SHOEBAT EXCLUSIVE

By Theodore Shoebat

Muslims in Pakistan took an entire Christian family and enforced them into slavery, laboring in a brick kiln. They took the son in order to send him into another brick kiln, and when his parents resisted the captors, they brutally beat the mother in front of the husband, and then horrifically tortured the husband. The husband and wife are Arif and Jamila Masih, and they have lived the lives of true saints.

As Arif Masih recounted his torture

The kiln owners forcibly used us as slaves in the kilns, they even restricted us to go to church or take any day off as they wanted us to work 24/7. … They trapped us so badly that we could not even run they sold my elder son to another kiln and took money from there, so he may work there and we remained working at their kiln. …They took my son from home and even they tortured my wife and children when we were resisting against their action.

His wife, Jamila Masih, retold the horror:

They beat and tortured my son and took him to another kiln, we were helpless and unable to resist, as they that unless you will not pay off the loan we will not set your son free.

They soon contacted our organization, Rescue Christians, and pleaded with us to help, and we most definitely did. Our team in Pakistan heard of their anguish, and told them to rendezvous to a specific location. Once they arrived at the agreed spot, our team picked them up, and liberated them. As Arif himself explains in a video interview:

With such suffering and agony, we cannot help but lament with David:

I am weary with my groaning;
All night I make my bed swim;
I drench my couch with my tears.
My eye wastes away because of grief;
It grows old because of all my enemies.
Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity;
For the Lord has heard the voice of my weeping.
The Lord has heard my supplication;
The Lord will receive my prayer.
Let all my enemies be ashamed and greatly troubled;
Let them turn back and be ashamed suddenly. (Psalm 6:6-10)

The saint weeps in the deepest melancholy, begging God for His defense, because his enemies surround him, just as Christ was surrounded by enemies, and wept, as the thick darkness of the earth’s evil surrounded Him. It is so for all the saints, for Christ encompassed on all sides by viperous wolves. As the Savior Himself said, “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you.” (John 15:18)

And thus is the life of the saint: struggling endlessly with the world, as the shepherd is forever vigilant against the wolves. When the saints are persecuted, they are engulfed by the love of God, for in their state of agony, they are being tested by the Lord Who is love. To be persecuted is to be loved by God; it is a sign that the Father desires that you be as His Son, to live as Christ lived, to suffer just as suffered. Those who are not persecuted, who live entrenched in the fat of comfort, without enemies from amongst the wolves, and in the avoidance from the struggle that the Sword of Christ brings, are hated by God, and thus God deprives them of the honor of persecution. As David wrote in the tenth Psalm:

For look! The wicked bend their bow,
They make ready their arrow on the string,
That they may shoot secretly at the upright in heart.
If the foundations are destroyed,
What can the righteous do?
The Lord is in His holy temple,
The Lord’s throne is in heaven;
His eyes behold,
His eyelids test the sons of men.
The Lord tests the righteous,
But the wicked and the one who loves violence His soul hates. (Psalm 11:2-5)

While God tests His people with persecution, blessing them with an opportunity to be as Christ, He blesses others to be like the Good Samaritan, helping those who are stricken and abandoned; He blesses us with opportunities to be as Simon the Cyrenian, before whom “they laid the cross that he might bear it after Jesus” (Luke 23:26), so that we can partake in the suffering of Christ, help those oppressed by the crucifiers. The Lord blesses us with an opportunity to live in accordance to the command of the inspired Solomon:

Deliver those who are drawn toward death,
And hold back those stumbling to the slaughter. (Proverbs 24:11)

Follow the commands of God, help those bearing this brutal cross.

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