There are certain Bible passages that are more popular than others because they distill truths from scriptures and are easy to remember. One if those is Ephesians 6:11-19 where Paul uses the metaphor of Roman armor to help visualize spiritual concepts. I have heard many sermons about this and even participated in a summer-long women’s Bible study about it. With so much talk, it seems like there would not be much to add, except that I feel that people are still missing point. Yes it’s a neat image, and yes it’s important memorize and even visualize scripture, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t actually do it.
Imagine this. You buy a brand new car. It has a perfect finish, a big powerful engine and leather seats. It’s awesome. You open up the glove compartment and find a book with a picture of you car on it—the owners manual. It’s so important, but its kind of thick and wordy. So, you get together with other owners of the same make and model of car. Together, you read your maintenance guides and use a dictionary to pick out tricky, technical jargon. You become an expert in the owners manual. In fact, other owners call you when something goes wrong. You memorize large portions and recite them at the weekly owners get togethers. The problem is that you never actually put any of your knowledge into practice. Although you know the maintenance schedule by heart, you find out it is pretty messy to change a car’s oil and transmission fluid. It’s also expensive to hire someone else. So you just don’t do it. Nobody in the car club knows. You fail to get the tires rotated and don’t condition your leather interior because it’s tedious and inconvenient. You want the prestige of car ownership without the time, cost or responsibility. After a while you own a gorgeous car with a seized up engine, bald tires and cracked leather.
The Bible is similar to an owners manual, it’s not the goal, but a road map to the goal. The purpose of studying the Bible is to live right before God and Man. So, the image of the full armor of truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation and the word is only helpful if you practice it.
The word “truth” has been especially abused recently. I just saw some local news station use it in their intro graphics. Gross. What does it mean to live out truth? It means you do what you say first and foremost, and then discipline yourself to seek out what is real and not just flattering. There are not alternate facts, just the whole truth. What is righteousness? Doing the right thing and standing up for justice even when it is costly and inconvenient. Peace means not seeking revenge, but figuring out how to live with others respectfully where everyone gets heard and their needs met. Faith is living out hope when things seem hopeless. Faith is planting a garden in the dark and rainy part of spring when your shoes get caked with mud. Faith is sitting with your friend who is going through a hard time and seeing through on your promises and obligations. Salvation comes by confessing your sins and not the sins of your neighbor. The Word of God is heal and reconcile, not scar and reject. And yet, so many people misuse scriptures so much that they have become a burden and not a blessing to the world. Nobody cares about a God who supposedly loves them if his followers actively reject them.
I read recently that American men idolize the Roman culture and dressing up like metaphorical soldier seems to play right into that. Paul wasn’t wanting us to emulate an operative of an oppressive regime, but the opposite. He urged us to have a pure character that gives us the strength to resist spiritual rot that would kill us from the inside out. We are preparing first to fight against the evil within before taking on the evil from without.
