15.  The first chapter opens with a description of God’s awful majesty and power, which nothing created can withstand.  These attributes shall be directed to the utter and perpetual overthrow of Nineveh and the salvation of God’s afflicted people.  The second chapter begins a sublime description of the process of this destruction by the invasion of foreign armies.  The third continues the account of the desolation of Nineveh by her foes.  For her innumerable sins she shall be brought to shame before the nations of the earth, and made like populous No, that is, No-amon, the celebrated metropolis of upper Egypt, also called Thebes, whose children were dashed in pieces and her great men laid in chains.  The present condition of Nineveh, a mass of uninhabitable ruins, is a solemn comment upon the closing words of the prophecy; “There is no healing of thy bruise; thy wound is grievous:  all that hear the report of thee shall clap their hands over thee:  for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?”

VIII.  HABAKKUK.

16.  Respecting Habakkuk’s personal history we have no information.  The apocryphal notices of him are unworthy of credence.  From the fifth and sixth verses of the first chapter it is evident that he prophesied not long before that series of invasions by the Chaldeans which ended in the destruction of Jerusalem and the captivity of the people; that is, somewhere between 640 and 610 years before Christ, so that he was contemporary with Jeremiah and Zephaniah.  The theme of his prophecy is, first, the overthrow of Judea by the Chaldeans, and then the overthrow in turn of the Chaldean monarchy, each power in turn for its sins.  In the first chapter he predicts in a dramatic form—­that of expostulation with God on the part of the prophet, and God’s answer—­the approaching desolation of the land by the Chaldean armies, whose resistless power he describes in bold and striking imagery.  In the second chapter the prophet appears standing on his watch to see what answer Jehovah will give to the expostulation with which the preceding chapter closes.  He receives a comforting message, but one that will try the faith of God’s people by its delay.  Verse 3.  It is an announcement of the overthrow of the Chaldean oppressor, carried out in a series of bold and vivid descriptions in which woe upon woe is pronounced against him for his rapine, covetousness, iniquitous oppression, and idolatry.  The third chapter is a lyric ode in which the prophet, in view of both the judgments that God is about to execute on his countrymen through the Chaldeans (chap. 1), and the promised deliverance from them at a future period (chap. 2), supplicates and celebrates the future interposition of Jehovah for the redemption of his people in language borrowed from their past history.  Thus this sublime song is both a prayer for the renewal of God’s wondrous works in the days of old and a prophecy of such a renewal.  The apostle Paul quotes the words of Habakkuk:  “The just shall live by his faith” (2:4), and applies them to all believers (Rom. 1:17).