The Book of Habakkuk

This is another short book.  Habakkuk asks two questions of God and gets an answer each time.

Question 1

The first question is why is God being silent.  Habakkuk has been calling on God and receives silence.  This complaint would presume that God had not been silent to previous inquiries of Habakkuk.  This would make sense if Habakkuk were an established prophet, but we do not get any details about him as a man in this book.

Another possibility is that prophecy is in the process of shutting off on Israel.  However, we still have a few more major prophets to go.

God answers Habakkuk but does not address the issue of silence.  Instead, God speaks of all the calamity that the Babylonians are about to do to Israel in detail.

Question 2

Habakkuk's second question is a timeless one - why is God silent when bad people do bad things happen to good people?  

God answers that there will be an end that is prophesied, but that the understanding of the prophecy will only come at the end as well.

This is interesting.  It could potentially mean that a lot of the future-directed prophecies of things like Isaiah or Revelation concerning such events like he Day of the Lord can only be interpreted as the events unfold.  Taking this interpretation to its conclusion, this would suggest that books that attempt to unravel the prophecies of the "End Times" (I.e., Late Great Planet Earth, the Left Behind novels, etc...) will always miss crucial details and be wrong until it is time for the actual events to unfold.

We will see at least one example for the phenomenon that understanding of the prophecy is contemporary to the predicted event during the life of Christ.  Notably, John the Baptist relays a message to Christ while John is in prison.  John is probably disillusioned about Christ after the supernatural experience when he first met Jesus.  John asks if Christ is the Messiah.  Jesus responds that the blind see and lame can walk.  This is in alignment with Old Testament predictions about the Messiah, but is not in alignment with their understanding of the interpretations thereof as they expected Christ to be a political Messiah, not a spiritual one.