The Vision of Habakkuk - Commentary on Habakkuk 3:9-11
Created to illustrate the following verses
“You stripped the sheath from your bow, calling for many arrows. Selah You split the earth with rivers. The mountains saw you and writhed; the raging waters swept on; the deep gave forth its voice; it lifted its hands on high. The sun and moon stood still in their place at the light of your arrows as they sped, at the flash of your glittering spear.” ~Habakkuk 3:9-11 ESV
Last year I was losing some passion around my art to be completely honest, I couldn’t pinpoint any new subject matter that I was incredibly interested in painting. I felt like I needed to travel to inspire me to switch it up!
Thankfully, this summer, I was so excited to refuel that burning fiery passion once again! This came through my spiritual walk! Since I returned to my God in Faith I also returned to an old list. I have a whole list of Bible verses that I have wanted to illustrate, but when I was the “lost sheep” I had completely lost my appetite for such topics.
I was reading my idea book and found a passage I was excited to create from! When I read it, I imagined a sunny field of green grass, the sound of a beautiful river of blue, with the sun shining brightly and nature being incorporated throughout the piece. As I started to paint, I found that something completely different was in store. The piece has a more sobering note to it and certainly illustrates the main point from the passage; that is, the response of the earth to God, and even to the “anger” of God. (don’t judge too soon, keep reading)
I cannot help but be slightly worried about the response others may have to my last sentence. But it's pretty obvious from this painting that something major is happening and the Earth is being shaken up.
We often hear about the Divine as being Unconditional Love, which is so true! Yet rarely will anyone want to speak on the “anger” of God. I have also heard the argument, “Why are we giving God these human characteristics and emotions when God is so much more? It is as if we are making up God in our head and limiting God to only what we know.”
But something that's very important to note here, is that “anger” is not actually evil in and of itself, rather the way that anger is released is what often brings in its scary side. Yet, anger need not always be expressed in a way that hurts others, rather it could be channeled as a way of standing up for justice.
Anger is an emotion that we all experience. Sometimes it may be anger directed towards things that one is very justified in feeling. The problem is that our view of anger oftentimes involves violence and negative connotations because as humans, most of the time we do not steward the anger in appropriate manners.
If we are angry about an injustice in the world can we hold that anger without letting it torment us or others, eating away at us from the inside.
If we are angry at our friend or family member, can we understand that that anger often comes from a healthy knowing of our worth and how we are meant to be treated? Validating ourselves instead of taking out that anger on the other person through violence or words that we regret later. Forcing them to apologize or treat us better. Rather the anger can be recognized and understood for what it is, an emotion. Emotions are not always something that we can “control”. However, taking actions based on anger needs to be from a place of justice and righteousness instead of our own selfish gain and rash choices.
It's interesting that one of my first paintings coming back to my Faith would be tackling this quite complicated subject, but I did not dive into it with such intentions! Like I said, I thought I was going to be painting a sunny field of beauty!
Here we have a river cutting the Earth, creating massive cliffs on either side! Mountains that look like ice cream as they melt, and a volcano lifting up its hands! When one looks closely, the mouth of the volcano is literally that, a mouth. Roaring! If you look closely you can see the profile of a face there. It looked a little bit too creepy for my taste, so I hid the face as best as possible. Next we see falling stars, asteroids like arrows, meteorites like spears made for piercing the heart! Perhaps piercing our heart metaphorically and spiritually with a wake up call!
But what are we being woken up to?
We see “Time” displayed as the sun and moon stand still. Are we in this present moment, has gravity started to lose its force?
Exactly what are we facing here, what is the reality of the circumstance of our heart?
I can only speak for myself and I find that in my life this year, this was the perfect sort of painting to illustrate what I was experiencing spiritually.
Even before I came back to my faith I had a rather askew view of God, it was a God that encompassed good and evil. My idea of God was not full of justice. Now that I come back to my faith and I get grounded again in the Word of God (which is the text this piece is inspired from) I find that I am much more at ease knowing that I serve a God whose characteristics are listed in these pages by the prophet Habakkuk. A God who is Just, having anger against evil, not also encompassing evil, like my old idea, rather a God of fiery passion for justice, righteousness, godliness, and goodness!
In my own life it makes sense that God would come in to disrupt my heart as a river rushing through, creating long deep caverns through my Illusions and would cause me to raise up the hands of my heart in surrender and worship.
Hands that are able to receive the rebuke of God towards me. Hands that are raised up, able to receive the arrows, perhaps sometimes they are raised as a shield against the arrows, but they prove useless as my hands are not made of steel. Other times my hands are raised as an offering praying, “Take all of me, take everything! Take my whole heart and melt it like a mountain, to morph it into what is righteous and godly, to make it flow like lava from a volcano, melting all the stubborn hard pride found there, so that my heart becomes a dwelling place for The Presence of You my God.”
A heart worthy of the dwelling place of God!
Can I accept these words about righteous anger as true, even if I don't understand them?
A mountain is so large, it is a symbol of something immovable, and yet in the presence of God it melts like the wax of a candle. If I were to truly get a glimpse of God, would not my heart also melt within me?
If I think that I see God without total heart transformation, then I would argue that perhaps I have not seen God at all.
If my idea of God is anything less than what could cut through the Earth as a raging river, cause the core of the earth to surface in molten lava, and the tallest mountains around me to melt, then am I really seeing God?
A God with enough power to even cause the sun and moon to stand still in their place, which means the Earth stops its turning. To stop in my tracks. Just set aside my own ideas and my life for a moment, just long enough to be able to really get a glimpse at God. To stop in my tracks like the Earth stopping on its axis.
Yes my God is unconditionally loving and full of righteousness. But there is more to God than an idea that I once had, of an all-encompassing God that even the trees are god, that even god is evil. Those old ideas are no longer something that I have found proof for in my life. Rather I have found proof for an all-powerful God, who encompasses the ability to hold unconditional love as well as rid the Earth of all evil. This is the God I choose to worship.
Furthermore, a common question: “So then why does God allow evil?”
And the answers to those questions and the promises we find, are that He doesn’t! God does not “allow” evil. In fact, evil is on its way to permanent destruction!!
That is the kind of life that I believe in! The kind of truth I know, that I will find when the perfect time comes. We are all headed to such never ending godly righteous living in Heaven, if we are not washed away by the roaring river, burnt up in the lava, or stuck in the mud, only to be trampled by the melting mountains! Who will rescue us from this wrath of God? Only God Himself!
If God's anger were the water, the lava of the mountain, who could rescue us but God Himself?
And that is why I look to God alone for my salvation.
And so I find that this painting illustrates my life over these last few months, where everything was taken away from me, my marriage, all my money, my friends, my home, I have been provided graciously by God with replacements to these things in one way or another such as a new place to live and so forth, of course no one could ever replace my husband. And God has even restored that relationship now, though it is still in a healing process!
My life and my heart has melted before God, and it is only by such an honest look at my reality and an honest look at my heart that I could so beautifully see the working of God in my life. And the willingness to allow God to continue working and the strength to trust that God has good intentions for me, intentions which allow me to escape such wrath that create beauty from these scary situations. For even as I love the beauty of a meteor shower, such awe inspiring shooting stars, so there is beauty when we allow God the space to work on us.
And I wonder exactly how we would feel if we were standing at the base of a bursting volcano, where would we turn for help?