New in the Study Guide Series
Two Prophets, One Binding: Habakkuk & Jonah
New release · The Study Guide Series · A verse-by-verse study resource
A new volume has joined the Study Guide Series — and this one holds two books at once. Habakkuk & Jonah brings two of the Minor Prophets together in a single binding, each opened verse by verse, and set side by side they turn out to ask the two hardest questions a believer ever brings to God.
Habakkuk: when God seems too slow
Habakkuk does not open with a vision or a call. It opens with a grievance. A man looks at his own nation — violence going unpunished, justice bent out of shape — and says so, plainly, to God: How long? It is not rebellion; it is the honest protest of a man who trusts God enough to bring Him the one thing that will not reconcile. Habakkuk puts words to a question you have almost certainly already asked: why does evil prosper, while God looks on and seems to do nothing?
The answer, when it comes, unsettles more than it soothes. God is not idle — He is raising up the Babylonians, a people more brutal than the one they will punish, to bring Judah’s sins home to her. That provokes a second, harder complaint. And in the reply to it, the book lays down the line on which everything turns:
“Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by his faith.” (Habakkuk 2:4, BSB)
Seven words that the New Testament will harvest three times over. To see where justification by faith begins — the doctrine unfolded across the Romans volumes of this same series — is reason enough to sit a while in Habakkuk. But the greater reason is the road the book travels: it begins in complaint and ends in worship, moving from “How long?” to “Yet I will rejoice” — not because the circumstances improve, but because the prophet comes at last to see the One who stands behind them.
Jonah: when God seems too merciful
If Habakkuk struggles that God is too slow to judge the wicked, Jonah struggles that God is too quick to spare them. Called to preach to Nineveh — the capital of a cruel and hated enemy — Jonah runs the other way, and the book that follows is not really about a fish. It is about a prophet who would rather die than watch God show mercy to people he believes deserve wrath. Jonah flees, is swallowed and delivered, preaches, and then sits down outside the city, angry, to see whether God will really relent. He does. And Jonah’s anger at that grace exposes something uncomfortably close to home in every one of us.
Read together, the two prophets frame the whole tension of the gospel. One cannot understand why judgment delays; the other cannot accept that mercy comes at all. Both must learn to trust the character of the God who holds the nations in His hand.
How the study reads
As with every book in The Study Guide Series, both prophets are worked through carefully and honestly, verse by verse, explaining the text and its key terms and letting each book speak on its own terms. Habakkuk rewards this kind of reading as few books do — for it also teaches how prophecy speaks. A word to a seventh-century Judah about a Babylon then gathering on the horizon speaks, in the same breath, of a final empire yet to rise and a day of reckoning still ahead. His woes fall on Nebuchadnezzar and on the last kingdom at once, so that a promise of the coming Kingdom can sit buried inside a taunt against an ancient tyrant — “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.” Learn to read Habakkuk, and you have begun to learn how to read prophecy itself, all the way to the return of the King.
Beneath all of it runs one quiet, unshakable conviction: God holds history in His hand. Nations rise because He raises them and fall because He brings them down — and the believer’s task, in the gap between the promise and its keeping, is to live there by faith.
Habakkuk & Jonah is available now — two prophets, one binding, opened verse by verse in the Study Guide Series.
Get your copy today!