Yet Still I Will Rejoice

29 June

Habakkuk 3

We started this series with a cry. How long, Lord? How long must I call for help and you do not listen? Violence everywhere, injustice winning, the law paralysed. God, why won't you do something?

We end it with a song.

Chapter three is different to everything else in Habakkuk. It's not a complaint. It's not God's answer. It's a psalm — a prayer set to music, written for the director of music to be played on stringed instruments. Habakkuk has been on a journey with God through all the emotions, and he has arrived somewhere. Not at a place where every question is resolved. Not at a place where the Babylonians have been stopped. What's coming is still coming, and it is going to be brutal. But Habakkuk has arrived at something more solid than answers. He's arrived at God himself.

The psalm moves through three things: he remembers, he trembles, and he rejoices.

Remember

It starts in verse two.

“Lord, I have heard of your fame. I stand in awe of your deeds. Repeat them in our day, in our time make them known. In wrath, remember mercy.”

Habakkuk isn't asking God to change the plan. He knows what's coming. He knows Babylon is on the way and God has said it will happen. He's not asking God to remove the judgement or go easy. He's saying: in the middle of the wrath, remember mercy. Don't let this pain be wasted. Use it. Burn away the idols. Bring revival. Transform us, even if it comes through heartache and tears.

And then from verses 3 to 15, he remembers. He goes back through everything God has done: the Exodus, the wilderness, Sinai, the conquest of Canaan. The God who came in fire and cloud. The God who made mountains tremble and nations shake. The one who made the sun and moon stand still. The one who parted the sea.

This isn't nostalgia. This is recalling promise after promise that came true. Covenant after covenant kept. It's what the Psalmists do again and again in Psalms 77, 78, 105, 106 — in the midst of the storm, they look back to what God has done, because the God who acted then is the same God acting now. Even when you can't see it. Even when it doesn't feel like it. The track record is there.

This is one of the great gifts we have as Christians, the spiritual discipline of remembrance. When life is genuinely terrible, when things have fallen apart, we open this book and we hear what God has done. And we hear every promise he has made and kept. And we hold that against what we're going through today.

Read your Bible. This is why. Not as a rule to follow. As a lifeline when life is falling apart.

Tremble

Then from verse 16, there is a shift.

“I heard and my heart pounded, my lips quivered at the sound, decay crept into my bones and my legs trembled.”

This is a physical response. Heart pounding, lips quivering, bones decaying, legs giving way. Habakkuk is genuinely, physically shaken as he encounters the God he has just been remembering. This is not performance. This is a man brought to his knees before the enormity of who God is.

J.I. Packer writes about something we've quietly lost in modern Christian culture, he calls it the godness of God. We've domesticated God. Made him manageable. Put him in a box that works for us, that we can get our head around. We use intimate, familiar language and the gospel does draw us into deep intimacy with God. But we've lost something in the process. We've lost the trembling.

The God Habakkuk stands before is the God who created and sustains this world. The God who parted the Red Sea. Who sent fire on Sodom and Gomorrah. Who sent the flood. Who sent his own son to die on the cross for the sin of the world. That is the God we are praying to when we pray. That is whose word we are sitting under when we open Scripture.

If that doesn't produce at least a moment of trembling, some honest recognition of who he is and who we are, then we are probably following a version of God we have made comfortable for ourselves.

But Habakkuk's trembling doesn't break him. It steadies him. This encounter with the enormity of God doesn't leave him paralysed. It prepares him for what is coming. He trembles, and he stands firm. He is shaken, and he holds on.

Yet

And then — the word that changes everything.

Yet.

Three letters. The whole book of Habakkuk pivots on it.

Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls — yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I will be joyful in God my Saviour.

Habakkuk is not pretending things are going to be fine. Every item in that list represents a layer of security, a means of survival, being stripped away. He's not listing inconveniences. He's describing total collapse. And he says: even so. Even here. Even now. Yet.

Not nevertheless, which carries a sense of trudging on despite everything. Yet is more radical than that. It's defiant. It's a declaration. It doesn't say I will rejoice in spite of all this. It says I will rejoice in the midst of all this, with my eyes wide open to what is happening.

How do you get there? It can't be manufactured. You can't just decide to feel it. You get there the way Habakkuk got there, by remembering who God is, by trembling before the enormity of him, by letting that encounter reorder what has the final say in your life.

What Habakkuk has discovered is that the God behind his questions is so enormous, so real, so faithful, that the questions no longer have the final say. God does. And that God, the one who parted seas and kept every promise and sent his son to die and rise again, that God is worth rejoicing in. Even when everything else is gone.

The sovereign Lord is my strength. He makes my feet like the feet of a deer. He enables me to tread on the heights.

That's where Habakkuk lands. Not with answers. With God. And turns out, that's enough.