CHAPTER 15CHAPTER 15

CHRIST IN EVERY BOOK PROPHETS MICAH THROUGH HABAKKUKCHRIST IN EVERY BOOK PROPHETS MICAH THROUGH HABAKKUK

The Old Testament prophetic books are filled with descriptions of (what we now know to be) two comings of the One called the Anointed, or the Messiah. His lineage, place of birth, nature of His birth (by a virgin), and the fact that He will die for the sins of His people (Isa. 53) are all predicted, and were fulfilled in His first coming. His second coming as the King over Israel and the world is also clearly foretold. In fact, hundreds of verses describe this coming and its impact on the Jews, the Middle East, and all humanity. Whole chapters describe how the land will be changed, nature harnessed, evil punished, health increased, and that the nations will truly know God and His Messiah. These themes occupy much of the content of the major and minor prophets.

—MAL COUCH¹

MICAH

Micah is a contemporary of Isaiah but preaches mostly in the country, whereas Isaiah speaks in the city.² Micah ministers to the Southern Kingdom of Judah during a period of religious revival, but his visions warn of a time of judgment that will precede the people’s deliverance. Like Amos, he preaches against social sins, and he denounces the rich for defrauding the poor of their lands and for evicting widows from their property. Like Isaiah, however, he also infuses his message of impending judgment with one of hope, grounded in the coming Messiah.³ Micah’s main purpose is to call Judah to righteousness by turning back to the Lord, because God would bring judgment on sinners and bestow blessings on those who repent.⁴

Micah’s prediction of Jesus’ city of birth, by name, seven hundred years before the event, is one of the Bible’s most extraordinary messianic prophecies: “But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days” (Micah 5:2). There is no ambiguity here—He is to be from “ancient days,” which would make no sense apart from Jesus’ eternal existence, and He is to be ruler in Israel, in fulfillment of the Davidic and other covenants. The clear intent of this passage is confirmed in the Gospel of Matthew, which records that when Herod asks the chief priests and scribes where the Christ will be born, they cite Micah’s prediction (2:1–6). In addition, Micah 2:12, 13; 4:1–8; and 5:4, 5 provide a clear description of the righteous reign of Christ throughout the world.⁵

Micah further prophesies that Christ, as the Shepherd, will regather the remnant of Israel to the land and lead His people as their king (Micah 2:12–13).⁶ He foretells that Christ’s kingdom will be established; the Temple will be restored; people from all over will be attracted to Jerusalem; the Lord will be the judge at Jerusalem; Israel will dwell in peace, security, and strength; peace will be universal; and Jerusalem will have dominion (Micah 4:1–8).⁷

It’s fascinating that Micah 5:1 not only prophesies Christ’s suffering—“with a rod they strike the judge of Israel on the cheek”—but it reminds us of the original Gospel announcement of Genesis 3:15: “he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” The language in both these passages indicates that the blows against Christ will not be enough to keep Him from perfecting His saving work. This is another gripping example of the unity of Scripture and its all-embracing message of redemption.

Finally we see redemptive and messianic themes in the last three verses of the book, which describe God’s pardoning of iniquities, His casting “all our sins into the depths of the sea,” and His showing “faithfulness to Jacob and steadfast love to Abraham, as [He has] sworn to our fathers from the days of old.” This is elegantly efficient language affirming God’s covenants with His people, which will all culminate in Jesus Christ, Who will pardon our iniquities and cast all our sins (not just some of them) into the depths (not merely the shallow part) of the sea, never to surface again. In this little Book of Micah, we have resounding reassurance of God’s promises of redemption and salvation.

NAHUM

Like Jonah, Nahum preaches to the Assyrians, but more than a century later. Some consider the book as a sort of sequel to Jonah. After repenting before Jonah, the Assyrians have now resumed and escalated their sins. Nahum warns them of God’s coming judgment, offering a lesson that transcends time and the particular plight of the Assyrians: the long-suffering of God has limits.⁸ Despite God’s revealing Himself to them, the Assyrians have turned away and failed to pass on to their children the good news of His gracious redemption. Judgment of the unrepentant, of course, even of those whose fathers had repented, is perfectly consistent with the holiness of God. As the saying goes, “God has no grandchildren,” i.e., we are all individually accountable to God.

The book is also a powerful statement of God’s sovereignty—no matter how mighty Assyria is in its heyday, it’s like a twig in God’s hands: “Thus says the Lord, ‘Though they are at full strength and many, they will be cut down and pass away. . . . No more shall your name be perpetuated; from the house of your gods I will cut off the carved image and the metal image. I will make your grave, for you are vile” (Nahum 1:12, 14). Nearly every verse from 1:15 through 3:19 speaks of Nineveh’s coming destruction, which finally occurs at the hands of a Babylonianled army in 612 BC.

There are no messianic prophecies in this book, but Nahum’s name is a prefiguring of Christ—it means “comfort,” and Christ is the “Comforter.” Nahum speaks eloquently of God’s divine attributes in verses 1:2–8, which parallel Christ’s prophesied role as the judge of all nations at His return. Verse 1:15 describes the “feet” of the messenger who preaches the good news of the demise of Assyria, which will bring peace. “The New Testament,” notes Kendell Easley, “sees Jesus Christ as God’s ultimate messenger, preaching God’s peace for the world (Acts 10:36).” Paul quotes this verse (and Isaiah 52:7) in his letter to the Romans, praising those who preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ: “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” (Romans 10:15). This metaphor illustrates that in order to spread the Gospel, one must go to others, using his feet, and preach the Word. “So faith comes from hearing,” Paul declares, “and hearing through the Word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).

Additionally, we see a prefiguring of Christ in Nahum’s depiction of God as “the One Who rebukes seas and dries up rivers” (Nahum 1:4), just as “Jesus rebukes the sea and calms the storm (Matt. 8:26).”⁹

With our immense gratitude for the Good News Christ brings, we sometimes forget that His grace and redemptive work are necessary because of God’s perfect justice and His abhorrence of sin. This means that along with His provision of salvation He will also judge the nations—both actions are part of God’s salvation history. In describing God’s firm judgment on Assyria, Nahum reminds us of this. But he also demonstrates that while judgment is necessary and inescapable, God provides for us a Substitute in Jesus Christ. As Julie Woods affirms, “The Suffering Servant took the wrath so that those who repent may escape [future] judgment.”¹⁰

ZEPHANIAH

Though Zephaniah preaches to Judah during the days of King Josiah, who had instituted spiritual reforms in the kingdom, the prophet warns of impending, severe judgment. Right off the bat, in the book’s second verse, Zephaniah begins, “‘I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth,’ declares the Lord. ‘I will sweep away man and beast; I will sweep away the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, and the rubble with the wicked. I will cut off mankind from the face of the earth,’ declares the Lord” (Zeph. 1:2–3). Like many prophets, especially Joel, he warns of the coming “day of the Lord,” when sin will be punished, justice will prevail, and the faithful remnant will be saved.¹¹ The immediate judgment will be Babylonia’s conquest of Judah and the people’s captivity, but the ultimate judgment for both God’s people (3:1–7) and the nations (3:8) will be in the future, after which there will be blessings both for the Gentiles (3:9–10) and the Jews (3:11–20).

When reading Zephaniah from the perspective of the New Testament and the words of Jesus, we see that the prophet is talking about Christ’s second coming and His judgment of all nations on the day of the Lord (Romans 2:16; 1 Cor. 1:8; Phil. 1:6, 10, 2:16; 2 Tim. 4:8). In fact, Jesus alludes to two separate passages from this book (Zeph. 1:3 in Matt. 13:41, and Zeph. 1:15 in Matt. 24:29), both relating to Christ’s return, His judgment, and His victorious reign. On the first occasion Jesus describes His gathering “out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers” (Matt. 13:41). On the second, He refers to Zephaniah’s account of a day of darkness, gloom, and devastation (Matt. 24:29–31). Zephaniah doesn’t expressly identify the Messiah as the deliverer of this judgment, but as other commentators have noted, who else could gather His people together and secure a complete and final victory over all the nations as Zephaniah prophesies?¹²

Though the judgment will be harsh and complete, the victorious reign will be wonderful. Zephaniah 3:9–20 details the conversion of the nations, when Christ will “change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call upon the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord” (Zeph. 3:9). Who besides Christ could bring about such a sweeping victory and transform all the people? Who else could fulfill a promise to restore Jerusalem, clear away all its enemies, and reign in the midst of its people (Zeph. 3:14–17)?

Zephaniah depicts Christ as the righteous Lord within Israel (Zeph. 3:5), the judge of all the nations (Zeph. 3:8), and the King of Israel, the Lord who is in their midst (Zeph. 3:15). Jesus, of course, is designated King of the Jews at His crucifixion (Mark 15:26). According to Old Testament Professor Mark Mangano, “The ‘day of the Lord’ of Zephaniah with its multifaceted focus in the New Testament centers on the coming of Jesus Christ to inaugurate the kingdom of God.”¹³ As Anglican priest Robert Hawker aptly puts it, “This chapter opens in sharp reproofs to Jerusalem, but ends in blessed promises. It contains much of Gospel mercies, and sweetly points to the Lord Jesus Christ.”¹⁴

JEREMIAH

Jeremiah’s prophetic ministry spans some fifty years, from King Josiah’s reign until after Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple. He is called the “weeping prophet” for good reason—constantly warning of the coming judgment against Judah’s apostasy, he provokes fierce opposition from the spiritually decadent people. Yet he isn’t an incorrigible pessimist, for he also delivers God’s message of ultimate restoration. These themes appear in the book’s opening declaration, in which the prophet relates what God told him: “See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jer. 1:10). Essentially, God has instructed him to preach against sin and to warn of the coming destruction of Jerusalem. But the book’s predominant message is one of renewal amid the background of deep and immeasurable suffering, causing some commentators to refer to Jeremiah as the “prophet of hope.”¹⁵ These themes of sin, destruction, hope, and renewal appear throughout the book (Jer. 18:7–11, 31:28, and 45:4).¹⁶

Jeremiah’s long ministry continues into the last days of Judah in the exile period, when he warns King Jehoiakim to submit to the Babylonian king, since God is directing these events in judgment of Israel. He warns his people remaining in Jerusalem not to be fooled by the false prophets who are filling them “with vain hopes” and who speak “visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord. . . . They say continually . . . ‘No disaster shall come upon you’” (Jer. 23:16–17). He also warns the exiles not to believe false prophets who predict they will soon return to their land (Jer. 29:8–9). Jeremiah insists God will bring them back only after seventy years in Babylonian captivity (Jer. 29:10).

Due to his unwelcome warnings, Jeremiah is persecuted, abandoned by his people, and imprisoned: “Now Pashhur the priest, the son of Immer, who was chief officer in the house of the Lord, heard Jeremiah prophesying these things. Then Pashhur beat Jeremiah the prophet, and put him in the stocks that were in the upper Benjamin Gate of the house of the Lord” (Jer. 20:1–2). At the end of his ministry, Jeremiah witnesses the wholesale destruction of Judah and the obliteration of the Temple. The Book of Lamentations, commonly believed to have been written by Jeremiah, expresses the author’s agony over these events.

Many Old Testament scholars emphasize the extent to which Jeremiah lives his message—he wholly identifies with his mission as the anguish of his warnings plays out in his own life, even before the predicted calamities come to pass. J. Sidlow Baxter describes this beautifully: “It is this man who, of all the prophets, gives us the fullest revelation of his own character. This is because the man and his message are in such passionate oneness under such tragic circumstances. Jeremiah’s nature was such that he simply could not be merely a transmitter, able to detach his own feelings from that which he was commissioned to declare. With an intensity of love and sympathy, he himself lived and felt and suffered in his message. His own heartstrings vibrated to every major and every minor chord. The man and his message were one.”¹⁷

Old Testament professor F. B. Huey Jr. observes that Jeremiah would probably be considered an abysmal failure by modern standards, as he preaches for forty years without even convincing some people he is a prophet of God, much less persuading them to heed his warnings. Huey insists, however, that we should not judge him by human standards but by God’s, Who values obedience. Jeremiah obeys God’s call to present a clear message to the people, and he’s not responsible for their failure to respond. He is remembered now and forever because of his selfless servanthood, while all the powerful kings of his time have fallen into disrepute.¹⁸

Jeremiah’s message couldn’t have been more relevant at a time when the people have forgotten God, abandoned Him, and replaced Him with pagan idols. Speaking against the grain of the culture, Jeremiah is ridiculed and persecuted. But he persists in faithful obedience to God, knowing that the people will find hope and life if they return to Him.

Jeremiah’s timeless message is just as relevant for us today, as our dominant culture upholds false gods. We Christians find our values rejected and scorned in society, but that doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility to promote those values to unreceptive ears and to preach the Gospel at home and to the ends of the earth. To the contrary, writes E. Martens, we must “confront evils in a world where evil is normalized; . . . protest against preachers of an ‘easy grace’ which promises endless benefits without responsibility; (and) . . . present a God who demands righteous living and sends his wrath against all evil.” F. B. Huey adds, “Just as ‘Jeremiah . . . challenged their falsely based security, their doublethink, their manipulative ways, their god-substitutes,’ we too must challenge people today in all their sin by proclaiming God’s Word, which brings life to those who repent.”¹⁹ Rather than look at Jeremiah as some freakish counter-cultural eccentric of a bygone era, Huey argues, we should regard him as “a model whom we should imitate in proclaiming God’s word.”²⁰

Foreshadowings of Christ appear throughout the Book of Jeremiah in numerous messianic prophecies: Christ will be the Lord of our righteousness (23:5–6, 33:16, fulfilled in Romans 3:22; 1 Cor. 1:30; 2 Cor. 5:21; Phil. 3:9); He will be born a King (30:9, fulfilled in Luke 1:69; John 18:37; Acts 13:23; Rev. 1:5); the infants will be killed (31:15, fulfilled in Matt. 2:17–18); and there is the announcement of the New Covenant (31:31–34, fulfilled in Matt. 26:27–29; Mark 14:22–24; Luke 22:15–20; 1 Cor. 11:25; Heb. 8:8–12, 10:15–17, 12:24, 13–20).

Furthermore, Christ is seen in chapter 23 as the righteous Branch Whom God will raise up from the line of David, Who shall reign as king, and Who will execute justice and righteousness in the land. Jeremiah foretells of the time when God will no longer be known only for bringing His people out of Egypt, but for regathering Israel back to the Promised Land. Christ’s people will finally recognize Him as their Messiah as He provides salvation for Judah (Jer. 23:6; Romans 11:26). And as we’ve seen, Jeremiah announces God’s coming New Covenant with the house of Israel, promising He would fulfill His previous covenants with Abraham, Moses, David, and the people of Israel, and put His Law within them and write it on their hearts. He “will forgive their iniquity, and . . . remember their sin no more” (Jer. 31:34).

Jeremiah portrays Christ as the Fountain of Living Waters (Jer. 2:13); the Great Physician (Jer. 8:22); the Good Shepherd (Jer. 31:10, 23:4); David the King (Jer. 30:9); our Redeemer (Jer. 50:34); a righteous Branch (Jer. 23:5), and the Lord our Righteousness (Jer. 23:6).²¹ Moreover, through his personal sufferings, Jeremiah prefigures the sufferings of Jesus. “Jesus Christ suffered in precisely the ways Jeremiah suffered,” Philip Ryken writes. “He suffered physically . . . domestically . . . (and) socially.”²² Like Christ and Nehemiah, Jeremiah weeps over Jerusalem (Jer. 9:1; Neh. 1:4; Luke 19:41), and like Christ, he predicts the destruction of the Temple (Jer. 7:11–15; Matt. 24:1, 2).²³

Moreover, Jeremiah points to the Gospel in his admonition that we must not trust in ourselves or become boastful, but boast only about our knowledge of the Lord: “Thus says the Lord: ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord’” (Jer. 9:23–24). This reminds us that man cannot save himself, that he is dependent on God, and that all blessings and gifts come from God. This calls to mind Paul’s statement to the Ephesians: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8–9). Paul paraphrases Jeremiah’s admonition twice: “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:31; 2 Cor. 10:17). This Jeremiah passage, read in conjunction with verse 17:7—“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord”—presents a crystal clear picture of the Gospel message.

Jeremiah points to man’s helplessness apart from Christ in another respect, writes Philip Ryken. Jeremiah asks the people, “How long will it be before you are made clean?” (Jer. 13:27). “The answer,” writes Ryken, “is that you will remain unclean for as long as you insist on cleaning yourself. As long as you try to reform your own life you will remain unclean. There is nothing a sinner can do to change his or her sinful nature. The point of Jeremiah’s famous proverb is that you are a dyed-in-the-wool sinner: ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots?’” (Jer. 13:23).²⁴

Finally, it’s instructive that the people surrounding Jesus speak of an association between Him and Jeremiah. For example, Jesus asks His disciples, “‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ And they said, ‘Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others say Jeremiah or one of the prophets’” (Matt. 16:13–14). This is unsurprising because, as we’ve noted, Jeremiah weeps over Jerusalem, suffers, and is rejected due to his unequivocal denunciation of evil, and feels the people’s suffering to the core of his spirit. Furthermore, he is driven from his native Ananoth much as Christ is driven from Nazareth (Jer. 12:6),²⁵ and he even compares himself to a lamb led to the slaughter (Jer. 11:19).²⁶

LAMENTATIONS

Jewish tradition holds that Jeremiah also wrote Lamentations,²⁷ which serves as a sequel to the Book of Jeremiah.²⁸ Whereas the Book of Jeremiah prophesies the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, Lamentations chronicles Jeremiah’s lament after the city is conquered.²⁹ Tremper Longman suggests that Jeremiah’s deep anguish follows his “discovery that the power behind the carnage that had just befallen Jerusalem was ultimately not the Babylonian war machine, but God Himself.”³⁰ While other Old Testament books, such as Job and Psalms, give us a glimpse into the personal suffering of the writer, in Lamentations Jeremiah laments the conditions of the entire nation.³¹ In that sense, it seems that Jeremiah exhibits a Christ-like quality of selfless concern for others.

As I discussed in Jesus on Trial, the structure of Lamentations corresponds to its message. It’s an alphabetic acrostic poem in which each successive line or stanza begins with sequential letters of the Hebrew alphabet.³² Though this doesn’t come through in the English translations, the original composition is a thing of beauty. The book contains five chapters, each forming a distinct poem with twenty-two stanzas of three lines each. The structure becomes more complex from chapter to chapter until the third chapter, which is the apex of the book’s complexity, where each line of every stanza, not just the first line, begins with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In the book’s last two chapters the complexity of the structure diminishes. Correspondingly, the subject matter of the book builds in intensity from the beginning and hits its climax in the middle of the third chapter, after which the intensity begins to diminish. Just when Jeremiah is filled to his limit with anguish and despair in verse 3:18—“My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord”—He remembers that God is a God of unfailing faithfulness. He then exclaims, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases” (3:22), and “The Lord is my portion . . . therefore I will hope in him” (3:23–24).

The book illustrates one of my main points—that throughout Old Testament history, God calls His people to remember what He has done for them, and that the Bible’s account of these acts of remembrance exemplify the unity of Scripture. In this case, Jeremiah recalls God’s loving-kindness without any recorded prompting from God, and at the very point of his remembrance, he turns on a dime from the deepest despair to the grandest hope. Jeremiah’s ultimate hope is grounded in his faith in God’s salvation (3:26).

The book’s main theme is God’s judgment of the sins of the people of Judah—though a corollary theme is that the people are still justified in hoping for God’s compassion. Underlying these themes is the constant refrain that God and His judgment are sovereign. His perfect holiness demands that Judah’s sin finally be punished in their prophesied destruction. Just as God used the evil Assyrian Empire to bring judgment against the Northern Kingdom of Israel, He uses Babylon to punish the Southern Kingdom of Judah.³³

Note that God does not relent in His promised punishment. But Jeremiah is uplifted by his remembrance of God’s faithfulness and his conviction that God will not forsake His people in the end. Imagine the depth of faith required for you to accept the destruction of your beloved city and your nation, and having enough honesty of mind, emotion, and spirit to recognize that your people deserve this fate. God’s fairness cannot be questioned here, especially since the Judeans already knew that the Northern Kingdom’s sinfulness had brought about its demise. Jeremiah, a man of unique faith, understands that despite the calamitous judgment on Judah, God’s promises are still in full force and effect. He would deliver His people in the future. As William LaSor notes, Jeremiah’s faith was doubtlessly inspirational to his people. “The poet’s strong faith must have heartened generations of fellow Jews,” says LaSor. “To find hope in the midst of disaster and lead others to do the same takes the deepest knowledge of God.”³⁴

Not only is Jeremiah a type of Christ as a man of sorrows (Lam. 1:12, 3:19), and one who is despised and mocked by his enemies (Lam. 2:15, 16, 3:14, 30),³⁵ but his message of hope points to Christ and all His redemptive work—for Christ will redeem those who place their saving faith in Him and will one day wipe away all tears (Rev. 7:17, 21:4). In fact, many commentators cite verse 1:12 as prefiguring Christ’s suffering on the cross: “Is it nothing to you, all who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger.” And in whom else but Jesus could Jeremiah have been placing his hope when he exclaimed, “The Lord is my portion . . . therefore I will hope in him” (Lam. 3:24).

HABAKKUK

Like Job, Habakkuk writes a partially philosophical book that directly questions some of God’s actions. He is particularly troubled by the notion that God would use a wicked empire like Babylon to accomplish His divine will to punish Judah. He expresses a dilemma that many still contemplate today: Why do evil people seem to prosper and go unpunished while the righteous suffer at their hands? Why does God sometimes seem to ignore our pleas for justice? He writes, “How long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? . . . Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted” (Hab. 1:2–4).

God replies that He is raising up the “dreaded and fearsome” Babylonians—“guilty men, whose might is their god!” (1:6, 7, 11)—for a particular purpose. Habakkuk persists in asking why God would use the evil Babylonians to do His work: “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?” (1:12–13).

Just as with Job, God doesn’t provide a direct answer, though one is implicit in His response. He informs Habakkuk that people must trust Him to administer judgment and justice in their appointed times. He will eventually punish the wicked nations, and in the meantime the righteous must have faith in Him and be patient, knowing He is a God of perfect justice: “For still the vision awaits its appointed time. . . . If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come. . . . but the righteous shall live by his faith. . . . Woe to him who gets evil gain for his house . . . who builds a town with blood and founds a city on iniquity! . . . For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. . . . The cup in the Lord’s right hand will come around to you, and utter shame will come upon your glory!” (2:3, 4, 9, 12, 14).

Habakkuk’s response shows that he fully understands God’s message, and that he indeed fears God and thoroughly trusts He will deliver justice: “I hear, and my body trembles; my lips quiver at the sound; . . . my legs tremble beneath me. Yet I will quietly wait for the day of trouble to come upon people who invade us” (3:16). Habakkuk closes by affirming his renewed faith in God. Even if he sees no immediate evidence of God’s justice and present circumstances seem terrible, even if “the free tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls” (3:17), he will nevertheless “rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation” (3:18).

It’s important to distinguish between God not answering our questions and His giving answers we don’t expect or don’t want to hear. In this case, He does respond to Habakkuk’s question. His response reveals, like His response to Job, that in our finitude we can’t possibly understand all of His ways. Habakkuk, in conversing with God, comes to understand that in the end it’s not important for us to comprehend every one of God’s actions. What’s paramount is that we come to know Him, which seems to be precisely what happens with Habakkuk in this exchange, just as it did with Job.

God’s answer to Habakkuk conveys the essence of the book’s Christ-centered message. He is acknowledging that things sometimes appear unjust to us, but that He is all powerful and all knowing and perfectly just, and that in His time He will make all things right. To get ourselves aligned with Him, we must trust Him to be fair. But our faith cannot be confined to His administration of justice; we must have faith in Him because that is the path to eternal life, which is perhaps the central theme of the Bible. Faith is not just a salve to keep our patience in check as we await the future judgment; it is the key to life in Him—a revelation that will become clearer and more specific in the New Testament, which teaches faith in Jesus Christ. “That [the righteous shall live by faith] is the central revelation of the prophecy,” G. Campbell Morgan avers. “It is a contrast between the ‘puffed up’ and the ‘just.’ The former is not upright, and therefore is condemned; the latter acts on faith, and therefore lives.” Morgan continues, “The first is self-centered, and therefore doomed; the second is God-centered, and therefore permanent.”³⁶

Affirming the centrality of this verse—“that the righteous shall live by his faith” (Hab. 2:4)—Scottish theologian Alexander Whyte writes,

          What Habakkuk wrote six hundred years before Christ on the gates, and walls, and pillars of Jerusalem—that very same word of God the Holy Spirit of God is writing on the tables that are in the believing hearts of all God’s people still: “Being justified by faith we have peace with God”: “By grace ye are saved through faith”: “The just shall live by his faith”: He shall live—not so much by the fulfillment of all God’s promises; nor by God’s full answers to his prayers and expectations; nor by the full deliverance of his soul from his bitter enemies; nor by the final expulsion of the Chaldeans: but he shall live, amid all these troubles, and till they come to an end forever—he shall live by his firm faith in God, and in the future which is all in God’s hand. And thus it is that, whatever our oppression and persecution may be, whatever our prayer and wherever and whatever our waiting tower, still this old and ever new vision and answer comes: Faith: Faith: and Faith only. Rest and trust in God.³⁷

Permit me one more quote from an old master, Scottish theologian Thomas Boston, who writes, “Nothing but an infinite good can satisfy the desires of the human soul, and here it is. Here in Christ, like Habakkuk, you may find a source of joy and strength, when all other comforts fail. As nothing but the mother’s breast can satisfy the hungry infant, so nothing but Christ can satisfy your souls aright: ‘Whosoever drinketh of the water (saith Jesus) that I shall give him, shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of living water, springing up into everlasting life’” (John 4:14).³⁸

As for messianic prophecies in Habakkuk, scholars cite 2:14 as one example: “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” This partially mirrors the language of Isaiah 11:9—“For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea”—and of Psalms 72:19—“Blessed be his glorious name forever; may the whole earth be filled with his glory!” Similar language is found in Numbers 14:21 and Isaiah 6:3. Some of these verses celebrate the day the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, while other verses, like that of Habakkuk, anticipate the day it will be filled with the knowledge of His glory. These are obviously interrelated—if people have knowledge of God, inevitably they will have knowledge of His glory because to truly know Him is to know His glory. This prophecy (and promise) means that when Christ rules in His kingdom upon His return, there will be worldwide knowledge of the Lord.³⁹

Jeremiah describes the expansiveness of this knowledge when he unveils the New Covenant: “‘And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more’” (Jer. 31:33–34). So widespread, so universal will be the knowledge of God that people will not need to be told about Him. That work will apparently already be complete, along with the forgiveness of the sins of all who “know” (place their faith in) Him.

Mark Dever observes that Habakkuk expresses his great contentment in God at the end of chapter 3, after he has been praying and meditating on Him.⁴⁰ The lesson is that the more we abide in God, the more content we will be. Like Job, what Habakkuk really wants, whether he fully realizes it or not, is not so much God’s answers to troubling questions but God Himself. As St. Augustine writes in his Confessions, “Thou awakes us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”⁴¹ R. C. Sproul reinforces this message: “With Habakkuk we are called to live life in the presence of God, under his authority, and to his glory.”⁴² For the Christian, to know Christ is to know God, because Christ, as we’ve noted, “is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb. 1:3). He “is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4).

Another Christ-pointing verse in Habakkuk is 2:4, quoted above: “The righteous shall live by his faith.” New Testament writers cite this verse several times (Romans 1:17; Gal. 3:11; Heb. 10:38) to reaffirm the doctrine of justification by faith.⁴³ We not only attain our eternal life through faith, but faith sustains our Christian walk. It is part of our sanctification process, our path to holiness.

Habakkuk, then, gives us a foretaste of the New Testament message that life in God’s presence will be eternal, but it’s also available to the faithful in this life. Elizabeth Achtemeier notes that this life-sustaining knowledge of God, given to Habakkuk by God Himself, provides him joy and certainty amid his turbulent and evil circumstances. Our faith in the afterlife, our trust in God, gives us contentment unavailable otherwise. As Paul writes, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. . . . The Lord is at hand, do not be anxious about anything. . . . I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content” (Philip. 4:4, 6, 11). Achtemeier observes, “By such faithfulness, God tells Habakkuk, the prophet can live an abundant life in his time and place. That is the message Habakkuk passes on to his contemporaries, to us, and to all the faithful who find that they must live ‘in the meantime,’ between the revealing of God’s purposes for his world and the final realization of those purposes. Countless faithful in Israel and in the church for over twenty-five hundred years have found God true to his word.”⁴⁴

Habakkuk emphasizes the importance of placing our faith in God. In our final chapter, we will turn to the prophet Daniel, who demonstrates the awesome power of such faith against overwhelming odds. We will also examine how the remaining prophetic books are centered in the divine object of that faith: Jesus Christ.