God Doesn't Need Armor

This is the passage the hyper-charismatic warriors love. Everybody quotes it. Ask most of them what it actually means, and you get the same look, eyes wide as a full moon, nobody quite sure what they just said. I rarely quote Ephesians 6:10-20 myself, and I don't volunteer it, mainly because I'm not sure I understand it well enough to explain it well.

The trouble starts at verse 11. Put on the whole armor of God.

So God's got armor, apparently. God's got an armory. Somewhere there is a counter, and you walk up and say, I'd like some armor. The clerk asks what kind. You say, well, I'd like the armor of God. Small, medium, or large. If you're anything like me, you say I'll take the 3X. He disappears in the back and comes out with this enormous box, stenciled on the side, Armor of God, 3X. You think, well, there it is, exactly what the Bible told me to get. The clerk asks if you need help putting it on, and you say no. I read the Bible. It just says put it on. I'll open the box myself.

Or maybe it means something else entirely. Maybe we are supposed to ask God directly: excuse me, if you are not using your armor today, could I borrow it. We don't walk around in it all the time. We're not knights clanking through the grocery store. Even actual knights didn't live in their armor. After the tournament was over, I doubt they lounged around the castle in full steel. I imagine they slipped into a robe and some of those curled-up pointy slippers and sat by the fire without a breastplate anywhere in sight.

Here's the real problem underneath the joke. God doesn't need armor. He is not out there ducking fiery darts from the devil. The devil knows better than to even try. Those darts might leave the bow, but that's as far as they're going. They'll never reach God, and if they got anywhere close, they'd disintegrate faster than a snowball in July. There's no armor sitting around for us to borrow from him, not literally. Which means the real question is not what the box looks like. The real question is, whose armor is this, and why does Paul say it belongs to God in the first place.

That question actually has an answer, and it's not a joke. Isaiah 59:17 says God himself put on righteousness like a breastplate and a helmet of salvation on his head. Isaiah 11:5 has righteousness and faithfulness as a belt around the Messiah's waist. Paul is not inventing a costume for Christians in Ephesians 6. He's picking up language Isaiah already used for God's own gear and telling the church in Ephesus: this armor was never yours to design. It's his. You're being dressed in it. It's not human armor with God's name stamped on the side like a sponsorship. It's armor that was already God's, now given to you.

We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12). If it were just flesh and blood, plenty of us could handle that on our own most days. This is bigger than that, and I think that's exactly why Paul doesn't leave us to improvise our own gear. Nobody improvises a defense against cosmic powers.

I hope you'll forgive the facetious part. It is a real problem I have with this passage, and I suspect a lot of other people have it too. A verse everybody quotes and nobody can explain doesn't help anybody. The whole point of writing this down was to help somebody, myself included.

Ephesians 6:14-17 gives it as a belt, then breastplate, then shoes, then shield, then helmet, then sword. That's the order right there in the text, and it settles itself once you go back and read it slowly instead of quoting it from memory.

The belt of truth. On a Roman soldier, the belt was not decoration. It cinched the tunic tight so his legs were free to move fast, and it was where the sword hung, ready to hand. Take the belt away and everything else gets loose, clumsy, hard to reach when you need it. Truth as a belt works the same way, holding the rest of your life tight enough that you can actually move when it counts, and close enough at hand that you can reach for what you need in a hurry. Not truth as a slogan you post somewhere. Truth as the thing keeping the whole man from sagging apart the moment life pushes on him.

The breastplate protected a soldier's most important organs, the heart above all. Paul isn't talking about your own righteousness here, because you don't have any worth wearing into battle. Philippians 3:9 is Paul again, saying he wants to be found in Christ, not with a righteousness of his own that comes from the law, but the righteousness that comes through faith in Christ. The thing guarding your heart in the middle of temptation, or accusation, or just an honest look at how far short you've fallen that day, isn't your own record. It's Christ's righteousness, credited to you. I didn't earn that plate of armor. None of us did. That's the defense. Not that I performed well enough today, but that the righteousness covering my chest was never mine to begin with and cannot be stripped off by my own bad day.

The shoes. Verse 15 calls them the readiness given by the gospel of peace. A Roman soldier's sandals had studs built in for traction, so he wouldn't slip in the middle of a fight. Readiness here is peace with God, Romans 5:1, which gives you stable footing when everything else is shifting. It connects to spreading the gospel too, since readiness to speak is part of having your feet under you. The footing itself is the peace, not just the errand.

The shield of faith. People sometimes hear "shield" and think cowering, as if bravery only looks like moving forward. But the Roman scutum was not a little round buckler you ducked behind. It was a large, curved shield, door-sized, and soldiers locked them edge to edge so one man's shield covered part of the man standing next to him too. Standing your ground under a barrage of flaming arrows, without breaking formation, takes more nerve than charging does. Verse 16 says the shield can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one, and I don't think that's cowering. I think that is holding a line that was worth holding, alongside other believers, not alone.

The helmet of salvation. 1 Thessalonians 5:8 calls it the hope of salvation as a helmet. What gets protected is the mind, above all against despair, against the moments where doubt about whether you actually belong to God starts working on you. The certainty of your own salvation is what guards your head from that.

The sword of the Spirit. Hebrews 4:12 calls the word of God living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing all the way to the division of soul and spirit, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. That is the one offensive weapon on the whole list. Everything else, belt, breastplate, shoes, shield, helmet, is defensive.

Look at the verbs Paul uses around all of it. That you may be able to stand, verse 11. That you may be able to withstand, and having done all, to stand firm, verse 13. Stand therefore, verse 14. Four times, stand. This is not a passage about charging anywhere. It is about holding ground that was already secured for you, with one weapon in hand for when you need to speak.

I've heard it said that this armor has nothing to do with the external self, that it's all the spirit man. I think that's half right. The battle is spiritual, no question about it. Verse 12 makes that plain. But I would push back on "nothing to do with the external self," because righteousness and truth and peace and faith are supposed to show up in how you actually treat the people in front of you, not stay locked inside somewhere private. I don't think Paul draws that hard a line between the inner man and the outer man the way we sometimes want to.

After all six pieces of armor, Paul does not end on the soldier standing there fully dressed. He ends with prayer. Praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication, keeping alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints. Then he asks for prayer himself, that words would be given him to make the gospel known boldly, for which he's an ambassador in chains.

He's writing this from a cell, likely chained at that very moment to the soldier whose gear he's just spent eight verses describing. What he asks prayer for isn't release. It's boldness to keep preaching from right where he is.

I am 80 years old. I've walked with the Lord about 40 of those years now. I still have to ask myself honestly, if I were the one in chains, would I spend my last bit of boldness asking for comfort, or would I spend it the way Paul did?