Yet I will rejoice

Habakkuk has spent his whole short book arguing with God, demanding to know how long the violence will go unanswered and why the wicked seem to win. He has not been given the tidy answer he wanted. And yet the book ends not in resignation but in one of the most astonishing sentences in Scripture, a sentence that refuses to pretend. He lists the ruin without flinching. Though the fig tree does not blossom, and there is no fruit on the vines; though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food; though the flock is cut off and there is no herd in the stalls. That is total collapse, the whole economy of a life gone, every visible reason for joy stripped away. And then the sentence turns on a single word, the smallest and strongest in the verse. Yet. Yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will be joyful in the God of my salvation. Not joy because the harvest came. Joy in God Himself when there is no harvest at all. He ends by calling the LORD his strength, who makes his feet like a deer's and sets him on the high places, sure-footed at last on the very heights that terrified him.

Almost all of our joy is borrowed against outcomes. We are glad when the figs come, when the diagnosis is good, when the situation finally turns; and there is nothing wrong with that joy, except that the wilderness specializes in taking away every one of its sources. When the fig tree does not blossom and the fields yield nothing, a joy built entirely on harvests has nothing left to stand on, and it collapses with the crops. Habakkuk has found something underneath that. He has found a joy whose ground is God Himself, and so it survives precisely when nothing has improved, when there is no good news to point to at all. It is worth being honest that this joy begins as a choice more than a feeling, a deliberate turning of the will toward God as the reason for gladness when every other reason has failed. The feeling may come later, or come and go. But the joy, once it has been relocated onto God and off the harvest, can no longer be taken by any failed harvest. There is no loss left that can reach it.