It's hard to be joyful in the midst of prolonged suffering, but that's exactly what the

Bible says we ought to do. Today I'm truth for life with Alistair Begg, we'll find out why and how we can rejoice in troubled times as we conclude our study in Habakkuk.

And so in coming to chapter 3 we notice first of all that the prophet reacts, the prophet reacts.

Secondly the prophet reviews, the prophet reviews, and in verses 3 to 15 what you have is a wonderful poem. It is a classic example I'm told of Hebrew poetry.

It provides a magnificent and a frightening picture of God's acts in history. It displays his power not only over nature but also over all of the nations.

So for example look at verse 6, he stood and shook the earth. That is a metaphor you understand that. It's all anthropomorphisms is describing God who is spirit in an anthropomorphic way so that we might have some point of identification.

God stood as it were and he shook the earth. He looked and made the nations tremble so when you're tempted to get all bend out of shape about the United Nations or phenomenally excited about the United Nations.

When you see them all sitting in their circle there with their microphones and their little signs all resplendent in their glory.

If you're old enough to remember Christchurch and the shoe banging incident, let me tell you God just cast a quizzical eye down on Christchurch.

Never mind your Bay of Pigs, never mind your shoe and all the events of the nations as described here and as described on a daily basis in our news broadcast are under the control of the creator of the ends of the earth who doesn't grow weary and whose wisdom is unsurchable.

You see what a radically different view of the universe it one has as a Christian to be a Christian is a mind altering experience.

It is not simply the addition of some spiritual dimension to our already fairly good life. It is not the inclusion of a God that exists simply to fill in the inconsequential gaps that we cannot handle by virtue of our own reason.

No, it is to fall down before the display of his splendor and to look at our world even as Habakkuk does here and to realize that he has given to us this great panorama of God's intervention.

I'm going to leave you to tie the poetry to the history. All you need is a Bible and a knowledge of the English language and you're able to see the different places that you can find in judges four and five and in the book of Exodus and so on.

And some of them you won't be able to get. I'm not sure that I could. But what you have here is just this great mural as it were painted all across the walls of these scenes of God's activity in the unfold.

The unfolding story of history. Now when I read I'm always looking for the one paragraph that summarizes the chapter because I'm lazy and I'm always looking for the one sentence that summarizes the paragraph and I'm always looking for one good phrase that gives me the handle on what's happening here in this section.

And I think I have it in verse 13. If somebody said, what is this whole poem about? What is it? Why does he take from three to 15 to say what he's saying? What is he saying? Well, this is what he's saying.

In each of the scenes described in the poem, what is happening is that God was coming out to deliver his people to save his anointed ones. All right.

Now again, you see this is why it's important that we understand the way the Bible holds together that the story of the Bible is the story of God's promise to Abraham to make of him a nation that will be so vast that no one would be able to count it into that nation God plugs believing Gentiles along with believing Jews and makes a community of his own that will eventually be innumerable in the portals of heaven.

And in order to achieve that ultimate objective, God throughout all of history protects and preserves his anointed one, his anointed ones.

Those ones eventually embodied in Christ himself who is the very Israel of God.

So when you read the Old Testament and you look at the Exodus and you say, what was happening when Moses said, let my people go and they came out and the churning of the water swallowed up the chariots.

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