What is the Armor of God?

Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.

Today we come to the end of our look at the book of Ephesians.

We go one chapter a day through the Bible and we have now come to the sixth chapter of Ephesians and we're going to be focusing primarily on the verses that deal with the armor of God.

So if you have your Bible out, go ahead and open to Ephesians chapter 6 and turn with me to verse 11.

Here we have the command, In all circumstances take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God.

Praying at all times in the Spirit with all prayer and supplication to that end keep alert with all perseverance making supplication for all the Saints and also for me that words may be given to me and opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel for which I am an ambassador in chains that I may declare it boldly as I ought to speak.

This is coming to the end.

These are among the final words of the Apostle Paul and I remember very vividly the first time, and I think that it was in seminary, the first time I ever had anyone really explain to me how the armor of God symbolized each piece of the armor of God symbolized some area in the life and how that symbolized that particular area.

Now again because this is a short video I'm not going to have time to do a deep and in-depth study but I want to share with you what was shared with me because I found it helpful and I thought maybe you might find it helpful as well as we end out this book.

In the armor of God we see several pieces of the armor.

We see that he mentions first the belt of truth, then the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, and of course the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit.

Now something to mention just right off is that this is an analogy and it's not a perfect analogy but anytime we see an analogy we say well what what are we learning from the analogy and we need to also recognize that there are other places where the Apostle Paul references the armor of God where he uses a little different language.

So again not only is this an analogy but it's not an absolute analogy.

So just to be clear about that before I go into this don't press these analogies too far but use them for the purpose that they are given and remember that all of this is to remind us that there's a spiritual battle that's going on all around us all the time.

If we could see the things that were going on in the spiritual realm we would be amazed but we can't see those things.

But the Apostle Paul gives us here a reminder of how to fight those battles.

A lot of battles going on in the world right now.

A lot of a lot of things going on that we see.

A lot of things that we don't see.

How do we fight the battles? We fight the battles with the armor of God.

And he begins with the belt of truth.

Why truth represented as a belt? Well the reason why truth is represented as a belt is because truth is the thing that holds everything else together.

If you don't have the truth you don't have anything.

If you're believing in a lie if you're believing in something false then everything is going to fall apart.

What does the belt do? The belt holds everything together and so truth holds everything together and therefore there is the analogy.

And then he talks about the breastplate of righteousness.

Well what does the breastplate do? The breastplate protects your heart.

It's the part that protects your your vital area your most vital area.

Sort of like if you imagine the modern use of body armor by military or a bulletproof vest that's used by police officers.

It's the same concept.

It's a it's a breastplate.

It's designed to be a shield.

And as I understand it is protecting the heart.

And you can look at this one of two ways.

You could say well primarily my righteousness is not my own but I have a righteousness that comes from outside myself.

The Bible says I don't have a righteousness of my own by keeping the law but I have a righteousness which comes through faith in Christ.

So my righteousness is actually his righteousness.

And ultimately I think that is the primary way to consider this breastplate because if we try to comfort our hearts with our own righteousness one of two things is going to happen.

Either we're going to fall into despair or we're going to fall into pride.

But if we understand that our our hearts have been cleansed our souls have been cleansed by the work of Christ and our righteousness is his righteousness that will be a true guard for the heart.

Because will we fail? Yes.

Do we fail every day? But the righteousness of Christ will not fail.

And what do I want to guard my heart if not the righteousness of Christ? Now some people say well what he's talking about here is practical righteousness because if you want your heart to be if you want your heart to be essentially feeling good about itself then you want to live a practically righteous life.

And yes and no I think yes there is a sense in which if you're if you're constantly seeking to disobey if you're constantly living in disobedience then your heart is going to be exposed.

But at the same time I cannot rely on my own obedience I certainly cannot rely on my own righteousness and the righteousness that I have is the righteousness of Christ and that's my breastplate.

The next thing that he mentions he mentions the belt he mentions the breastplate and he mentions of all things shoes.

He says the shoes that are and it's kind of a strange sentence shoes for your feet having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace.

Again the language here is very interesting because basically he's saying the shoes that we wear are the shoes of the gospel.

How does that work? What does that even mean? I believe that what that's referencing is the fact that as Christians we are supposed to be taking the gospel everywhere that we go and the gospel of peace is what we we're ambassadors of the gospel of peace so therefore we're supposed to be wherever we walk wherever we go that's where the gospel is supposed to go.