Scripture References: Habakkuk 3:2-6; 17-19

When the pressing times of life come and our coping capacities are not sufficient, where do we turn? Or when we need support with energy merely to make sense of life day by day, on whom do we call? The answer you would expect to hear from a Christian pulpit, especially on a Sunday morning, is, of course, “God.” And most of us would want to give that answer, but are we really convinced that God is our strength? I think many of us have had evidences of God as strength in our lives, and we likely wish we could appropriate this reality more consistently. So how do we come to the point of living in such a way as to find our strength in the Lord? Well, coming to the point has something to do with the degree to which we believe that God can be our strength; this fact becomes a conclusion by which we live.

A principle way by which we come to conclusions is through a type of ongoing inner conversation. Our understanding of God, for example, is rarely shaped in any major way by a single reading, service, conversation, or experience. Rather, we take what we glean from all of these, and process our “hypotheses” over periods of time; certainly thinking about them and maybe testing them in verbal exchanges with ourselves and others, or even action. The real testing ground of our thoughts about God, though, is the inner conversation with God as we contemplate the validity of certain assumptions. In this sense, we do theology, and we are involved in the ongoing process of faith development. It’s certainly a “non-exact science.” If we’re appreciative of free thinking and rethinking, we can grow by the rather continual testing of positions we have held. We’re evidently trying in this process to move to some conclusion which will give us greater understanding, greater assurance, or at least will allow us to survive for a time. Our lives are finally shaped by the few conclusions, in other words, the absolutes, we may be able to call them, which we are able to reach by what amounts to integration of many strands of thought.

Our Old Testament Scriptures takes us into one of these inner conversations with God. Though the form is polished and poetic because Habakkuk had prepared this prayer for public worship, the content or gist of this prayer is the same as the inner dialogue and the searching conversation we often have with God ourselves as we look for what we can hold onto.

There’s something about coming into God’s presence, regardless of how comfortably we may slip into conversation with God, certainly unconscious at times, which often makes us “test the waters” a bit. That’s justified, since there is more to God than we know and can even comprehend. There can be this sense of being acquainted and yet unacquainted with God. It has nothing to do with how God relates to us as if God intended to “keep us guessing” about where we stand. God has made that clear through the revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ. Even so, there is more to God than we can comprehend so our approach is cautious, a feeling out of things, as it were. John Baillie caught the motivation for this attitude in the opening lines of a prayer he penned in A Diary of Private Prayer:

Almighty and eternal God,
Thou art hidden from my sight:
Thou art beyond the understanding of my mind:
Thy thoughts are not as my thoughts:
Thy ways are past finding out. ¹

To Be Continued

¹ John Baillie, A Diary of Private Prayer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949).
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from the New King James Version®, NKJV © 1982 by Thomas Nelson.
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