Israel is gone, taken to Assyria because of their rebellion against God (722 BCE). Now Judah has reached the same level of sin and rebellion against God.
Verses 1-4 begin with a vision from God to Habakkuk. Evidently Habakkuk had been crying out to God for some time about the conditions in Judah he was seeing, praying about, and feeling God was not answering his prayers. He could not understand what was going on; why wasn’t God responding?
I think most Christians have faced this situation at least once in their lifetime, and some of us more than once. In John 11, we are told that Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus that their brother, Lazarus, was sick yet Jesus didn’t come right away. By the time Jesus got there, Lazarus had been dead 4 days. Why did Jesus wait? Because His disciples, not just the 12, needed to understand that He had the power over death and hell.
Beginning in verse 5, God revealed His plan for the near future. He had chosen the Chaldeans to punish Judah as Assyria had punished Israel. Who were these Chaldeans? They were the people who lived in the area of Babylon and further south to the Persian Gulf. The Bible tells us this was the area where Abraham lived when God called him. The Chaldean Empire A.K.A. the Neo-Babylonian Empire (626-539 BCE).
About 620 BCE, a man named Nabopolasser gained control over most of Babylonia. His son, Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 BCE) became the ruler of Babylon, and he was the one who invaded Judea and made them his subjects. According to Wikipedia, there were others in Nebuchadnezzar’s line who ruled for short periods when Nabonidus (556-539) and his son Belshazzar ruled until the kingdom was crushed by Cyrus the Great.
Habakkuk almost had a stroke when he heard God’s plan. “O Lord my God, You Who are eternal – is Your plan in all of this to wipe us out? Verses 12-17 can be so human to us when we are surprised by the turn events in our lives.