439_Responding to slander and lies Psalm 7 O Lord my God, in you do I take refuge; save me from all my pursuers and deliver me, 2 lest like a lion they tear my soul apart, rending it in pieces, with none to deliver. 3 O Lord my God, if I have done this, if there is wrong in my hands, 4 if I have repaid my friend with evil or plundered my enemy without cause, 5 let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it, and let him trample my life to the ground and lay my glory in the dust. Selah 6 Arise, O Lord, in your anger; lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies; awake for me; you have appointed a judgment. 7 Let the assembly of the peoples be gathered about you; over it return on high. 8 The Lord judges the peoples; judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness and according to the integrity that is in me. 9 Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end, and may you establish the righteous— you who test the minds and hearts, O righteous God! 10 My shield is with God, who saves the upright in heart. 11 God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day. 12 If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword; he has bent and readied his bow; 13 he has prepared for him his deadly weapons, making his arrows fiery shafts. 14 Behold, the wicked man conceives evil and is pregnant with mischief and gives birth to lies. 15 He makes a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole that he has made. 16 His mischief returns upon his own head, and on his own skull his violence descends. 17 I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness, and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High. A man once visited his rabbi, burdened by the guilt of having spread a false rumor about someone in his community. He wanted to know how he could make things right. The rabbi handed him a feather pillow and asked him to cut it open and shake its contents out the window. The man did as he was told, and feathers flew in every direction. “Now,” said the rabbi, “go and gather every feather.” The man looked at him in shock. “That’s impossible!” he replied. The rabbi nodded and said, “Exactly. Words, once spoken are like those feathers. You can’t get them all back.” Proverbs 18:21 tells us, “The tongue has the power of life and death.” Words can breathe encouragement and hope, but they can also crush spirits and destroy lives. Slander is a weapon that leaves deep wounds. It can shred a person’s reputation and destroy trust. These wounds are invisible, but they pierce the soul. David, the man after God’s own heart, describes this pain in Psalm 7. It is his cry to God when he is falsely accused by a man named Cush from the tribe