Though God had not responded to the prophet's questions previously, He did eventually, and Habakkuk recorded His answer. The form of this revelation is an oracle.
1:5 The Lord told Habakkuk and his people (plural "you"in Hebrew) to direct his attention away from what was happening in Judah to what was happening in the larger arena of ancient Near Eastern activity. They were to observe something there that would astonish them and make them marvel. They would see that God was doing something in their days that they would not believe if someone just told them about it.
1:6 The Lord urged the prophet and his people to see that He was in the process of raising up the Chaldeans as a force and power in their world.14The Neo-Babylonian Empire began its rise to world domination with the accession of Nabopolassar to the throne of Babylon in 626 B.C. This aggressive king stimulated the Babylonians to become a ruthless and impetuous nation that had already marched through the ancient Near East and conquered several neighboring nations (cf. Ezek. 28:7; 30:11; 31:12; 32:12).
"The seventh-century prophets depicted the Lord as the sovereign ruler over the nations."15
1:7 Many nations feared the Babylonians, who were a law unto themselves. They lived by rules that they made rather than those that were customary at the time. Similarly the Third Reich called error truth and right wrong to suit its own purposes.
"If God's people refuse to fear him, they will ultimately be compelled to fear those less worthy of fear (cf. Deut 28:47-48; [sic] 58-68; Jer 5:15-22)."16
The Jews of Habakkuk's day did not believe that God would allow the Gentiles to overrun their nation (cf. Jer. 5:12; 6:14; 7:1-34; 8:11; Lam. 4:12; Amos 6). Yet their law and their prophets warned them that this could happen (cf. Deut. 28:49-50; 1 Kings 11:14, 23; Jer. 4; 5:14-17; 6:22-30; Amos 6:14).
1:8 The military armaments of the Babylonians were state of the art. Their horses, implements of war in the ancient world, were the swiftest, faster even than leopards, one of the fastest animals in the cat family. They were more eager to attack their enemies than wolves (cf. Jer. 5:6). Their mounted soldiers swooped down on their enemies as fast and unsuspected as an eagle (or vulture) plummeting from the sky to devour a small animal on the ground (cf. Jer. 5:17; Lam. 4:19). All three of these animals that God used for comparison with the Babylonians were excellent hunters, fast and fierce.
1:9 The Babylonians loved violence. The faces of their warriors showed their love for battle as they moved irresistibly forward in conquest. They were as effective at collecting captives from other countries as the sirocco winds from the East were at driving dust before them (cf. Jer. 18:17; Ezek. 17:10; 19:12; Jon. 4:8). This enemy was advancing like a whirlwind gathering captives as innumerable as the sand.
1:10 The kings and rulers of the lands they overran were no threat to them. They laughed at them and their fortified cities in contempt (cf. 2 Kings 25:7). They heaped up rubble to conquer fortifications; they did not need special machines but used whatever they found to build siege ramps to conquer them (cf. 2 Kings 19:32; Ezek. 4:2).17
1:11 The Babylonians would sweep through the ancient Near East like the wind and pass on from one doomed nation to the next. Yet Yahweh promised to hold them guilty because they worshipped power instead of the true God. This is the reason God would judge them.
God may seem to be strangely silent and inactive in provocative circumstances. He sometimes gives unexpected answers to our prayers. And He sometimes uses strange instruments to correct His people.18
