The Oracle to Habakkuk, Part 4: Mind Frame

“Mind Frame” is not a phrase in English.  The correct saying is “frame of mind”.  But proper grammar aside, the idea remains the same.  Namely, a mental attitude or outlook on something.  In this case, as it applies specifically to Habakkuk, we are talking about the lenses through which our prophet perceived the world around him.  The framework around the pictures he saw in his mind's eye.  The foundation upon which his world view was built.  This is absolutely critical to analyze because it impacts our ability to understand where Habakkuk was coming from and why he responded to God the way he did.  Taking that line of reasoning to its inevitable conclusion, if we determine that Habakkuk's frame of mind was God honoring, then it can serve as a guide for constructing our own mental attitudes and world views.

We have already touched on this issue, albeit briefly, in chapter 2.  There we considered Habakkuk's initial complaint to God about the depravity and evil he was witnessing which were perverting God's nature and allowing justice to be subverted.  We recognized that the prophet's motives were pure, in that he was most primarily concerned with God's glory rather than his own comfort.  And we acknowledged that, in chapter 1 verse 3, he understood that the Lord was in control of the events transpiring in Judah at the time.  In that verse he asked “Why do You make me see iniquity, and cause me to look on wickedness?”  Habakkuk was clear in his view that even though what he was witnessing was beyond the pale of the most unimaginable evils we can conceive in our minds, God was still God and was choosing to both allow it to continue and allow His prophet to witness it.  Habakkuk’s concern wasn’t over whether things were spiraling out of God’s control.  His frustration stemmed from the fact that he didn’t understand what in the world God was doing.  It appeared as if He was calmly standing by while Jehoiakim and most of the rest of Judah dragged His holy name through the mud.

This gave us our first clue into Habakkuk’s psyche, or his frame of mind.  But it is not until here in verse 12, after God’s initial response that we looked at in the last chapter, that the building blocks are revealed that came together in Habakkuk’s mind to construct his perspective.  These foundation stones take the form of seven attributes of the Lord, all of them appearing in 1:12 and then one of the points fleshed out more fully in verse 13.  The qualities that the prophet saw in his God and how those characteristics interacted with the “events on the ground”, so to speak, are what informed his understanding of how he should respond in the face of circumstances that were frankly beyond his ability to fully comprehend, which God alluded to in verse five when He said that Habakkuk “would not believe if you were told.” 

We are going to take two chapters to examine these seven points because the implications of who God is that are revealed are so monumental and expansive that we dare not give this less attention than that.  The human tendency is to rush through scripture, sub-consciously processing each word with a pre-conceived assumption of its meaning based on past education or experiences, ignoring the words we deem less consequential, and arriving at a conclusion with far too much conceit and far too little care.  It should not be this way.  David, the probable author of Psalm 119 says in verse 15, in consideration of God, that he will “meditate on Your precepts and regard Your ways.”  This means to think extensively about who God is.  It means to drink deeply from scripture and dwell upon what it says.  It means to take each contemplation of God’s nature and carefully turn it, rotate it, flip it, and weigh it to look at Him from all possible angles.  This is completely impossible to do without a significant investment of time.  Time which our fast paced ultra-modern society demands that we throw at other pursuits in a vain and ultimately soul quenching quest to keep up with the human obligations we placed upon ourselves. 

This is woefully insufficient when it comes to studying the transcendent creator of the universe.  And it’s not simply because He arbitrarily demands our attention.  It is true that He does, but that insistence upon His own pre-eminence is not some sort of random requirement that he throws at us on a whim that is disconnected from reality.  God demands that we meditate upon who He is because who He is demands meditation.  Micah 7:18 puts it this way: Who is a God like You, who pardons iniquity and passes over the rebellious act of the remnant of His possession?  He does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in unchanging love.  The key element of that verse is the very beginning.  Namely, “who is a God like our God?”  As Paul puts it in Romans 11:33-34: Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!  For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor?  Who is this God that we serve?  Paul says that His mind is infinite in the previous passage.  In the verses of Romans 11 just prior to that he reveals that God’s plan of redemption and inter-weaving of the Jews and Gentiles is so Machiavellian, or convoluted and incomprehensible, that it elicits the response Paul gives in 33-34.  His presence is literally earth shaking, in the case of Mount Sinai in Exodus 19.  He dwells in unapproachable light, Paul said to Timothy in 1 Timothy 6:16.  Yet He is gentle enough to weep over the pain people feel at the death of a loved one, as recorded in John 11:35.  Peter reveals in 1 Peter 3:9 that His patience is so incredibly flawless that He does not want people to perish.  And Isaiah 53 tells us that His love is of such magnitude that He crushed His own son and caused Him to bear our iniquities.  Like the prophet Micah we must cry out once again “Who is this God?”

That is why we must invest time and energy into a consideration of the Lord.  We wouldn’t go into a course on Calculus and expect to come out in 10 minutes with a complete knowledge of that mathematical discipline.  Granted, most of us wouldn’t go anywhere near a course on Calculus in the first place!  But the principle is sound.  That which is weighty requires a significant human investment in order to comprehend it.  And God is the weightiest subject in all of eternity past, present, and future.  So we will slow down now for the next two chapters and carefully labor over ascertaining what it was that Habakkuk saw about His God who is our God and what that revelation says about both the prophet’s perspective and what our perspective should be.

But before we begin to explore these seven revelations of who God is, we need to understand that by all human reasoning Habakkuk should be fuming right about now.  Think about it.  He is witnessing the death of his country.  The spiritual and social fabric of Judah is ripping apart right in front of his face.  He remembers the glory days of Josiah’s kingship, when the sanctity of the temple was once again respected, the reverence due to God was instituted on a governmental level, and the people were benefiting from having society run the way God designed which always works better.  With those memories brimming behind his tear filled eyes, the chaos running rampant now must have been especially bitter and galling.  So he cries out to God in desperation.  It doesn’t seem like God is doing anything to save His law from destruction and restore justice.  The state of affairs in his country doesn’t make any sense at all to Habakkuk.  And he voices this concern to the Lord, expectant of a response from His creator.

But the response God just gave in verses 5 through 11 of chapter 1 cannot possibly be what Habakkuk was hoping for.  I have no doubt that what he had in mind was for God to work some mysterious change of heart in the king which would then bring about spiritual reforms at the governmental level.  We humans are nothing if not predictable.  Our imaginations are often limited to our own experiences, incapable of thinking outside the box to come up with something beyond ourselves.  Habakkuk had witnessed a similar solution to Judah’s problems before with Josiah.  So it would have been natural for him to assume that that was the optimal resolution that was called for here.  Imagine how he must have felt to have God essentially yank the rug out from under his feet.  Instead of bringing justice through an internal process which preserved the integrity of the country, God said He was going to restore righteousness by using a pagan, godless, evil, and unclean nation.  He was going to use Babylon to exact punishment on Israel.  Although the specifics of this course of action are not revealed in God’s response, the implication is clear: the Jews are going to be abused, defiled, tormented, and ultimately culled by a foreign power.  At some level in Habakkuk’s mind had to be a response of “What!?  Are you kidding me!? Say it isn’t so Lord!”

To put this in perspective think about the United States in the 21^st century.  Those of us who hold allegiance to the Bible as the only authoritative source of absolute truth seem to be getting fewer as time marches on, even among professing evangelicals.  This country was founded by Christians and non-Christians who shared a respect and reverence for the word of God as well as a shared assumption that it was the guide they should follow for how to build a successful and prosperous country.  But we have systematically worked, for about 150 years, to extricate God from the bedrock of our society.  Mention of Him has been eliminated from our universities.  Acknowledgement of His creative work has been stripped from our textbooks.  His special revelation in the Bible has been gutted from our Law school curriculums so that each successive generation of law makers, law interpreters, and constitutional guardians ground themselves more than ever on human rather than divine wisdom.  And the media have greased the slopes with liberal humanist agendas so that this atheistic boulder can slide downward ever faster.

In response to this spiritual decline many in Christendom decry, protest, and bemoan, often rightly so.  We cry out to God just as Habakkuk did to change our nation.  To bring our country back to Him.  To stop His moral law from being perverted and His justice from being destroyed.  Again, this is exactly the same complaint Habakkuk had.  And I suspect that most of those modern day Habakkuks, when they pray for national deliverance, have in mind a renovation of the moral and spiritual culture of the United States which springs forth from within.  I seriously doubt there is nary a thought given to any other means by which God might choose to discipline this country.  I’m sure you can see where this is going.  What if He chose to deliver justice through means of a foreign power; China perhaps?  What would our response be?  What was Habakkuk’s?

Amazingly, rather than the expected man centered response of dismay, we find Habakkuk in verse 12 begin his reply with a series of declarations describing his view of God.  The first is this:

                        Are You not from everlasting,

                        O Lord, my God, my Holy One?

This is of course a rhetorical question.  Such an inquiry is not really a question at all, but a statement.  And what a statement it is!  Habakkuk draws from his knowledge of scripture to call attention to four characteristics of God in this single sentence.

The first divine aspect we see is bound up in the word everlasting.  But it’s not quite the notion we might at first think it is.  The translation into English in most bibles, frankly, leaves something to be desired.  Our immediate instinct would be to assume that Habakkuk is describing God’s eternal existence.  But the Hebrew word for perpetual, ancient, of long duration, or forever is different than what is used here.  The word here, qedem, instead has the idea of that which is before or in front of.  Consider the context of its usage in the Psalms:

·         Psalm 44:1 – O God, we have heard with our ears, our fathers have told us the work that You did in their days, in the days of old.

·         Psalm 68:33 – To Him who rides upon the highest heavens, which are from ancient times; behold, He speaks forth with His voice, a mighty voice.

·         Psalm 74:2 – Remember Your congregation, which You have purchased of old, which You have redeemed to be the tribe of Your inheritance;

·         Psalm 77:11 – I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.

As we can see, qedem still has reference to times long past and long durations, but there is a unique twist where it refers not just to an ancient time, but to an ancient time when the Lord did something.  The idea is a remembrance of His saving works, the ways in which He manifested His power, and His faithful presence.  An additional usage of qedem is “from the east”, as seen in Genesis 3:24: So He drove the man out; and at the east of the Garden of Eden He stationed the Cherubim.  But the context of Habakkuk 1:12, which we will see shortly, makes it clear that the prophet is specifically referring to God’s historical collection of works.  So what he is doing is calling to remembrance, probably for his own benefit as much as God’s, that He is a faithful God who will not abandon His people.  This makes the prophet’s comment very personal and real as opposed to a clinical recitation of facts.

Furthermore, notice that all of Habakkuk’s understanding of God’s work throughout Israel’s history would have come primarily through the study and internalizing of scripture.  The Jews were the keepers of the oracles, or the heavy and burdensome tidings, of God.  As such they obviously kept them on record for education and worship.  Excepting the periods when various scrolls were temporarily lost, such as prior to Josiah discovering the Torah in the temple, the Old Testament scriptures would have been available to a Jewish prophet.  This is significant because it is primarily the storing up of scripture in our minds that guards us from sin.  David puts it this way in Psalm 119:11: Your word I have treasured in my heart, that I may not sin against You.   Habakkuk was simply putting this principle into practice and using it to call to remembrance what he knew of God’s character, specifically His saving might, and how it applied to this situation.

Following this reminder Habakkuk proceeds to catalog three specific qualities of God’s nature that we will consider as points two through four of our list of divine aspects on display here.  These are not just three different ways to say God that Habakkuk tosses in for the sake of variety.  There is meaning and import behind the words he chose.

First he refers to God as “O Lord”.  English translations of Lord from the New Testament usually come from the Greek word kurios, meaning master.  The equivalent word in Hebrew is adonai.  But that is not what Habakkuk used here.  He is instead using the actual name of God, Yahweh, unpronounceable in Hebrew and often substituted with adonai out of respect.  This was the name given by God to Jacob at Bethel in Genesis 28:13: He said, “I am the Lord, the God of your grandfather Abraham and the God of your father Isaac.”  Usage of His personal name was how God got through to Jacob that He was the same deity who had communicated with his forebears.  So Habakkuk was calling God literally by name, or as close as he could safely come to it.  This was a personal and intimate communication for him.  It was not a cold and unfeeling taskmaster he was crying out to but a real, living, cherished person who was being addressed.  Habakkuk’s choice of how to address his God tracks consistently with the context of qedem mentioned above.

It is also noteworthy because speaking to God by the name He has given to us rather than a moniker humans have assigned to Him indicates a spirit of response rather than assertion.  In other words, Habakkuk was reacting to what God reveals of Himself rather than attempting to fit God into his own faulty perception.  Jesus illustrates this attitude beautifully in Luke 12:35-40: “Be dressed in readiness, and keep your lamps lit.  Be like men who are waiting for their master when he returns from the wedding feast, so that they may immediately open the door to him when he comes and knocks.  Blessed are those slaves whom the master will find on the alert when he comes; truly I say to you, that he will gird himself to serve, and have them recline at the table, and will come up and wait on them.”  Habakkuk’s mental posture of readiness and response is the same that Jesus taught and that we are expected to have.

Second he says “my God”.  This English translation is the Hebrew word elohim.  Similar to the way in which we use god to refer to the general concept of deity but God with a capital G to refer to the true and living God, the Jewish people before us developed a method of specifying their God.  The Hebrew word el means god in the generic sense.  But usage of elohim indicates that an Israelite is meaning their God individually.  The point here is that Yahweh is unique.  He is an individual with no comparison and no competition.  He is without equal, Habakkuk knew that, and he is making that clear in this passage with the words he used.

The final way in which Habakkuk addresses God is as “my Holy One”.  This is the Hebrew word qadowsh.  Fortunately, it means the same in English as it does in the original language: sacred, holy, set apart.  We will explore this concept more in the next chapter.  But for now it is sufficient to acknowledge that Habakkuk is calling into view the holiness of God.

To summarize what we have established to this point, the prophet begins his second round of oration with a magnificent recognition of God's nature that is densely packed with theology.  Within two sentences he points out that God has a history of providing for His people which stretches back into ancient times, He is a personal and sentient being, He is completely unique and without equal, and He is fully pure and set apart from the profanity of the world Habakkuk lived in.  Would that our prayers were as rich, as deep, as informed, and as heartfelt as this!  But Habakkuk doesn't stop there.  He follows up this description of God with a bombshell of a statement that we might be prone to miss:

                        We will not die.

Now this is a very curious phrase and it serves as our fifth point of God’s character that Habakkuk offers up for consideration.  The phrase mirrors very closely the wisdom of Solomon found in Proverbs 23:13: Do not hold back discipline from the child, although you strike him with the rod, he will not die.  Upon further investigation it seems that this parallel has merit because the Hebrew word used is identical.  With this symmetry established the question that arises is “what is Habakkuk getting at here by quoting Solomon?”  To determine that we need to figure out exactly what the king had in mind when he penned those words three and a half centuries prior to Habakkuk’s time.

The typical modern usage of the phrase “he (or we) will not die” is “it won’t kill you.”  As in, “It won’t kill you to clean up your bedroom” or “Eating your dinner won’t kill you.”  Obviously, the connotation here is of a parental nature.  But the conceptual idea spreads beyond that.  The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche popularized the following phrase in the 19^th century: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”  What Nietzche had in mind was a sort of rugged male individualism that encouraged standing firm in the face of adversity and weathering the storms of life.  This saying and the associated implications have filtered down into the psyche of modern western civilization in the century following Nietzche’s death to the extent that it has become a staple of popular culture.  A cursory search on the Internet reveals a plethora of opinions, analyses, and advertisements all predicated upon this singular phrase.  Because of this mass dissemination into the general consciousness even we in the Christian church have fallen under its sway.  So when we come to a passage such as Habakkuk 1:12 or Proverbs 23:13 our natural tendency is to read it with a negative connotation which revolves on death and pain.  For example, “God, Your discipline isn’t going to kill us, so we need to just suck it up and take it.”  But is this type of thinking really what first Solomon, later Habakkuk, and ultimately the Holy Spirit had in mind?

A fuller look at Proverbs 23:13 reveals the fallacy of our modern thinking.  Do not hold back discipline from the child, although you strike him with the rod, he will not die.  You shall strike him with the rod and rescue his soul from Sheol.  Whoa!  That is a complete 180 degree switch from the aforementioned cultural perception I believe we probably bring to this text.  God is not saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.  He is in fact saying “My discipline as well as parental discipline under my authority, far from bringing death, actually gives life.”  The idea is that, in complete harmony with the Biblical record, humanity is lost in slavery to sin and alienated from God through disobedience.  We can see this plainly in the classic passage Romans 3:23: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.  God is the only source of life, which the Apostle John makes clear in 5:25-26 of his gospel: Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.  For just as the Father has life in Himself, even so He gave to the Son also to have life in Himself.  In point of fact, it is His very breath that gives life as we looked at in chapter 1.  Therefore, if we desire to have life it has to come from God and in order to get back into harmony and communion with God, so as to receive that life, we must have correction from our disobedient propensity.  This statement is the complete opposite of a negative connotation which revolves on death and pain.  It is instead a positive connotation which revolves on life and pleasure.

Now let’s go back and paraphrase Habakkuk’s statement.  “Yahweh, You have demonstrated Your providence, faithfulness, and love over centuries of caring for my people which stretches all the way back into ancient times.  You are my Elohim; the personal, living, and active God of my fathers.  You are morally pure, unswervingly righteous, and transcendentally set apart from all of creation.  Because of this I know that your correction will preserve us and give us life!”  Wow!  This scripture is absolutely loaded with depth to the point that the pages of our Bibles seem to groan with the weight of the truth contained in the ink stamped upon them.  As we looked at earlier in the chapter, we dare not tread lightly with God’s holy word.  His breath, which 1 Timothy 3:16 says all scripture flows from, is the same breath which gave life to Adam’s lifeless shell of flesh.  And it is the same breath which offers eternal life to us today.  We trifle with it at our peril.

After this towering God centered opening, it should come as no surprise to us that Habakkuk’s next two sentences are unified in their elevation of the divine and their demotion of the profane:

                        You, O Lord, have appointed them to judge;

                        And You, O Rock, have established them to correct.

Habakkuk finally gets back to the topic at hand with these statements; namely, the Babylonians.  But even here where he discusses the situation of the impending Chaldean conquest, he still doggedly couches it in the context of what God is doing rather than the “events on the ground”, so to speak.  He recognizes that it is God alone who is the instigator here.  It is not the motivations of Nebuchadnezzar or the Babylonian Empire that is responsible for what is coming.  In fact, Habakkuk actually goes so far as to link these future events to the restoration of justice in Israel that he originally was concerned about back in verse 4.  He does this by using two distinct expressions.  We will consider them separately as points 6 and 7 of our investigation of God’s nature.

“Appointed them to judge”, although a phrase in English, is actually translated from the single Hebrew word mishpat.  It means literally a judgment or ordinance, perhaps the act of deciding a case.  It is used most commonly as a legal term in the Old Testament.  And where its use is not overtly associated with the concept of law it is understood as either having some type of official association or dealing with the concept of justice.  Isaiah 28:6 uses mishpat to describe someone who makes judicial decisions.  Exodus 23:6 uses it to convey the idea of upholding justice for the poor.  Leviticus 9:16 describes Aaron in his high priestly role and uses mishpat to point to the regulations he was required to follow.  And Psalm 72:2 sets up an expectation of fair and equitable arrangements between litigants by using mishpat.  And to drive the point home of exactly what was in Habakkuk’s mind, it is the exact same word that he used in the aforementioned verse 4 when he said: “and justice is never carried out” and “For this reason justice is perverted.”  So there is zero doubt about the prophet’s meaning here.  He complained to God about justice not being done.  God responded that He was raising up the Babylonians to be His instruments that would restore justice from its perverted and corrupted state.  So Habakkuk replies with an acknowledgement that re-states what God has already told him in a sixth testament of who God is.

Then to further back up his point he tackles the project of pointing to God’s being for the seventh time and affirming His actions again, but this time from a different angle.  Our second phrase from the latter half of verse 12 is “have established them to correct.”  The construction of this sequence comes from just two Hebrew and one Aramaic words.  Suwm means to ordain, that is to officially invest with authority in a role.  Yacad has an idea of a foundation or a baseline.  Yakach is synonymous with reproof or rebuke.  The reason I point out the original language here is not to give an introductory lesson into ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, which I am not equipped to do anyhow.  Rather, it is striking that in the original writings there is no pronoun “them”.  It is translated into English that way to aid us in reading the scriptures.  But when Habakkuk wrote these words what he was literally saying was this: “God, you have ordained the foundation of your reproof.”  Why is this relevant?  Because once again we see this exact same pattern of placing the focus of attention upon God rather than man.

With that being said, it is interesting to note the moniker that Habakkuk attaches to God in this sentence.  He calls Him “his Rock”.  An alternative translation could be “protector”.  The idea is that God is preserving and caring for His people even in the midst of their punishment.  Habakkuk is, even in the process of realizing that discipline is coming, continuing to point back to God with every sentence he “breathes out”.  To coin a recent popular phrase, it is as if Yahweh was the very “air that Habakkuk breathed.”

With these two proclamations Habakkuk is confirming in his own mind the truth of what God has said and his acceptance of that truth.  He is settling it as a surety and making it official to himself by repeating it back to the Lord.  This is, quite frankly, identical to the process of confession that God expects all of us to go through.  1 John 1:9 teaches that “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  To properly understand this verse we need to gain a clear understanding of the word confess.  Noah Webster defines it as follows: To own, avow or acknowledge; publicly to declare a belief in and adherence to.  As you can see, confess is not strictly tied to sin.  Anything can be confessed, if one publicly declares belief in it.  This is exactly what was meant by Jesus in Matthew 10:32 when He said “Therefore everyone who confesses Me before men, I will also confess him before My father who is in heaven.” 

With this in mind when we consider the prospect of confessing our sins to God we need to understand that it is the act of avowing before Him that we are sinners in need of His forgiveness that He is looking for.  Obviously He knows our hearts and whether we are truly repentant or not.  And so the question might arise in our minds of why we need to bother with “making it official” with the Lord in the sense of formally confessing to Him.  But this is not a valid argument and stems from a human desire to avoid responsibility.  There is a certain almost imperceptible and undefinable quality to a formal confession; whether it is made public with fellow Christians or whether it is private with just God.  The willingness to humble oneself in penitence through the act of confessing is an indicator of whether true repentance has occurred in the first place.  In other words, if you are unwilling to confess your sin to God then you never repented for it in the first place.

It is this similar principle we see here with Habakkuk’s confession of what God has told him.  Although sin is not in the picture here, the prophet confesses the truth of God’s word by repeating it back to Him as an expression of worship.  This can be seen as the ultimate culmination of this masterful piece of adoring God centered adulation.  And it is at its core the heart of worship.  God knows all things.  Therefore He knows perfectly well His own qualities.  But He still desires us to repeat or reflect those qualities back to Him in the act of worship because in the doing of it we are forced, if worshiping properly “in spirit and truth”, to come to terms with that which we are reflecting.  It is this realization of God’s greatness, in the quiet of our own minds, which forms the heart and soul of true worship.  And that is exactly what Habakkuk is doing in verse 12; worshiping.

We discussed back in chapter 2 the fact that Habakkuk was squarely and firmly oriented toward God even in the midst of his complaint.  And I said at the time that this is the correct and Biblical way to voice a concern.  But we left the question of how to get to a place of being able to do that for another day.  This is that day.  What we see here in verse 12 of chapter 1 is exactly how the prophet was able to maintain such a high view of God and low view of man even in the midst of his distress.  He achieved this with a dogged, unyielding allegiance to the intentional incorporation of God’s attributes, God’s historical track record, God’s essence, and God’s actions into every aspect of how he thought and lived.  He did this through seven distinct and separate references to what he understood of God’s character, as follows:

1. God is an eternal being who has a history of interceding on behalf of His people.
2. God is a personal being who is living and active.
3. God is a totally unique and incomparable being who must be recognized as being real where all others are false.
4. God is a pure and transcendent being who dwells outside of time, space, and all of creation.
5. God is a life giving being from whom all life flows and for those who are out of harmony with Him, His correction and reproof is necessary to achieve restoration and taste of that life.
6. God is a righteous being who will see justice done with whatever implements seem best to Him to utilize.
7. God is a protective being who will super intend the establishment of His corrective policies.

These seven points that Habakkuk managed to pack into a single verse make one thing abundantly clear.  The glasses through which Habakkuk’s worldview was formed were framed with God’s past and the lenses were constructed out of God’s present.  God’s being resonated with every thought and intention of Habakkuk’s heart that is available to us in scripture.  Undoubtedly he was just as sinful of a person as the rest of us are so it is taken as writ that he didn’t always achieve this level of devotion.  But through the power of the Holy Spirit, who was living and active in these Old Testament prophets just as much as He is in us today, and for our edification 2700 years later, Habakkuk got it right this time.  We would do well to follow his lead.