write Down the Message

And the answer comes. Write down this message! Record it legibly on tablets, so the one who announces it may read it easily. For the message is a witness to what is decreed; it gives reliable testimony about how matters will turn out. Even if the message is not fulfilled right away, wait patiently; for it will certainly come to pass … it will not arrive late (2:2–3). Where the NET says message, the Hebrew word is chazon, the vision, and the older versions speak of a vision for an appointed time. God tells the prophet to write the coming word large and clear, like a notice posted where a runner can read it at a glance, because it is a word men will need to hold onto through a long and dark waiting. The vision is for a time God has fixed and decreed; it has a set hour in God’s calendar that has not yet come. And so the great counsel of the passage is patience: Even if the message is not fulfilled right away, wait patiently. From the human side it will seem to delay; from God’s side it will certainly come to pass, and not one hour late. Faith is taught here to live by an appointed-but-not-yet-arrived promise, trusting the word against the apparent silence of the present.

And the writer to the Hebrews tells us what that awaited vision finally was. Taking up this very passage (in the Greek form the early Church knew), he writes, For just a little longer and he who is coming will arrive and not delay. But my righteous one will live by faith (Hebrews 10:37–38). He who is coming: the writer reads Habakkuk’s awaited vision as a Person, the promised One whose coming the whole Old Testament strains toward, the Lord Jesus Himself. The vision Habakkuk was told to write plain and wait for, through all the long centuries of Israel’s hoping, was at its deepest the coming of the Christ. So the patience the prophet was taught is the patience of the whole people of God across the ages, waiting through the dark for the One who would certainly come, and it is our patience still, as we wait for His coming again. The vision delayed, and delayed, and at last stepped onto the page of history in Bethlehem; and He will come again, and will not delay.

There is great steadiness for faith in the truth that the vision has an appointed time. The Hebrew word mo’ed, which the NET renders what is decreed, is the word for a fixed and appointed time. God does not improvise; His promises are not vague hopes that may or may not materialize when conditions allow. They have a fixed hour in the counsel of His will, an hour He has set and will keep to the minute. The whole long wait of the Old Testament for the promised Seed seemed, from below, like an endless delay: generation after generation passing, the promise still unfulfilled, the faithful dying in hope without having received it. And then, at the stroke of the appointed hour, when the appropriate time had come, God sent out his Son (Galatians 4:4). Not a year early, not a year late, but at the exact moment God had fixed before the foundation of the world. The same is true of every promise we are still waiting on, including the last and greatest: the appointed time for Christ’s second coming is as fixed and as certain as the first, and faith waits for it not in anxious uncertainty but in the calm assurance that God keeps His own calendar.

The Righteous Shall Live by Faith

And now we come to the verse, the single line that sits at the heart of this book and very near the heart of the whole gospel. God sets two kinds of people side by side. Look, the one whose desires are not upright will faint from exhaustion, but the person of integrity will live because of his faithfulness (2:4). On the one hand stands the one whose soul, the Hebrew says, is puffed up or lifted up, swollen with self (the NET follows a slightly different reading of one Hebrew word and renders it will faint from exhaustion, which is where such pride ends). He is like the Chaldean who credits his own strength and worships his own net: the proud, self-reliant man who stands on his own achievement. That soul, God says, is not upright; it is crooked at the root, however straight it appears. And over against him stands the person of integrity, the tsaddiq, the righteous one, who will live because of his faithfulness. The Hebrew word is ’emunah: firmness, steadfast reliance, the trust that holds on. The proud man lives, or tries to, by his own strength; the righteous man lives by trusting God. The whole difference between the two kinds of people in the world is drawn in that one line: the one leans on himself and is not upright; the other leans on God and lives.

It is worth dwelling on what kind of thing this saving faith is, for we are prone to misunderstand it, and the English word faithfulness can mislead us if we hear it as a record of loyal performance that earns life. The Hebrew ’emunah comes from the same root as our word amen, the root of what is firm and sure; it carries the sense of leaning the whole weight upon something trustworthy, of clinging, of resting upon. It is the steadiness of one who holds on to God’s promise, not a steadiness he supplies from within. Faith is not a feeling we work up, nor a strength of conviction we generate from ourselves; it is the Holy Spirit’s gift, worked through the Word, by which the whole weight of the soul leans upon Another. And this means the power of faith lies not in itself but in its object. A weak hand that takes hold of a strong rescuer is saved as surely as a strong one, because it is the rescuer, not the grip, that does the saving. A trembling faith that lays hold of Christ is saving faith, for the strength is in Christ and not in the faith. This is unspeakable comfort to the believer whose faith feels small and shaky, who fears he does not believe well enough to be saved. The question is never how strong your faith is, but whom your faith is in. The righteous live by faith: not by the quality of their believing, but by the One their believing lays hold of.

The apostle Paul saw in that line the whole gospel of justification, and he set it at the foundation of the two greatest letters of the New Testament. To the Romans he wrote, For the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel from faith to faith, just as it is written, “The righteous by faith will live” (Romans 1:17). To the Galatians, fighting for the gospel against those who would add the works of the law to it, he wrote, Now it is clear no one is justified before God by the law, because the righteous one will live by faith (Galatians 3:11). The Holy Spirit, speaking through the apostle, draws out the full meaning of Habakkuk’s word: the one who holds fast to God’s promise is the one who is righteous before God, and he is righteous by faith. Paul’s point in both letters is the same, and it is the doctrine on which the Church stands or falls: that a sinner is set right with God (justified, declared righteous) not by anything he does, not by the works of the law, not by the lifting-up of his own soul, but by faith, which receives as a gift the righteousness of Another. Faith is not a work we contribute, not even a work of loyalty; it is the empty hand that takes hold of what God gives. And what it takes hold of is the righteousness of the Lord Jesus, reckoned to us, credited to our account: an alien righteousness, the old theologians called it, because it comes from outside us and is not our own. The righteous do not live by a righteousness they have manufactured; they live by a righteousness they have received.

And the writer to the Hebrews draws out something Paul’s use might let us miss: that the righteous not only begin by faith but live by it, all the way to the end. But my righteous one will live by faith, he quotes, and then adds, and if he shrinks back, I take no pleasure in him (Hebrews 10:38). The same faith that first receives Christ’s righteousness is the faith by which the believer then walks every day of his life, perseveres through trial, and is carried home to glory. We do not begin in faith and then graduate to living by our own works; the whole Christian life, from the first day to the last, is lived by leaning the soul’s weight on Christ. Justification is by faith; the daily life of the justified is by faith; perseverance to the end is by faith. There is never a point at which the believer outgrows his need to lean and begins to stand on his own. The righteous shall live (the whole of their living, from start to finish) by faith.

We must be careful to say this in the right key, for it is possible to get even justification slightly wrong. The righteousness by which we are saved is not a slow improvement of our own character until at last we are good enough for God; it is a verdict, declared over us in the courtroom of heaven and received by faith as God speaks it to us in His Word: not guilty, indeed righteous, for the sake of Christ, whose perfect obedience is counted as ours. We are not first made gradually better and then accepted; we are accepted, declared righteous, while still sinners, on the ground of Christ alone, received by faith alone. The improvement follows (the righteous, having been declared righteous, do begin to live a new life), but it follows as fruit, never as the root. To reverse the order, to make our growing goodness the basis of God’s acceptance rather than its result, is to lose the gospel entirely and fall back under the puffed-up soul’s delusion that a man can be upright by his own striving.

And precisely because justification is a verdict and not a process, the believer may have assurance, may actually rest. If our acceptance with God depended on how far our character had improved, we could never be sure, for the work is never finished and the conscience can always find fresh failure to fear. But if we are declared righteous on the ground of Christ’s finished work, received by faith, then the verdict is as settled and secure as Christ Himself, and the trembling conscience may at last lie down in peace. Therefore, since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1). That peace is not the fruit of feeling we have done enough; it is the fruit of knowing that Another has done it all, and that His doing has been reckoned to us. The puffed-up soul can never rest, for it must forever be propping up its own uprightness; the soul that lives by faith rests in a righteousness it did not earn and that no accuser can take from it, and so it has peace. This promise comforts faith; it does not authorize presumption. God preserves His elect and all who remain in Christ through faith, and none whom He keeps through His Word and Sacraments will perish. Yet the warning of Hebrews 10:38 against shrinking back is real, and the believer’s security is found not in a past profession but in continually receiving Christ through His appointed means.

This is the verse that remade the world, because it remade a monk. Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar tormented by the demand of a righteousness he could never produce, had read in Romans that the gospel reveals the righteousness of God, and he had hated the phrase, for he understood it as the righteousness by which a just God righteously condemns unrighteous sinners, and what gospel was there in that? He labored at the words day and night, by his own account, until at last, meditating on Habakkuk’s line as Paul quotes it, that the righteous shall live by faith, the light broke. He saw that the righteousness of God in the gospel is not the righteousness by which God punishes, but the righteousness by which God justifies the ungodly: a righteousness God gives, and faith receives. Luther wrote that he felt himself born again and to have gone through open gates into paradise itself. The whole Reformation, and the recovery of the gospel for the Church, flowed from one troubled prophet’s line about the righteous living by faith; and behind the prophet, from the heart of God, who had hidden the treasure of the gospel in Habakkuk’s complaint and waited centuries for an apostle to proclaim it and a monk to be set free by it.

The Knowledge of the Glory

Having answered the prophet at the root, God turns to deal with the proud oppressor whose prospering had so troubled Habakkuk, and He does it with a series of five woes (2:5–19). Each opens with the Hebrew cry hoy, “woe,” which the NET renders is as good as dead. Woe to the Chaldean whose appetite is as big as Sheol’s and who gathers all nations to himself: the very nations he plundered will rise and plunder him. Woe to him who builds his house by unjust gain, for the stones in the walls will cry out, and the wooden rafters will answer back. Woe to him who builds a city by bloodshed. Woe to him who makes his neighbors drink to gaze on their nakedness. Woe to the idolater who says to wood, Wake up!, and to speechless stone, Awake!; for What good is an idol? (2:18–19). The puffed-up soul, for all its present triumph, is storing up its own reckoning; the net that has swallowed the nations will itself be emptied at last.

There is a grim justice in the shape of these woes, for in each of them the oppressor’s own sin recoils upon his head. He plundered the nations, and all who are left among the nations will plunder him; he built his house by violence, and the very stones of the wall and the rafters of the roof cry out against the builder; he made others drunk to gaze upon their shame, and the cup in the LORD’s right hand will be turned upon him, and disgrace will replace his glory. This is not random vengeance but the moral order of a universe governed by a righteous God, in which the seed a man sows is the harvest he reaps. The proud Chaldean, drunk on his own success and certain he is beyond all reckoning, is in fact storing up the precise judgment his own deeds have earned. And the same warning stands over every power and every person who imagines that cruelty can be practiced forever without an accounting. The God who is slow to anger is not blind, and He will not be made a fool.

But planted in the middle of these woes is a promise that lifts the whole horizon. For recognition of the LORD’s sovereign majesty will fill the earth just as the waters fill up the sea (2:14). The Hebrew says, literally, the knowledge of the glory of the LORD. The Chaldean empire and every empire like it is a passing thing; what abides, and what is coming, is a world flooded with the knowledge of God’s glory as completely as the ocean fills its own depths. That knowledge has been spreading ever since the Lord Jesus sent His Church out to carry it, and it presses toward the day when it will cover the earth without a dry patch left. And the chapter ends with the proper response of all the earth before the God who reigns over the rise and fall of empires: But the LORD is in his majestic palace. The whole earth is speechless in his presence! (2:20). The Hebrew word for palace is also the word for temple, and the older versions read, The LORD is in his holy temple. Against the noise of the proud and the clamor of the oppressor, the prophet sets the holy silence of worship. The puffed-up soul boasts and rages; the righteous, who live by faith, fall silent before the LORD in His temple, and wait, and trust, and live.

And, read canonically, that promise of the knowledge of the glory of the LORD fittingly directs us to where that glory is finally seen. Paul tells us that God is the one who shined in our hearts to give us the light of the glorious knowledge of God in the face of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6). The knowledge that will one day cover the earth as the waters cover the sea is the knowledge of God as He has made Himself known in the face of His Son, and it spreads across the world by the preaching of the gospel, one heart at a time, until the appointed day. And when the prophet says that the LORD is in His holy temple and all the earth is silent before Him, faith may fittingly hear more than a call to reverent hush. For the true temple, the place where God dwells with men and is met and worshiped, turned out to be a Person; the Lord Jesus spoke of the temple of His body, and in Him the whole earth now has access to the holy presence. Before that presence the proud are silenced, and the righteous bow, and live.

Gathering the Threads

Habakkuk gives us faith with its hard questions still in its mouth. He cries how long? over the violence of his own people, and is not rebuked for the asking; he is staggered when God answers that the rod will be the godless Chaldeans; he presses the harder question of how a holy God can use a nation more wicked than the one He judges; and then he does the thing that makes a complaint into faith: he climbs his watchtower and waits for the answer. And the answer, when it comes, reaches past the immediate crisis to the deepest thing of all. The vision is sure though it seems to delay; wait for it, for it will certainly come; and the vision, Hebrews tells us, was the coming One Himself. And at the center stands the line that divides the whole human race in two: the soul puffed up in its own strength is not upright, but the person of integrity will live by his steadfast faith. The proud lean on themselves and are crooked at the root; the righteous lean on God, receive His gift, and live.

And all of it is the things concerning Himself. The vision that seemed to delay was the Lord Jesus, the One who would certainly come; the righteousness that faith receives is His righteousness, reckoned to the ungodly and worn as a gift; the life the righteous live by faith is the life He won and gives. Paul found the gospel of justification witnessed in this one verse and set it at the heart of Romans and Galatians; Luther was carried through open gates into paradise by it; and the Church recovered the pure gospel of grace because a troubled prophet was told, in the dark of a coming exile, that the righteous one will live by faith. We do not climb to God by the lifting-up of our own souls; we are declared righteous, freely, for the sake of Christ, and we receive it with the empty hand of faith. The earth shall yet be filled with the knowledge of His glory as the waters cover the sea; and in the meantime the righteous keep the watch, and wait for the vision that will certainly come, and live, every day, not by their own strength but by faith in the Son of God who loved them and gave Himself for them.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

Habakkuk brings his raw complaint to God (How long, LORD, must I cry for help? 1:2) and is not rebuked for it. How is faith not the absence of hard questions but what we do with them? What is the difference between taking our why and walking away from God, and taking it to God and waiting?
God answers that He is raising up the wicked Babylonians as His rod (1:6), yet the Babylonian will be judged for his evil (the five woes of chapter 2). How does Scripture hold together God’s sovereignty over evil instruments and their full accountability? Why is this both steadying and staggering to faith?
Having asked his hardest question, Habakkuk says, I will stand at my watch post … I will keep watching, so I can see what he says to me (2:1). What does this watchtower teach about the posture of waiting faith? How is it different from demanding that God justify Himself at the bar of our reason?
The message (in Hebrew, the vision) is sure: Even if the message is not fulfilled right away, wait patiently (2:3), and Hebrews reads it as he who is coming, the Lord Jesus (Hebrews 10:37). How does it change our waiting to know the vision was a Person? How do we live now by a promise that has not yet fully arrived?
The person of integrity will live because of his faithfulness (2:4) is the verse Paul quotes as The righteous by faith will live (Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11). Why is it crucial that ’emunah is the faith that leans on God’s promise and not a performance of loyalty that earns life? Why is it crucial that justification is a verdict declared over us (righteous for Christ’s sake, received by faith) and not a slow self-improvement until we are good enough? What happens when the order of root and fruit is reversed?
Luther was carried through open gates into paradise when this verse broke open for him. What was the difference between the righteousness of God he had hated (by which God condemns) and the righteousness he came to see (which God gives)? How does the empty hand of faith differ from a work we contribute?

Looking Ahead

Habakkuk has brought his questions to God and received his answer; in the next session, “Yet I Will Rejoice in the LORD,” we hear what faith does once it has been answered: it sings. The third and final chapter of the book is a prayer set to music, a psalm of the prophet, and it moves from a trembling vision of God coming in glory and power to one of the most astonishing confessions of faith in all the Scriptures. Habakkuk knows now that the Babylonians are coming, that the fields will be stripped and the flocks cut off, that everything which makes for earthly security will fail, and he resolves to rejoice anyway: When the fig tree does not bud, and there are no grapes on the vines … I will rejoice because of the LORD; I will be happy because of the God who delivers me! (3:17–18). We will watch a man whose world is about to collapse find a joy that does not depend on his circumstances at all, but rests wholly in the God who is his salvation.

Before the next session, read Habakkuk 3: the prophet’s prayer, his trembling vision of God marching out in glory to save His people, and the great closing confession of joy that needs no harvest and no flock to sustain it: I will rejoice because of the LORD. Ask how a man who knows ruin is coming can rejoice in God anyway, and where such a joy, independent of every circumstance, could possibly come from.

Closing Prayer

O LORD, our God and our Holy One, from everlasting to everlasting, we confess that we are often more like Habakkuk than we would admit: crying how long, unable to square the evil we see with the goodness we believe, tempted to think You silent when You are at work in ways we would not believe even if we were told. We confess, too, the puffed-up soul within us, the pride that would stand on its own strength and call itself upright. Forgive us, and teach us to bring our questions to You and to keep the watch until You answer.

We bless You above all for the word You hid in this prophet’s complaint and grew into the gospel itself: that the righteous will live by faith. We thank You that You do not wait for us to make ourselves good enough, but declare us righteous freely, for the sake of Your Son, our Lord Jesus, whose perfect righteousness You reckon to us and whose life we receive with the empty hand of faith. Carry us, too, through open gates into the freedom of that gospel; let us live by faith and not by our own striving; and keep us waiting, with patience and with joy, for the vision that will certainly come: the Lord Jesus Himself, who came once from Bethlehem and will come again, and will not delay; who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.