Even So

Habakkuk begins as we do when God leads us in the way we don’t want to go.

“Are you not from everlasting, O LORD my God, my Holy One? We shall not die.” (Habakkuk 1:12)

It can’t be so.

When God sends the Chaldeans and contradicts our controlled perception of his ways, we begin with debate. We tell God that he is not allowed to do what doesn’t make sense to us. “Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen” (Matthew 16:22).

The Lord lets us take him aside and rebuke him. He mercifully waits and watches as we grieve the death of a god we could predict.

What is needed is a greater revelation. Peter saw the scars. Habakkuk talked with God and wrote the vision.

At the start of a confounding trial, we tell God: 

It can’t be so.

But once we’ve stuck around and seen the Lord whose ways are higher, our posture turns:

Even so. 

“Though the fig tree should not blossom, not fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.” (Habakkuk 3:17-18)

Lord, you can do what doesn’t make sense to me. 

You can proceed without my permission. 

You can send locusts to the fruit. 

You can blast the fields with fire and make me barren.

You can send the Chaldeans.

You can carry me where I don’t want to go.

And I will cry. I will weep. I will hunger. I will thirst. I will scream. I will throw on sackcloth when I meet the heart-sinking suffering I didn’t expect. 

But I will not throw away my praise.

Even so, you are God.

Even so, you are here.

Even so, I will rejoice.

Our vision blurs when God sends the opposite of what we were hoping. But the whirlwind of confusion is a revelation of the Lord. 

Here we come to a point of decision. Will our faith crumble when we learn that God does not follow us? Or will we get behind Jesus and go where he goes?

“God, the LORD, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on my high places.” (Habakkuk 3:19)

After the knee-buckling news, God gives us a new set of feet.

We make the decision to follow before we can see from the high places. But when we go, with legs still sore from the pain, God makes our feet like the deer’s. He makes us tread on the rocks we thought would crush us. He raises us to where he stands. And to our surprise, we find, waiting at the summit of sorrow, a friend—one who knows exactly how it feels to say through bloody tears: 

Even so.