Doves On Distant Oaks

The Full Armor of God

Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.–Ephesians 6:14-18

Much has been written about the armor that the apostle Paul suggests we wear to face our enemy. Paul uses the metaphor of a Roman soldier because, of course, that's what a soldier wore during the times in which he lived. However, we can compare it to the modern soldier as well. All soldiers wear combat gear and equipment depending on their need. Some carry the barest of essentials, designed to move quickly and strike quietly. Others are weighed down with a lot of equipment that, while it makes them move more slowly, brings more power to bear. Regardless, no one walks into a battle without some amount of battle-tested equipment, and neither should believers.

Like Paul, We can relate all these to what we need, as believers, to fight our enemy. But the focus is not on the equipment itself, but the function of those pieces of equipment to defeat the enemy, either as defensive or offensive weapons. Our defensive spiritual equipment includes truth, righteousness, reconciliation, faith, and salvation. We have only one offensive weapon, the Holy Spirit.

There is one aspect of modern combat gear and equipment that cannot be related to our spiritual weapons, that being camouflage. Just about everything in our modern armies are camouflaged. From uniforms to massive tanks, all are meant to hide among the terrain in which the fighting occurs. But the Roman soldier needed no camouflage. Everyone knew when Roman legions were coming. There was no need to camouflage their soldiers, mainly because they thought they were invincible. History tells us they were not, but in their arrogance they stuck to the straight-on approach. They had an attitude of "Here we are, defeat us if you can."

The spiritual warrior requires no camouflage either, but not out of arrogance, but by choice. In fact, those who camouflage their belief are not bearing fruits of the Spirit like God intends for us. We are often admonished to acknowledge our relationship with God, not to straddle the fence, and let our light shine. This is not because we cannot be defeated ... many times we are. It's because in whom our faith resides. Our Lord is the one who cannot be defeated, and that is the source of our confidence, why we need no camouflage. We need not strut out of arrogance, but we need not fear and hide from the battle we all must fight.