Friday 4th August
Habakkuk 3:11-15
“Sun and moon stood still in the heavens
at the glint of your flying arrows,
at the lightning of your flashing spear.
12 In wrath you strode through the earth
and in anger you threshed the nations.
13 You came out to deliver your people,
to save your anointed one.
You crushed the leader of the land of wickedness,
you stripped him from head to foot.
14 With his own spear you pierced his head
when his warriors stormed out to scatter us,
gloating as though about to devour
the wretched who were in hiding.
15 You trampled the sea with your horses,
churning the great waters.” (NIVUK)
God’s presence is so awesome, His wrath burns so bright, that even the sun and moon are stilled (v11). The juxtaposition of what follows is strangely enough at the very heart of the gospel.
The purpose of God’s marching out in wrath is to have compassion or show mercy on His own people. Yet that wrath, as plainly seen in the whole of Habakkuk, is directed against His own people too. Those who would remove this Old Testament, fire and brimstone, God of wrath from their faith must reckon with the repeated scriptural insistence that wrath and salvation go together. They are two sides of the same coin.
Although this psalm is notoriously difficult to both translate and understand we can see clearly enough that God strode out in wrath to thresh the nations (v12) but, in the same act, saved His people (v13) by ‘crushing the head of the leader of wickedness’ (v13-14). Those with good memories will hear echoes of Genesis 3, where the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. But the serpent will also ‘bruise the heel’ of the chosen one (Genesis 3:15).
In Christ, on the cross, God Himself was bruised as the serpent’s head was crushed. It was a self-inflicted wound (cf v14), just as much as it was the deliberate act of God’s people and the nations. Wrath and salvation in the one act – an act both natural and supernatural. As the saying goes, “Salvation is free, but it was not cheap”. These strange verses in Habakkuk point us, in an admittedly oblique way, to the very heart of the gospel.
