Habakkuk 1:12-2:5 –Positioned to See Clearly: Living by Faith

With so much immorality and injustice in the world today, it can be tempting to question why God would allow such things to continue. You may have even found yourself wondering, “Where is God?” or “Why is God letting this happen?” or “Why does God seem silent?” Few struggles test our hearts more deeply than the feeling that God is silent when life is unjust. When the wicked succeed, when suffering continues with no explanation, when the world feels upside down—our theology collides with our experience. Inundated as we are with disturbing news and images from around the world, the sheer scale of the problem will appear overwhelming if we do not view it in light of the gospel.

Think of a child waiting for a parent to return from a trip. The parent promised, “I’ll be back,” but the hours stretch, night falls, and fear whispers, “Maybe they won’t keep their word.” For the child, waiting is not merely a matter of time—it is a test of trust.

That is where Habakkuk stands. He knows God is holy. He knows God is just. But what he sees with his eyes contradicts what he knows in his heart.

You see, like Habakkuk, we struggle to trust God’s justice and timing when the wicked seem to prosper and He appears silent. But God assures His people that His appointed justice will surely come, and He calls them to live by faith—a faith ultimately fulfilled and modeled in Christ, the Righteous One who trusted God perfectly and secured God’s final victory over evil.

Because God’s justice is certain even when it seems delayed, His people must live by faith in His sure promises rather than by sight of present circumstances.

So how are we positioned to see God and His ways clearly amid the evil and injustice that surround us? It is when we live by faith, even when it appears God is silent. This passage gives us four ways to live by faith when it seems God is silent. You can see them printed for you there on page 6 of the WG. We live by faith when we remember God’s unchanging character, when we bring our honest struggles to God, when we trust God’s appointed timing, and when we reject pride and embrace humble dependence on God for deliverance.

These verses in Habakkuk teach us that God’s character is trustworthy and his timing is perfect. Therefore, as we live by faith, we can trust that God will deal justly with all unrighteousness. Let’s look together at these verses now.
 
Habakkuk begins here in verse 12 by confessing what he knows, not what he feels. He sets out what he is sure of, which is God’s unchanging character.  He states that God is “from everlasting, the Holy One, and the Rock.” Even as he laments about the evil that is around him and how God uses it for His purposes, he anchors himself in God’s character—eternal, holy, unchanging, faithful.

Habakkuk’s questioning does not indicate a weak faith but more like a perplexed faith. Why? If Judah suffers the same fate as the northern kingdom of Israel, what will happen to the nation as God’s covenant people? Habakkuk knows of the covenant God made with Abraham. The promises of a great nation, a land, and a people. If Judah is destroyed by the Chaldeans, will those promises fail? Despite his sincere concern, the prophet bolsters his confidence by focusing on the character of God.

Sailors in ancient times navigated by the North Star because it alone did not move. In storms, when clouds parted for a second, one fixed point gave them orientation.
Habakkuk’s theology, specifically his knowledge of God’s attributes and character, is his North Star. To state it more precisely, God is our North Star because of His character.

We too must be oriented or positioned to see clearly and respond appropriately to what we don’t understand about the outworking of God’s providential decrees. We are able to do this by being anchored in the truth about his character.

Where do we discover His character? It is revealed in His Word, which we have recorded in the pages of Scripture. In other words, we must be students of God’s word.

As we encounter God in His Word, we learn what WSC 4 summarizes about God. It states that, “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”

The truths about God that Habakkuk mentions here are:
God’s eternality – “2 Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” (Ps. 90:2); 8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” (Rev. 1:8).
God’s holiness - 15 but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, 16 since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:15).
God is referred to as the Rock, which communicates God’s strength and permanence – 4 “The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he” (Deut. 32:4).
 
This is the God of the Bible. This is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the Creator and Sustainer of all existence. This is our God. These attributes of God lead Habakkuk to proclaim there in verse 12, “We shall not die.” Scholar and author O. Palmer Robertson writes, “The prophet here conjoins the covenant people with himself. Yahweh is their God. Therefore, it is impossible that they could perish.” Habakkuk has trusted in God by faith. He is a part of the covenant community, and he remembers God’s covenant promises to His covenant people. Those promises combined with God’s character help Habakkuk live by faith, even when God seems silent.

It is the same for us. When God seems silent, we must preach God's character to our own heart. We must look to His Word and be reminded of His promises and character.
Circumstances change; our feelings change; our fears change—but God does not.

But knowing God’s character doesn’t mean we always understand His decrees. Because of our finitude, or finiteness, we question why certain things happen the way they do. Faith is not the absence of questions…so we also see that we live by faith when we bring our honest struggles to God.

In verse 13, Habakkuk reiterates His knowledge of God’s character. He says, “You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong.” He knows God is pure and holy and cannot tolerate sin and evil. So, we can understand and even empathize with Habakkuk’s confusion here. He essentially says, “You are a God who is holy and just. You condemn sin, therefore I know that you must judge and punish all wickedness. But that isn’t what I see happening here. It seems You are just standing back and even using these evil Chaldeans. Where is the justice?”

But notice something here, Habakkuk doesn’t suppress his confusion—he brings it to God. He says, “Why do You look at evil? Why are You silent? How long will this continue?” He knows God character, so he questions God’s actions. But he doesn’t walk away in cynicism; he walks toward God in lament.

We see this throughout the Scriptures, especially in the Psalms. We see David, a man after God’s own heart, struggle with and question God when evil and wicked men pursue him. Yet, what he records in the Psalms, in places like Psalm 43, shows that his hope is in the Lord. He says, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.”

The descriptions Habakkuk uses for the wicked in verses 14-17 reveal the depth of depravity of the enemy as well as their strength. He uses the vivid imagery of fishing, which was a very common vocation, and which many were intimately familiar with. He equates the Israelites to helpless fish who are caught by the wicked and who are easily destroyed. The wicked even worship their nets, their strength as it were. They live happy and full from their wicked deeds. “How can this go on?” Habakkuk asks. “How can You seemingly remain silent while this continues, God?”

Maybe you can relate? Are you discouraged by the presence and proliferation of wickedness? If God is holy and just, why does it seem He often allows evil to continue to and the wicked to prosper? Do you find yourself thinking, “Why is God not putting a stop to this?”

As believers who have the Holy Spirit, we recognize wickedness and have a desire for God to enact His justice upon all that is evil. However, in our haste for God to deal swiftly with sin, we think we have a higher and better sense of justice than God. We think we know what God should do and how He should respond better than He does.

But we would do well to see and remember what Habakkuk does next. Look at verse 1 of chapter 2. After lamenting, he says he is going to take a stand at his watchpost. This is military terminology for those who stand guard or on post. They are the lookouts. Habakkuk says, I will wait and see what the Lord says. It is the stance of expectant faith. He positions himself to listen, to see how the Lord responds. Convinced that the events of history were not determined by blind fate but by the righteous and holy God of Israel, Habakkuk expectantly waited on the Lord until he received an answer.

We are allowed to lament the evil we see and even appropriately and respectfully bring our concerns and questions to God. God is not threatened by our questions. But even as we do lament, we understand from Scripture that we must ultimately wait on the Lord and trust in His plan and His timing.

So how does God answer the prophet’s cry for justice?

Look there at verses 2 and 3. God tells Habakkuk: “Write the vision.” “It will not lie.” “Though it seems slow, wait for it.” “It will surely come; it will not delay.”
In other words: God’s justice is never late. It only seems slow to us. You see we live by faith when we trust in God’s appointed timing.

If you’ve ever tracked a package that says, “out for delivery,” you know the restlessness of waiting. But the driver is not lost; the schedule is precise. Delay is not abandonment.

Or have you ever been in a situation where you had an idea of a timetable for something to occur, realized that timetable was not going to be met, became frustrated and annoyed, only to find out later that if the thing would have happened when you wanted it to, things would not have gone nearly as well? We all can probably think of examples of that.

God’s timetable is not aligned to human impatience. His justice is not forgotten—it is scheduled. We see this promise of justice back in places like the book of Zephaniah. In verse 8 of chapter 3, Zephaniah writes, 8 “Therefore wait for me,” declares the Lord, “for the day when I rise up to seize the prey. For my decision is to gather nations, to assemble kingdoms, to pour out upon them my indignation, all my burning anger; for in the fire of my jealousy all the earth shall be consumed.”

In fact, all the way back in Genesis, in chapter 3, we see God’s promise to deal with sin when He said He would crush the head of the serpent. In other words, Christ would defeat Satan, sin, and death. Justice would be delivered.

So we too must remember God’s promise to deal with sin and evil. Faith waits because it knows God works on a clock calibrated to eternity, not our immediacy. We must trust in God’s timing.
And that leads to our final point.

God doesn’t just contrast “now” with “later.” He contrasts two kinds of people. Look at verses 4-5. We see the unrighteous contrasted with the righteous. Habakkuk describes the unrighteous by saying, “Behold, his soul is puffed up, it is not upright within him,” and then in verse 5, “Moreover, wine is a traitor, an arrogant man who is never at rest. His greed is as wide as Sheol; like death he has never enough. He gathers for himself all nations and collects as his own all peoples.”

The proud trust in themselves—their strength, success, weapons, wealth (2:5). Babylon sacrifices to its own “net,” its own power (1:16).

Then he describes the righteous. And here is the center of the book: “But the righteous shall live by his faith.”

Few phrases of Scripture have had as far-reaching an impact as the Lord’s declaration to Habakkuk in verse 4. The apostle Paul references it several times in the New Testament. This single line becomes the heartbeat of New Testament Christianity—quoted in Romans 1:17, Galatians 3:11, and Hebrews 10:38. Martin Luther adopted it as his watchword during the Protestant Reformation of the early 1500s. It is the verse that set the church free from the shackles of corruption and empty religion.

What is it teaching? Contrasted with the unrighteous who trust in themselves, the righteous do the opposite: they trust God when they cannot see God’s justice yet. Faith is not wishful thinking; it is dependence on God’s promised redemption. And what is that promised redemption?

Those whom God regards as righteous do not find life by doing the right things, although doing the right things is important. Instead, they find life by trusting wholly in the Lord to act according to His character and keep His promises to His people. The Apostle Paul fleshes this out in his epistles, telling us that fallen human beings are not regarded as righteous in God's courtroom except by faith alone, and that it is this faith that leads to the imputation of a righteousness that is not our own, which in turn leads to eternal life.

Like Habakkuk, Paul also confirmed that true life is only possible in a relationship of total dependence on the Lord. Such dependence, based on the faithfulness of our God, transforms our existence in this world, filling our lives with joy in the certainty of God's gratefulness to his promises. Have you trusted in the Lord? If not, I urge you today to trust in Him and live in dependence on Him. Here in Habakkuk, we realize that trusting in the Lord and living in dependence on Him only occurs as we live by faith in Christ.

You see Habakkuk hears, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
But the gospel reveals that no one lives by perfect faith—except One.
Christ is the Righteous One who lived by faith His entire earthly life.
He entrusted Himself to the Father when evil seemed to triumph.
He faced injustice not only unexplained but undeserved.
He endured silence—not imagined but real—as He cried, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?”

And His faithfulness becomes our righteousness. He trusted fully where we trust weakly. He waited perfectly when we despair quickly. He secured the final triumph of God’s justice by bearing it in Himself on the cross. And He rose to guarantee that every promise of God will surely come. Our faith rests not in our ability to wait well, but in Christ’s perfect trust and God’s completed redemption.

Habakkuk teaches us that: When God seems silent—He is still holy. When evil seems triumphant—He is still sovereign. When justice seems delayed—He is still faithful.

Habakkuk live by faith in God and in God’s promises. But what Habakkuk looked forward to in faith, we can look back to in faith. We can look back to the birth of Christ, who is the fulfillment of God’s promise. When Christ entered the world, the promised Messiah had arrived. He was the embodiment of God’s justice.

So above all, we look to Christ—the One who lived by faith perfectly, who bore injustice completely, and who guarantees that God’s justice will surely come. It is Christ who positions us to see clearly, so let us look to Christ and live by faith in Him today.

Let’s pray together.