The Armor of God: 2
Cor. 10:4-6; Eph. 6:10-18
It is not
immediately evident to us at the moment we trust Christ as saviour that we are
drafted into an army that is the army of the Lord made up of believers in this
age. We are Christian warriors and it is up to us in the time after our
salvation to decide whether we are going to be a casualty or part of that
victorious army of the Lord who learns the Word of God, lets it shape our
thinking that we might advance to spiritual maturity. Spiritual warfare is a term
that describes the conflict that we all get into. It is unseen, invisible, but
it is very real.
We now look at the
armour that God has provided for the believer in Ephesians 6. Theologians have
summarised what the Bible teaches and says that there are three enemies of the
believer: the world, the flesh, and the devil. The devil became our enemy at
the time of he originated his enmity with God and his fall when he succumbed to
arrogance in his soul, desired to have the authority of God, to rule creation
as he wanted to, according to his thinking, thinking the creature could subvert
the creator, and he managed to deceive a third of the angels to follow him in
that rebellion. There was a trial held, God sentenced them to eternity in the
lake of fire (Matthew 25:41), but there is a postponement of the execution of
that sentence. Satan must have raised some objection to God; that is why he is
called Satan, the accuser; that God was not fair, that somehow He would not
give the creature opportunity to show that he could function as well as God. He
challenged God’s integrity and justice and grace. So God in His graciousness
decided to deal with this issue by developing a laboratory case study that
would entail the creation of two lesser creatures, but they were endowed with
similar abilities as the angels—intellectual, volition, responsibility, created
in God’s image and had a perfect righteousness. But there was a test which had
to do with the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they were
prohibited from eating it, and this was the point of the attack. So Satan
indwelt one of the creatures of the garden and enticed the woman to question
God’s goodness, His provision, His revelation. The result was that she
succumbed to the temptation, ate of the fruit and gave it to her husband and
the human race fell.
So the first enemy
was Satan, the second was the introduction of a corrupt nature which we call
the sin nature, and that is true of every single human being. The third enemy
is the world system. Worldliness really encompasses the thinking of Satan, and
we have identified that under two categories: autonomy and antagonism. Autonomy
means the creature is asserting his independence from God: that somehow we can
find happiness, meaning and stability in life without being one hundred per
cent dependent on God in everything that we do. So the creature thinks in
deception because the of deceptive quality of the sin nature, because of the
attractiveness of the world system that provides the comfort zones and
rationalisations that makes us think that we are actually happy, stable and
content even though we know in the core of our soul that we are not walking
consistently with God, not thinking His thoughts after Him, and so we succumb
to worldly thinking. So whenever we are not walking by the Spirit, whenever we
are thinking outside of divine viewpoint in human viewpoint we are thinking the
devil’s thoughts after him, we are taking the devil’s way, and whether we want
to fully face the harshness of it or not we are under demon influence. Human
viewpoint is demon influence.
The first aspect is
autonomy, the second is antagonism because when the creature asserts his
independence from God eventually things don’t work. The Christian life is a
battle. It sometimes seems overwhelming but there is always more than enough
supply and provision for us from the grace of God. God in His omniscience knew
every problem, every difficulty, that the creature would ever face in life and
He has supplied us with everything we need in order to be the victorious in
this conflict. It is ultimately, though, a conflict of thinking, a battle of
the mind. It is an issue of not only what we think but how we think.
Paul points out in
2 Corinthians 10:4-6 that there are ways and means of approaching life’s
problems and challenges and difficulties that seem very good to us. They feel
good to us, they are within our comfort zone, we think they actually work. We
find ways to sort of deaden the pain, the challenge of living in a fallen world
with disappointing people who are fallen creatures themselves and often the
cause of difficulty in our own lives, and so we find ways to handle these
things that aren’t any different from the unbeliever. We manage our stress when
we come up with different problem-solving techniques that range from just
trying to escape reality through drugs and alcohol and entertainment to trying
to come up with a perfect scheme to explain reality, to give us some sort of
intellectual comfort zone. But all of this is nothing more than worldliness,
and so we have to learn the difference between living in the flesh, out of the
sin nature, and living according to the principles of the spiritual life given
in the Scriptures. Even though we are living in the flesh we do not walk according
to the flesh. We have to understand the difference between the systems the
world devises to somehow make life work and the systems that God has provided
for us.
2 Corinthians 10:4 NASB
“for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh…” They don’t come out from
the sin nature, they are not consistent with the thinking of the cosmic system.
“…but divinely powerful [Lit. empowered by God].” It is God’s power, not our
power; God’s method, not our method; it is God’s Word, not our thinking that is
the issue. We see in Ephesians 6:10ff that the battle is focused on whether we
will do it God’s way with God’s weapons and God’s tools or whether we will try
to somehow merge that and compromise it with various forms of human viewpoint
thinking. [5] “{We are} destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up
against the knowledge of God…” So we see a contrast here between thought and
thought: speculation versus knowledge of God. There is guesswork ultimately
based on empiricism and rationalism because there is always another piece of
data that we may discover tomorrow or next week that causes the thinkers of
this world to go in and revamp their system because they don’t have a starting
point that begins with an omniscient God who has revealed to us that which we
must know, that which we need know in order to properly interpret all of
reality.
The main idea in
Ephesians 6:10ff is that the believer is protected by that which God provides
and that the nature of our role in the warfare is defensive, to stand in the
truth; not offensive, to go out and try to attack spiritual, unseen forces. We
rest in the provision of God and actively trust in Him. The key word that we
find in various passages related to this is the Greek word histemi [i(sthmi] or a form of it, anthistemi [a)nqisthmi]. It is a word
that has at its core a defensive meaning.
Ephesians
James 4:7 NASB
“James 4:7 Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from
you.”
The only command
given to believers for dealing with Satan is to resist the devil, not to attack
the devil. It is significant that there are three passages in Scripture that
all deal with this principle of resisting the devil. We find the word anthistemi three times in Ephesians
6:10ff. Whenever we find something repeated that much it ought to grab our
attention to the fact that God the Holy Spirit is making sure we don’t miss the
point that it is about resistance, not about attack. In order to stand firm we
have to first put on the armour of God. But before we put on the armour of God
we have to decide that that is something important that we want to do in life,
that we realise that we are in a spiritual battle and that the way to avoid
becoming a casualty in the conflict is to orient ourselves to the grace of God
and to Bible doctrine.
The word “resist”
is a very important word, a word that is often used historically in a military
context. It is a word used to describe setting up a defensive posture and not
going on the offensive.
Ephesians
Ephesians
Eph
Ephesians
The anchor piece of the Roman armour was the six-inch-wide leather belt.
Everything the soldier wore anchored to that. So under the inspiration of the
Holy Spirit Paul says that it is the belt that is the key element. The Romans
wore robes and togas and these would get in the way as they went into battle so
they would gird up their loins, which means that they would take up the robe
and stuff it into their belt. That means they were getting rid of the
distractions or the hindrances in life, and what gets rid of these is truth.
Truth is the Word of God. It is the truth of God’s Word, Bible doctrine, that
is what anchors everything in life. So we start with truth. Jesus prayed to the
Father: “Sanctify them by means of truth; your Word is truth.” So before we can
stand firm we have to make sure that we have removed the distractions in our
life by the truth of God’s Word, and the truth of God’s Word is the anchor
point in the thinking of our soul.
The breastplate of righteousness is something the believer puts on after
salvation. It is not imputed righteousness, it experiential righteousness, that
righteousness that comes as part of the fruit of the Spirit as the believer
grows and matures. To be effective as a believer doesn’t come with salvation,
it begins with maturity.
Ephesians
Ephesians
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The last element here is the sword of the Spirit. A lot of people make
the mistake of thinking that this is an offensive weapon, but it is a defensive
weapon. In defense there is often counter defensive action. Usually it was the
larger broadsword that was used in offensive action; it was the short sword
that was used in defensive action in close combat. The sword is described as
the Word of God, it is not the Logos of God here but the Rhema of God, the
spoken or applied Word of God. The illustration of this is how Jesus handled
the temptations in Matthew chapter four. He quoted Scripture and used it to
counter the assaults of Satan.
The bottom line is
that having the full armour of God in place we are able to stand.
Ephesians