Habakkuk 3

The chapter is headed A prayer of Habakkuk the prophet upon Shigionoth (v. 1) - a psalm meant to be sung, with a musical notation we no longer fully understand but which marks this as worship set to music. And the prayer opens with a confession of holy fear: O LORD, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid (v. 2). Habakkuk has listened all through the book - to God's answer that the Babylonians are coming, to the long catalogue of woes pronounced over the oppressor - and what he has heard leaves him shaken.

He has grasped the stakes, and he trembles. Then he prays the one thing the moment most needs: O LORD, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy. He asks God to keep His saving work alive even now, in the middle of these terrible years - and, above all, that in the outpouring of deserved judgment God would not forget to be merciful.

It is the prayer of a man who knows the wrath is just and pleads for mercy anyway.

With verse 3 the prayer becomes a vision, and the prophet's eyes lift to see the LORD Himself coming in majesty: God came from Teman, and the Holy One from mount Paran. Selah. His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise (v. 3). The places named are no accident. Teman lay in Edom, Paran in the wilderness south of the promised land - the very country of the Exodus, the direction from which the LORD had once come down to Sinai and led His people through the desert.

Habakkuk is deliberately reaching back to the founding rescue of his nation. He summons the memory of the God who split the sea and shook the mountain, and he sees Him on the move again. And the scale is cosmic: His glory covered the heavens, and the whole earth rang with His praise. Before a single detail of the coming deliverance is spelled out, the prophet has fixed his gaze on the One who delivers - the God whose glory fills the sky and whose coming the earth itself cannot help but praise.

The vision steadies him, because it is larger than the threat.

The portrait of the advancing LORD grows almost unbearable in its brightness: And his brightness was as the light; he had horns coming out of his hand: and there was the hiding of his power (v. 4). Rays of blazing light stream from His hand - and even that dazzling display is only the hiding of His power, the veil over a strength too great to be seen directly. What we glimpse is the edge of the glory; the full force stays hidden because it could not be borne.

Then the imagery turns to judgment marching in His train: Before him went the pestilence, and burning coals went forth at his feet (v. 5). And creation itself cannot stand its ground: He stood, and measured the earth: he beheld, and drove asunder the nations; and the everlasting mountains were scattered, the perpetual hills did bow (v. 6). Notice the words chosen - the mountains are everlasting, the hills perpetual, the oldest and most immovable things the human eye knows.

And they scatter; they bow. The point lands with great force: there is nothing in all creation so settled, so ancient, so seemingly permanent that it does not give way before the LORD. His ways are everlasting - He alone is the truly immovable one. Even the tents of distant peoples tremble at His approach (v. 7).

The vision now sweeps into the full march of the divine Warrior, and the prophet frames it with a striking question: Was the LORD displeased against the rivers? was thine anger against the rivers? was thy wrath against the sea, that thou didst ride upon thine horses and thy chariots of salvation? (v. 8). The question is almost rhetorical wonder. When the LORD split the sea and turned back the rivers, was it because He had some quarrel with the water itself?

No - the upheaval of nature was never about nature. He rode out upon chariots of salvation, and the salvation was the point. The waters parted so that a people could pass through; the sea was driven back so that the captives could go free. Every convulsion of the natural order in the Exodus served one end: the rescue of God's people. And His coming is faithful, not arbitrary: Thy bow was made quite naked, according to the oaths of the tribes, even thy word (v. 9).

The drawn bow, ready for battle, is bent in keeping with the oaths God swore to His people - His warfare is the keeping of His promises. This is the deep comfort buried in all the terror of the vision: the God whose approach scatters mountains is moving, every step, to save.

Creation continues to convulse at the LORD's approach, and the language grows almost overwhelming: The mountains saw thee, and they trembled… the deep uttered his voice, and lifted up his hands on high (v. 10). The mountains shudder; the great deep roars and throws up its waves like hands raised in surrender. Even the highest lights in the sky halt in their courses: The sun and moon stood still in their habitation: at the light of thine arrows they went, and at the shining of thy glittering spear (v. 11).

The image recalls the long day at Gibeon, when the sun and moon stood still while the LORD fought for His people; here the heavenly bodies stop in their tracks, outshone by the lightning of His arrows and the gleam of His spear. The picture is of the entire created order brought to a standstill, dwarfed, by the brightness of the LORD going out to war. And the war has a target: Thou didst march through the land in indignation, thou didst thresh the heathen in anger (v. 12).

He treads down the nations like a farmer threshing grain on the floor. The same coming that brings salvation to His people brings judgment on the oppressor - a single march with two effects.

The center of the whole theophany now stands revealed, and it is salvation: Thou wentest forth for the salvation of thy people, even for salvation with thine anointed; thou woundedst the head out of the house of the wicked, by discovering the foundation unto the neck (v. 13). Here, at last, the purpose of all the brightness and shaking is named twice over - salvation… even for salvation. The LORD came to rescue His people, and to crush the head of the house of the wicked, stripping the oppressor down to bare foundations.

The imagery is of a decisive, total defeat of the enemy of God's people. The closing verses press the same point: those who came out as a whirlwind to scatter the defenseless, whose secret joy was to devour the poor, are themselves struck down (v. 14). And the vision ends back where it began, at the sea: Thou didst walk through the sea with thine horses, through the heap of great waters (v. 15).

The LORD strides through the very waters that drowned His enemies and carried His people to freedom. The whole song of judgment is, underneath, a song of deliverance.

Before the great confession of faith comes a confession of dread, and it is worth pausing on, because it shows that the joy ahead is no easy thing: When I heard, my belly trembled; my lips quivered at the voice: rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in myself (v. 16). The prophet does not arrive at peace by feeling nothing. The vision of the LORD's coming has shaken him to the core - his stomach churns, his lips shake, his very bones feel as if they are rotting.

This is honest terror at the holiness and power of God and at the day of trouble he knows is coming, when the invader cometh up unto the people. And yet, in the same breath, he names where it is leading: that I might rest in the day of trouble. The trembling is the road to rest. Having seen the LORD in all His majesty - the One who scatters mountains and rides chariots of salvation - Habakkuk can now wait quietly for the day of trouble, because he has seen who governs it.

The shaking gives way to stillness. The man who trembled at the voice of God will rest in the storm of God's judgment, precisely because he knows whose hand is in it.

Now the book climbs to its summit, and there is nothing else quite like it. Habakkuk does not reach his joy by closing his eyes to the disaster; he names it, line by line, in pitiless detail: Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls (v. 17).

This is total ruin. Fig, vine, olive, grain, flock, herd - every source of food and livelihood in his world, every visible support a person could lean on, gone. He pictures the worst the coming judgment could bring and writes it all down. And then comes the single most defiant word in the verse, the hinge on which the whole book turns: Yet. Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation (v. 18).

He rejoices in the LORD Himself, in the God of my salvation - the Giver, even when the gifts are gone. Here the prophet finds the thing his joy was always meant to rest on. When every other support is stripped away, the one that remains is found to have been enough all along.

The book closes with a confession of strength that answers the trembling of verse 16: The LORD God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds' feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places (v. 19). The man whose bones felt rotten now declares that his strength is the LORD - not his harvest, not his circumstances, not anything that famine can touch. And the picture he chooses is exquisite.

A hind is a deer, and a deer's feet are made for steep and dangerous ground; it leaps surefooted along cliff faces where a person would stumble and fall. The LORD will give the prophet feet like that - the ability to stand and even to climb in the very places that should be impossible to cross. He will make me to walk upon mine high places - to walk them steady, where the footing is worst.

This is the final answer to the whole book. Habakkuk does not get a removal of the danger; he gets the strength to climb through it without falling. And the chapter ends as it began, with a musical note - To the chief singer on my stringed instruments - for this is, after everything, a song. The complaint that opened the book has become worship set to music.