Habakkuk: Learning to Live by Faith

Habakkuk: Learning to Live by Faith is a ten-week, verse-by-verse study of the entire book of Habakkuk. Lydia Brownback follows the prophet’s movement from bewilderment over unchecked evil to confident worship, using the book’s three chapters to address a recurring Christian question: how should believers live when God’s ways are difficult to understand and his answers do not come in the form or timing they expected? The study joins close attention to Habakkuk’s historical and redemptive setting with practical reflection on prayer, waiting, suffering, and trust.

Habakkuk begins by asking how long God will tolerate violence, injustice, and wrongdoing. Brownback treats those questions seriously rather than presenting faith as the absence of perplexity. Habakkuk 1:1–4 establishes the prophet’s anguish; God’s answer in 1:5–11 is itself unsettling, because judgment will come through Babylon. Habakkuk’s second complaint in 1:12–17 therefore sharpens the problem: how can a holy and just God use a nation more wicked than Judah as an instrument of judgment? The study helps readers distinguish between not understanding God’s providence and concluding that God is unjust or unfaithful.

Habakkuk 2 becomes the theological center of learning to live by faith. The prophet waits for God’s answer, and Habakkuk 2:1–5 introduces the contrast between proud self-reliance and the righteous person who lives by faith. Brownback develops faith not as optimism about circumstances but as trust grounded in who God is. The ensuing woes in Habakkuk 2:6–17 demonstrate that evil is not beyond divine judgment, while 2:18–20 exposes idolatry and contrasts powerless false gods with the living Lord before whom the earth is called to silence. God’s apparent delay is therefore not moral indifference.

Prayer and waiting become especially prominent in Habakkuk 3. The prophet’s plea recalls God’s mighty acts and asks him to act again in mercy. Brownback shows how remembering God’s character and past faithfulness strengthens present trust. The closing confession in Habakkuk 3:16–19 brings the book’s movement to its practical climax: even while trembling before coming trouble and facing the possible loss of ordinary provision, Habakkuk chooses to rejoice in the God of his salvation. Waiting faithfully does not require knowing the whole outcome; it requires knowing the One on whom faith rests.

The study applies this pattern to seasons when believers wait for answers about illness, relationships, work, healing, or other painful uncertainties. It addresses unanswered prayer, the flourishing of evil, fear about the future, and the temptation to measure God’s faithfulness by immediate circumstances. Brownback repeatedly directs attention first to what Scripture reveals about God—his holiness, justice, sovereignty, mercy, faithfulness, and power to deliver—and then to the believer’s response.

This makes Habakkuk: Learning to Live by Faith both an individual-book Bible study and a practical study of faith in God. It helps readers ask honest questions without making circumstances the final interpreter of God’s character, pray while answers remain incomplete, wait without passive resignation, and live by faith when providence is confusing. Its central message is that the God who judges evil and governs history can be trusted, and that growing knowledge of him enables his people to move from anxious questioning toward patient, worshipful confidence.