How Long, Lord?

Habakkuk was a prophet, and what he said was not like what any other prophet said. Most prophets talk to the people for God. Habakkuk talks to God about the people — and God answers him, and he argues back. The whole thing is an argument, and he is never told to be quiet.

It begins in the middle, the way a complaint does. “How long, Lord? I keep calling, and you do not listen. I cry out to you that I am being wronged, and you do not save. Why do you make me look at all this work and pain? Why do I have to stand here and watch people being miserable and doing wrong? There are quarrels everywhere, and the judge takes the money.” “That is why the law has come apart in people’s hands. Nothing is ever judged right through to the end. The wicked man gets his hands round the good man, and what comes out of the court is crooked.” That is a man saying to God: I can see it, so you can see it. Why are you not doing anything?

And God answered him. That is the first surprise. “Look at the nations. Look hard, and be amazed, and be amazed again — because I am doing something in your own lifetime that you would not believe if somebody told you about it.” And then he said what it was. “Look — I am raising up the Chaldeans. They are a bitter nation and a quick one, and they march across the whole width of the earth to take houses that are not theirs. They are frightening, and everybody has heard of them. They make their own rules and answer to nobody.” “Their horses are faster than leopards and fiercer than wolves at evening. Their riders come from a long way off; they fly in like an eagle in a hurry to eat. They gather up prisoners like sand. They laugh at kings — rulers are a plaything to them. They laugh at every fort: they heap up earth against the wall and walk in over it. And then they go on their way, and say that their own strength is their god.” Chaldeans meant Babylon. God’s answer to a man complaining about crooked judges in his own city was: I am sending the biggest army in the world to your door. It did not help. It made it worse, and Habakkuk said so.

“Are you not from the beginning, Lord, my God, my Holy One? We are not going to die. Lord, you set them there to judge us; you made them strong to teach us a lesson. But your eyes are too clean to look at evil. You cannot look at people being hurt. So why do you look at men who betray other men? Why do you say nothing while a wicked man swallows somebody better than himself?” “You have made people like the fish in the sea, like the little crawling things that have nobody to look after them. He pulls them up with a hook. He drags them in with a net. He gathers them into his dragnet, and his heart is glad — and then he makes an offering to his net. He burns incense to his dragnet, because that is what he grew fat on.” “Is he going to keep emptying his net for ever? Is he never going to stop killing whole nations?”

And then Habakkuk did this. “I will go and stand at my watch. I will climb up on the rock and keep watch, to see what he says to me — and what I am going to answer when he corrects me.” He had shouted at God twice. Now he went up and stood there like a soldier on night watch, waiting to be answered, and expecting to be told he was wrong.

And the Lord answered him, and the first thing in the answer was about writing it down. “Write the vision down. Write it clear and plain on the tablets, so that a man running past can read it as he runs. The vision is for a time that is set; it is coming to the end, and it will not turn out to be nothing. If it seems slow, wait for it — because the one who is coming will come, and he will not be late.” And in the middle of it, this: the righteous will live by my faith. Then God went on: “The boastful man, drunk with himself, will finish nothing. He has opened his soul wide like Hades; like death, he is never satisfied. He gathers all the nations to himself and takes all the peoples for his own.” God did not tell Habakkuk that the Chaldeans were not coming. He told him what would happen after them — because everybody they trampled would make up a song about them, and God gave Habakkuk the words of it. It is a mocking song, and it goes woe, woe, woe. “Woe to the man who piles up what is not his — how long is he going to do it? — and loads his heavy collar heavier still. The people you bit will wake up one morning and stand up, and then you will be the plunder. You stripped a great many nations, and the ones that are left will strip you.” “Woe to the man who does wrong to make his own house rich, and builds his nest up high where nothing can reach him. Woe to the man who builds a town with blood and sets a city up on wrongdoing. The stone will shout it out of the wall, and the beetle in the roof beam will answer.” And in the middle of the woes, this: the earth will be filled with knowing the glory of the Lord, the way the water covers the sea. “Woe to the man who hands his neighbor a drink and makes him drunk so he can look into his hiding places. The cup goes round, and it is coming round to you. Woe to the man who says to a piece of wood, ‘Wake up!’ and to a stone, ‘Get up!’ It is a shape, that is all. It has gold and silver laid over it, and there is no breath in it anywhere.” And then the song stops, and everything stops with it. The Lord is in his holy temple. Let the whole earth be quiet in front of him.

Then came not a complaint and not an answer, but a prayer, and it was written to be sung. “Lord, I have heard what they say about you, and I was afraid. I thought about the things you have done, and I was amazed. Let them be known again in our own years. And when you are angry — remember mercy.” And then he sings God coming, and it is like weather arriving over the hills. God comes from Teman, the Holy One from the dark wooded mountain. The sky is not big enough to hold how bright he is, and the earth is full of the sound of people praising him. He stands still, and the ground shakes. He looks, and the nations melt. The old mountains break; the everlasting hills sink down. The sun goes up, and the moon stops where it is, and his arrows go out in the light. He asks God, in the song, whether he is angry with the rivers — whether it is the sea he is furious with — and then answers it himself. No. God came out to rescue his people, to save the ones he had chosen. And then, having sung all that, he says what it did to him. “I kept watch, and my stomach shook. My lips trembled at the sound of my own prayer. The shaking went into my bones, and my whole body was shaking under me. I will keep still, and wait for the day when the trouble comes.”

Habakkuk knew what was coming. He had been told, plainly, twice. And this is what he sang. “Though the fig tree does not blossom, and there is no fruit on the vines; though the olive crop fails and the fields grow no food; though the sheep are gone out of the fold and there is not one cow left in the stalls — yet I will be glad in the Lord. I will be happy in God, the one who rescues me. The Lord God is my strength. He will set my feet on the high places, and I will come through it in his song.” Everything a farmer has is in that list, and every one of them is gone. And then he says yet. The man who began by shouting ‘How long, Lord?’ ends up singing.