Paul's Use of Habakkuk 2:4 in Romans 1:17: The Righteous Will Live by Faith

Habakkuk 2:4 is a key Old Testament text for understanding Paul’s theology. Paul says in Rom 1:16–17 that the saving righteousness of God is revealed through the gospel “as it is written” in Hab 2:4: “the righteous will live by faith.”

Habakkuk 2:4 has often been taken as espousing a pan-historical principle of salvation by faith, but this overlooks the fact that Hab 2:4 is a prophecy of the end times. In order to understand this better, we need to pay attention to the flow of the book of Habakkuk.

Habakkuk can be divided into six sections. After the introduction in 1:1, in we have in 1:2–4 Habakkuk’s complaint about wickedness in Israel. Yahweh’s answer is given in 1:5–11. The Lord says that he will punish wickedness in Israel by sending the Babylonians to punish them. In response to this, in 1:12–2:1 Habakkuk complains a second time. How can God solve the problem of evil in Israel by using a nation of idol worshipers who is more wicked than Israel? How can God solve wickedness by wickedness? In 2:2–20 we are given Yahweh’s answer to Habakkuk’s second complaint, and this is followed by a prayer of Habakkuk in 3:1–19 in which he remembers and rejoices in the saving power of God despite the prospect of calamity.

Habakkuk 2:4 occurs in Yahweh’s answer to Habakkuk as to how he could use wicked Babylon to judge Israel. This answer is actually a vision that is to be written down (2:2). According to 2:3, it is a vision that concerns the time of the end. In other words, Hab 2:2–20 is an eschatological prophecy. The core of the vision is Hab 2:4. At the time of the end, there would be someone whose soul was puffed up and not upright. In the context, this seems to refer to Babylon in its eschatological manifestation. It is interesting in this regard that Babylon becomes a symbol in the New Testament for the enemies of God’s people (Rev 16:19; 17:5; 18:2–24). What is implied in Hab 2:4a, therefore, is that God would deal with the problem of using instruments of wickedness to solve the wickedness of Israel by bringing judgment upon those instruments.

In contrast to the arrogant enemy, at the time of the end there would also be another class of person, namely, the righteous: “the righteous will live by his faith” (2:4b). It is important to understand that the Hebrew word translated as faith in Hab 2:4 ordinarily means faithfulness, as the translators of the TNIV acknowledge. Emunah includes within its semantic domain the idea of constancy and persevering loyalty. Emunah is the idea of faith that exists within a perfect marriage (Hos 2:20). The idea that the righteous would live by his faithfulness is a truth that an orthodox old covenant Israelite would have viewed as applying under the Mosaic covenant. The author of Ps 119, for example, can describe the law of Moses as being the way of emunah (Ps 119:30). But the emunah that is spoken of in Hab 2:4, while retaining its standard meaning of faithfulness, is transformed into an eschatological concept by virtue of the context in which it is found.

Apart from the mention of the end in 2:3, Hab 2:6–19 is a series of five woe oracles that prophesy judgment against the eschatological enemy of God’s people. Associated with this judgment is the idea of the earth being “filled with the knowledge of the glory of Yahweh as the waters cover the sea” (2:14). The connection of the language of Hab 2:14 with Isa 11:9 confirms the eschatological nature of this vision. Habakkuk 2:2–20 is clearly an eschatological prophecy, and this is exactly how Paul understood it.

Paul understood Hab 2:4 as being a prophecy of the new covenant, a prophecy of the time of the end when righteousness would be defined in terms of eschatological faithfulness instead of faithfulness to the Mosaic covenant (as per Deut 6:25), which was impotent to bring about righteousness for the nation of Israel, because of the hardness of the hearts of the spiritually uncircumcised majority in Israel. In Paul’s thinking, the emunah in Hab 2:4 matches with the aman root of the verb translated as believed in Gen 15:6, the implication being that the righteousness of eschatological covenant faithfulness would be something that faithful Gentiles would graciously be able to participate in (hence the idea of both Jew and Greek in Rom 1:16, and the law-keeping of the Gentiles in Rom 2:14–15, 26–27).

In conclusion, the truth of Hab 2:4 is not a general principle in its original context, but an eschatological truth that replicates the pre-Mosaic justification of (Gentile) Abraham by faith. In its original context it speaks of eschatological faithfulness rather than a kind of faith that excludes faithfulness as part of its meaning. It is this which led Paul to understand that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the eschatological torah or word of God that, written in human hearts, brings the fullness of justification, salvation, and life to Jew as well as Gentile, who, through the presence and power of the Spirit of God, are led in the paths of righteousness and faithfulness. Paul was not ashamed of the gospel that brings the righteousness of faith to the nations, because the gospel functions in this way in complete fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.