In the prophet’s first prayer (Hab. 1:2-4) he asked the Almighty how he could endure the violence and injustice within Judah. God’s first revelation to his servant (Hab. 1:5-11) disclosed a brutal invasion of Judah about to come from Babylon in response to the nation’s sin. In a second prayer (Hab. 1:12-2:1) the prophet boldly questioned how a holy God could countenance triumph by the most wicked of men over the less wicked. We are now in the midst of considering God’s second revelation to the prophet (Hab. 2:2-20).

In this answer to Habakkuk’s prayer is the key to reading all of history. A great conflict is raging on the earth. It is the clash between the proud on one hand and men of faith on the other. The boastful, arrogant and self-reliant assert themselves. The righteous place all their reliance upon God. Throughout history this Almighty God is resisting the proud but giving grace to the humble (Hab. 2:4). In Habakkuk 2:5-20 the Lord applies this principle to the raging bully-nation, Babylon. However, the same response from God’s sovereign throne is given to every swaggering power on earth.

The God who knows all hearts described the threatening empire of Babylon in Habakkuk 2:5. The history of Babylon is characterized by its excessive use of alcohol. Human pride was propped up by means of intoxicated passion. On the night Babylon fell to the forces of Persia, all her leaders were carousing in a palace orgy. Having desires as insatiable as are death and the grave the empire heaped up captive nations and plunder from their conquests.

God Has Destined Babylon to Shameful Mocking⤒🔗

Of course the proud, as they always do, taunted their victims, just as the Pharisees taunted Christ on the cross. Consequently Jehovah expressed five of his own taunts to the proud Babylonians. His statements assure Habakkuk that Babylon would not have the last word in history. God would bring them to ruin after they have ruined proud Judah.

These five taunts by the living God of Providence are marked by exclamations in verses 6, 9, 12, 15, and 19. In many versions of the Bible the exclamation is translated, ‘Woe’. As Dr Palmer Robertson has shown us, the word is more appropriately rendered, ‘Ha.’ God is mocking the mockers.

Earlier in Israel’s history a giant of a warrior had stood before the Jewish forces inviting them to send out their best man to fight him. Proudly he had cried, ‘I defy the armies of Israel this day.’ This man of massive dimensions, wearing his mammoth armour and carrying his Herculean weapons, had stood before the Jews. A lad dressed as a shepherd had approached him. The boy had said, ‘I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the LORD will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you and take your head from you.’ Thus the taunter had been taunted.

Habakkuk 2:6-8 brings the first taunt to Babylon and to every proud, warring oppressor in history. It is as though God points a finger and cries, ‘Ha! The plunderer is plundered.’ The day is coming when the remnant of all the nations which Babylon had pillaged would rise up and pillage Babylon herself (verse 8). But God speaks not only of the spoils of military campaigns. Conquering nations also impose unjust terms of business and credit on those they oppress. Practising a policy of heavy taxation and excessive interest for loans will return to bite the proud who use these measures against others (verses 6-7).

Habakkuk 2:9-11 holds God’s second taunt. ‘Ha! Your places of refuge have crumbled.’ Men and nations pursue ‘evil gain’ (verse 9) to provide protection for their houses. They are building future ‘security’ for their families, for their dynasties, and for their nations and empires. They are like hawks and eagles who build nests in the rocky mountainsides (verse 9b). Nevertheless, these fortresses will collapse. The proud victors will hear the rocks of their walls and the timbers of their building beams cry out against them (verse 11) as they crumble to the ground. ‘Pride goes before destruction’ (Prov. 16:18). ‘The LORD will destroy the proud’ (Prov. 15:25).

A third taunt issues from the mouth of the Lord in Habakkuk 2:12-14: ‘Ha! Your efforts are for nothing!’ Babylon organized its people to build towns, cities, and nations. They did it with bloodshed. They did it then as nations often do now – by aiming at proud human goals. Secularism (in which man, not God, motivates their efforts) leads to the goals of materialism, hedonism, and feminism. All such building will be burned in the fires of God’s judgments. It will prove to be vanity (emptiness).

Fourthly (Hab. 2:15-17) they are told, ‘Ha! You who shame others will be publicly shamed.’ Luxurious and wild entertainment at the expense of others will make you disgusting in their eyes. What you think is your glory is your dishonour. You will feel their contempt before multitudes, and in the last judgment.

God’s Purpose of Grace Is Not Hindered by Its Enemies←⤒🔗

In the midst of this ringing indictment of the Babylonian empire the Lord explains why all this must be so:

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.Habakkuk 2:14

God has decreed the terminal point of human history. When the tale is entirely told, everyone will see how every event and every era has served this end.

This was not the first time that God spoke these very words by the mouths of his prophets. In Numbers 14 the people of Israel had refused to enter the Promised Land as God had told them to do. They openly planned to choose a new leader to replace Moses and to lead them back to Egypt. God found it necessary to curse them with forty years of wandering in the wilderness until all the rebellious adults had died.

Yet, the Lord proclaimed on this occasion, ‘Truly, as I live, all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord’ (Num. 14:21).

Also, in Isaiah 10 and 11, God had addressed the pride of Assyria with the prediction:

The Lord, the Lord of hosts, will lop off the bough with terror; those of high stature will be hewn down, and the haughty will be humbled.Isaiah 10:33

With this is contrasted a branch growing out of the root of Jesse (Isa. 11). As the Branch (the Messiah) and his kingdom are described it is said, ‘For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea’ (Isa. 11:9).

The supreme answer to proud humanism in all its forms is the One who said, ‘I am gentle and lowly in heart’ (Matt. 11:29). It is He of whose coming it was said:

The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.Isaiah 40:5

Again in this place prophets were told to ‘say unto the cities of Judah, 'Behold your God!'Isaiah 40:9

The Kingdom of God under Christ Will Fulfil This Promise←⤒🔗

The New Testament tells us that the gospel of ‘Christ Jesus the Lord’ is a gospel of glory (2 Cor. 4:4). Glory speaks of splendour and greatness. And ‘the glory of God’ is ‘in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4:6). Christ is the image of God (2 Cor. 4:4). He is the brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of his person (Heb. 1:3). The apostles testified, ‘We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth’ (John 1:14).

The knowledge of this glory of God is, by God’s determination, destined to cover the entire earth. It must be seen by every nation, not only by the Jews of Habakkuk’s nation. In Psalm 2 God laughs at those nations in rebellion against him and his Messiah. In defiance of their will God sets his King upon Zion and promises to him the nations as an inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession.

The god of this age (Satan) is blinding men so that they do not see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:4). Those who cannot see the glory are now perishing (2 Cor. 4:3). However, in the process of history the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness will shine on a multitude of hearts to give them the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in Christ (2 Cor. 4:6).

This knowledge of God’s glory will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea (Hab. 2:14). The Jews were serving the ends of God in this purpose as they were severely chastised by the stick of Babylon. They would return to their land one day and through them would come Messiah, in whose face the glory of God would supremely and savingly shine. A great missionary movement would take the gospel of this glory to the ends of the earth. In the Messiah would be the triumph of faith over pride. Trust in God would be exalted above human self-reliance, whether intellectual or physical.

Modern Parallels←⤒🔗

Those of us who live in the West (Europe and America) have been highly privileged to have a history of our fathers’ knowing the glory of God. We have further served the end of extending a knowledge of God’s glory in Christ over much of the earth, ‘as the waters cover the sea’. Yet there has crept into western society an ‘enlightenment’ which was built upon the pride of the human intellect. Such pride has been seen in the increasing challenge to all knowledge of God and his glory and in increasing attempts to diminish his significance. This advancement of pride in western man’s observations and thoughts has driven faith into a corner.

The modern West is at the present time re-enacting the tragic self-destruction of the ancient classical cultures of Greece and Rome. Now, as then, universities and governments are ‘suppressing the truth in unrighteousness’ (Rom.1:18). ‘Professing to be wise they became fools’ (Rom. 1:22). As Jesus explained, ‘Everyone practising evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed’ (John 3:20). Because of this hostility to truth ‘God gives them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonour their bodies among themselves’ (Rom. 1:24). This is the first phase of ‘the wrath of God’ being ‘revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men’ (Rom. 1:18).

What does it look like?

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful.Romans 1:28-31

When moral decay eats away all strength in nations, they will fall prey to violent, evil empires. After that comes judgment at God’s throne.

With this continuing trend away from faith and toward pride we live under the threat of God’s chastening, as did Judah of old. If there is not serious, widespread repentance, we shall find it difficult to hide from our enemies under the shadow of God’s wing.

The danger is to us, not to the cause of the knowledge of the glory of God throughout the entire earth. God stands in no need of us to give the uttermost parts of the earth to Messiah. He will accomplish his grand purpose with or without us.

It is the pride of humanism and the rejection of divine revelation which we must shake off, or God will seriously shake our nations.