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HABAKKUK

THE IDEAL DEVOUT LIFE

     ‘The Lord God is my Strength, and He will make my feet like hinds’
     feet, and He will make me to walk upon mine high
     places.’—­HABBAKKUK iii. 19.

So ends one of the most magnificent pieces of imaginative poetry in Scripture or anywhere else.  The singer has been describing a great delivering manifestation of the Most High God, which, though he knew it was for the deliverance of God’s people, shed awe and terror over his soul.  Then he gathers himself together to vow that in this God, thus manifested as the God of his salvation, he ‘will rejoice,’ whatever penury or privation may attach to his outward life.  Lastly, he rises, in these final words, to the apprehension of what this God, thus rejoiced in, will become to those who so put their trust and their gladness upon Himself.

The expressions are of a highly metaphorical and imaginative character, but they admit of being brought down to very plain facts, and they tell us the results in heart and mind of true faith and communion with God.

It is to be noticed that a parallel saying, almost verbatim the same as that of my text, occurs in the 18th psalm, and that there, too, it is the last and joyous result of a tremendous manifestation of the delivering energy of God.

Without any attempt to do more than bring out the deep meaning of the words, I note that the three clauses of our text present three aspects of what our lives and ourselves may steadfastly be if we, too, will rejoice in the God of our salvation.

I. First, such communion with God brings God to a man for his strength.

The 18th psalm, which is closely parallel, as I have remarked, with this one, gives a somewhat different and inferior version of that thought when it says, ‘It is the Lord that girdeth me with strength.’  But Habakkuk, though perhaps he could not have put into dogmatic shape all that he meant, had come farther than that with this:  ’The Lord is my strength.’  He not only gives, as one might put a coin into the hand of a beggar, while standing separate from him all the while, but ’He is my strength.’

And what does that mean?  It is an anticipation of that most wonderful and highest of all the New Testament truths which the Apostle declared when he said:  ’I can do all things in Christ which strengtheneth me within.’  It is the anticipation in experience—­which always comes before dogmatic formulas that reduce experiences into articulate utterances, of what the Apostle recorded when he said that he had heard the voice that declared, ’My grace is sufficient for thee, and My strength is made perfect in weakness.’