Behold, his soul is puffed up, it is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith.- Hab_2:4.
1. Habakkuk ascends his spiritual watch-tower to hear what Jehovah will say to the weary plaint of His prophet; and the answer comes. It is such that all may easily read it. The Divine truth revealed will not indeed be verified till the appointed time, but there can be no doubt that it will be verified, though long years should pass. “Though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not delay. Behold, his soul is puffed up, it is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith” (Hab_2:3-4).
The first clause of Hab_2:4 describes the Chaldæan. His whole nature is inflated, presumptuous, insincere. It is essentially false and unreal; and therefore-so we must complete the sense by inference from the second clause-it has no principle of permanence; he is doomed to perish. But the righteous-Israel according to its calling, realized in the character of those godly men who even in the darkest days represented what Israel was designed to be-shall live in his faithfulness. “We shall not die,” was Habakkuk's confident assurance, based upon the character of Jehovah; and this oracle is the Divine response to that confidence. For the true Israel his integrity, his trustworthiness, his constancy, the correspondence of his nature to God's eternal law, constitute a principle of permanence: he cannot perish but is destined to live, through all the cataclysms and convulsions which are to shake the world.
This is the sense of the words as they are used by Habakkuk. We must not anticipate the progress of revelation by supposing that “faith” in the full New Testament sense of the word is here revealed as the means of life. The Hebrew language indeed has no word which fully expresses the idea of faith as an active principle. Yet, since integrity of character and constancy in trouble could for the Israelite spring only from reliance on Jehovah, the thought of faith as an active principle is not far distant. St. Paul takes the message, enlarges it, interprets it, and shows its fulfilment in the light of the gospel revelation.
It is frequently said that trust and faith are the same thing, but it is not so in the Old Testament. According to the usage of the Hebrew Bible, trust is more nearly related to hope than it is to belief, and yet it springs out of belief. It makes the confident conviction of those who take God at His word. The reason of this is that so much of what we call Revelation has to do either with the unseen or with the future, both of which are beyond the ken of our natural faculties. Faith realizes the unseen; hope looks forward to the fulfilment of the promises; trust rests on Him who is the revealer of His own will and purposes.1 [Note: R. B. Girdlestone, Old Testament Theology, 125.]
2. Here then lies the secret of the life of an Israelite; he shall live by his faith. Feeling and knowing himself to be nothing, he is obliged to cast himself wholly upon God. And anything which takes away that self-confidence and brings forth that faith is blessed is Divine, let the outward aspects of it be as dark, let the inward anguish which it produces be as terrible, as it may. Here is the solution of the riddles of the universe; here is the key to God's dark and inscrutable ways. Not a solution which we can resort to as if it were a formula of ready application, which may stifle questioning and set our minds at ease. Not a key such as empirics and diviners use, pretending that they know all the wards of every mystery and can open it at their pleasure, but one to which the humble and the meek can always resort when most baffled, when most ignorant-one which helps them to welcome their own tribulations, and to see in the tribulations of the world a sure witness that the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.
This is the climax of the great drama; but it is almost impossible to do justice to the wealth of Divine truth which the noble message contains. Briefly put, it suggests that ordinary human life is only a half-told story. God's purposes extend through the ages. The eternal principles of the Divine rule may not appear to be vindicated in one lifetime. Good men may die under a cloud, and bad men may live out their days in the sunshine; but nevertheless good is good and evil is evil. Worldly prosperity does not mean real happiness, and worldly suffering does not mean spiritual misery. Right is right, and wrong is wrong, to the end of the world; and, though a man die under suffering, it is better to be loyal and true to God than to be wicked and apparently to flourish. Pride and all sin carry in themselves their own doom, which surely comes sooner or later in one way or another. But faith in God and loyal faithfulness to Him always give poor humanity strength to wait and to endure also in one way or another.
In this spirit Habakkuk stands and waits. He writes the vision and makes it plain upon tables that he that runneth may read it; that men in after-days may know how their forefathers have suffered and sorrowed, and may know where they could not find and where they did find deliverance. He does not see to the end of the vision; he does not ask to see. There is yet an appointed time; to tarry is his task-yes, and his privilege.
To most people the radiance and peaceful joy of his old age seemed so natural that they thought it came by nature. That was not so. By nature he was active, and even restless; there was in him the spirit “that bids not sit nor stand, but go”; by nature he was tempted to impatience; by nature he found it the hardest task in the world to keep within the limits of his shortened tether; and now and again there would gleam out a flash of the will that must be about the Father's business, and forgot that the Father's business was for him not doing, but to be still and see the salvation of the Lord. It was by the grace of Christ, by much prayer and striving, that he became trustful, peaceful, content to lie and wait the good time of the Lord. In his private litany the first grace for which he prayed was meekness.1 [Note: J. L. Paton, John Brown Paton (1914), 518.]
3. If the prophet's message, that “the just shall live by his faith,” seems to us to be simple and commonplace, let us remember the toil and tears through which it came to him. It may be said that there is nothing new here, even according to his own statement. That was all implied in the belief in a righteous God which he professed. Just so. In the full, clear light of to-day it is easy for us to see that; but, as a matter of fact, it is only when a man is thrown back in doubt and agony upon his creed that he begins to realize its full meaning. The prophet joins in the most significant manner two things which Christian theology recognizes as two aspects of the same sublime reality, personal faith in the righteous God and the clear perception of the moral order of the world. The superficial view is to say that in the face of pride and tyranny God is silent; He does nothing. Even the man of faith in hours of weakness hears this sinister whisper in his soul, “God is silent; He does nothing.” The deeper thought that comes in the hour of meditation and prayer is that the Eternal is never silent, but ever-present and always active. It is true that the prophet refers to the future. The message is written plainly so that men's faith may be confirmed when future events cast their lurid light upon it, when it is read in the light of burning cities, and amid the crash of falling empires. He has also his great hope of a time when “the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” But the great truth which has come to him, and in which he finds rest, is one of present application, namely this, that character decides destiny, sin is its own punishment. We are so familiar with this truth, and have had presented to us in so many forms the fact that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap, that we do not easily feel how living and original it was to the prophet in his hour of wrestling.
“Prisoner, tell me, who was it that bound you?”
“It was my master,” said the prisoner. “I thought I could outdo everybody in the world in wealth and power, and I amassed in my own treasure-house the money due to my king. When sleep overcame me I lay upon the bed that was for my lord, and on waking up I found I was a prisoner in my own treasure-house.”
“Prisoner, tell me who was it that wrought this unbreakable chain?”
“It was I,” said the prisoner, “who forged this chain very carefully. I thought my invincible power would hold the world captive, leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.”1 [Note: Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, 24.]
4. The rest of the Book of Habakkuk proceeds with a forward rush. Hitherto the progress of thought in the mind of the prophet has been slow and painful, like that of a man who toils uphill and pauses often to cast a wavering glance on what is before, behind, and around him. When the summit is reached, and speculative doubts give place to definite conclusions, the time for thinking is past, and the time for action is come. It is pardonable in any thoughtful man to be long in finding a working faith; but, when once it has been found, he is a spiritual laggard if he does not proceed to act directly upon his hard-won and fixed beliefs. With a rush, then, Habakkuk goes on to predict the certain doom of the wicked oppressor. He makes the captive nations, in their outraged humanity, lift up the voice of woe and doom in a series of “taunt-songs,” which are living with poetic force. They are given in five strophes which heap up the several accusations against the Chaldæans-for their rapacity, their selfish greed, their ambitious buildings, their insulting corruption of the nations, and their senseless idolatry. They do not merely manifest personal feeling; they express the judgment of God and predict the doom which has already begun to work itself out. Insatiable greed, unbridled lust, reckless extravagance, shameful cruelty, worship of one's own power-these sins against God and man carry in themselves the seeds of their own corruption. Just in so far as a nation is ruled in this spirit it is built upon a rotten foundation; its day of doom may seem to tarry, but it is in process of coming all the time. Its very success is its degradation; even before the height of ambition is reached, judgment comes by slow decay or sudden calamity.
This line of thought is exceedingly interesting. We have already seen in prophecy, and especially in Isaiah, the beginnings of Hebrew Wisdom-the attempt to uncover the moral processes of life and express a philosophy of history. But hardly anywhere have we found so complete an absence of all reference to the direct interference of God Himself in the punishment of the tyrant; for “the cup of the Lord's right hand” in Hab_2:16 is simply the survival of an ancient metaphor. These “proverbs,” or “taunt-songs,” in conformity with the proverbs of the later Wisdom, dwell only upon the inherent tendency to decay of all injustice. Tyranny, they assert, and history ever since has affirmed their truthfulness-tyranny is suicide.
