The Prophet, the Fisherman, and the Words of God

Habakkuk, Part 2: Making sense of Habakkuk’s complaint and God’s grace for doubters.

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A version of this article originally appeared on 1517.

Habakkuk was a prophet with the unenviable task of speaking for God during a time in which upheaval, corruption, and chaos had become endemic. God’s covenant people had long since sloughed off their covenantal decorum, becoming a shell of their former selves with such glowing trademarks as strife, contention, and violence (Hab. 1:2–3). The ones whom the Lord had specifically chosen to be his beacons of light, hope, and blessing in the world now strutted around as people full of iniquity and full of themselves. The place where the promises of God were meant to be cherished above all else had corroded into a place of grief, disaster, and antediluvian disorder.

• Habakkuk’s cry of “Violence” is evocative of pre-flood humanity.

• It’s the same term that appears in Genesis 6:5, 11, and 13, where the Creator sees his creation in a state of sheer ruin.

• Humankind was thoroughly corrupt and full of “violence.”

• A similar disintegration has taken place in the Kingdom of Judah.

1. When God’s Answers Raise More Questions

It’s understandable, then, that the prophet unloads all his grief on the Lord. Why was he letting this happen? Why wasn’t he doing anything? The Lord’s reply was undoubtedly not what Habakkuk wanted or expected to hear. Apparently, the iniquity of Judah had reached such a fever pitch that God was “raising up the Chaldeans” to be his instrument of judgment (Hab. 1:6). The only silver lining to this dreadful news, if there was one, was the realization that this, too, was part of the work that God was doing in those days (Hab. 1:5). Even then, God was providentially unfolding his plances for his people and the rest of the world.

Accordingly, even though everything seemed to be crumbling into oblivion, God wasn’t scrambling. “Nothing that is happening is a surprise to God, or too big for him to grapple with,” John L. Mackay notes.¹ This was God’s message to his prophet, one that surely made him shudder. In fact, by the midway point of Chapter 1, Habakkuk is still grappling with what God told him:

Are you not from everlasting,
O Lord my God, my Holy One?
We shall not die.
O Lord, you have ordained them as a judgment,
and you, O Rock, have established them for reproof.
You who are of purer eyes than to see evil
and cannot look at wrong,
why do you idly look at traitors
and remain silent when the wicked swallows up
the man more righteous than he?
(Hab. 1:12–13)

Historically speaking, there is likely a gap in time between verses 11 and 12. The nation that Habakkuk was warned about is now actively “swallowing up” God’s people. Babylon wasn’t looming on the horizon; they were very much on their doorstep. This is what stirs the prophet to cry out to God once again.

2. Clinging to the Covenant in the Dark

He begins by returning to some of the most basic truths concerning God himself. He is eternal, “from everlasting.” There was nothing and no one before him, and everything that exists comes from him and continues to exist because of him. As Paul says in the New Testament, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:25). Moreover, the God of Judah is the Holy One of Israel, a title that’s repeated throughout the Old Testament.² He is the one true God, perfect and just in all that he says and does. But most significant of all is the fact that Habakkuk refers to the Lord as his God: “O Lord my God, my Holy One” (Hab. 1:12, emphasis mine). This, of course, is an allusion to the fact that the God to whom he speaks is none other than the God who made a covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He isn’t just any god, he is their God, the one beside whom there is no other (Isa. 45:21).

Despite how deep Habakkuk sank into doubt and despair, his faith was not entirely lost. He was merely taking his doubts where they belonged: with the Lord, who is his Rock. You almost get the sense that as he processes what he’s just heard, he strives to convince himself of what he knows is true of who God is and what he’s like, which is what allows him to proclaim that they would not ultimately perish. “We shall not die,” he says (Hab. 1:12). Although they would be devastated, they wouldn’t be annihilated (cf. Mal. 3:6). After all, their God is the promise making and promise keeping God (Deut. 7:9; 1 Kings 8:23; 2 Chron. 6:14), whose track record is flawless. None of his promises have ever failed. Habakkuk knows this, and after reminding himself of these truths, he wrestles with what it all means.

3. The Dragnet of Injustice

That the Babylonians were ordained by God “as a judgment” of God’s people shouldn’t have been a total shocker. God had warned them of the consequences should they turn away from him long ago (Deut. 28:15, 25, 49–50). Judah’s rebellion amounted to insubordination and infidelity to God, which were now coming home to roost. God was living up to his word; it was just the word that gave him no delight to fulfill. He wasn’t eager to dispense justice on his children, but what kind of God would he be if he didn’t? Still, Habakkuk couldn’t reconcile the Lord’s use of Babylon as his instrument of justice (Hab. 1:13). The fact that his God was so holy that he “cannot look at wrong” made it all the more difficult to understand what was unfolding in front of him. After all, by remaining idle as the wicked engulfed the world in violence, it was as if God was giving his silent approval to it all, which is what didn’t make a lick of sense to him. To further illustrate the collective turmoil this was wreaking on the people of Judah, Habakkuk employs a striking analogy:

You make mankind like the fish of the sea,
like crawling things that have no ruler.
He brings all of them up with a hook;
he drags them out with his net;
he gathers them in his dragnet;
so he rejoices and is glad.
Therefore he sacrifices to his net
and makes offerings to his dragnet;
for by them he lives in luxury,
and his food is rich.
Is he then to keep on emptying his net
and mercilessly killing nations forever?
(Hab. 1:14–17)

In short, he imagines God’s people as a school of fish that are swiftly caught in a fisherman’s “dragnet.” As the net slides across the ocean floor, they are helpless and powerless to escape its clutches. They were easy pickings. Making matters worse, the fisherman gloats and rejoices over his catch, going so far as to worship his net, as if that’s what allowed him to live a life of luxury. Are you really going to let this blasted fisherman go unchecked and unchallenged? Habakkuk cries. Is this our new normal? How long, O Lord?

The fisherman in the story, of course, represents nasty Babylon, “whose own might [was] their god” (Hab. 1:11). Just as the fisherman found glory in his net, they gloried in themselves. The school of fish, though, isn’t just God’s people, but all mankind (Hab. 1:13, 17). Habakkuk’s heart and mind were overwhelmed by the injustice on display, not just in the nation of Judah but in the whole world. How long would the one true God let this continue? Why did it feel like those who were flagrantly and unapologetically vile prospered while those who were “more righteous” were being devoured? Habakkuk joins a long line of God-fearing inquirers who’ve asked the same question (cf. Jer. 12:1; Ps. 73:3–5). But after laying it all out there, the prophet then positions himself to see how the Lord would answer him. “I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower,” Habakkuk determines, “and look out to see what he will say to me, and what I will answer concerning my complaint” (Hab. 2:1).

4. Unflinching Faith and Unavoidable Doubt

Although the wording is a little tricky, the gist is that he is waiting for God to answer his impeachment (תּוֹכַ֫חַת). It’s shocking, at first, to hear such guttural language coming from a “man of God,” but it should be relieving, since Habakkuk is demonstrating that faith and doubt aren’t incompatible. A mistake has been made if we’ve come to believe that the faithful ones are those who never have any doubts. They’re never uncertain, nor do they question anything, least of all God. There’s this idea that comes from who knows where that those who follow God don’t ask why, they just forge ahead, sort of like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Light Brigade.” But if that is true, doubters experience an added weight of guilt, since they are not only burdened by the doubts they feel but also by the mere fact that they feel doubt in the first place.

The idea that faith and doubt are mutually exclusive, like oil and water, loses all of its steam once we take a step back and recognize that God’s Word is a catalog of doubters — a quality that isn’t exclusive to Thomas. From Gideon to David to Zechariah to Paul to Sarah and Father Abraham, those who belong to the Lord have never been immune to doubt. The so-called “hall of faith” (cf. Heb. 11) isn’t a list of folks who never had questions. Indeed, the point is not “if” you experience doubt or not, it’s what you do with it. As Habakkuk shows us, we take our doubts to our ageless, immovable rock-like God.

God, in his inexhaustible grace, invites us to unload all of our deepest anxieties, frustrations, and troubles on him. He wants us, writes David Prior, “to trust him with our deepest fears and our wildest feelings . . . [he] wants us to throw everything at him, not to pretend that we do not think and feel in ways which are, for a certain kind of believer, unacceptable or shocking.”³ Just as the troubled prophet fled to his tower and waited for God to answer him, we are welcome to fly to the Word. To every doubter, sinner, and saint, there is abundant grace to be found in God’s Word. Its pages were preserved precisely for you who are in affliction and desperation. (And who isn’t?)

5. A Word You Can Run With

In response to Habakkuk’s complaint, God offers a word of revelation:

And the Lord answered me:
“Write the vision;
make it plain on tablets,
so he may run who reads it.
For still the vision awaits its appointed time;
it hastens to the end — it will not lie.
If it seems slow, wait for it;
it will surely come; it will not delay.
Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him,
but the righteous shall live by his faith.”
(Hab. 2:2–4)

Even though the Lord’s “vision” was originally given as a reply to his dubious prophet, it was meant for everyone’s benefit. This is why God tells him to “write it down” and “make it plain.” He intended all humankind to hear, know, and understand this word. Thus, Habakkuk was tasked with making this message so unmistakably clear that “he may run who reads it.” The implication of this assignment was to make the message so digestible that even runners passing by could read and understand it at a glance, or so that couriers and messengers could run from place to place with it with ease. Either way, what God gave him was urgent. He wasn’t interested in his words getting bogged down by a long string of exceptions or caveats. Neither did he want this revelation to get lost in translation along the way.

Unlike English grammar rules, which tell us to put I before E, except after C, or in words like “science,” “weird,” and “ancient,” or when sounding like A, as in “neighbor” and “weigh,” God’s message is much simpler than that: “The righteous shall live by his faith.” This, in many ways, is all of Scripture condensed in a single phrase. It’s what we and the rest of the world need to hear most. Faith alone is our lifeline. When corruption and chaos seem to rule the day, when God seems to go silent, when God’s plans seem more than a little delayed, faith is our only refuge, specifically faith in the God who definitively says that he is doing a work in our days (Hab. 1:5), which lets us understand the nature of faith itself.

6. The Logic of God and the Folly of the Cross

As we’ve already established, faith isn’t opposed to or immune to doubt. However, faith is opposed to our wisdom; to what we can rationalize or fathom via our own logic. Faith abandons any self-derived reason or wisdom by which we can discern or decipher what is. To have faith inherently means we have relinquished any grip we might have on man-made rationale for the way things are or will be. This, to be sure, doesn’t mean that the Christian message is “irrational” or “against reason” or “illogical.” It just means that it is above and beyond any logic found “under the sun.” Faith is tethered to a Word that wasn’t authored by the wisdom of man but by the logic of God. The Author and Finisher of our faith isn’t confined to our finite rationale. “His ways are not our ways,” as the prophet Isaiah says (Isa. 55:8). Therefore, even though it may not make sense to us, faith clings to a God whose words and ways are “super-rational” and beyond our logic.

This is what Paul was getting at when he said that “God [has] made foolish the wisdom of the world” (1 Cor. 1:20). The wisdom or logic of God dashes to pieces all “worldly wisdom.” How? Through the cross. The cross of Christ is “the content of God’s wisdom.”⁴ The cross is where everything is turned upside down. The cross is where “the foolishness of God is shown to be wiser than men” (1 Cor. 1:25). The wisdom of the world laughs and ridicules the very idea of a crucified Messiah. But faith holds fast to the God whose wisdom is so often mistaken for “foolishness,” because after the cross came the resurrection. “True faith,” continues Graham Tomlin, “means abandoning all conventional wisdom, being stripped of all pretension and pride, and leaving aside trust in anything but God’s word in Christ.”⁵ Genevan reformer John Calvin put it like this:

When our minds are agitated with unbelief, when doubts respecting God’s providence creep in, when things are so confused in this world as to involve us in darkness, so that no light appears: we must bid adieu to our own reason; for all our thoughts are nothing worth, when we seek, according to our own reason, to form a judgment . . . Let this, then, be our understanding, to obey God speaking to us, and reverently to embrace his word, so that he may deliver us from all troubles, and also keep our minds in peace and tranquillity.⁶

In the face of devastating circumstances or even debilitating doubts, faith says, Wait. “If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay” (Hab. 2:3). The God of the Bible cannot lie, which means that what he has set in motion “will not lie” either. “There is a time fixed in the Divine counsels for the accomplishment of every promise,” Charles Simeon once said.⁷ There is a divine timetable by which all things are ordered and established, and as much as we might ache to know what that timetable is, that isn’t for us. Thus, even though it might feel like his plans are delayed, God is right on schedule. What he has set in motion “awaits its appointed time.” (After all, the one who is outside of time can never be late.) Faith, in the end, isn’t the absence of questions, nor does it mean that every doubt is settled. Rather, faith stands on the watchtower not because we can see everything clearly, but because we cling to the God who does.

1. John L. Mackay, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah: God’s Just Demands, Focus on the Bible Commentary Series (Ross-shire, England: Christian Focus, 2019), 260.

2. For example, see 2 Kings 19:22; Ps. 71:22; 78:41; 89:18; Prov. 9:10; 30:3; Isa. 1:4; 5:19, 24; 10:17, 20, etc.

3. David Prior, The Message of Joel, Micah, & Habakkuk: Listening to the Voice of God, The Bible Speaks Today, edited by J. A. Motyer (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 227.

4. Graham Tomlin, The Power of the Cross: Theology and the Death of Christ in Paul, Luther, and Pascal, Paternoster Biblical and Theological Monographs (Carlisle, United Kingdom: Paternoster, 1999), 88.

5. Tomlin, 185.

6. John Calvin, “Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai,” Commentaries on the Twelve Minor Prophets, translated by John Owen, Vols. 1–5 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1848), 4:58–59, 61.

7. Charles Simeon, “Hosea to Malachi,” Horae Homileticae: or Discourses (Principally in the Form of Skeletons) Now First Digested into One Continued Series, and Forming a Commentary Upon Every Book of the Old and New Testament, Vols. 1–21 (London: Holdsworth & Ball, 1832), 10:365.