NOTES for Hab 1:1-17

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.

The words of Habakkuk about the Torah (law), which is slacked, and about the incorrect (literarily. perverted) judicial decisions, have of course a quite concrete legal sense in all the times because the realities described by the prophet are identical at all times. But there is in the words of the prophet something more, beyond the purely legal frames. It is not surprising: because the Torah was never perceived practically either by the yahviste tradition or by the Jewish tradition as only the law, it also always supposed the lifestyle, the corresponding law, and the spiritual state, necessary for such a life.

Certainly, the Jewish traditional doctrine about the internal Torah appeared not immediately, but separate elements of that spiritual and ascetic experience, of which it grew, had to exist quite early, already at the pre-captivity period, at the time of later prophets. The Torah is slacked, says the prophet, and the judicial definitions (what we translate usually simply as "judgment") Bible of do not reach the goal (in the translation King James Version it is said "wrong judgment proceeded").

And it happens like that, according to the words of Habakkuk, because are lost in the society the entire spiritual and moral guidelines, in it reign general contention and a total egoism. And the link here is not only external, formal, legal, but spiritual also. Indeed, the spiritual chaos, the loss of all the moral guidelines is not a reason of the weakening of the Torah, but its consequence, if, of course we have in mind not external, legal, but internal spiritual measure of the Torah. Well then it turns out that the social problem is only an external demonstration of the spiritual problems, that these plunders and violence, this war of all against all, that sees the prophet, are not the disease in itself, but only the symptom of the disease.

It is not surprising that the Torah was given not only to an individual, but also to all people as a whole, as it is not surprising that the prophets never looked at public life, as on "something mean” and "unspiritual": because it is about the same Torah and about the same life. Man cannot (if only he is schizophrenic) live in the altar or at his home in his room one life and in the street another one. And Habakkuk, as other prophets, understands that perfectly. If the Torah, the law and the commandments given by God are for man a reality, he cannot have two lives. As the people also cannot have, if only it is about the people of God, the people-community.

The prophet Habakkuk asks this question for a concrete cause and receives a corresponding answer to it- farther in the same first chapter. But indeed, millions of people ask this question according to billions of causes, in such that it became for a long since a common question. How can God bear strife and violence dominating on this earth, why will He not intervene and will not stop the iniquity?

It had already since become a generality to say that the problem of evil is not resolved in a logical way. Simply because if we resolve it absolutely logically, then it will be necessary to destroy all the humanity - indeed, all men do evil. In this sense, God is illogical; He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live (see Ezekiel 33:11). But the evil, raging in humanity, turns out this punishment, which is capable of moving somebody to turn from his way. God does not do evil and doesn’t support it - God gave freedom to people and waits, when they will turn away from the abuse of this freedom.

But indeed, evil leads to suffering, where is thus God's mercy? But here is otherwise. God is absent in the iniquity, but is present in the suffering, He took upon Himself the suffering and thereby entered in our suffering. His mercy is in particular in the fact that He shares with us our pain and makes it ephemera and meaningful.