God's answer to Habakkuk's complaint does not come the way anyone waiting for justice would expect. It opens with a summons. 5"Look among the nations, and see; wonder and be astounded." Then comes 5"I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told." The Hebrew word for "believe" comes from the root that will surface again a chapter later in the book's most famous line, that the righteous shall live by his faith. God begins his answer by naming the very thing Habakkuk's whole response will have to reach for.
God does not dispute Habakkuk's diagnosis of Judah. The corruption is as bad as he said. He answers with something larger, a corrupt Judah about to meet a far more violent Babylon.
The work itself is almost too strange to accept. 6"I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation." Habakkuk had complained about corruption inside Judah, the wicked surrounding the righteous and justice perverted. God does not clean that up directly. He raises a foreign power, 7"dreaded and fearsome," to carry out his discipline. The description that follows leaves no doubt that this is no gentle tool. Their horses are faster than leopards and fiercer than wolves at dusk. They mock kings and laugh at fortresses, and they pile up earth and take walls that other nations trusted to keep them safe. They gather captives like sand, an image of scale with no restraint in it.
The last line explains why the Chaldeans unsettle us as God's instrument. 11"Guilty men, whose own might is their god!" The Hebrew for might is the word used of Samson's strength, raw physical power worshiped as if it belonged to no one but itself. These are willing agents of their own ambition, crediting their strength for every victory, with no interest in serving the God of Israel. And yet God says plainly that he is raising up this nation, this army, for his own purposes. The instrument of judgment is itself guilty, and God uses it anyway.
An answer like this leaves anyone unsettled, and Scripture does not pretend otherwise. Centuries later Paul stands in a synagogue in Pisidian Antioch and quotes this very passage as a warning to those tempted to dismiss what God was doing in their own day. "Look, you scoffers, be astounded and perish; for I am doing a work in your days, a work that you will not believe, even if one tells it to you" (Acts 13:41). Paul applies it to the gospel itself, a work so unexpected and so far from what religious training had taught people to look for that unbelief was always going to be the easier response. God's ways in history have never fit neatly inside what his people expected of him, not with the Chaldeans and not with a crucified and risen Messiah.
Habakkuk has not yet responded. His reply comes in the verses that follow, and it will be another complaint before it becomes anything like acceptance. For now the text lets the announcement stand in all its strangeness, a holy God using a godless nation to discipline a wayward people in a way no one watching could have predicted.
Where is God working in your days in a way you did not expect and are tempted to dismiss? Wonder, be astounded, and hold on.
Prayer
Father, thank you for a history that has never run according to our expectations, unsettling as that has often been. Give us the honesty to admit when your work in our days looks nothing like what we assumed, and the faith, however slowly it grows, to trust you through what we cannot yet believe. Let us be among those who wonder and are astounded and still hold on. In Jesus' name, amen.