Scripture References: Habakkuk 3:2-6; 17-19
In the midst of horrid circumstances tainted with implication that God somehow caused the pain as a means of judgment, Habakkuk is singing, and his song says he will rejoice in the Lord anyway, not in what has happened, but in the Lord. His song says he will be joyful, not in the pain caused by the difficulties, but in God, the source, of his salvation. That, my brothers and sisters, is an amazing statement of confidence in God, and it is only in this way that he can hope to lean upon God for strength. God has the power to be the source of strength; that is established as fact for Habakkuk. God is capable of acting in mercy even toward disobedient children; that, too, is established as fact in Habakkuk’s mind. Whatever else might be said or thought of God, these facts settle for Habakkuk that God is the real source of strength in life’s strained, confusing, and painful times: “The Lord God is my strength” (verse 19).
“The Lord God is my strength.” Habakkuk concludes that God is his strength because, in addition to God’s mercy, Habakkuk finds the feeling of safety and security in his relationship with God: “He makes my feet like the feet of deer, And sets me on my high places.” – Psalm 18:33. The deer, also known as the “hind,” was known for its speed and surefootedness. Habakkuk felt secure in the face of insecurity because of what he knew that God could do for people. He felt this security as a deer was secure in its ability to leap rocks and streams and to move with agility through precarious mountain passages. In the heights, no harm could come to the deer, and in the same way, Habakkuk felt safe because God sustained his life as if in high places.
Can we ourselves come near such a confidence in God’s power? Remember Paul’s writing reminds us that our confidence in God cannot rest on human wisdom, our ability to figure how and why, but must rest in the fact of God’s power alone. (See 1 Corinthians 2:5). With all the questions and reservations in his mind, Habakkuk still comes to this moving confession: “The Lord God is my strength.” It is not unlike the eloquent conclusion reached by the nineteenth-century poet, John Greenleaf Whittier. In his poem, “The Eternal Goodness,” Whittier wrote:
I see the wrong that round me lies,
I feel the guilt within;
I hear, with groan and travail-cries,
The world confess its sin.
Yet, in the maddening maze of things,
And tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed trust my spirit clings;
I know that God is good!
I know not what the future hath
Of marvel or surprise,
Assured alone that life and death
His mercy underlies.
And if my heart and flesh are weak
To bear an untried pain,
The bruis’ed reed He will not break,
But strengthen and sustain? 1
The Lord God is our strength also. If we believe it, we will believe it because of God’s mercy, a fact about which we will have become convinced through inner conversation with God as our Father. But, we will always have to believe it in spite of our reservations and possible confusions about the why of evil in the world and how it relates to our own pain. Even so, let it be our praise as well:
Though the fig tree may not blossom,
Nor fruit be on the vines;
Though the labor 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—
Yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will joy in the God of my salvation.
The Lord God is my strength. – Habakkuk 3:17-19.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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