Yet I Will Rejoice

Micah came from Moresheth, a small town in the Judean lowlands, and preached under the same kings as Isaiah (Micah 1:1). His targets are people with power who use it badly: those who lie awake planning how to take fields and houses (2:1–2), leaders who “hate the good, and love the evil” (3:2), judges who take bribes, priests who teach for hire and prophets who divine for money. The sharpest line is what they tell themselves: “Is not the LORD among us? none evil can come upon us” (3:11). Religion had become a kind of insurance. Micah, by contrast, says he is “full of power by the spirit of the LORD” (3:8). A century later his warning of 3:12 was remembered in a courtroom and helped save Jeremiah’s life (Jeremiah 26:18–19).

🔗 Cross-references

• Jeremiah 26:18–19 ↗Elders quote Micah’s warning, recall Hezekiah’s repentance, and Jeremiah is spared.
• 2 Nephi 26:29 ↗Nephi defines priestcraft: preaching for gain and praise rather than for the welfare of Zion.
• Isaiah 1:1 ↗Isaiah served under the same kings, so the two prophets were contemporaries in Judah.

After the warnings, Micah looks ahead. In the last days “the mountain of the house of the LORD” will be established on the top of the mountains, and people will stream to it saying, “he will teach us of his ways” (4:1–2). Swords become plowshares, and everyone sits under their own vine and fig tree, unafraid (4:3–4). Isaiah records nearly the same vision (Isaiah 2:2–4). Then comes the verse the scribes would quote to Herod: from little Bethlehem Ephratah will come a Ruler “whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5:2; Matthew 2:4–6). The baby of Bethlehem was not beginning to exist. He was the premortal Jehovah, coming down. Micah adds that “this man shall be the peace” (5:5).

🔗 Cross-references

• Matthew 2:4–6 ↗Herod’s chief priests and scribes quote Micah 5:2 to say where the Christ would be born.
• Isaiah 2:2–3 ↗Isaiah’s nearly identical vision of the mountain of the Lord’s house in the last days.
• Abraham 3:27 ↗In the premortal council, one “like unto the Son of Man” answers, “Here am I, send me.”

Chapter 6 is a courtroom. The Lord calls the mountains to witness and asks, “O my people, what have I done unto thee?” (6:3). The people answer by raising the bid: calves, thousands of rams, rivers of oil, even a firstborn child (6:6–7). The Lord’s reply is the heart of the book: “do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” (6:8). Jesus called justice, mercy and faith “the weightier matters of the law” (Matthew 23:23). Chapter 7 moves from lament to hope. When I fall, Micah says, I will rise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be my light (7:8). And he ends praising a God who “delighteth in mercy” and casts all our sins “into the depths of the sea” (7:18–19).

🔗 Cross-references

• Matthew 23:23 ↗Jesus names judgment, mercy and faith as the weightier matters the Pharisees neglected.
• Doctrine and Covenants 58:42 ↗The Lord promises to remember repented sins no more, like sins cast into the sea.
• Mosiah 4:26 ↗King Benjamin ties retaining a remission of sins to caring for the poor and needy.

Nahum is Jonah’s sequel. About a century after Nineveh repented at Jonah’s preaching, the city had returned to cruelty, and Nahum announces its fall, which came in 612 BC. His book is fierce, but it opens with a portrait of God worth slowing down for: “The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power” (Nahum 1:3), and “The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him” (1:7). Both halves are true together: patience and power, mercy and justice. Then Nahum borrows a line Isaiah also used: “Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace!” (1:15; Isaiah 52:7). Abinadi taught that those feet belong ultimately to the Lord Himself (Mosiah 15:18).

🔗 Cross-references

• Jonah 3:10 ↗A century earlier, God spared Nineveh when its people turned from their evil way.
• Mosiah 15:18 ↗Abinadi teaches that the Lord Himself is the one who brings good tidings and publishes peace.

Habakkuk doesn’t preach to the people; he talks to God. “O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear!” (1:2). The answer unsettles him: the Lord will raise up the Chaldeans, the Babylonians, to punish Judah (1:6). So Habakkuk asks again. How can a holy God use people more wicked than those they punish (1:13)? Then he does something worth copying. He climbs his watchtower to wait for the answer (2:1). The Lord tells him to write the vision plainly, because “though it tarry, wait for it” (2:3), and “the just shall live by his faith” (2:4). By chapter 3 the fig tree still hasn’t blossomed, and the stalls are still empty, yet Habakkuk says, “Yet I will rejoice in the LORD” (3:17–18). His circumstances didn’t change. He did.

🔗 Cross-references

• Romans 1:17 ↗Paul quotes Habakkuk 2:4 as the heart of the gospel: the just shall live by faith.
• Ether 12:6 ↗Moroni teaches that we receive no witness until after the trial of our faith.
• Doctrine and Covenants 121:1–2 ↗In Liberty Jail, Joseph Smith asks, as Habakkuk did, “How long?”

Zephaniah prophesied in the days of King Josiah (Zephaniah 1:1), just before or during Josiah’s great reform. He warns of the day of the Lord, and he aims at a particular kind of person: those “settled on their lees” (1:12). Wine left too long on its sediment goes thick and flat. These people had settled so comfortably that they said, “The LORD will not do good, neither will he do evil,” as though God were irrelevant. Zephaniah’s answer is to seek the Lord, seek righteousness, seek meekness (2:3). The book ends in one of the most tender verses in the Old Testament. The Lord in your midst “will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing” (3:17). Picture that: God singing over you.

🔗 Cross-references

• 2 Kings 22:1–2 ↗King Josiah, in whose days Zephaniah prophesied, turns “not aside to the right hand or to the left.”
• Luke 15:7 ↗Jesus teaches that heaven rejoices over one sinner who repents.
• Isaiah 62:5 ↗Isaiah also pictures God rejoicing over His people as a bridegroom over his bride.

Return to the key passage. Habakkuk 2:4 sets two kinds of people side by side. One has a soul “lifted up,” proud and self-reliant, and it is “not upright.” The other lives by faith. Paul quoted this verse three times (Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11; Hebrews 10:38) because it names how disciples actually live: not by seeing everything first, but by trusting the One who does. Habakkuk’s last lines show where that faith leads. “The LORD God is my strength,” and He will make my feet like hinds’ feet, surefooted on high places (3:19). Faith doesn’t remove the climb. It gives us feet for it. As you take the sacrament today, bring one unanswered question and one choice to keep rejoicing anyway.

🔗 Cross-references

• Hebrews 10:38 ↗Paul quotes Habakkuk to encourage Christians not to draw back under trial.
• 2 Corinthians 5:7 ↗“For we walk by faith, not by sight.”
• Alma 32:21 ↗Alma teaches that faith is hoping for things not seen which are true.