A Word in Season: God My Strength (Habakkuk 3:17–19)

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When Habakkuk considered the desolations of his day, he trembled. When he thought about what was coming upon the nation, his heart quivered.

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He says, I trembled in myself that I might rest in the day of trouble. And as he contemplates the coming of the

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Babylonians and all their dreadful consequences, as he thinks about the potential judgments of God that will rain down upon the nation that he loves, this is where he concludes, this is where he rests his soul.

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He first of all faces, quite honestly, the expected realities.

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Habakkuk chapter 3 from verse 17, Though the fig tree may not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, though the labour of the olive may fail, and the fields yield no food, though the flock may be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls.

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So he's painting, perhaps in some senses you might say, the gloomiest possible picture.

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This is what is likely to come to pass, and it's a picture of economic and social devastation on the widest scale and to the most complete degree.

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An utter failure of flocks and herds, the nation under the deprivation of all the good things that they might have looked for and anticipated.

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And Habakkuk says, yes, those things may indeed come to pass. That is what may yet happen.

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And it did, in fact, come to pass. So where, when you're facing such devastation and desolation, do you find any consolation?

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What do you set against these things? If you're going to start that catalogue of woes with, even though this comes to pass, what's the but?

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What's the yet? What's the however, the nevertheless that balances out such an awful expectation?

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It's found in verses 18 and 19. Now that is the language of a man who has already said that the just shall live by faith.

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He knows that whatever else he loses, he cannot lose

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God. Whatever else can be taken away, God cannot be taken away and will not take himself away.

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Whatever else may fail, the God of his salvation will not fail.

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Whatever else may be cut off, God will not be cut off from him nor him from God.

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Whatever else is made empty, whatever else is proved vain, whatever else disappoints or shames.

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Yet if he has God as his God, then he is happy and secure.

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And we are perhaps too accustomed to rest upon the the fruitfulness and the blessing that we see in the world around us.

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We're very accustomed to our comforts. We enjoy our ease and our pleasures.

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And though they are in themselves good gifts of God to be received in their proper time and received with Thanksgiving.

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Also, they are not the source of our joy. It is God and God himself who is to delight our hearts.

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And who knows what devastations and desolations that you and I will face in the coming days or weeks or months or years?

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Who knows what battles there may be for us individually? Who knows what challenges we might face as churches?

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Who knows what distresses may come upon us? To whom will we look?

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What will we set against the devastations and desolations of these days?

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If it is not the enduring God, the God of my salvation.

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There is our anchor point. There is our consolation. There is our delight, even our joy in the midst of sorrows.

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Because though our strength is not sufficient, the Lord God is our strength.

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Though our hands will hang down and our knees will become feeble, God can make our feet like deer's feet.

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We strengthen ourselves, not in what we've got or what we can do. Not in our ability to defend what we've received or to recover it if it's lost.

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But in the God who is always the same and is always our

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God. He is the one who will make us walk on our high hills. And for Habakkuk that may have been a pointing forward to a measure of restoration still to come.

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For every Christian, God will truly lift us up. Though we lose everything here and life itself, we are to rejoice in what we now have in God.

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And what God has promised that he will soon give to us. Making us to walk on our high hills.