Wait for It

A watchman's whole task was to see a thing before anyone else could—the dust of an approaching army, a runner carrying news from a battle no one in the city had yet heard. He stood above the gate while the people below slept or traded or quarreled, and he watched the one road. Habakkuk, a prophet in the last anxious years before Babylon swept down on Judah, takes up exactly that posture, only he turns it toward heaven: "I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower, and look out to see what he will say to me" (Habakkuk 2:1). He has lodged a complaint—the violence goes unanswered, God seems silent—and he climbs up to wait for the reply.

The reply, when it comes, is an instruction. God tells him to write it down and make it legible: "Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it" (Habakkuk 2:2). Then the hard mercy of it—the vision has an appointed time, and that time is not yet: "If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay" (Habakkuk 2:3). The tablets are not really for him. He is to cut the letters deep and plain for runners not yet born. And then the word itself, two kinds of men: one "puffed up," propped up by nothing but himself; the other given a single line to live on—"the righteous shall live by his faith" (Habakkuk 2:4).

Habakkuk asked why the violence goes unpunished, and was told to write something down and wait. God does not answer that question. He answers one the prophet had not thought to ask: not why this is happening, but how to live while it does. Keller puts it plainly — faith rests in what God has said rather than in what we can presently see.¹ The swollen soul of verse 4 is not only Babylon's; it is ours on the tower, wanting proof before we will rest. The righteous are handed a word instead, and told to live on it.

That one line, handed to a man told to wait, became the gospel's own summary of how anyone is saved. Paul builds on it: "the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith" (Romans 1:17); a person justified apart from works of the law (Romans 3:28); peace with God (Romans 5:1). Babylon did fall, as promised. But the road ran past it: when Hebrews takes up Habakkuk's words, the thing that was coming has become a someone—"Yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay" (Hebrews 10:37).

Up on the wall, in the dark, before the dust appears. We do not live by what we have already seen. We live by him—and the vision cut into the tablets for a runner to read has a name now, and he will not delay.