Habakkuk 2:6-11: in context

Habakkuk has been crying out to God about the violence of a rising empire that plunders nations and answers to no one. And God gives him a taunt-song, a series of woes to be sung against the oppressor, and two of its images cut past the ancient empire straight into the human heart. The first: woe to him who gets evil gain for his house, that he may set his nest on high, that he may be delivered from the hand of evil. Picture what that describes. A man builds up wealth by exploitation, by taking what is not his, and his goal is security, to set his nest up high, out of reach, safe from any harm that might come. He imagines that enough gain, gotten by any means, will put him and his household beyond danger.

Then God punctures the illusion twice over. First, he says, you have devised shame to your house by cutting off many peoples, and have sinned against your own soul. The exploitation meant to secure his house actually dooms it, and worse, it is a wound he has inflicted on his own soul. The one he has harmed most is himself. And then the strangest image in the passage: the stone will cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the woodwork will answer it. The very materials of the house he built with stolen gain will testify against him. The walls themselves cry out the injustice baked into them. You cannot build a secure home on wrong, because the stones will not keep quiet.

That reaches a temptation dressed up in respectable clothes. I want to secure myself and the people I love, to build a nest high enough to be safe from trouble, and it is easy to tell myself that the means do not matter much if the end is my family's security, a corner cut here, a gain taken that was not really mine. Habakkuk says the security so built is a lie; it dooms the very house it was meant to protect, and it wounds my own soul. Am I tempted to make myself safe by means that quietly harm others, and if I built my nest on high that way, what would the stones in its walls be crying out?