Habakkuk 3:16-19 Are You There God? It’s Me, Habakkuk: Defiant Faith
Yet I…
Today we are wrapping up our 4 week series of messages on the book of Habakkuk.
For the title of the series, we made a play on a classic book for adolescent girls called Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. As I’ve been saying, the series doesn’t have much to do with the Judy Blume book. I’ve never read it. Except, I understand that it is written as a sort of journal where the main character–Margaret–is struggling with some big questions about life.
And the book of Habakkuk, as we’ve seen, reads like that. It reads like Habakkuk’s prayer journal, as he asks big questions of God. Things in Judah have gotten really bad, the leadership is terrible and violence is out of control, is God even paying attention?
Then God answers, He is paying attention, and He is going to do something: He’s sending in the Babylonians. But for Habakkuk, that’s even worse. That’s cleaning house with a dirty broom. The Babylonians are even worse than the Jews, is God being fair?
And then God gives Habakkuk some visions, He lets Habakkuk in on the woes that are coming the Babylonians’ way and reminds him of some of the great deeds of salvation. He gives Habakkuk a picture of Himself as a divine warrior and reminds him that He has never lost control of the world.
In addition to playing on the book title, we also used the cover of a recent edition of Judy Blume’s book for inspiration for our sermon graphic. That image of a text conversation, where you send out your message and then you see the three little dots that tell you the person on the other end is working on their response. (I think some people call them bubbles? You know the person on the other end is working on a reply because they are “bubbling”. Is that a thing?)
And I said the first week that those three dots are a great metaphor for the book of Habakkuk, as well as so many experiences in our own lives. That feeling of anticipation and also impatience as we wait for the reply to come through. That uncertainty, as we ask our big questions and then wait for the answer.
The main theme of Habakkuk is faith. The central verse in this little book is Habakkuk 2:4: “The righteous will live by faith.” And as we have seen, the challenge is living by faith even as we live in the space represented by those three dots.
And as we come to the very end of Habakkuk, he’s still living in those three dots. He’s dialogued with God, he’s had space to wrestle with some of life’s biggest questions, he’s gotten some answers from God; but as the book concludes his situation has not really changed. The Babylonians are still coming. Disaster still looms. Cities are going to be raised, friends and family are going to be killed and carried off, deprivation and despair are right around the corner.
Habakkuk has been given some divine perspective. He’s been given visions and prophetic insight. But that hasn’t changed the situation on the ground. Life has not suddenly become miraculously sunny and cheerful.
So what does Habakkuk do? He resolves to defiantly and tenaciously cling to faith. Regardless of what his circumstances are, he refuses to turn away from God. Here’s our text. Habakkuk 3:16-19:
16I heard and my heart pounded,
my lips quivered at the sound;
decay crept into my bones,
and my legs trembled.
Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity
to come on the nation invading us.
17 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,
18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
19 The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights.
For the director of music. On my stringed instruments.
I love this passage of scripture. I aspire to have the kind of faith this passage depicts. I am in awe of the resilience of Habakkuk’s faith.
This passage of scripture falls into a category of Bible passages that I call the “Yet I” verses. Yet I. You see Habakkuk use those words in both the middle of verse 16 and the beginning of verse 18. Yet I. Other examples of Bible passages that use this idea are Lamentations 3:19-20; Psalm 73:23; and Psalm 42:11.
The idea is that the Biblical author is describing a difficult situation. Habakkuk is painting a picture of true devastation and deprivation. The fig trees are dry and lifeless. The grape harvest and the olive crops have completely failed. The sheep have stopped producing lambs and the cattle have all been run off or eaten. It’s similar in those other passages. Things are dismal.
And yet…and yet…the Biblical author commits to living by faith in spite of dire circumstances. “Yet I…will wait patiently.” “Yet I…will rejoice in the LORD.”
I call it defiant faith. Faith that persists in the face of brokenness and pain. Faith that hangs in there even when all the evidence would seem to indicate it isn’t worth it.
Yet I… I love these passages so much. In fact, a friend got me this tumbler that plays off of a popular brand name. Yet I… I want to live in such a way that even when all around me gives way, yet I will cling to faith in God.
It’s one thing to praise God when his blessings are flowing into your life. But if yours is the kind of faith that also praises him when things are bad, then it’s the genuine article. That’s our big idea this morning: genuine faith is the kind of faith that continues to praise God even when things are bad.
So how do we get that kind of faith? How do we defy our circumstances and cling to God no matter what? I have three things I want to draw from the text.
Preach to Yourself
First, we need to learn to preach to ourselves. When life is throwing bad news at us, we need to remind ourselves of the good news.
What we tell ourselves in the middle of trying times is so important. David Bast writes a series of questions:
What do you say when you pray and believe and trust God and try to live a decent life, but still you’re lying in a hospital bed sick and frightened and in pain, and the doctor tells you he’s sorry but there’s nothing more they can do for you? What do you say when your husband informs you he’s just plain tired of being married to you and he’s found real love for the first time in his life–with someone else?... Or your investment turns sour and the security you were counting on for your retirement suddenly has evaporated? Or you miscarry the baby you’ve been trying to have for ten years? Or you don’t get the job or the promotion or the girl or the award or the prize? What do you say when the fig tree does not bud?
He says that many people are tempted to say, quite literally “To Hell with it” and turn their backs on God. But that’s not what Habakkuk does. He says:
17 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,
18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
I think Habakkuk is giving himself a pep talk here. He’s reminding himself of where his hope and security is found.
An author named Paul David Tripp writes this:
“No one is more influential in your life than you are, because no one talks to you more than you do. We never stop talking to ourselves….The things you say to you about you, God, and life are profoundly important because they form and shape the way you then respond to the things that God has put on your plate.”
What I see in Habakkuk, is that he is talking to himself. Not just talking, preaching. He is acknowledging the painful truth of his reality—he feels overwhelmed, stressed, worried, angry, and more—yet he is resolved to remind himself of God’s greater reality. His self-talk focuses more on God’s truth than on his circumstances.
You see, we all keep a running dialogue going in our heads. As Paul David Tripp says: “nobody talks to you more than you.” And so, we need to think about what we tell ourselves. Especially when things are hard. Especially when circumstances are less than ideal.
Do we tell ourselves that the world is out to get us? Do we tell ourselves that we are no good? Do we tell ourselves that nobody can fix our situation but us, and so we better start fighting back?
Or do we remind ourselves of God’s goodness, faithfulness and love? Do we talk back to ourselves? Do we preach the truth of the Bible to our souls?
Now I need to be careful here. When I talk about preaching to ourselves, I’m not talking about simply using the power of positive thinking.
Some of you might remember a Saturday Night Live character named Stuart Smalley. He was a nebbish, nerdy character played by Al Franken who wore cardigan sweaters and hosted his own TV show called “Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley.” Every show would begin with Stuart looking into a mirror and saying “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!”
It was a gentle send-up of the idea that we can make our lives better through the power of positive thinking. The self-help movement is based on the idea that we can achieve self-salvation through the right self-talk. Tell yourself you are good enough and smart enough often enough and eventually it will be true.
And, of course, it is important to have positive self-talk. Like the quote says, nobody talks to you more than you. So what we say to ourselves matters.
But what we are talking about here goes beyond telling yourselves things you want to be true or hope to be true. This is more than giving yourself a mental pick-me-up. This is preaching to yourself the truths of the Bible. This is replacing wrong thinking with Godly thinking.
Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was an influential preacher in the mid-20th Century. For 30 years he was the minister of Westminster Chapel in London. Before he became a preacher he was a medical doctor. He wrote a book called Spiritual Depression in which he talked about the importance of talking to ourselves with God’s truth. This is a long quote, but I’ll put it on the screen so you can follow along:
I say that we must talk to ourselves instead of allowing “ourselves” to talk to us! Do you realize what that means? I suggest that the main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this, that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self. Am I just trying to be deliberately paradoxical? Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. (quoted by John Piper, Future Grace, p. 304)
You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: ‘Why art thou cast down — what business have you to be disquieted?’ You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: ‘Hope thou in God’ — instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged himself to do. https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/speak-the-truth-to-yourself
This is what I see Habakkuk doing. He’s taking himself in hand, preaching to himself, exhorting himself to hope in God.
This is what I am urging us all to do. Self-preaching, not self-help. Take that mental soundtrack that loops in your mind a chorus of worry, doubt and fear and replace it with the stern, clear truth of God. Say: “Self! Listen up! Instead of constantly listening to you, I will start talking to you!” I will rejoice in God.
The Stockdale Paradox
Second, we must confront the brutal facts, but never lose hope. Even as we deal with the reality of our situation, we cannot let go of the source of our hope.
Look again at verse 16:
16I heard and my heart pounded,
my lips quivered at the sound;
decay crept into my bones,
and my legs trembled.
Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity
to come on the nation invading us.
Habakkuk is scared and anxious and beaten down. But he knows God is a God of justice and that one day the Babylonians will get what they deserve. So he can wait patiently.
Or, again, verses 17 and 18:
7 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,
18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
Habakkuk cannot deny the reality of his circumstances. There are no rose colored glasses that are going to make the famine any less severe. But he can still find hope in God. He can still find reason for joy, because he believes in the Lord.
I’ve been thinking about the story of Admiral Jim Stockdale this week. I learned about Stockdale’s story in the Jim Collins book “Good to Great.” Collins wrote about something he called “the Stockdale Paradox.”
Admiral Jim Stockdale was the highest ranked American to be held Prisoner of War during the Vietnam conflict. He spent 8 years at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” where he experienced and witnessed all sorts of torture and atrocities. Not only did he need to endure his own imprisonment, but as the highest ranking officer he was responsible for the morale of all the other American P.O.W’s, doing everything he could to create conditions that would increase the number of prisoners who would survive unbroken, while fighting an internal war against his captors and their attempts to use the prisoners for propaganda.
When Collins interviewed him years later, he asked him how he endured:
“I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which in retrospect, I would not trade.”
Then Collins asked him: “Who didn’t make it out?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused given what he’d said earlier.
“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart. This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end–-which you can never afford to lose–-with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-stockdale-paradox_b_5897ca82e4b02bbb1816bc38
This is what Collins coined as the Stockdale Paradox: Never lose hope that there is something better coming even as you confront the most brutal facts of your current situation.
Habakkuk is completely in touch with reality. He knows how bad things are, and he knows they may even get worse. But he has a deeper, underlying conviction that God is still in control. And that God is writing a good ending to the story. And so he can rejoice even in the midst of hardship.
John Piper puts it like this:
[This] means that for the Christian things may go really bad right now and yet not rob him of his joy. The joy is the joy of hope. Christians set their hearts on how good it will be in the age to come and in the presence of Christ after death. This is why Christians can rejoice in tribulation and not just in health and peace and security. Tribulation drives the roots of joy down into hope. The future joy streams back into the present and lightens every load. https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/happy-in-hope-patient-in-pain-constant-in-prayer
For Christians, it’s a matter of perspective. The situation you are currently in might not be so great; but we believe there is something better coming. We look forward in hope. And from that hope we can find the strength to be joyful, even when there is nothing to be immediately joyful about.
I think of it like this: the Bible tells us that there is an indescribable inheritance being stored up for us in heaven. An inheritance that can never perish, or spoil or fade away (1 Peter 1:4). A day is coming when we will be indescribably joyful around the throne of Christ. And we know this inheritance has been earned for us by Christ’s incredible, sacrificial love for us and by His triumphant victory over sin at the cross and the empty tomb.
It is as though we all have this retirement account of joy stored up for us in this bank account called “Hope.”
Now, typically, financial advisors will tell you that you should not borrow against your retirement. If you have money put away for your golden years, you shouldn’t be dipping into it for use right now. If you do that, you are just setting yourself up for pain later on.
But in this case, we are being told that we can borrow against our inheritance of joy all we want. We can dip into that bank account called Hope whenever we need to. Whenever we run into a situation that threatens to steal our joy, whenever we are tempted to get depressed or discouraged because things are not good right now, we can draw down on our future joy. Because that future joy is inexhaustible. Because that future joy is unlimited. Because that future joy is so spectacular we can start living on it right now.
But that doesn’t mean we have to put on plastic smiles and pretend everything is great right now when it ain’t. We can confront our current reality even as we hang on to the end of the story that we know has already been written.
Focus on the Giver
Then, third thing: we must focus on the Giver, and not the Gifts. We must check to see if we love God because of the things He gives us; or if we love Him because of who He is.
Here is Habakkuk’s declaration in verse 19:
19 The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights.
He’s just acknowledged that his life is in the dumps, but he still feels like he could run up a mountain because God is his strength. Not the crops in his field and not the animals in his barn. Not the money in his bank account nor the praise of his peers. His joy is not contingent on the stuff in his life, it is anchored on the Sovereign Lord in his life.
We must be careful not to reduce God to the level of a broken candy machine.
Let me explain. Imagine you have a vending machine in the break room at your work. And you discover that, if you tap it just right, it will drop a free candy bar. No payment. No coins. Just a free, sweet treat every day. You’d love that candy machine. You’d love the great things it gave you.
But then suppose somebody comes and repairs the candy machine. Suddenly, it takes $1.50 every time you want a Snickers. It would probably be better for your waistline, but you wouldn’t love that machine quite as much. Or, suppose they decide the machine can’t be fixed, so they just empty it of all candy. Now it’s just a big empty box with nothing inside of it. You’d probably never give that vending machine a second thought.
When we only love and appreciate God during the good times–during the bright and shiny times when everything is going right for us and we experience no suffering–then we are treating him like that vending machine. As long as the candy comes, we’re all in. But as soon as the candy stops, we shake our fists and walk away.
It is idolatrous to make the gifts more important than the giver. He is not glorified by our gratitude if it is based on the value of the gift and not on His inherent excellency. God is so much more than a vending machine. He is the all-satisfying good of the universe--and He deserves our thanks and joy simply for who He is.
Even if our plates are empty we should--and can--give thanks to the Lord. Even if God has not chosen to bless us with a lot of material things--we can rejoice in who He is. For those of us who are Christians, it is the relationship we have with God--and not the things that we have been given--that allows us to give thanks. It’s setting our focus on God and not our circumstances that enables us to defiantly hold on to faith even in the face of great challenges.
Keep Singing
Finally, I want to note the very last line of Habakkuk:
For the director of music. On my stringed instruments.
It’s a composer’s note. Instructions for a musician. Probably it means that the entire third chapter is written to be a song. It was meant, in the original language, to be sung.
This little note doesn’t add much to the content of the book, but it tells us something about Habakkuk’s defiant faith.
Even in the midst of disaster and despair, Habakkuk kept on singing. If we want to follow his example–if we want to say “yet I will rejoice”, then we should keep singing as well.
David Bast tells of listening to a Russian believer talking about what it was like to be a Christian in the darkest days of communism. The man said: “We learned to sing our joy in a minor key.”
Habakkuk’s song is like that. It’s easy to sing praises to God when everything is great. “I sing because I’m happy/I sing because I’m free.” Sometimes that is the case. And if it is, we should sing with all manner of joy.
But a better measure of our faith is whether or not we can still sing when life stinks, when every tune is in a minor key.
Habakkuk doesn’t sing because he’s happy. He doesn’t sing because things are so great. Habakkuk sings even though things are the way they are because he is basing his song not on what he has, but he is basing it on who God is. He is rejoicing in the Lord. He is joyful in God his savior.
