Written by S.M. Baugh |
Saturday, March 25, 2023
One temptation we have in our examination of the armor of God is to get wrapped up in the armor itself and not in the one who gives it to us. As noted, this armor is the Lord’s own which he wore to defeat all his and our enemies in his great conquest of sin and death to ransom us (Rev 5:5, 9). This means that the “armor of light” given to us in Christ is expressed as our faith in him when we “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 13:14) to become “children of the light” (1 Thess 5:5). And the “captain of the Lord’s army” (Josh 5:13–15) has already clothed us with himself in full battle array in our baptism.

Professional athletes were as popular in the ancient world as they are today, even if the sports back then were somewhat different. Wrestling competitions, for example, were held throughout mainland Greece and Asia Minor in various festivals. And winners of these wrestling matches received extraordinary public honors: their exploits were celebrated with statues, friezes, and wall paintings. Thus it would have been impossible for Paul, who lived in Ephesus for over two years (Acts 19:8, 10) to have missed seeing Greek culture’s enthusiasm for victorious wrestlers. This may explain aspects of his curious description of the “armor of God” in Ephesians 6:10–17.
Have you ever noticed that Paul calls our struggle a “wrestling match” (πάλη [pale]) in Ephesians 6:12, yet he describes this match as carried out in full battle armor (πανοπλία [panoplia]) in the previous verse? Paul knew, of course, that wrestlers in his day did not wear much of anything in their matches, much less loads of military gear. Furthermore, soldiers in armor win battles by advancing, not by standing, yet Paul states three times that Christian armor allows us to hold our ground and to “stand” fast in the evil day (vv. 11, 13). “Having done all,” we are to “stand” (Eph 6:13 KJV). What gives? Is Paul mixing his metaphors?
As I stated in my work on Ephesians in Lexham Press’s Evangelical Exegetical Commentary series, I think Paul is portraying the fight facing Christians against “the schemes of the devil” (v. 11) and “against the cosmic forces of this darkness” (v. 12) as a hand-to-hand brawl in which staying on one’s feet—as in a wrestling match—is the only sure way to victory. “Stand fast then!” Paul says (v. 14).
And if the enemy seems too scary to imagine, Paul details the protection which God gives to us, which is the very armor which our hero Jesus wore for his great conquest on the cross (Rev 5:5–10) when he “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them” (Col 2:15). This is why Paul describes the armor of God which we are to put on in terms of the divine armor of Isaiah worn by the Messiah:
He saw that there was no man,and wondered that there was no one to intercede;then his own arm brought him salvation,and his righteousness upheld him.He put on righteousness as a breastplate,and a helmet of salvation on his head. (Isa 59:16–17)
It is worth looking briefly at the different elements of the “panoply of God” (Eph 6:13) which Paul details for us in Ephesians 6:14–17. This armor of God is not only for ancient people but for Christians today.
The Belt
The first part of the armor of God is the belt implied when Paul says, “Belt up your waist with truth” (Eph 6:14). An older translation for “belt up your waist” is to “gird one’s loins” (KJV; NKJV): the loose clothing worn in antiquity was pulled up and tied or belted in preparation for wrestling (Job 38:3, 40:7; cf. 1 Pet. 1:13). Here “truth” acts as the belt for believers, and Paul is reminding us that the truth is found in Jesus (Eph 4:21) and his gospel (Eph 1:13). We belt our waists with truth when we speak the truth in love (Eph 4:15, 25) as the fruit of saving faith (Eph 2:8–10) in the battle which Christ, the righteous warrior of God has won for us (Isa 11:5).
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Being poor in spirit is being someone who knows that you have nothing, spiritually, to offer and therefore you stand completely dependent upon God—upon his grace, his mercy, his provision, and effort. Being poor in spirit is accepting that you are spiritually needy.

There’s a bright thread of connection between the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the way the sermon on the mount begins. The tree stood as a perpetual sign for Adam and Eve to rely upon and walk submitted under God’s word. God declared all that was good or not good and they, as His creatures and image bearers were to trust Him. Of course, that didn’t pan out and we’ve all, since Adam, placed more weight on our own perspectives and words than we have in God and His word. Utterly foolish. William Henley’s Invictus declares that we’ve become the “captain of our own fate”, when in reality we’ve become conquered (victa) by own fallen self-reliance. Utterly foolish because the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God and a true fear of God is essentially a radical reliance upon Him.
Our world today, like Cain and Lamech before us, is intoxicated in self-reliance and self-sufficiency. We pronounce blessings upon the rich and able, the well-to-do and confident, for theirs is the power of influence and the world’s applause. But Jesus, picking up a rather well-defined Biblical theme, starts off his famous sermon with a still more ancient promise – “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3). The idea of being poor, that is, materially destitute, is not a foreign concept. We understand poverty. And poor people are, more often than not, quite dependent upon others for any well-being. A beggar begs because he needs help from someone who has more than him. John Stott recognizes that within the Scriptures “gradually, because the needy had no refuge but God, poverty came to have spiritual overtones and to be identified with humble dependence on God.”[1]  Hence Psalm 34:5-6, “Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles.”[2]
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God’s Christ has conquered, and he will return to consummate his inaugurated kingdom. While we wait, the nations are raging, trying to burst his bonds and cast away his cords. It is ours to understand and embrace the interpretive perspective of the biblical authors, to see the patterns in the narrative and then to align those with the patterns of our own experience: the seed of the woman could only come if women are saved through childbearing, and the human race will only continue if men and women embrace their created sexual identities, enter into marriage, and do together what God commanded in Genesis 1:28. The serpent hates the woman and her seed, and he hates Christ and his church.

To give an anecdotal illustration: Two girls in our church, an eleven-year-old and her fourteen-year-old sister, recently met girls their own ages in a public place. Both were asked by separate little girls on different occasions: “Do you like girls or boys?” These encounters took place, not in San Francisco or New York City, but in Louisville, Kentucky.
The loss of the givenness that, for instance, little girls will like little boys represents the successful destabilization of norms, or “hegemonic discourses,” as Antonio Gramsci terms them, whereby the assumption that little girls will like little boys can no longer be made. This “blurring of boundaries” is exactly what things like Drag Queen Story Hour are designed to achieve. The drag queens, by the way, have made it all the way to Jackson, Tennessee. The offensive and perverse sexualization of the public library is meant to call into question fixed categories of male and female. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay explain, Queer theorists hold that “we should believe sex, gender, and sexuality to be social constructs, not because it’s necessarily true, but because it is easier to politicize them and demand change if they are social constructs than if they are biological.”[3]
The water in which we swim is a toxic brew of Marxism, postmodern philosophy, and expressive individualism. It is an alternative religion, a false gospel, as has been observed:
Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith . . . a postmodern faith based on a dead God, which sees mysterious worldly forces in systems of power and privilege and which sanctifies victimhood.[4]
We must take our thoughts and our tastes captive by the knowledge of Christ. Here are the strongholds that need destroying. These are the lofty opinions and arguments raised up against the knowledge of God (2 Cor. 10:4–5). We must bring taste into line with the truth. We must disciple people so that they know the difference between the worldview of Critical Theory and Christianity. The formation of a Christian worldview requires a biblical-theological understanding of who we are and where we live, and biblical theology will also equip us to notice the typological patterns in the way the serpent and his seed keep trying the same things in new ways.
Biblical theology is the attempt to understand and embrace the interpretive perspective of the biblical authors.[5] That interpretive perspective, or worldview, has an overarching master story, from which those authors derive (1) truths, doctrines, and dogmas, (2) symbols, imagery, and patterns, and (3) values, ethics, and culture. In the Psalms and other expressions of worship (Exod. 15, the hymns in the New Testament, etc.), the liturgical expressions of worship reinforce the truths by activating symbols to build culture.
In other words, the master narrative explains where the world came from, who human beings are, what has gone wrong, and what God has done, is doing, and has promised to do to set things right in the end. Thus the master narrative inspires faith in God and provokes those who believe to respond to him with thanks and praise. The master narrative also generates symbolism and imagery that summarize, interpret, and portend what has been and will be. In the narrative we find recurring patterns whose significance escalates with each new repetition.[6] And the explanation given in the Bible for why God began the project, how he has orchestrated it and to what telos, is that God seeks to set the fullness of his glory on display. He does this as he makes known his character as a righteous God who upholds his own word when he judges, setting the backdrop and context for the simultaneous display of his character as a merciful God when he forgives and saves the repentant who believe. That is to say, the center of biblical theology is the glory of God in salvation through judgment.[7]
I rehearse this definition of biblical theology and its central claim to be grounded in God’s revelation of his own character because I want to set the biblical worldview in contrast with what seems to be the predominant worldview that informs the rejection of the Bible’s teaching on how human beings have been created male and female with specified responsibilities. Paul speaks of those who “depart from the faith” to embrace alternative worldviews that inform alternative ways of living as “devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared” (1 Tim. 4:1–2). Note that this comment follows hard on the heels of his statement that he does “not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man” (2:12), shortly after which he explains that he writes so that Timothy might “know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth” (3:15).
Carl Trueman explains how the Marxist worldview works:
Take, for example, Christianity’s teaching, taught from myriad pulpits over the years, that husbands and wives should be faithful to each other, should not drink too much, and should work hard and honestly for their masters or employers. A Christian might see these as imperatives because they are the will of God and the means by which human beings, made in his image, can flourish.
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