Habakkuk: Yet I will rejoice

Continuing on with Read Through The Bible (RTTB) in one year, I am starting the H'es with Habakkuk. I have noticed one downside of RTTB in alphabetical order: It's hard to tell if I'm on track or not for finishing in one year. I use a printed schedule on which I check off the three-chapter-a-day readings, so I would have to go and count up the number of days. Pretty tedious. And it doesn't really matter all that much if I go past twelve months, does it, dear reader?

So. Habakkuk. It's a very short book, only three chapters. The prophet lived in Judah, the southern kingdom that remained after the collapse of Israel. The prophecy probably dates to about 605 B.C., not long before the demise of Judah at the hands of the Babylonians in 597.

Habakkuk starts by crying out to God about the evil in Judah. His words in the first few verses could be ours today. Many of us are appalled at the violence, wrong, strife and injustice that mark our nation(s). We, too, wonder how God can let it go unpunished.

Imagine how we would feel if God replied to us as He does to Habakkuk: "I will punish the wrongdoing of My people--and I will use a foreign, hated, godless nation (Babylon) to do the punishing."

Just think about that for a while. Feel your blood run cold.

Habakkuk cries out again, asking how God can use a people even more unrighteous than the Jews to inflict the punishment. God answers that Babylon will also be punished in due time. I suppose that's comforting. The prophecy also rants with woes against the Babylonians and their wickedness. Also comforting, sort of.

Still, Habakkuk is a poem of steadfast faith. I have a couple of favorite verses underlined in my Bible:

2:4b "...but the righteous will live by his faith." If I'm not mistaken, that was the verse that got Martin Luther's attention and was seminal to his reforming the Church away from works-based theology to faith alone.

2:20 "But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him."

The best is 3:17-19, a beautiful passage of faith:

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 Savior.
The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights.

That may the bottom line of faith. Even when all we have left is faith, it is the strength that comes from trusting God that enables us to go on.