Live By Faith & Make It Plain
The prophet protested twice. First about the local warlords and oppressors and why they weren't being dealt with. Secondly he protested against God's cure for their own garden-variety gangsters. The cure God offered was international gangsters, more brutal and more wicked. When God gets around to speaking to the prophet in response to his second complaint he tells the man to write the vision (message) down and make it plain.He is to write it on "tablets". Aside from a couple of references where the word is used of building materials this word is used in the plural only of the tables of the covenant. And he had to write it clearly. This word for write is used only three times in the Old Testament and in all three it has to do with how the covenant is presented.
Why did God put it in these terms to Habakkuk? I'm going to conclude with Rikki Watts that we're supposed to link the vision with God's covenant with Israel. In speaking of the vision God uses speech that would say the vision and the covenant are alike. Habakkuk noted the apparent failure of the covenant torah in 1:4 and noted as well that God didn't seem to hear his protests. But God assured the prophet he had heard and seen everything and that he was keeping faith with his grand purposes. As surely as he had made a covenant with Israel he was now giving assurance in the vision. He is, so to speak, reaffirming his covenant relationship with the nation.
This new vision like the covenant law was itself a witness to God's grace and faithfulness to them and to their fathers. However complex the elements and however long it would take to run its course those who trusted God and remained faithful would know the faithfulness of God and in that faith they would live. He was told to look toward the nations and to watch (1:5). He stays at his post peering and watching and what he saw becomes part of the vision God gives him (2:1-2).
The covenant faithfulness of God is seen in and through the approach of the marauders. How this is so isn't worked out for the prophet or the people but he feels the challenge and tremblingly takes it up (3:16-19). The vision with all its terror makes its demand for trust; what else is there in the face of such a calamity? But trust in what? Trust in what way? The prophet, seeing the destruction of the nation before him, gasped in horror looking for assurance, "we shall not die." (1:12) This is what 2:4b assures him about. Trust in the God who comes looking like the enemy and trust in him by remaining faithful to him. God's righteous one, God's righteous nation is marked out by faithfulness to him even when he works a strange work that brings them loss. God's righteous one, God's righteous nation is also destined for life and not death.
Under calamity they still live more fully than the sparkling visitors to Acapulco and they are destined to even fuller life beyond the calamity.
He was told to write it plain because people whose eyes are filled with tears or are red because they can't sleep at night for worry have a hard time reading small print they need it plain! It was not to be hard to read. Even people in a panic would get the message as they galloped by and might be kept from a mad dash to oblivion. It was to be plain so that those who might want to run and tell it to others wouldn't have to have a degree from J.U. in order to understand and tell it. And listen, the tougher the message is to swallow the plainer it needs to be. Spell it out plainly because hurting people are going to be the ones who have to take the medicine. The people who suffer most have earned the right to hear the unvarnished truth however difficult it might be to embrace. Not only do they have the right to hear it, they've made it clear that above all others they have the heart and faith to receive it.
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