Habbakuk 3:17-19

In grieving Micah’s death, we relied (and continue to rely) heavily on the promises of the Bible. As an encouragement to all of us to know and study scripture and to let the word of God speak to us in our daily lives, I wanted to share, over the course of a few posts, a few of the scriptures that spoke to us through the circumstances surrounding Micah’s death.

Praising God Even With No Fruit on the Vine

First, Habbakuk 3:17-19 encouraged me to praise God even through the hardest day of my life. The morning of Micah’s internment and funeral, I was reviewing some of the messages left to us under Micah’s online obituary. A Christian colleague of mine had left us a message that included a citation to Habbakuk 3:17-19. At home that morning, I wrote the passage on a piece of paper and brought it with me to reflect upon throughout the day. This passage reads,
“Though the fig tree should not blossom
Nor fruit be on the vines
The produce of the olive fail and
The fields yield no food
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
God, the LORD, is my strength
He makes my feet like the deer’s;
He makes me tread on my high places.”

When there seemed to be no redeeming value, no “fruit on the vine,” to the death of our only son, all we could do is worship God. We turn our affections to God even during these trials for, as the Psalmist says, “Whom have I in Heaven but you?” (Psalm 73: 25). If we don’t praise God now, we will lose ourselves in anger, bitterness and depression. But if we lift up our eyes to Heaven, we can live in the hope in the resurrection to come. When there seems to be no benefit to what the Lord has brought, all we can do is praise God not for what we see, but for what we hope to see, someday, when God reveals the purposes He accomplished through trials such as Micah’s death.

When we arrived at the cemetery for the internment, I stood next to Pastor Kenny. While we waited for others to arrive, I pulled out the piece of paper on which I had written the passage. Pastor Kenny noticed the paper and asked what passage I had written. As it turned out, Pastor Kenny had planned his internment message around the very same passage. The Holy Spirit, it seemed, was using this particular Bible passage to encourage me to lift my attention up in worship to God, even when I could see no “fruit” in everything that had happened to us.