A Sermon on Habakkuk 3:17-19 has been lightly edited.
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Good morning. If you’ve been in Sunday school for a while, you’re going to get a little bit of a repetition here because we’re still in Habakkuk in this sermon. So it’s actually the last few verses of Habakkuk, not a very well-known book, but we’ve been getting a good dose of it in Sunday school and now.
So let’s pray. Lord, enliven our hearts by your Spirit that we might hear your word, that we might believe your word and be encouraged in our faith. Speak to us, Lord, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
Our main text today comes from Habakkuk, chapter 3, verses 17 through 19. These are the last verses. Hear God’s Word:
“Though the fig trees should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail, and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I will take joy in the God of my salvation. God the Lord is my strength. He makes my feet like the deer’s. He makes me tread on my high places. To the choir master with stringed instruments.”
INTRODUCTION
These verses come at the end of the short book of Habakkuk. Habakkuk was an Old Testament prophet who struggled to understand God’s ways.
From many clues given within the text, we can surmise that this book was written just prior to the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. Habakkuk also is unique among the prophets in that the entire book is a dialogue between the prophet and Yahweh the Lord. Habakkuk speaks and then God speaks. Habakkuk questions and then God answers.
HABAKKUK QUESTIONS & GOD ANSWERS
I’m going to begin with an overview of the book to provide some context and then we’ll delve more deeply into our main text which I just read. So early in the book, Habakkuk is trying to understand why God seems absent and disinterested in what’s going on in Judah and Jerusalem.
He questions God. He asks, “How long are you going to let me cry for help and not answer?” Many of his countrymen at that time in Jerusalem and in Judah were bent on destruction and violence, strife and contention were commonplace, you know, like staples in the society.
The wicked surrounded the righteous in the land and justice was being perverted. So much so that Habakkuk describes the law as being paralyzed. It was ineffective. It wasn’t working.
Habakkuk questions God. His questions are, and I’m summarizing, “Where are you God? Why are you allowing this to go on? How am I to understand this? What’s happening? All this evil in the land and you’re not doing anything.”
God answers Habakkuk. He says, “I see the wickedness of my people, Habakkuk, and I’m about to deal with it according to the Mosaic Covenant. I told my people that if they rebelled against me and served and worshiped other gods that I would expel them from the land. And I’m raising up the Babylonians to do just that. They’re going to be my agents of discipline and judgment against my people.”
Not really the answer that Habakkuk was looking for. He would much have rather heard something like, “Well, you know, Habakkuk, you preach to them and they’ll repent and they’ll turn from their sins.”
That would have been preferable, right? Not, I’m bringing the Babylonians to destroy and to send them away. However, God’s response did supply an answer to his question about the injustice in the land. However, the answer brought with it another question.
How can you use this nation, Babylon, a nation known for its evil and brutality, to punish your people? You know, they’re worse than your people. How can you do this, God? How is that just? And God answers by telling his prophet that though Babylon will destroy Jerusalem and its temple and take many of God’s people into exile, it will nevertheless be held responsible for its actions. After an extended period of 70 years, during which time his people are in exile, the cup of God’s wrath would be poured out on Babylon, turning its glory into utter shame.
Its practice of idolatry, which consisted of worshiping the work of men’s hands, would be revealed for what it was, an utter lie unable to save. The Lord gives Habakkuk a lengthy description of the woes that would come to those arrogant ones who resisted his will. I’m just going to, and he’s talking about Babylon, I’m just going to describe one of those woes.
Chapter 2, in verse 12, he said, Woe to him, there’s actually five woes, it’s just one of them, okay.
“Woe to him who builds a town with blood and founds a city on iniquity. Behold, is it not from the Lord of hosts that people’s labor merely for fire, that nations weary themselves for nothing?”
The Babylonians were takers. The Lord told Habakkuk that the great building products, projects that the Babylonians accomplished through injustice and iniquity would prove to be meaningless, merely fuel for the fire of God’s judgment. All their weary works would prove in the end worthless and vain because they were done for their own glory, not for the glory of God. The nations expend energy wearYing themselves without achieving anything of lasting value.
It would all be burned up in God’s condemnation and wrath. Where Habakkuk was limited in his own view to see only the present, if he were to expand his vision over time, he would see that the Lord did indeed judge the evil of nations. His judgment, his judgments included giving them over to the vanity of expending ceaseless energy, amassing things that would prove worthless because they were not done in faith to the glory of God. They would all be burned up.
You know, Paul tells us about that with Christian’s works. Some of our works will be burned up in the end because they weren’t done for God’s glory.
They were done for their own glory. During this challenging time when Habakkuk prophesied, when God’s people were being disciplined for their sins and carted off to Babylon for 70 years of exile. Those true believers, God’s covenant faithful, were to wait patiently for their deliverer and were to live in faith and trust. As God instructed Habakkuk in chapter 2 verse 4, the righteous shall live by faith.
The Lord was telling Habakkuk and all the faithful to trust his love, his compassion, his mercy, and justice in these trying times. We too, in all of life’s challenges, are to trust him and never forget that God is on his throne high above the heavens and is sovereignly in control of what you and I and our limited field of view often see as chaos. Now, having provided the historical context for this book as a whole, I would like for us to return to our opening passage, the last passage in this book.
HABAKKUK’S REST IN GOD
As the dialogue between the Lord and Habakkuk develops in this book, it becomes evident from Habakkuk’s words that God has tenderly moved his prophet from the despair of his anxious questions to a place of rest and trust in the Lord’s majesty and sovereignty. Habakkuk gives it peace and his Lord, and so he writes a song, a song to be sung by the faithful. In the final verse of the book, he even gives instructions for his singing to the choir master with stringed instruments.
So it was to be accompanied by stringed instruments. So we’re going to reread that last section of this book.
“Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail, and the fields yield no food. The flock be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I will take joy in the God of my salvation. God the Lord is my strength. He makes my feet like the deer’s. He makes me tread on my high places.”
At this time, Judah was an agricultural society. Habakkuk penned these words of a song to be sung during the worst of circumstances. This was the situation. They would have no figs to eat, no grapes to eat, or wine to drink.
Their olive trees would not produce. They would have no grains to make bread or produce from the fields. Not only was he envisioning a time when their plant crops would be decimated, but they wouldn’t have any wool for clothing or meat to eat.
The animals were going to be destroyed too. Nothing to fall back on. So this was economic disaster.
These circumstances are often the byproducts of war. When the Babylonians sent its armies through Judah like a swarm of locusts, nothing would be left in its path. The situation would be so bad that people would count it a blessing to be taken into exile.
Many would die either through warfare or starvation. Can you imagine being in that place at that time? I guess there are places like that in the world today where it’s just like this. God was painting a picture of fearful times about to occur because of his people’s sin.
This passage led me to some questions, both personal and for you as well, I hope. What do you fear most? What do I fear most? What are your anxious what-ifs? What if this happened? What if that happened? What keeps you up at night? Worries about failing health? Fearful of what might happen in our country politically or economically? Worries about relationships? Fearful for your children? What if I were to develop Alzheimer’s like my mom did? That actually happened. What if the worst thing you can imagine actually happened and it could? How would I cope? Would God be enough for me? These are questions that each of us needs to answer.
Is God enough in my life? Will I let God be enough to see me through this or any other of my fearful what-ifs? We see in this short prophecy the amazing grace of God in Habakkuk’s life. God brings him from the dread of the what-ifs of the Babylonian invasion to the faith-filled song of rejoicing in God even though the what-if happened. Even if all these horrible things happen to us, Habakkuk says, I will rejoice in the Lord.
I will take joy in the God of my salvation. My enemies can do me harm, but they cannot take my God from me. God is my salvation.
He is the source of my joy, not circumstances. He offers me his joy and I will take it by faith from his loving hands. And then he says, the Lord is my strength.
He’s the one who makes me tread on high places. Those high places are those craggy, rocky terrains where I wouldn’t choose to go. But he also gives me feet like the deer so I can grab hold of those cracks in the rocks and not fall.
He trains my feet for living like an exile in this world. Habakkuk’s faith has been tested by fire and proved genuine. Though his world has been shaken, he has learned that his God is a solid rock, a place to stand in the trials of life.
CONCLUSION
We don’t know what happened to Habakkuk. Don’t hear about him anymore. After writing this brief prophecy, did he die? Was he taken to Babylon? Don’t know.
However, from his honest dialogue with God, we know that he struggled with doubts and fears. We also know that the Lord brought him graciously to a place of trusting in and surrendering to his sovereign will. He knew by faith that God loved him.
And so he wrote this song of faith to be sung together with his fellow sufferers, those whose faith and trust were in Yahweh. I can imagine them exiled in a foreign land singing this song together as they labored on the banks of the Euphrates River in Babylon. Asking God questions when done in sincerity and humility is something that many saints have done through the ages.
Ike mentioned it today and it’s in the sermon. Job. Job questioned God.
He claimed to his friends that he was righteous. God had said he was righteous. They said he was a sinner.
And that’s why all this stuff is happening to you, Job. And the things that he was suffering had nothing to do with his sins, he told his friends. However, in the end, even though all Job’s questions weren’t answered, he surrendered to the wisdom and sovereignty of God.
He said, I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.
Through his suffering and through God’s words to him, Job was given a vision of the glory and majesty of God that enabled him to trust and humbly submit to him. Other saints brought questions, God questions, and that rooted in despair. King David in the Psalms, Elijah, you know, and after his great victory, you know, he asked God to kill him.
The majesty, also Moses, Jeremiah, but the ultimate question asked of God was this. And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, Eli, Eli, lama, sabachthani, that is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why was he forsaken? Like the unfaithful Jews or the ruthless Babylonians, all of us have transgressed God’s holy law and as such are deserving of his wrath. The scriptures declare all have sinned.
There is none righteous, no not one, and the wages of sin that which we have earned by our works is death. But that cup of wrath, death, and condemnation was poured out on Jesus in our stead. Isaiah said, all we like sheep have gone astray.
We’ve turned everyone to his own way and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter and like a sheep that before shears is silent, so he opened not his mouth.
By oppression and judgment, he was taken away. And as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? Why was he cut off? To what end was he forsaken? The apostle Peter answers that question. For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.
Jesus was forsaken in order that we might be welcomed into God’s family. Jesus died for our transgressions so that we might not die for them but have eternal life. In closing, it’s important for us to know that Jesus’ cry of forsakenness was not his last word from the cross.
He knew that this alienation from the father, this condemnation that he was experiencing was temporary and that he would be raised from death to life. On the cross, after Jesus had asked why he had been forsaken, Luke records Jesus’ final words just before his death. Then Jesus calling out with a loud voice said, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.
And having said this, he breathed his last. In other words, Father, though you slay me, yet will I trust you to save me from this death. I commit my spirit and my eternal destiny into your hands.
What a savior! In the myth of being cut off from life itself for the transgressions of his people, Jesus the son expressed his enduring trust in God his father. When we come up against life’s fearful what-ifs, let us know in our heart of hearts that even though these fears may come to pass, our God is mighty to deliver us from our and into his joy. This might take time, perhaps even years, depending on what you’ve experienced.
It took time for Habakkuk to be moved from his desperate cries for help into a quiet, patient trust. And I don’t want to minimize the pain that severe trials cause in our lives. There are times when we are simply to weep with those who weep.
But David also writes, weeping may tarry where the night, but joy comes in the morning. And God has promised never to leave us or forsake us. He will see us through the pain of our trials and into the joy of his presence.
By opening ourselves up to his grace, we can learn to take hold of true joy. Not the fleeting joy of our ever-changing circumstances, but the abiding joy of our never-changing God. Let us rejoice in the Lord and take joy in the God of our salvation.
Let us love the Lord for who he is and not only for what he does. May we trust him in and through all of life’s circumstances. May we trust him today.
Let us pray. Father, when you cause us to walk on painful paths that we would not choose for reasons known only to you, uphold us with a trusting spirit which surrenders to your sovereign wisdom and will. Be to us a strong tower, a place of refuge in this fallen world. Give us your joy, a joy that depends not on favorable circumstances, but which finds its source in God our savior. A fountain of joy in a dry and weary land. Make us strong in faith and equip us by your spirit to walk with you steadfastly.
Give us grace to know that you love us dearly and that you and to trust your wisdom and your promise that all things truly work together for our good and for your glory. O Lord, you know what it is to feel forsaken, for you have walked that path before us. When we stumble, pick us up. When our strength fails, carry us. We love you, Lord, for you first loved us and gave yourself up for us. Father, hear and answer our prayer for the sake of your son and our savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.
As you leave this week, strengthened by the grace of the Lord’s table, take this blessing upon you.
“May the love of God, the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
He who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon.
Amen. Come Lord Jesus.
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