Rulers persecute me without cause,My heart TREMBLES. Why?
but my heart trembles at your word.
Psalm 119:161
The Hebrew word is pachad, to dread. Persecution by people in power might cause you to tremble with dread, but the Word should cause even greater dread.
I suspect anyone who spent their childhood as part of a church remembers the visiting missionaries. They would come to the church and speak about their mission, often with a slideshow with pictures of exotic foreign places and people (with an obligatory sunset picture at the end). It was exciting because they had been there and done that, unlike me - and unlike most of the people in my church. We hadn't been anywhere or done much of anything, by comparison.
The part I always liked best was when they told stories of persecution. They had been there and experienced that. I still remember the stories of people smuggling Bibles across the border of the iron curtain. When I was young I pictured an actual iron curtain between one country and another, with communist soldiers hiding in the curtains like a cheesy murder mystery.
The stories of what would happen and what did happen to God’s smugglers if they were caught made my heart tremble. Even now when I read stories in The Voice of the Martyrs magazine about people in other countries being persecuted, I'm tempted to think of it as reading an adventure tale where everything is going wrong for the hero. I'm sure it's not much of an adventure for the real people in the stories, a realization that again causes my heart to tremble with second hand fear.
Jesus makes a backhanded sort of promise to his disciples that because the world will hate them because the world has hated Him. That could be unnerving for those of us who seek to be serious about following Christ.
When I fully invest my imagination in reading the stories of someone like Stephen, inserting myself into the story, standing before the Sanhedrin alongside him, falling to my knees in front of the people holding large stones, my heart trembles.
What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36 As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:31-39Words like these make my heart tremble a bit, because it seems so daunting. But when I read these promises and others, my heart trembles at the words of God.
My heart trembles when I read the scriptures because their promise is so amazing, so life-altering.
My heart trembles with the sure knowledge that in the adventure God has set before me He will be standing beside or kneeling in the dirt beside me, no matter where God's mission takes me to.
I don’t need some politician to pass laws to protect me from persecution. My first line of defense against my persecutors isn’t a good lawyer.
When I am actively doing the things God has tasked me to do, when my heart is trembling and I feel a hand on my shoulder, I can trust that it’s not the hand of my persecutor. It’s the hand of my Savior
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