The answer received by Habakkuk can be applied not only to the events of his own days, but also to all those times when people will try to repeat the same thing. Then it was the Chaldeans, expanding the borders of their possessions by arms, but a little later the same thing happened to them that they had brought to others; and afterward, one after another, empires founded on violence and conquest changed and collapsed. So it has been until now, and so it will be until attempts to create and expand such empires cease.

But does not the evil rooted in the heart of the "peaceful" ordinary person continue in the deeds of conquerors? How different is the desire to conquer one more country from, say, the desire to grab one more room from a neighbor? Arguments of the sort "we are little people, this is not about us" should not calm us. For sin remains sin, however much we may want to divide it into "big" and "not so big."

And now, amid the triumph of lawlessness, when the law loses its force, the Lord reveals new depths of His Revelation. The words "the righteous shall live by his faith," proclaiming the primacy of faith over law, open to humanity the possibility of qualitatively new steps on the spiritual path. If we compare how many times the word "faith" is mentioned in the Old and New Testaments, we will see that the New speaks of faith much more. But the two Testaments are interconnected, and it is important to understand that the gospel proclamation did not sound in a vacuum: it was prepared even in Old Testament times.

Among the denunciations of lawlessness, a prophecy of retribution unexpectedly sounds "for the destruction of frightened animals." When after the flood the Lord gave the animal world to human beings for food (Gen 9:2-4), He proclaimed that every living thing should fear the human being placed over nature. But it was not enough for the crown of creation to inspire fear; he began to destroy all living things in quantities immeasurably beyond what was necessary to sustain his life. In Habakkuk's time, not everyone could easily have understood the meaning of this prophecy. For us, however, contemporaries of the ecological crisis and witnesses to the destruction of whole species, this prophecy sounds especially threatening.

The fear of God, as we see, does not exclude the boldness with which Habakkuk asks the Creator his questions. To some they might have seemed impious, for one could view it as Habakkuk, by demanding an answer from the Lord, almost challenging Him. And yet He does not reject these questions and answers them. Here we unexpectedly discover that the Lord does not shut Himself off from us - He is ready to give answers to any of our hard questions, provided we are ready to hear and understand them. More than that, He not only wants us to grasp and accept His will, but also does not reject our desire to enter into dialogue with Him. In the end, it was He who endowed the human being with reason, and His gifts were given to us not so that we might let them rot in the far corner of the pantry.

It is another matter that human reason alone is not enough to comprehend the highest wisdom; trust in the One whose reason is immeasurably higher is necessary. For what the Lord reveals to us is often hard for our consciousness to assimilate. Trust in God is all the more necessary because the law on which the pious had relied until now is called powerless. The law, of course, did not thereby become untenable, but its constant violation greatly weakened the possibility of its full action. This will have to be paid for: in place of the old evil, already grown familiar, a new evil will be brought by the Chaldeans. In them, violators of the weakened law will encounter "elemental materialists" who worship only understandable earthly things. Their god is named as strength: they worship everything that serves to increase their power.

The pagan Chaldeans are compared to fishermen who catch people in a net and send them into slavery, and here we paradoxically recall Christ's call to be fishers of men, addressed to the Galilean fishermen. But those who agreed to be caught in the apostles' nets are, on the contrary, freed from the nets of sinful slavery.

As the Savior's words show, the question of faith is directly connected with the question of spiritual life as such. What does it mean to increase faith? How did the disciples themselves understand an increase in faith? They must have meant something connected with the confidence they experienced when, at their Teacher's command, they preached the Kingdom and joyfully saw that not only people, but also spirits obeyed them. In those days, this sense of power was usually associated with faith, with its presence or absence. Jesus, however, is speaking of something somewhat different. He speaks of faith as a spiritual state. Precisely and only a spiritual one. After all, any manifestation of inner strength in a person is a natural phenomenon as much as a spiritual one. Here there is not only the spiritual impulse as such, not intention alone, but also nature and the psyche, which also respond to spiritual influence. But Jesus speaks only of the spirit. Only of the will. Only of intention.

Spirit is not nature. Quantitative measurements are impossible here. Spirit, or will, does not come in larger or smaller amounts. If the will is not fragmented, if it is not scattered through inner, psychological space or outer, physical space, it has absolute force. Not in the whole universe created by God, of course; only the will of the Creator Himself has that kind of power. But at one concrete point, it certainly does. That is why faith the size of a mustard seed is enough to move a mountain from its place. Faith here is not inner strength, and certainly not conviction about anything at all, but the fullness of relationship with God. It is that same fullness which, when directed toward creation, becomes the source of an infinitely powerful force, if only it is fully concentrated on something specific. But reaching that kind of concentration is not easy. No psychological techniques will help here.

This concentration is a derivative of that fullness of the life of the Kingdom which, in principle, has been opened after Christ's coming to everyone who seeks. It is the same fullness whose experience lets a person serve without counting merit: we have done what we were supposed to do; we are only servants who do not deserve a reward. It is the fullness in which one understands that every sin is absolutely destructive, and that, although sin is inevitable in the fallen world, complicity in it is always an existential catastrophe for a resident of the Kingdom. It is the fullness that is possible only in the Kingdom and without which there is no Kingdom. The fullness for which alone it makes sense to live.