O Lord, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear? I cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save.- Hab_1:2.
1. The book opens with a dialogue between the prophet and God, in which God is boldly but reverently challenged to defend His action in the government of the world. Habakkuk looks upon the utter destruction of Josiah's reforms-the downfall of pure religion; the return of idolatry, the very worst kind of idol-worship; sensuality eating away the very fabric of social life; injustice, unrighteousness, tyranny, oppression, breaking up the commonwealth-and the questions confront him: “Is God holding His people in His hands? Is God, through Israel, building up a kingdom here on earth? How can that be true when Israel has, on the one hand, sunk down into such sin and guilt; and, on the other, been brought into such utter subjection to a heathen power?”
The prophet's horizon is filled with wrong: Israel thrown into disorder, revelation paralysed, justice perverted. But, like Nahum, Habakkuk feels not for Israel alone. The tyrant has outraged humanity. He “sweeps peoples into his net,” and as soon as he empties this, he fills it again “ceaselessly,” as if there were no just God above. He exults in his vast cruelty, and has success so unbroken that he worships the very means of it. In itself such impiety is gross enough, but to a heart that believes in God it is a problem of exquisite pain. Habakkuk's is the burden of the finest faith. He illustrates the great commonplace of religious doubt-that problems arise and become rigorous in proportion to the purity and tenderness of a man's conception of God. It is not the coarsest but the finest temperaments that are exposed to scepticism. Every advance in assurance of God or in appreciation of His character develops new perplexities in face of the facts of experience, and faith becomes her own most cruel troubler. Habakkuk's questions are not due to any cooling of the religious temper in Israel, but are begotten of the very heat and ardour of prophecy in its encounter with experience. His tremulousness, for instance, is impossible without the high knowledge of God's purity and faithfulness, which older prophets had achieved in Israel:
“Art not thou of old, O Lord, my God, my Holy One,
Purer of eyes than to behold evil,
And incapable of looking upon wrong?”
His despair is that which comes only from eager and persevering habits of prayer:
“How long, O Lord, have I called and thou hearest not!
I cry to thee of wrong and thou givest no help!”
His questions, too, are bold with that sense of God's absolute power which flashed so bright in Israel as to blind men's eyes to all secondary and intermediate causes. “Thou,” he says,-
“Thou hast made men like fishes of the sea,
Like worms that have no ruler,”
boldly charging the Almighty, in almost the temper of Job himself, with being the cause of the cruelty inflicted by the unchecked tyrant upon the nations; “for shall evil happen, and Jehovah not have done it?”
He was one of the first of path-finders through those dark and tangled ways of doubt into which even good people fall sometimes, when their practical experience of human life seems to contradict the doctrines of their religion. He is one of the fathers of that great company of the speculative, who have not shirked before the contradictions which life seems to offer to faith, but have brought their brains to bear, sometimes with reverence and humility, and sometimes, alas! without either, upon the dark problems of life. As among the disciples stands Thomas, so among the prophets stands Habakkuk, a devout freethinker. He dared to look round and ask what things meant; more than this, he dared to lift his fearless face to the heavens and ask what God meant.
This man, and his like, have helped to raise faith out of stagnation, and have constrained her to make sure that she was grappling herself to realities and not to shadows; they have helped to deliver her from the fetish of phrases which had ceased to hold living and operative ideas; and, as perhaps the greatest service of all, they have compelled the salutary discovery and admission that there are some things that even good people do not know, that not the wisest have seen all the paths that radiate from the throne of God, that there is a point where our little tapping staff of inquiry goes clean over the edge of things, and finds nothing that it can probe. And in compelling this discovery, he and those like him have done by no means their least service, for it is only when faith is taken off its feet that it discovers it has wings.
Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
He fought his doubts and gather'd strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length
To find a stronger faith his own;
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone,
But in the darkness and the cloud,
As over Sinai's peaks of old,
While Israel made their gods of gold,
Altho' the trumpet blew so loud.1 [Note: Tennyson, In Memoriam.]
2. We can understand the prophet's impatience. There may be weakness in it, but it is also tinged with piety and patriotism. It is not all personal vexation. There is much real zeal and jealousy for the righteousness of God. The prophet is just as zealous for the vindication of Jehovah's character as for the honour and safety of his own nation. But God's demand is that the prophet must have patience. It is the prophet's duty to watch and wait. He can utter his complaint. Certainly there is no book where man's freedom of utterance is more fully vindicated than in the Old Testament. Every mood and passion of the soul finds full expression. So long as it is not mere self-conceit or idle fretfulness, it is good that man's complaint should be spoken and not cherished in sullen silence. When that is done the prophet can look longingly towards God. How dignified is this attitude! “I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will look forth to see what he will speak with me, and what answer he will give to my plea.”
Some of you have seen, on an ocean steamer, the officer of the watch on the bridge, peering out toward the horizon. Sometimes he cannot see a ship's length ahead; sometimes the sky is blue and serene before him; but always there is a man standing watch, to see what may meet him; and in the sense of that alertness on the bridge the passengers rest in peace below. Such is the discipline and preparedness which the voyage of life demands. We speak of such a man as being “on deck”; and the trouble with a great part of the religious world is that it is not on deck, but is snugly below, like cabin passengers, with no officer on the bridge. “I will stand upon my watch,” says the prophet. No man can tell another when the exigencies of life are to arise or its storms of temptation to be met. No good seaman waits until the storm has struck to go on deck, and no mystery of experience is so startling as the abrupt, unanticipated, and surprising ways in which the shifting weather of life suddenly tests the human soul.
Oh to be up and doing, O!
Unfearing and unshamed to go
In all the uproar and the press
About my human business!
But ye? O ye who linger still
Here in your fortress on the hill
With placid face, with tranquil breath,
The unsought volunteers of death,
Our cheerful General on high,
With careless looks may pass you by.1 [Note: F. G. Peabody, Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 138.]
3. To such anxious hope and earnest expectation an answer is not lacking. It comes in the promise of a vision, which, though it seem to linger, will not be later than the time fixed by God. A vision is something realized, experienced-something that will be as actual and present to the waiting prophet as the cruelty which now fills his sight.
In December 1900 my father paid his last visit to Cambridge, to preach for the second time at the Trinity College Commemoration. In the Bishop's sermon the following passage occurs:
“In this Chapel and in these Courts fifty-six years ago I saw visions as it is promised that young men shall see them in the last days-visions which in their outward circumstances have been immeasurably more than fulfilled. I have had an unusually long working time, and I think unequalled opportunities of service. Where I have failed, as I have failed often and grievously, it has not been because I once saw an ideal, but because I have not looked to it constantly, steadily, faithfully; because I have distrusted myself and distrusted others; because again and again I have lost the help of sympathy, since I was unwilling to claim from those ‘who called me friend' the sacrifice which I was myself ready to make. So now an old man I dream dreams of great hope, when I plead with those who will carry forward what my own generation has left unattempted or unaccomplished, to welcome the ideal which breaks in light upon them, the only possible ideal for man, even the fullest realization of self, the completest service of others, the devoutest fellowship with God: to strive towards it untiringly even if it seems ‘to fade for ever and for ever as we move.' ”2 [Note: A. Westcott, Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, ii. 327.]
