"Help! I've Been Ambushed!"

“The words of the wicked are to lie in wait for blood: but the mouth of the upright shall deliver them.” (Proverbs 12:6)
The Complete Jewish Bible translates this proverb as: “The words of the wicked are a deadly ambush, but the speech of the upright rescues them.” We have all experienced a deadly ambush of words at some point in our lives. We were most likely walking along the road of life without any thought of mortal enemies lying in wait for blood just around the bend. An ambush is sudden to obtain an element of surprise, but its main goal is to take out the target with minimal collateral damage to the ambushers themselves. Although ambushing is a tactic of war, it is by nature a cowardly attack. It is an assassination attempt where your enemy seeks to take your life, while never showing his face. In the war of words, our enemies employ similar tactics: they generate rumors, sow seeds of discord and assassinate our character without ever having the courtesy to show their faces. They do not have the courage to confront us directly, so they sneak around and prepare their ambushes, lying in wait for our blood. We have no control over the actions of our enemies, but we can govern our own response. How do we choose to respond to enemies who desire our blood? The natural, carnal reaction is to get them before they get us. However, the answer is not to plan a counterattack of our own. The Word says that our speech shall rescue us. In an ambush, there is no time to talk your way out of the situation. You are in a life-or-death predicament. The only thing we can do is to call on the Lord for deliverance as David did. “Deliver me from mine enemies, O my God: defend me from them that rise up against me. Deliver me from the workers of iniquity, and save me from bloody men.” (Psalms 59: 1, 2)