Song of the Warrior

It was a hard day. Aaron and his neighbors wailed aloud in their tents. The pharaoh had died, who'd been cause to so much of their suffering, only to be succeeded by another who made things worse. No wonder “the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help,” and “their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God” (Exodus 2:23). That night, Aaron and Miriam and the others went to bed in tears. It looked as if nothing had happened. And perhaps it would be years before it would. But little did they know that they were heard (Exodus 2:24). Little did they know that they'd been seen (Exodus 2:25). How little did they realize that, from the moment they'd lifted up their sorrows in prayer, God had been on the move.

We know, I should hope, what happens next. However long it takes, Aaron's brother Moses, a freedom fighter living in exile in the land of Midian, is leading his flock through the wilderness of Paran and comes to the foot of Mount Sinai, where a voice speaks to him from a burning bush (Exodus 3:1-6). The LORD tells him, “I have come down to deliver them” (Exodus 3:7). God summons Aaron to meet Moses in the wilderness, together they return to inspire hope, and God unleashes ten plagues or afflictions on the Egyptian oppressors, exposing all the fraudulence of Egypt's idols. At last we find Israel pinned between the Sea of Reeds and the pursuing Egyptian army, and there Moses assures them: “The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to be silent” (Exodus 14:14). Sure enough, when the Egyptians realize they've driven their chariots into a trap between the waters, they panic and cry out, “The LORD fights for [Israel] against the Egyptians” (Exodus 14:25). Watching from the far side of safety, Moses sings that “the LORD is a man of war” (Exodus 15:3), and that when the nations in the land ahead hear about this, they too will freeze in fear and trembling (Exodus 15:14-16).

God marches ahead of Israel for the next month and a half, until they reach Mount Sinai, where he comes down with “thunders and lightnings” and “smoke” and “fire,” so that “the whole mountain trembled greatly,” and God answered Moses in a voice of fearsome thunder (Exodus 19:16-19). Decades later, when Moses stood with a new generation and passed his authority over to his disciple Joshua, Moses reflected on the LORD and this march of war to answer his people's plight. Moses considered how “the LORD came from Sinai and dawned from Seir upon us; he shone forth from Mount Paran; he came forth from the ten thousands of holy ones, with flaming fire at his right hand” (Deuteronomy 33:2). And Moses assured Joshua and the Israelites that, as they marched into the promised land, “the LORD your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes and in the wilderness” (Deuteronomy 1:30-31).

Entering the land, they found that Moses' words were true, that the LORD did wage war for them, crumbling the walls of Jericho (Joshua 6:20), throwing down hailstones (Joshua 10:11), freezing sun and moon in the sky, “for the LORD fought for Israel” (Joshua 10:12-14). But, failing temptation, Israel chose to share the land with the Canaanites, and so in a later generation, the tribes came to be as oppressed by the Canaanites of Hazor as they had been in Egypt (Judges 4:2). “Then the people of Israel cried out to the LORD for help” (Judges 4:3), from their twenty-year oppression. A man named Barak (whose name means 'lightning') was called upon to raise an army, and with the prophetess and judge Deborah at his side for courage, the enemy was defeated. Deborah sang of the victory, connecting it to God's ancient march of war: “LORD, when you went out from Seir, when you marched from the region of Edom, the earth trembled and the heavens dropped, yes, the clouds dropped water; the mountains quaked before the LORD, even Sinai before the LORD, the God of Israel” (Judges 5:4-5).

Generations passed. The age of the judges ended; the age of the kings began. David found himself persecuted. And, looking back afterwards on how God had saved him from his own danger just like God saved Israel from Egypt, David rehearsed his story in those same terms: “In my distress I called upon the LORD. To my God I called! From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry came to his ears. Then the earth reeled and rocked; the foundations of the heavens trembled and quaked, because he was angry. Smoke went up from his nostrils, and devouring fire from his mouth. … The LORD thundered from heaven, and the Most High uttered his voice. And he sent out arrows and scattered them; lightning, and routed them. Then the channels of the sea were seen; the foundations of the world were laid bare at the rebuke of the LORD, at the blast of the breath of his nostrils. He sent from on high, he took me; he drew me out of many waters. He rescued me from my strong enemy, from those who hated me, for they were too mighty for me” (2 Samuel 22:7-9, 14-18).

And then we come to our friend, the prophet Habakkuk. And we remember that for years he's been crying out to God, wondering why he isn't seeing an answer. He's begging for help about what's wrong in Judah, all the violence, and he hasn't found salvation (Habakkuk 1:2). He's being forced to look at iniquity and trouble, and in all of this, God doesn't seem to be angry but only looks on in idleness, unmoving and unmoved (Habakkuk 1:3). And even when Habakkuk does hear about God acting to raise up Babylon (Habakkuk 1:6), Habakkuk protests that God's action is unhelpful and mysterious (Habakkuk 1:12—2:1). But Habakkuk knows he's living in the times Moses warned about, when “the LORD will make the pestilence stick to you until he has consumed you off the land” (Deuteronomy 28:21), when “I will heap disasters upon them, I will spend my arrows on them, they shall be... devoured by burning plague” (Deuteronomy 32:23-24).

Yet when he comes to the end of it all, Habakkuk realizes – and he puts it into a hymn, like Moses and Deborah and David before him – that from the very moment he cried out, God was on the march in burning wrath and saving love. And now that we've heard from Moses and Deborah and David, when we listen to Habakkuk sing, it makes a lot more sense what he's doing. He's again looking back at God's march as a warrior to judge Egypt and save Israel, to judge Canaan and save Israel, to judge the Philistines and Saul and to save David and Israel, and he's rehearsing that for his own life, he's appealing to that in the present, he's using that to understand what's been happening and what's going to go down.

So Habakkuk sings that “God came from Teman, and the Holy One from Mount Paran” (Habakkuk 3:3), that “his brightness was like the light” (Habakkuk 3:4). When Israel cried out in Egypt, then (just as Moses said) God was like a sunrise on the eastern mountains of Edom, dawning hazily at first but brightly once he rose. His dawning in the heavens lights up the darkness with splendor, majesty, radiance, and all the earth gives praise (Habakkuk 3:3). And as he marches, hiding his strength in the light, on his left and right he's attended by twin rays of light from his hands, and in front of him goes pestilence as a herald, and at his feet marches plague as a rear guard (Habakkuk 3:4-5). This entourage escorted God as he marched to Egypt to unleash those plagues, but they're also at play in Habakkuk's day as the curses of Moses work themselves out in the assault of Babylon.

When God stands up as a warrior, he surveys the landscape, and it shudders in fright (Habakkuk 3:6). “His eyes see, his eyelids test the children of men” (Psalm 11:4). The nations – be they Egypt, Canaan, or otherwise – shake and are startled before God's penetrating gaze. The mountains, like Mount Sinai, tremble and scatter and sink, and even the orbits of the lights in the heavens bow (Habakkuk 3:6). The point here is that even the things we count on as the most reliable, predictable, and stable – whether the trusty orbits of stars above or the solid firmness from age to age of mountains and hills here below – are no obstacles when God is on the march. They offer no obstacles to hide behind. “When Israel went out from Egypt,” a psalmist says, “the sea looked and fled, Jordan turned back, the mountains skipped like rams, the hills like lambs,” trembling “at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob” (Psalm 114:1, 3-4, 7). And so, where once Habakkuk cried out that God was making him look at iniquity and trouble in Judah, now he says he sees trembling and affliction come to the desert nomads of Midian as God approaches (Habakkuk 3:7).

If in the first half of the hymn the LORD comes across almost like a sun god, in the second half he marches like a storm god. Other prophets and psalmists celebrated how, in the exodus, God “dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep” (Isaiah 51:10), how he “divided the sea by [his] might” (Psalm 74:13), how he dominated and ruled its raging (Psalm 89:9). But his quarrel isn't with the rivers, and it isn't with the sea. Habakkuk depicts God like a warrior riding in a great chariot. And a chariot-mounted warrior in those days usually had a few main weapons. One was a bow-and-arrow, for shooting from a distance. The others were a spear and a mace, for stabbing or clubbing what came near to his path. And Habakkuk imagines God riding in a chariot (Habakkuk 3:8), unsheathing his bow (Habakkuk 3:9), wielding a lightning spear (Habakkuk 3:11), and using his mace or staff (Habakkuk 3:13). As he comes, rain pours down, the mountains tremble and writhe, and even the deep abyss raises its hands high in surrender and cries out for mercy (Habakkuk 3:10). And if the deepest thing surrenders, so do the highest things – sun and moon – freeze and halt before God (Habakkuk 3:11).

That's the picture Habakkuk is painting here: one where all the phenomena of nature, whether earthly or even heavenly, surrender and yield as the LORD marches or rides past them. They don't even try to resist God when God is on the warpath. But, again, his quarrel isn't with them at all. It's with the earth and its nations. “You marched through the earth in fury, you threshed the nations in anger” (Habakkuk 3:12). Before, Habakkuk was worried that God was showing no capacity for anger at injustice – that God was just idly standing around, doing nothing, totally passive in the face of the world's cruelty (Habakkuk 1:3). Now, Habakkuk's come to a very different picture of God, one on the march to thresh the nations of the earth like wheat being threshed into grain and ground into flour. God is living and active in the world in ways Habakkuk just couldn't see before. Far from being a passive observer of injustice, God is furiously on the march to put a stop to it.

For while his quarrel wasn't with the mountains or rivers or sea, his quarrel is with the nations insofar as they belong to “the house of wickedness,” which God has come to slice open and whose head the LORD has come to crush (Habakkuk 3:13). That's what God did when he overthrew Pharaoh and his charioteers in the sea, and now that Habakkuk feels himself threatened by enemies like an oncoming storm, he's looking for God to smash them the same way (Habakkuk 3:14). Why has God come? Why is God on the march? Why is God trampling the foamy waters of the sea, churning them all into a tizzy (Habakkuk 3:15). In the end, all of this – every last bit of the upheaval that comes as God marches through – is for one purpose: “You went out for the salvation of your people, for the salvation of your anointed” (Habakkuk 3:13). That's what God's march to Egypt was about – he crushed Pharaoh for the salvation of Israel. That's what God's march in Canaan was about – he literally crushed the head of Sisera by the hand of Jael, all to ensure the salvation of Israel. That's what God's defense of David was all about – so that David could gain the upper hand and crush the violent (2 Samuel 22:43). And it's nothing less than that that Habakkuk's praying for and seeing in advance when it comes to Babylon's cruel dominion – which, Habakkuk now realizes, is itself just part of God's angry march against Judah's sin, but is ultimately purposed for the salvation of God's people. Babylon will somehow help save Judah from her sin.

Good for Habakkuk – but can we sing with him? What does Habakkuk's hymn mean to us? It foretells, I tell you, the coming of Jesus Christ. Habakkuk looks back – and, he hopes, ahead – to God rising like a dawning sun from the south and the east. The birth of Jesus was heralded with the radiant glory of God shining in the fields outside Bethlehem (Luke 2:9), and when it happened, “the people dwelling in darkness” saw “a great light,” for “on them a light has dawned” (Matthew 4:16). The Light of the World marched through the land, marching his way to the cross. And there at the cross, mountains of sin crumbled to dust, and sun and moon hid their faces, and “the earth shook and the rocks were split” (Matthew 27:51). So too, when he rose from the dead, “there was a great earthquake” (Matthew 28:2). With the cross as his spear and mace, he cracks the head of the house of wickedness – the devil – and before the might of his resurrection, the very abyss of hell throws up its hands in surrender. And he fires his apostles like arrows into all the world to declare the good news that a Warrior has come from heaven to save them. Down through every age since, Christ has been marching in his Church, growing a kingdom that grinds mountains to dust and makes the darkness tremble. And he threshes the nations, Jew and Gentile alike, beneath his feet – not to their destruction, but to their transformation into a pure bread of God, an offering fit for the altar. Jesus Christ is the LORD, the Man of War, who came in a hidden strength to wage a gospel war until at last the earth is indeed as full of his praise as the heavens are his splendor.

But in days to come, the days we still await, we will see and know in a new way that our Lord is on the march. For just as the exodus was accomplished by plagues that led Israel to the thunder-trumpets at Mount Sinai, and just as the LORD's march was seen at Jericho through the seven trumpets that made the city walls fall, so Revelation gives us a picture of history's unfolding in terms of seven plagues and seven trumpets – for when the seventh trumpet sounds, Christ conquers the kingdom of the world amid “flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake, and heavy hail” (Revelation 11:19). We are here “to wait for [God's] Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead: Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thessalonians 1:10), and Revelation shows us Jesus riding in as a Warrior who “in righteousness judges and makes war” (Revelation 19:11) when he “treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty,” striking down rebellious nations with the sword of his word (Revelation 19:15).

All of this is a picture, told in thick symbolism, of our final deliverance, which Habakkuk's hymn is suitable to sing aloud. For if in his first coming Christ was the Warrior who saved us in a spiritual exodus from sin, in his second coming Christ will be the Warrior who saves us at last in a bodily exodus from death and sorrow and all evil. And then at last will he crush the head of the house of wickedness, crushing Satan underfoot – and Evil will not survive. When Christ dawns on us in his return, we will see a new march of God, a march that will stop all the powers of nature in their tracks as they surrender joyously. And he will save his people – me and you, if we trust him. Habakkuk's hymn can be our song of that final victory, when God's fury at sin finally resolves it. But his fury at sin is just an aspect of his all-consuming love for us and our ultimate welfare: he marches for us.

Habakkuk's hymn sings to us of when Christ first came, to be born, to live, to teach, to die, and to rise again – that was the form of his great warfare that we read in the Gospels. And so too does Habakkuk's hymn sing to us of when Christ shall come again, to put an end to sin and sorrow, death and devil, in a great war won by his word. For now, we live in the in-between, the overlap of the ages. But if David and Habakkuk teach us anything, it's that God's march isn't only for the big events of salvation-history. Remember, David prayed for rescue in his own personal plight, his persecution by Saul and by the Philistines, and although there were no flashy miracles, no literal upheaval of the elements, still David portrayed it using the same language as Moses and Deborah, because David knew that, for him and him personally, God had nonetheless marched in to save.

Friends, as we live here in the in-between, we face some battles of our own. The Apostle Peter warns us that “the passions of the flesh... wage war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11). The Apostle Paul claims he “fought the good fight” (2 Timothy 4:7), and advises Timothy to likewise “wage the good warfare” (1 Timothy 1:18). And he speaks of us all as armed with “the weapons of our warfare” (2 Corinthians 10:4). Were we not facing opposition in life, were we not embattled and oppressed, the apostles wouldn't speak so, would they? And it's not just the enemies outside of us in the world. It's the enemies embedded within our own self, the passions that wear and tear at our souls, the temptations and evils that infiltrate past the barrier we think marks the boundary between world and self. There, even there, is a battleground. There must a good fight be fought, there must a good warfare be waged, with the weapons wherewith we are armed. But we are chronically outgunned.

Enter Habakkuk's hymn. Habakkuk celebrates the remembrance of God's march as the Divine Warrior, wrathful against oppression, intimidating the nature of heaven and the nature of earth as he passes by in fury, shining and storming on his way to thresh the nations and set his people free – free from the slavery of Egypt, free from the oppression of Canaan. And though his arrival may have seemed slow to those who were crying out, that didn't mean God was standing idly by; it meant God was on the move, beginning to respond in mysterious ways from the very moment he heard their cries. So, too, for us – even in the in-between.

We have liberty to cry out to the LORD, calling for the Warrior's help in our good warfare against the passions of the soul and our spiritual enemies. For what makes this warfare good is that we are “fighting the battles of the LORD,” that “evil shall not be found in you so long as you live” (1 Samuel 25:28). As King Hezekiah assures us, “with us is the LORD our God, to help us and to fight our battles” (2 Chronicles 32:8). If we endure in the armor he supplies, and if we cry out for the Warrior's help, he will march to our defense and deliverance. He will provide all we need to rise above. He will crush fleshly passions and sinful temptations under our feet, and save us from the enemy. He will unveil in us the splendor of his holiness in the hidden place of our soul. And though the process of sanctification is painful – it will feel like being threshed by the LORD's feet – nonetheless it is a blessing, not a curse. Even when kissed by burning plague and pestilence, even when exposed by the rays from the LORD's hand, even when what's stable in and around us crumbles at his gaze, even when it rains and floods and splits the earth of our hearts – then, perhaps especially then, is God marching in us. Then is the LORD waging war in us, both against us and for us – against the self we think we are, for the self he means us to be. No more have we to do than pray and persevere in expectation of God, and we can say with the prophet Jeremiah: “Terror is on every side..., but the LORD is with me as a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble, they will not overcome me” (Jeremiah 20:10-11). So sing the Warrior's praises! For our Lord has conquered Egypt and Canaan, has conquered death and hell, will come to conquer all, and marches even now when we cry!  Thanks be to God!  Sing the Song of the Warrior!  Amen, and amen!