Yet I Will Rejoice in the LORD
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Scripture: Habakkuk 3
Before this session, read Habakkuk 3: the prophet’s prayer, set to music; his trembling vision of God marching out in glory to save His people and to strike down the leader of the wicked; and the great closing confession of a joy that needs no harvest and no flock to sustain it: I will rejoice because of the LORD. Notice how the man who flung his hard questions at heaven in the first two chapters now answers God’s word with worship. Keep your Bible open, and ask: how can a man who knows ruin is coming rejoice in God anyway, and where could such a joy, independent of every circumstance, possibly come from?
When the fig tree does not bud, and there are no grapes on the vines … I will rejoice because of the LORD; I will be happy because of the God who delivers me!
(Habakkuk 3:17–18)
A Prayer Set to Music
The third chapter of Habakkuk is different in kind from the two that come before it, and the difference is the whole point. Chapters one and two were a dialogue: the prophet’s hard questions and the LORD’s answers, ending in the great word that the righteous will live by faith. Chapter three is what a man does once he has been answered: he prays, and he sings. The chapter is headed This is a prayer of Habakkuk the prophet (the Hebrew adds a musical term, shigionoth), it is punctuated with the musical rest Selah, and it ends with a note to the worship leader: This prayer is for the song leader. It is to be accompanied by stringed instruments. In other words, this is not private musing; it is a psalm, written to be sung in the congregation. The man who began the book flinging how long? at heaven ends it composing a hymn for the choir.
We should not pass over what that means for us. Habakkuk 1 and 2 gave us the doctrine: the righteous will live by faith; Habakkuk 3 gives us the life that doctrine produces. Here is faith actually living: taking the answer it has been given and turning it into worship, even as the dreaded Babylonian army gathers on the horizon. This is the order the Christian life always follows. First the word comes, often through our questions and our wrestling; then, having heard it, faith answers back, not with further argument, but with prayer and song. The doctrine of justification by faith is not meant to sit in the head as a settled proposition; it is meant to come out of the mouth as praise. Habakkuk shows us the whole movement in three short chapters: from the trembling question to the singing heart.
There is something almost unbearably moving about when this psalm was written. Habakkuk does not sing it after the deliverance, with the enemy already defeated and the danger past; he sings it before the disaster, with the Babylonian army still on its way and the ruin he describes still entirely in the future. He has been told the invasion is coming, that the fields will be stripped and the nation carried off, and it is precisely then, in the gathering dark, before a single Chaldean soldier has crossed the border, that he composes a hymn of joy. This is not the easy gratitude of a man whose troubles are behind him; it is the costly faith of a man whose troubles are all ahead of him, who chooses to rejoice in God not because the storm has passed but in full view of its approach. That is the kind of faith the rest of the chapter will unfold, and it is the kind we most need to learn.
Remember to Show Us Mercy
The prayer opens with holy fear. LORD, I have heard the report of what you did; I am awed, LORD, by what you accomplished (3:2). The Hebrew word the NET renders I am awed is the ordinary word for fear. Habakkuk has heard of the LORD’s mighty deeds of old, and he has heard the LORD’s answer (that the Chaldeans are coming, that the rod is real, that the day of trouble will surely arrive), and the hearing has left him shaking. Faith does not pretend the coming storm is nothing. But out of that fear the prophet frames a prayer that is one of the most precious in all the Old Testament: In our time repeat those deeds; in our time reveal them again. But when you cause turmoil, remember to show us mercy! He does not ask God to cancel the judgment; he has been told it is just and it is coming. He asks instead that God would keep His saving work alive in the very midst of the years of trouble, and (the heart of the plea) that even as the turmoil of judgment falls, God would remember … mercy.
There is a second petition tucked into the prayer that the Church has prayed in every dark age since. The Hebrew says, literally, in the midst of the years, bring it to life; the NET renders it, In our time repeat those deeds; in our time reveal them again (3:2). Habakkuk knows that years of trouble are coming, and he asks that in the very midst of them God would keep His saving work alive, would not let the lamp of His grace go out among His people while the night lasts. It is a prayer for revival in the truest sense: not for excitement or novelty, but for God to do again, in a barren and frightening time, the reviving work He has done before. The history of the Church is in large part the history of this prayer being answered: of God preserving a remnant through every exile, of His work flaring up again when it seemed all but extinguished, of the gospel recovered in a Reformation when it had been nearly buried. In our time repeat those deeds is a prayer for our own years too, and the God who answered it for Habakkuk has not grown deaf.
When you cause turmoil, remember to show us mercy. The Hebrew word for turmoil (rogez) is the agitation of wrath, which is why the Church has long prayed this line as in wrath remember mercy. There is the prayer of every believer who knows he deserves the judgment and yet casts himself on the God who delights in mercy. And there is, hidden in it, the deepest answer the gospel gives, for the place where wrath and mercy were finally remembered together was a hill outside Jerusalem. At the cross the wrath of God against sin fell in full, not one ounce of it withheld; and yet in that very falling, mercy was remembered, for the wrath fell on the Substitute and the mercy reached the sinner. In wrath remember mercy is a prayer the Father answered by laying our judgment on His Son, so that the day of wrath became, for all who believe, the day of our mercy. Habakkuk prayed it not knowing all that it would mean; we pray it standing on the far side of the cross, where we have seen exactly how God remembers mercy in the midst of wrath.
God Comes from Teman
And now the prophet’s prayer opens out into a vision: a great theophany, a poem of God coming in glory, built from the memory of all His mighty acts of salvation in the past. God comes from Teman, the sovereign one from Mount Paran. Selah. His splendor covers the skies, his glory fills the earth. He is as bright as lightning; a two-pronged lightning bolt flashes from his hand. This is the outward display of his power (3:3–4). The NET’s sovereign one renders the Hebrew Holy One. Teman and Paran lie to the south, toward Edom and Sinai, and the language deliberately recalls the LORD coming down on the mountain in fire when He redeemed Israel out of Egypt. Habakkuk is reaching back to what God has done before, to steady himself for what God will do again. The God who is coming in judgment is the same God who came in salvation; the memory of past deliverance is the fuel of present faith.
Notice the method of the prophet’s faith here, for it is one we should learn. Facing an unknown and frightening future, Habakkuk steadies himself by remembering the known and glorious past. He reaches back to Sinai and the Exodus, to the God who came down in fire and led His people through the sea, and he lets the memory of what God has done become the ground of his confidence in what God will do. This is the discipline of holy memory, and the Scriptures command it constantly: I will remember the works of the LORD. Yes, I will remember the amazing things you did long ago! sings the psalmist in his own dark night (Psalm 77:11). Faith is not blind optimism about the future; it is reasoned confidence built on the record of the past. And the Lord Jesus gave His Church the Supper, in which He gives us His true body and blood and in which we proclaim His death until He comes; so that, like Habakkuk, we steady ourselves for every uncertain tomorrow by receiving and remembering the certain thing God has already done for us at the cross.
The vision swells into a portrait of the LORD as the Divine Warrior, before whom all creation convulses. Plague goes before him; pestilence marches right behind him. He takes his battle position and shakes the earth; with a mere look he frightens the nations. The ancient mountains disintegrate; the primeval hills are flattened (3:5–6). The mountains that have stood since creation crumble before the One who made them. This is fearful language, and it is meant to be; but to the believer it is also deeply comforting, for this overwhelming power is marching out, as the next verses will show, to deliver His people. The strength that flattens the ancient hills is the strength enlisted on our side. There is nothing in heaven or earth that can stand against the God who has set Himself to save us.
The picture of God as a warrior marching out to battle runs all through the Scriptures, and it is meant to comfort, not merely to frighten. The LORD is a warrior, the LORD is his name, Israel sang at the Red Sea (Exodus 15:3); the LORD of hosts, the LORD who commands armies, is one of His most frequent titles. The same overwhelming might that makes the mountains crumble is the might that fights for His people and against their enemies. And the New Testament gathers up this Divine Warrior and gives Him a face: at the end of the Revelation, John sees heaven opened and a rider on a white horse, called Faithful and True, whose name is the Word of God and who bears the title King of kings. Yet here is the great paradox the gospel adds: that this Warrior won His decisive victory not by slaying His enemies but by being slain, conquering the powers of darkness through His own death. Read canonically, the Divine Warrior of Habakkuk 3 directs us to the Lamb who was slain, whose mightiest act of war was a cross.
You March Out to Deliver Your People
For the whole terrifying march has a purpose, and the prophet names it at the center of the vision. You furiously stomp on the earth, you angrily trample down the nations. You march out to deliver your people, to deliver your special servant. You strike the leader of the wicked nation, laying him open from the lower body to the neck. Selah (3:12–13). There is the heart of it. The Divine Warrior does not go out merely to display His power, but to deliver His people, and to deliver the one the NET calls your special servant. The Hebrew is meshichekha: Your anointed one, Your Messiah. Older English versions read, for salvation with your anointed; the grammar more likely makes the anointed one the one God rescues. Either way, the deliverance of God’s people is bound up with God’s Anointed.
That phrase, your anointed one, deserves to be weighed, for it is one of the great titles of the One the whole Old Testament awaits. The Hebrew mashiach gives us our word Messiah; rendered into Greek it becomes christos, the Christ. To be anointed was to be set apart by God and equipped by His Spirit for an office: prophets were anointed, priests were anointed, and above all kings were anointed, the oil poured over the head as the sign that this one was God’s chosen. The whole expectation of Israel narrowed, across the centuries, onto a coming Anointed One who would be prophet, priest, and king together, in whom all the anointed offices would be gathered up. In Habakkuk’s day the anointed one was the king of David’s line, and the people over whom he reigned. But read canonically, this fittingly directs us to that coming One. And we know His name: the Lord Jesus, the Christ, the Anointed of God, in whom the long line of anointed servants reaches its fulfillment. The Father did not abandon His Anointed to death but raised Him up, and in His deliverance His whole people are delivered once and for all.
And mark what the Warrior does: You strike the leader of the wicked nation. The Hebrew word the NET renders leader is ro’sh, head; the older versions read, you crushed the head of the house of the wicked. He strikes the head of the enemy. The words may well echo the first promise in Eden, where God told the serpent, her offspring will attack your head, and you will attack her offspring’s heel (Genesis 3:15). From that day the whole Old Testament had been waiting to see whose heel would be struck and whose head would receive the blow. Habakkuk’s vision of the LORD striking the head of the wicked can serve as a picture of that promised victory. And we know now where that ancient promise came true. The Lord Jesus, the true Anointed One, went forth for the salvation of His people; and on the cross, in the very moment His own heel was struck, He crushed the head of the serpent, disarming the powers of darkness and breaking the dominion of the one who holds the power of death (Hebrews 2:14). The Divine Warrior of Habakkuk 3 has, for us, a name and a face: the LORD Himself come in the flesh, the Son whom the Father sent and did not leave in the grave; and the head of the wicked is broken forever.
It is worth tracing the thread that ties this verse to the very beginning and the very end of the Bible. In the garden, after the fall, God spoke the first promise of the gospel (what the old theologians called the protoevangelium, the first good news), telling the serpent that the woman’s offspring would strike his head, even as the serpent struck the offspring’s heel. That single promise set the whole of redemptive history in motion, and every page after it leans forward to ask when, and how, and by whom the serpent’s head would be crushed. Habakkuk’s vision of the LORD striking the head of the wicked nation may echo it. And it came true at Calvary, where, as the woman’s Offspring was struck down, He crushed the serpent’s head: disarming the rulers and authorities, he has made a public disgrace of them, triumphing over them by the cross (Colossians 2:15). Paul could therefore promise the Romans that The God of peace will quickly crush Satan under your feet (Romans 16:20): the victory already won by the Head now being worked out in His members. The head of the wicked is broken, and the promise of Eden is kept.
As If My Bones Were Decaying
How does the prophet respond to such a vision? Not with serene detachment, but with a fear that shakes him to the marrow. I listened and my stomach churned; the sound made my lips quiver. My frame went limp, as if my bones were decaying, and I shook as I tried to walk (3:16). The glory of God coming in power is not a comfortable thing to behold, and Habakkuk does not pretend it is. His body quakes; his lips shake; he feels as though his very bones are rotting. This is honest, and it matters, for the joy he is about to confess is not the joy of a man who feels no fear. He has just told us, in plain words, that he is terrified.
We should let the prophet’s honesty teach us something about the nature of faith, against a false spirituality that would shame us for ever feeling afraid. Habakkuk is a man of great faith, and he trembles to his bones; the two are not in contradiction. The Scriptures are full of faithful men who felt the full weight of dread: David crying out of the depths, Jeremiah weeping, Paul confessing, we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of living (2 Corinthians 1:8). And the Lord Jesus Himself, in the garden, said, My soul is deeply grieved, even to the point of death (Matthew 26:38), and in His anguish His sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. If perfect faith meant the absence of all fear, then our Lord in Gethsemane would have had imperfect faith, which is unthinkable. Faith is not the suppression of fear or the denial of grief; it is trust that holds on through them, that brings the trembling self to God rather than away from Him. The believer who is afraid is not therefore faithless. Habakkuk shows us that a man may quake to the very marrow and rest in the day of trouble at the same time.
And yet, in the same breath, he looks ahead to the day of distress with a strange steadiness. The NET renders it, I long for the day of distress to come upon the people who attack us (3:16); the Hebrew verb means to rest or wait quietly, and the older versions read, that I might rest in the day of trouble. The trembling itself becomes the doorway to rest. Having seen the LORD come in such power, Habakkuk can now wait quietly for the day when that power will fall upon the invader; he can rest, because he has seen who fights for him. Here is the realism of true faith, and it is profoundly Lutheran: faith does not deny the fear or suppress it with gritted teeth; it feels the fear fully and then rests anyway, because its rest is grounded not in the absence of danger but in the presence of God. The same man can tremble to his bones and rest in the day of trouble; indeed, it is often only through the trembling that he comes to the rest.
Yet I Will Rejoice
And so we come to the summit of the book, and to one of the highest peaks of faith in all the Scriptures. Habakkuk lists, item by item, the total collapse of everything that made for life and security in his world. When the fig tree does not bud, and there are no grapes on the vines; when the olive trees do not produce, and the fields yield no crops; when the sheep disappear from the pen, and there are no cattle in the stalls (3:17). Strip it down: no figs, no grapes, no olives, no grain, no sheep, no cattle. Every source of food, every measure of wealth, every earthly security gone: the very things the Babylonian invasion would in fact destroy. This is not a hypothetical; the prophet is naming the ruin he knows is coming.
It helps to mark the difference between happiness and joy, for the world confuses them and the confusion is deadly. Happiness, as we commonly use the word, depends on happenings: on circumstances falling out well, on the figs blossoming and the flock multiplying. When the happenings turn against us, that kind of happiness drains away, for it had no deeper root than the things that have now failed. Joy, in the biblical sense, is something else entirely. It is not a product of circumstances but a fruit of the Spirit, grown in the soul by God Himself and rooted in God Himself; and because its root is in the unchanging God and not in the shifting things, it can flourish in soil where happiness would wither and die. This is why the apostle can speak of being sorrowful, but always rejoicing (2 Corinthians 6:10): a combination impossible if joy and happiness were the same thing, but perfectly possible when joy rests in the Lord while sorrow weeps over the circumstances. Habakkuk has no happiness in the world’s sense; the fields are failing. And yet he has joy (the NET’s I will be happy because of the God who delivers me translates a Hebrew word for exultant gladness), because his joy was never in the fields.
And then the word on which the whole book turns: Yet. The Hebrew opens verse 18 with But as for me, and the older versions render it, yet I will rejoice; the NET lets the same contrast stand in the shape of the sentence: When the fig tree does not bud … I will rejoice because of the LORD; I will be happy because of the God who delivers me! (3:17–18). Not I will grit my teeth and endure; not I will hope the loss is not so bad as I fear; but I will rejoice: I will exult, I will be glad, because of the LORD. Here is the secret of a joy that no circumstance can touch: it does not rest on the gifts but on the Giver. The believer who finds his joy in the figs and the flocks will lose his joy when the figs and the flocks are gone; but the believer whose joy is in the LORD Himself, in the God who delivers me (literally, the God of my salvation), has a joy that the failure of every harvest cannot reach, because its ground is the one thing that can never fail. This is the theology of the cross brought home to the heart: not a faith that finds God in the visible blessings and would lose Him with them, but a faith that has learned to rejoice in God alone, naked of every prop, when all the visible blessings are stripped away.
What Habakkuk has discovered is the great secret of the saints: that the soul which has God has everything, even when it has nothing else. The psalmist found it in his own dark hour: Whom do I have in heaven but you? I desire no one but you on earth. My flesh and my heart may grow weak, but God always protects my heart and gives me stability (Psalm 73:25–26). Where the NET says gives me stability, the Hebrew says God is my portion forever. When everything that could be desired on earth is stripped away, the believer still has the one thing better than all of them together: God Himself as his portion. The weeping prophet of Lamentations said the same in the ruins of Jerusalem: “My portion is the LORD,” I have said to myself, so I will put my hope in him (Lamentations 3:24). This is the bedrock beneath Habakkuk’s yet. He can lose the figs and the flock and the field and still rejoice, because none of those was ever his true wealth; his portion was the LORD, and the LORD remains when all else is gone. The man whose treasure is God can be impoverished of everything and lose nothing that matters.
The apostle Paul lived in this very verse. Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I say, rejoice! he wrote, while in chains (Philippians 4:4). I have learned to be content in any circumstance (Philippians 4:11). He had learned, as Habakkuk had learned, that the joy of faith is not a barometer of circumstances but an anchor independent of them, fixed in the unchanging God. And the Lord Jesus Himself is the great pattern: For the joy set out for him he endured the cross, disregarding its shame (Hebrews 12:2). The deepest joy the world has ever seen was the joy that carried our Lord through the worst suffering the world has ever inflicted: a joy set not in His circumstances, which were agony, but in the salvation He was winning and the Father He was trusting. The yet of Habakkuk 3:18 is the yet of every martyr who sang in the flames, of every believer who has stood at a graveside and still blessed the LORD. It is the lived shape of Habakkuk’s own word, that the righteous will live by faith.
And there is a forward lean to this joy that we must not miss. The joy set before the Lord Jesus that carried Him through the cross was the joy of what lay beyond it: the redeemed people He would win, the glory He would enter, the Father’s welcome He would hear. So the joy of faith is not only a present resting in God but a future-tilted hope, a confidence that our present sufferings cannot even be compared to the glory that will be revealed to us (Romans 8:18). Habakkuk rejoices in the God who delivers him, knowing that the day of trouble is not the last word, that beyond the failing fields and the marching armies lies the salvation God has promised and will surely bring. This is the joy that has sustained the people of God in every catacomb and every prison cell and every deathbed: not a denial of the darkness, but a hope that sees through it to the dawn. The yet of faith looks present ruin in the face and rejoices, because it is already looking past the ruin to the God who will have the last word.
The Agility of a Deer
The book that began with a trembling complaint ends with a man bounding like a deer on the heights. The sovereign LORD is my source of strength. He gives me the agility of a deer; he enables me to negotiate the rugged terrain (3:19). The Hebrew is vivid: He makes my feet like those of a deer, and makes me walk upon my high places. The deer is surefooted on the steep and dangerous places where other creatures stumble and fall; it runs the cliff faces with ease. Habakkuk says the LORD will make his feet like that: not that the high and dangerous places will be removed, but that he will be given the strength and the surefootedness to walk them without falling. And notice where the strength comes from: the sovereign LORD is my source of strength; not Habakkuk’s own resolve, not a stiff upper lip, but the strength of God supplied to a man who has nothing left of his own.
And we should not miss where the strength comes from, for it is the same lesson the whole book has been teaching. The sovereign LORD is my source of strength: not Habakkuk’s own grit, not a reserve of natural courage he summons from within, but a strength given to him from outside, supplied by God to a man who has been reduced to having none of his own. This is the gospel’s deep pattern, that God’s power is made perfect in our weakness, and that those who wait for the LORD exchange their exhausted strength for His. The apostle learned it in his own trials, and could write, out of his weakness, I am able to do all things through the one who strengthens me (Philippians 4:13), and that One is Christ; and he wrote it, tellingly, in the very letter that tells us to rejoice in the Lord always. The surefooted deer on the heights is not a naturally strong climber; it is a trembling man given the strength of God for the dangerous places. We do not walk the high places by becoming strong; we walk them by being carried by the strength of Another.
Look at the distance the prophet has traveled. He began the book crying how long?, and only three verses from its end his bones seemed to decay and he shook with fear; yet he ends it on the high places, surefooted and singing. Nothing in his circumstances has changed (the Babylonians are still coming, the fields will still fail), but everything in his soul has changed, because he has been answered, and the answer was the LORD Himself. This is what it looks like when the righteous live by faith: not a life with the dangers removed, but a life carried over the dangers by the strength of God, rejoicing in the God of salvation while the storm gathers. The whole book of Habakkuk is the journey from how long? to the feet of a deer on the heights, from the question flung up in the dark to the deer running surefooted on the rugged terrain; and the bridge between them is one line: the righteous will live by faith.
Gathering the Threads
Habakkuk 3 is the life that grows from the doctrine of Habakkuk 2. Having wrestled his hard questions to the ground and been answered that the righteous will live by faith, the prophet now does the thing that faith does: he prays and he sings. He hears the coming judgment and trembles, and out of his fear he prays the deepest of prayers, when you cause turmoil, remember to show us mercy (the Church’s old in wrath remember mercy), a prayer the Father would one day answer in full at a cross, where the wrath fell on the Substitute and the mercy reached the sinner. He sees the LORD march out as the Divine Warrior, in glory that makes the ancient mountains crumble, and he sees the purpose of the march: deliverance for God’s people and for God’s Anointed, the striking of the enemy’s head, a picture of the crushing of the serpent’s head promised in Eden and accomplished by the Lord Jesus on the tree. The God who came down at Sinai in fire came down again in flesh; and the Warrior before whom the primeval hills are flattened let Himself be nailed to a beam; and there, in His apparent defeat, the head of the wicked was crushed forever.
And then, knowing the ruin that is coming, the prophet climbs to the summit of faith and plants there the word that has steadied the people of God ever since: yet. Though the fig tree does not bud and the sheep disappear from the pen and every earthly security fails, I will rejoice because of the LORD; I will be happy because of the God who delivers me! It is a joy that rests not in the gifts but in the Giver, and so it cannot be touched by the failure of the gifts; it is the joy of Paul in his chains and of the Lord Jesus enduring His cross, the joy set on the unchanging God when all that can be seen is being stripped away. The man whose bones seemed to decay in 3:16 ends, three verses later, with the feet of a deer on the high places, carried over every danger by the strength of God. From how long? to I will rejoice: that is the whole journey of faith, and Habakkuk has walked it before us, and shown us that the righteous do indeed live, and sing, by faith.
For Discussion
These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.
Chapters 1–2 were the prophet’s questions and God’s answers; chapter 3 is a prayer set to music. How is Habakkuk 3 the life that grows from the doctrine of Habakkuk 2? Why is the doctrine of justification meant to come out of the mouth as praise, not only sit in the head as a proposition?
Habakkuk prays, when you cause turmoil, remember to show us mercy (3:2), long prayed in the Church as in wrath remember mercy, not asking that the judgment be canceled. How is this the prayer of faith under the cross? Where were wrath and mercy finally remembered together, and how does the cross answer this prayer?
The Divine Warrior marches out to deliver your people, to deliver your special servant (in Hebrew, your anointed one), and strike[s] the leader (in Hebrew, the head) of the wicked nation (3:13). How might this echo Genesis 3:15 and point forward to the cross? What does it mean that the deliverance of God’s people is bound up with God’s Anointed?
Habakkuk trembles to his bones (3:16) and yet rests, and rejoices. How is the realism of faith (feeling the fear fully and resting anyway) different from either denial or gritted-teeth stoicism? Why is faith’s rest grounded in God’s presence rather than the absence of danger?
I will rejoice because of the LORD (3:17–18), though every earthly security fails. What is the difference between a joy that rests in the gifts and a joy that rests in the Giver? Why can only the second kind survive the loss of everything?
The book travels from how long? (1:2) to feet like a deer’s on the rugged heights (3:19), with nothing in the circumstances changed. What has changed, and how? How does The sovereign LORD is my source of strength differ from a stiff upper lip or our own resolve?
Looking Ahead
Habakkuk has shown us the believer rejoicing in God; in the next session, “He Will Rejoice Over You with Singing,” we will hear something even more astonishing: God rejoicing over the believer. We turn to Zephaniah, a prophet who sounds the day of the LORD as a great and terrible day of darkness and wrath, the day the old hymn calls the dies irae, the day of wrath. Through most of his three chapters the trumpet is one of judgment; the whole earth is to be consumed, and the proud brought low. And yet Zephaniah ends, as so many of the Twelve end, with the sun breaking through: the gathering of a humble and trusting remnant, and a promise so tender it can scarcely be believed: The LORD your God is in your midst; he is a warrior who can deliver. He takes great delight in you; he renews you by his love; he shouts for joy over you (3:17). The Hebrew speaks of a ringing cry of joy, a song. Habakkuk sang to the LORD in the day of trouble; Zephaniah tells us the LORD sings over His people. We will end the session listening to the song of God.
Before the next session, read the short book of Zephaniah: the sounding of the day of the LORD as a day of wrath upon the whole earth, the call to seek the LORD and to be hidden in the day of His anger, the gathering of the meek remnant, and the breathtaking promise that God Himself will rejoice over His people with shouts of joy (3:17). Ask how the same day can be terror to the proud and salvation to the humble, and what it means that the God we are taught to love first sings for joy over us.
Closing Prayer
O LORD, we have heard the report of what You have done, and we stand in awe and in fear. We see the storms gathering, the supports of our lives proving fragile, the day of trouble drawing near; and we confess that we have too often staked our joy on the figs and the flocks, on the gifts that fail, rather than on You who never fail. When You cause turmoil, remember to show us mercy; in our time repeat Your saving deeds; and teach us a deeper joy than our circumstances can give or take away.
We bless You that You marched out to deliver Your people and Your Anointed, our Lord Jesus, who on the cross struck the head of the ancient enemy and broke his power forever, even as His own heel was struck. Grant us the yet of faith: that though every visible blessing be stripped away, we may still rejoice in You, the God of our salvation, finding our joy not in Your gifts but in Yourself. Be our strength when we have none of our own; give our feet the sureness of a deer upon the high and dangerous places; and carry us, singing, through the day of trouble to the day of glory; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.