You know how you hear something over and over, and it never means all that much until WHAM! the same old words you thought you knew reach out and smack you between the eyes?
Such was the case for me last Sunday in church. In the bulletin was listed the hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”. Oh, good, I thought. I like that one. When it came time to sing the song, I sang along with everyone else. I wasn’t using the hymnal because I know almost all the words. I was kind of singing on autopilot, enjoying the sounds of the congregation’s voices raised together and of the organ music.
Until…WHAM!
The third verse goes like this: “And tho’ this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, we will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph thro’ us.”
I know what it’s like to have this devil-filled world threaten to undo me. Maybe you do too. So I was excited about this stanza, because it reminds me that I don’t have to fear! Over and over in Scripture, my God has promised that I will triumph!
But then came the next line, the one that was so meaningful to me: “The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him.”
WHAM.
All of a sudden, I could see clearly the ways in which I had indeed been trembling because of the Prince of Darkness, that is, Satan. Oh, I know that Jesus has saved me and will take me to heaven to live with Him one day. I don’t tremble in terms of my eternal destiny. Nor do I tremble in fear that I might not be victorious one day; I know I will be because God has already won the victory.
My trembling looks more like trying to force people to treat me a certain way so that I can feel loved and secure. Satan has used circumstances in my past to wound me to such an extent that sometimes, the thought that something similar might be happening again seems like the worst thing I can imagine at that moment. So when someone acts a certain way toward me, or fails to take action, the pain from those experiences in my life rises up and demands a response. The fact that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God will take care of me gets pushed into the background.
The thing is, Satan can’t cause me to tremble unless I allow him to. I don’t have to tremble before him or his plans because greater is He who is in me than he who is in the world. Yes, certain things happened or failed to happen in the past, but I don’t have to let those things determine how I respond today. And I don’t have to live in fear that anything that might happen in the present can truly harm me, because I have a God who loves me passionately and has promised that He’ll always take care of me.
True, sometimes people do wound me. But being wounded by someone’s verbal remarks (or lack thereof) here on earth not the worst thing that can happen, even when my emotions tell me that it is. The worst thing that can happen is that in those moments I might forget that God has already won the victory over my pain and that I don’t need to tremble anymore. The worst thing would be trembling instead of standing strong and secure in the knowledge that God loves me and won’t let anything destroy me.
As the third verse continues, “His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure. One little word shall fell him.” In other words, one day God is going to put an end to Satan’s ever hurting anyone ever again. You won’t be destroyed by Satan’s schemes. For one thing, Jesus has brought you into relationship with Himself and will never let you go. For another, Satan is already defeated by Jesus’ victory over sin and death. He just doesn’t recognize it yet.
Satan’s doom is sure—not yours. That means you’ve already won the victory.
So don’t tremble before Satan and his schemes any more. Praise God, you don’t have to.
John 10:28—“I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.”
1 Corinthians 15:57—But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 John 5:4-5—For everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.
1 John 4:4—Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.