(Part 21 in a series of posts on Habakkuk.)

Habakkuk 3:16-19

This is the final week in our Blogging with Habakkuk series. Throughout this series of posts, we have been tracing Habakkuk’s journey from doubt to faith. In these final verses Habakkuk makes one of the strongest statements of faith you will find in all of Scripture. This statement makes a fitting climax to the whole book, and in many ways we have saved the best for last with these verses.

When we started this series back in April, we began by first looking at the prophetic books in general, and we asked the question, “Why are the prophetic books important for us to read and study today?” One of the reasons we gave was this:

The prophets deal with the weighty issues of life – things like God’s character, God’s uniqueness, God’s sovereignty over the nations, God’s requirements for his people, the importance of justice and righteousness. Without the prophets our faith can grow shallow and weak, unable to stand up to the rigors and challenges of life. (Reading the Prophets 3)

This is certainly true with the book of Habakkuk. The book of Habakkuk is all about faith in God. In fact we saw that the key verse of the whole book was Habakkuk 2:4: “The righteous will live by faith.”

We live in a day and age where the best-selling Christian books seem to be the ones that tell you how to prosper, succeed and live the good life. And I would guess that most of us would probably find it easy to exercise faith in God when we are prospering, when life is going well and according to our plans.

But the book of Habakkuk challenges us to put our faith in God even during the worst of times. When Habakkuk reached the end of his journey, he had moved from a place of doubting God to a place of trusting God no matter what. And that “no matter what” was a serious issue for Habakkuk, far more serious than most of the issues we deal with on a daily basis.

God revealed to Habakkuk that his country was about to be invaded, pillaged and ransacked. Habakkuk and his people would lose everything that they had built up over the years, everything they had worked for. It would all be gone. That is a whole different matter than trusting God even though you got a traffic ticket, or even though you had a bad day at work or at school. The book of Habakkuk challenges you to learn to trust God no matter what.

Let’s put the question in the same terms Habakkuk faced. If the United States was invaded and conquered by a foreign power in your lifetime, how would that affect your faith in God? Is your faith strong enough to stand up to that kind of a trial? Could you still rejoice in the Lord if you lost everything – your job, your home, your family? Is your faith strong enough to trust God no matter what?

That is the place to which the book of Habakkuk has brought us by the end of chapter three. How do you exercise faith in God during the worst of times? Habakkuk shares with us three things that he did, even when he was facing the worst calamity of his lifetime. We will look at the first of those tomorrow.

(Looking ahead: Tomorrow we will look at Habakkuk 3:16)

Here are the links to the whole Blogging with Habakkuk series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25.