In some ways Habakkuk was one of the bravest of the Old Testament prophets. He was the first person in the Bible to seriously consider and focus on the problem of evil, and to question the prophetic tradition he received. More than that, he did not consider it too presumptuous to question God Himself, and most of the Book of Habakkuk is the prophet doing just that. You see, the prophets operate on what is known in some circles as the deueteronomic principle. It is the idea that suffering is caused by bad behavior. Do good, good things will happen to you, do bad and bad things will happen to you.
At a time when the religion of Yahweh was being questioned do the the rise of the great empires of history and in light of the suffering they caused, the prophets gave a simple and straightforward answer: people were getting what they deserved. The prophets experienced good as Pure Goodness as Justice and Mercy Incarnate, and they believed He was absolutely sovereign over the earth (after all, from their point of view He told them He was.) This being the case, all 'evil' in the world must be the result of God's just will. Habakkuk questions this simple formula.
He begins with a lament about how bad things are in Judah. The system is corrupt, and God is not being worshipped or followed as He should be. God's response is that He is sending the Babylonians to exile Judah. Justice will be done, God proclaims, through the Babylonians. Habakkuk doesn't really like this answer. To him, it doesn't solve the problem, it just makes it worse. For the thing he was lamenting was the fact that the good were being oppressed by the evil. The solution God offers isn't much of a solution at all, as the Babylonians are going to cause hard times for the good as well as the evil. Habakkuk knows that no man is justified before God, but there is still in his mind an issue of relative justice. While no man is good before God, some men are better than others before one another. If there were no innocents, then there would be no reason to be upset about the injustice in Judah, after all. It is just the oppression of the 'relatively good' by the 'relatively evil' that Habakkuk was upset about before. The fact that they will all be treated the same by the Babylonians only heightens the problem of evil, it doesn't solve it. So Habakkuk questions God, asking how this solves the problem.
God's response is that the individual will be treated as an individual. God is going to make sure that no one undeserving is going to be punished by Babylon. Only those who do the oppressing will be punished. While the nation as a whole is undergoing correction, God will provide for the individual. Habakkuk accepts this answer and then goes off to proclaim God's judgment upon Judah. But there is a serious problem here. We know that babies and children were killed and hurt during the Babylonian invasion. More than that, it seems all but impossible to believe that the uprooting of most of an entire nation, and the invasion that preceded it, only caused suffering for oppressive forces in that country. I guess those who are strong believers in the stories of miracles think of this as a miracle, but we have reports that contradict it. I mean, really, do YOU believe that only relatively 'bad' people suffered under the Babylonian heel? I certainly doubt it.
So in the end Habakkuk offers not convincing answer to the problem of evil. And really, for me, no real positive answer comes until the apocalyptic writers, and parts of the New Testament. But Habakkuk should be credited for beginning the long Biblical re-examination of the received prophetic tradition. His struggle to understand God's place in this world of pain was picked up by Psalmists, by Ecclesiastes, by the writer of Job and later by the Apocalyptic writers. His is an important place in the extended Biblical conversation over this issue. In the end, the answer offered sucks. Later writers reject it, and rightly so. You have to give credit, though, to the man who cared about the world enough to question the tradition he received, and was brave enough to argue with the being he knew as the Almighty
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