Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Mark Daniels: Welcome to Hear the Word of God, the online and broadcast teaching ministry of the Reverend Eric Alexander. Let's join Reverend Alexander as he continues his series on Ephesians chapter 6.

Eric Alexander: The subject is the Christian's warfare and the Christian's armor. Let me say to you again this evening that in terms of practical day-to-day Christian living, I know of nothing that is more important for the Christian than a grasp, a firm and sure grasp, of the teaching of such a passage as this. I hope that it may stimulate us to think a great deal more about Christian warfare, about the enemy, the strategy God has revealed to us in Scripture, and about the victory that is ours so clearly in Christ.

I mentioned books last time on the subject of the Christian warfare. Let me say to you this evening that if you have a bit more time perhaps than usual, there is nothing more profitable that you could get than the two volumes of Dr. Lloyd-Jones’ series on Ephesians. One is on the Christian warfare and the other on the Christian soldier, I think. I commend these very warmly to you. You would also need a little bit more money than you would for the rest of those that I'm going to recommend to you this evening.

There are two booklets which you will find on our own book rack this evening, both published by the Didasko Press, which publishes material from Scottish ministries. One is by the Reverend George Philip from Glasgow on Kingdom Against Kingdom. It's an excellent study in this subject. Then the Reverend William Still from Aberdeen has a booklet entitled Biblical Teaching on the Devil, which I very warmly commend to you. What I really want to commend to you this evening is the quite excellent chapter in the newest book to hit the evangelical world in the last spell, Sinclair Ferguson's book entitled Add to Your Faith, which has a quite excellent chapter on the Christian warfare. I do very cordially recommend that to you.

Now with the commercials over, let me recollect for you that last time, we dealt with the warfare of which Paul speaks in a general sense. First of all, we dealt with the fact of it, that it is real and not imaginary. This warfare in which we are engaged as Christians is the most real experience in our Christian pilgrimage. Christians of all kinds, all ages, and stages discover the reality of this warfare, usually sooner rather than later in their Christian living.

The reason, of course, is that the Christian warfare and the fact of it derive from the work of grace which God accomplishes in the life of the Christian. That work of grace does two things and never separates them. One is it reconciles you to God, from whom previously you had been estranged as an enemy. The other thing it does is to antagonize you to Satan, with whom you had previously been reconciled.

These two things always happen in a genuine Christian experience. Because you have been released out of the devil's prison house, you are able to say with Wesley, “Long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin and nature's night. Thine eye diffused a quickening ray. I woke; the dungeon flamed with light. My chains fell off; my heart was free. I rose, went forth, and followed thee.” Immediately you rise to go forth to follow Jesus, the devil is in pursuit because he regards you as an escaped prisoner. His work is to harass and pursue you, to trouble and distress you, to turn you away from following after Him.

That is the fact that we really do need to face. There is so much confusion and so much of our disablement in Christian life and service which is caused by our failure to face the fact of this warfare. The sphere in which it is engaged is the sphere that Paul describes as the heavenly places. He says we are contending in verse 12 against flesh, not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, world rulers of this present darkness, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

The interesting thing is that in the first chapter of Ephesians, that is the very sphere in which we are blessed with every spiritual blessing. God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. The very sphere in which we are most richly blessed is the sphere in which we enter into the deepest conflict.

That is why the reality of this warfare, the harassment of the devil, circumstances, and situations where you are aware of the fact that he is pursuing you are not an evidence that there's something wrong in your Christian life. They are not an evidence that you're far away from God. They may well be the very evidence that you are in the place of blessing because the sphere of the warfare is the heavenly places. I forget who it was who said, “He who stands near to the King is a target for the archers,” but it's true. This is the sphere where the arena of greatest blessing brings us into the sphere where the conflict is at its fiercest.

The nature of the conflict, we thought about briefly last time, is against principalities and powers, mustering their unseen array, as the hymn says. It's a conflict with one who is described in a rather fearsome list of phrases in the Bible: the prince of the power of the air, the prince of darkness, the strong man Jesus speaks of him as, the accuser, Satan, the devil, that serpent. The phrases are loaded with a sense of the fearsomeness of his power.

Paul says we are not wrestling against ordinary enemies like flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, the world rulers of this present darkness, and the spiritual hosts of wickedness. He is piling phrase upon phrase to convince us of the seriousness of this conflict. That is why you see when we are simply playing at Christian soldiers, or as Mr. Duncan was saying last weekend, when we are just chocolate soldiers, we will discover that we are unable to be in such a warfare victoriously because this is a real battle against a moral power who leads men into captivity.

It is against an intellectual power who blinds the minds of those who believe not and operates in the minds of men and women to discredit God and His gospel, and a subtle, cunning power deceiving the very elect. It is a very interesting thing that the mythical figure of the dragon is the figure that's used in the Book of Revelation to describe the devil. The dragon, of course, is not a real animal. He is a mythical picture of great ugliness and ferocity, and on the other hand, great strength and power.

The Bible brings these two ideas together in this picture to produce for us not some strange and fictional thought of some horned creature with a tridentine tail who is the joke figure, but the figure of a spiritual supernatural ferocious power who, like a roaring lion, is out to devour us. You see the difficulty the Bible writers have in describing him.

This evening, I want us to concentrate for the rest of our time on the resources that God has given us for waging this warfare. You will notice how the apostle speaks of them. In verse 10, he says, “Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might.” In other words, the strength that we have to enable us to wage this warfare is not human strength.

That's a great encouragement because it means that some of us who regard ourselves as weak and poor creatures of God are able to take courage from this word of God to recognize that the feeblest saint can win the day because it is being strong in the Lord and in the power of His might that we are able to overcome. The believer does not wage this warfare at his own charges, as the apostle says. He does not go to it with carnal weapons. He does not rest on the arm of the flesh, for the arm of flesh will fail you.

He trusts in the resources that God has made available to him. In the glory of all that God is to the believer, the name of the Lord is a strong tower. The righteous runneth into it and is safe. It is in the victory that God has achieved for us in Jesus. Now, says the apostle, “Take therefore the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.”

“Stand therefore,” verse 14, “having your loins girded with truth.” I want us to look at some of the details of this armor more closely this evening, and at this first piece particularly: loins girt about with truth. These are the pieces of armor that we are to take to put on. The first of them is this rather strange picture of having our loins girt about with truth.

The phrase is really a reference to what the soldier would do in order to prepare for the battle. Indeed, I think Sinclair Ferguson in his chapter expounding this particular passage divides the armor into that which is preparatory and that which is military. This is clearly a preparatory piece of armor because what the soldier did when he girded his loins around was really to prepare himself for battle.

This was not actually part of the equipment to fight with. It was the thing that made fighting possible, if you like. It was the armor of God that was put on, as it were, on top of this, and this is the basic requirement. It's a figure of speech that Jesus uses in another connection. Do you remember in Luke's Gospel, “Let your loins be girded about,” he says, “and your light burning.”

It's a reference, of course, to what people did with flowing Eastern clothing, which was unsuitable for traveling in as it was and was very unsuitable for fighting in. So you had to gird it up. This belt or girdle of which the apostle speaks is the instrument by which the clothing was got ready for action. It is a piece of counsel which is really to say, “Don't be caught out unprepared. Be ready for the battle.”

There is something that you have to do in order to be ready to fight this warfare. If you are caught unprepared, then you will never be able to battle. But this girding up of the loins with truth is the way to prepare. So it seems that the Christian's relationship to truth is the standpoint from which he will be able to engage in spiritual warfare. The question is: what then is the truth with which our loins are to be girded?

You may know that there is a clear division of view that people have on this because the word truth can either mean genuineness as opposed to unreality, falsehood as opposed to sincerity, a lack of reality, or on the other hand, the word can mean truth as we think of it in the truth of God. There is no question that inner reality, the kind of reality that David spoke about when he said to God and was crying to God about his own condition because he had been disabled by sin, he said, “Thou desirest truth in the inward parts.”

It's that of which the apostle is certainly speaking in one sense. But that can never be divorced, I would suggest to you, from the ministry of the Word and the ministry of the truth of God in our daily lives for the simple reason, you see, that the way to inner reality is just to allow the whole truth of God, what the apostle Paul calls in the chapter we read in Acts 20 this morning, the whole counsel of God, to be applied to the whole of our life.

That's the road to inner reality. There is no kind of psychological means of achieving inner reality. The way to be real through and through is to let the whole truth of God touch every area of your life. I'll tell you how we become unreal, you see. We become unreal inwardly when we allow God's truth to touch one area of our life but not another, when we say to him, “Now I am ready to receive your Word to me here, but not here. Keep that area out.” And so there is one area of our life where we are suffering from unreality. We have to hide that away from God and from other people too.

So to be girded with truth is so to let the whole counsel of God touch the whole of our life that we discover there is no area of life that we are not ready to let that white light of the Word of God penetrate in. Now that's of great importance because, you see, there is nothing that disables you for Christian warfare more than unreality, than some area of your life that you've got to hide from God. The pretense that can so easily come into our lives and is more concerned with our reputation than with the truth about us.

That's a very real thing when you get involved in the service of God, you know, whether you're more interested in the impression you make than in the man or woman you are. It is terribly, terribly easy to have this unreality, but the way out of it is to let the whole counsel of God from the whole Word of God penetrate the whole personality of the man of God. That's how men of God are made.

That's why it's so important for us to have a whole Bible, a whole Christ, for the whole life, so that nothing's excluded from it. Do you have little private areas that you have excluded God from? May I dare to ask you this evening? Little corners which God is shut out from? You know there are things you are ready to listen to that God will say, but there are areas where you don't want God to interfere. Now that's the way into unreality.

You will see how the two meanings of the word for truth are linked together: the whole truth of God for the whole of life. But it's an interesting thing if you notice how significantly the devil acts on this whole realm of unreality and half-truth. It's a very significant thing that the very ethos in which he works, you see, is this realm of half-truth and subtle cunning. Whenever we become subtle, cunning people who are more concerned with the impression that we are giving than with the truth about ourselves, we are becoming like the devil, so we will never be able to battle against him, for this is exactly what the devil is like.

Let me read to you some words of somebody I was quoting this morning. Those of you who were here this morning will recognize that I've been reading Helmut Thielicke recently. Here he is a German, as you would guess from his name. He is in Hamburg and he has written some very penetrating things about spiritual warfare. He says, “The tempter never whispers to us, ‘Come on, I'll teach you a sin and destroy you.’ If he did, we would immediately recoil. Instead, he says to us, ‘Come on, I want to give you a fascinating experience. You have no idea what life has to offer following me. Do you want to miss the best, the most exciting things in life?’”

“So with the most friendly and ingenuous words in the world, he invites us to step onto a trapdoor that looks like a parquet floor, and not until much later do we realize that we have stepped onto the abyss because, you see, the evil one comes disguised, pretending to be what he is not, pretending to have a care and an interest, even a deep pastoral interest in you, and he is hiding the truth.”

So, says Paul, before you set out on this warfare, be girded about with truth. But let me emphasize something else before we pass from this. It does seem to me that there are certain truths we need to buckle on especially for Christian warfare. There are certain truths of Scripture and of the counsel of God that we particularly need to belt on in order that we may be in a position from which we will be able to wage war. Let me mention one of them simply to you because I don't have time for the others that I've noted down here, but the one is important and it's this: that Satan's power is limited by God.

That's one of the vital things we need to grasp in spiritual warfare: that Satan's power is limited by God. It's part of the doctrine of the sovereignty and supremacy of God. High above all principalities and powers, even the devil is under His ultimate control. It's vital for us to grasp this. It's not grasping this, you see, that makes some people more Satan-conscious than God-conscious, and that's a great error. You dare not be more Satan-conscious than God-conscious. The Christian's great business is not to be obsessed with Satan, but to be obsessed with God.

Now here is how we know that Satan's power is limited by God. It's all through Scripture, but let me give you one of the greatest examples of it in the Book of Job. In Job chapter 2 and verse 6, for example, you discover that Job is at the very beginning of this time of remarkable testing which he went through. You will remember how Satan comes to God. What he's actually doing in the second chapter of Job is to apply to God for permission to test Job in a certain way.

“There was a day,” chapter 2, verse 1, “when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the Lord. And the Lord said to Satan, ‘Whence have you come?’ Satan answered the Lord, ‘From going to and fro upon the earth and from walking up and down on it.’ And the Lord said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job?’”

Now here is a man who went through the toils. Murder of every kind hit his soul, as one commentator says. He went through the toils, this man Job, and yet do you see who he is? God says to Satan, “Have you thought about Job, my servant? Have you seen him? Have you considered his life?” Oh, my friends, what a thing to have a life that God brandishes in the face of Satan and says, “Have you considered my servant? Have you thought about him?”

Satan says to God, “Skin for skin. All that a man has he will give for his life. But put forth thy hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face.” The Lord said to Satan, “Behold, he is in your power.” In other words, He hands him to him, as it were, for testing, sifting, trial, and temptation, to go through some fierce agonies. But you notice the last four words of verse 6 of Job chapter 2. “Only,” he says, “spare his life.”

Now Satan went out that day and Job, as it were, was in Satan's hands, but there was an area which God had put limits around. God said to him, “You may do this and you may do that, but stop there. That's the barrier. You can't go any further than that. Don't touch this area of my servant's life.” Throughout the whole of the first part of Job, read it for yourself. This is one of the things you discover: God is putting the barrier. It is God who raises His hand and says to Satan, “Enough.”

The apostle Paul takes that up in 1 Corinthians chapter 10, verse 17, when he says, “God will not allow you,” says my brothers and sisters, “God will not allow you to be tested above what you are able to bear.” He will not let it happen. It is God who says, “That's enough,” and at that point, Satan cannot move another finger. Now that's immensely important and we greatly need to grasp it: that Satan's power is limited by God. God is greater than Satan. Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world, says the Epistle of John. And this is the encouragement. This is the truth we need to buckle on—certain truths that are especially relevant to Christian warfare. Satan's power is limited by God.

Here is the second piece of armor that we are to be clad in, and it is the breastplate of righteousness. Stand therefore having girded your loins with truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness. Now this is an essential piece of armor, of course, because the breastplate protects the heart. That's why it's such a vital piece of armor because what the enemy was constantly trying to do was to aim for the heart. Satan is out to destroy God's people, and he is aiming for the heart.

Now what is the heart of the matter, if we may change the phrase a little, that Satan seeks to attack and assault when he is seeking to harass and destroy God's people? Well, what the apostle is here referring to as he speaks of the breastplate of righteousness is the utterly central issue, as vital as the heart is to the body, of the sufficiency of Christ's righteousness for the believer.

Some people have sometimes suggested, and you may see it in some of the commentaries, that it is the righteousness of moral character that the apostle is speaking of. But I don't really think that is true, and neither does Sinclair Ferguson, may I say. I think that he is speaking here of that righteousness of Christ, which is the believer's sufficiency for salvation. Let me say to you that satanic attack is so often precisely here.

It happens like this: you may feel that you have been something of a failure as a Christian. You may even have been something of a failure as a Christian. The devil fastens upon that immediately. Like a leech, he fastens upon it. He begins to nag and nag and nag about that, about your failure, about your weakness, about this or that area of your life where you are all too conscious that you are weak and cast down.

Ultimately, it becomes almost the only thing that you can think about until Satan has begun to convince you that you're really not a Christian at all. He erodes every sense of reality that you have had. He concentrates on this so much and depresses you so much. Then he begins to say, “Now feeling like that, you can't possibly have any assurance of faith, do you? You don't. Now how can you possibly be a Christian?” And he begins to assault and attack you on that level.

Now the basic thing that he is really assaulting—and we need to identify what the warfare is all about—is this: he is really assaulting us on this question of what is a Christian? How do you become a Christian? What is it that makes a man acceptable with God? That's the fundamental question of life, beloved. I hope you have grasped this: that there is nothing that is more fundamental, there is nothing that is more basic than this issue: what is it that makes a man acceptable with God? Have you settled that? Are you sure about this? Do you know it? Because one day, it's going to be the great issue that will ring round the universe when the Lord Jesus returns in glory.

What is it that makes a man acceptable with God? Basically, there are two and only two possible answers. Either it is something that I have done or achieved or may hope to achieve in the future, or it is something that God has done and God has achieved, that only God could achieve, in Jesus Christ by His death and resurrection. It is, in other words, either my righteousness which I have achieved, or it is God's righteousness which He has provided in Christ.

Now these are the only two answers to this question of what makes a man acceptable with God. It rests either on my righteousness or on Christ's. Now there is nothing in the world that we need to be clearer on than the answer to this question. Are you absolutely clear on what makes a man acceptable with God? Do you find yourself at one with the words of the hymn we sometimes sing: “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. I dare not trust my sweetest frame but wholly lean on Jesus’ name. On Christ the solid rock I stand; all other ground is sinking sand.” Do you really identify with that this evening?

My dear friends, may I say to you, because there are always people coming into this church who are not clear on this issue: is that really where you stand this evening for the sake of your eternal well-being? Do you stand resting on the righteousness of Jesus, or have you some hope that something you ever can become or do is going to be the means of satisfying God? “Jesus, thy blood and righteousness, my beauty are, my kingly dress.”

This is the ground on which the believer stands. When Satan comes, he has to take the breastplate of Christ's righteousness and cover his heart with it and cry out to the devil that he will not be moved from this ground. “Here I stand, God help me,” and He will, if that's where you're standing. You see, the easiest thing in the world is to be moved away from that ground.

Or let me put it another way. Satan may come as the accuser in a somewhat different guise. He may come, for example, as is a common tactic, to the back door of your mind and he may slip a thought in, some foul thought, some unworthy thought, something that makes you ashamed and embarrassed. Or he may put some false low motive into your mind and heart. He may inject something that's really satanic.

Then he comes round to the front door of your mind and he says, “Excuse me, but what is a Christian like you doing with a thought like that? How can someone like you be a Christian with that kind of thing harbored away in your mind? You can't really be a Christian, can you, because Christians are not people like this? You see, they are not the kind of people who have that kind of thing.” Now how do you deal with that kind of attack? How do you face him?

Well, the answer the apostle gives us is with the breastplate of righteousness, that is of Christ's righteousness as my shield against the devil. Do you know John Newton's great hymn, “Approach my soul the mercy seat,” where he speaks of this very kind of accusation? He says, “I may my fierce accuser face and tell him...” Now what do you tell him? That's the really vital thing. What do you tell him?

Do you tell him, “Now you're exaggerating. When you come with this accusing, nagging voice, I'm not nearly so bad as you're making me out to be, and besides, there are a whole lot of other things that I could put in the other side of the balance.” Oh, no, you say to him, “I acknowledge all the things that you're speaking about and the source from which they ultimately come. In me, that is in my flesh, there dwells no good thing. But blessed be God, I have no confidence in the flesh. My confidence is in Christ and His righteousness and His finished work.”

On this ground, I stand and will not be moved. As Luther says, you thrust the cross of Jesus in his face and he will flee. That's how you resist the devil. Now, my dear friends, have you rested on this? Have you rested on Christ's righteousness as the believer's absolute sufficiency? “Ah,” but you say—but there's no “but” to that. There's no addition to the righteousness of Jesus. That's the sole ground of the believer's hope. And the great question is: are you resting? Are you resting on it?

Let me just call your attention to the third of these pieces of armor. You guessed, of course, when we began that we wouldn't finish them tonight. I hope you don't think I'm going to finish them tonight. That could produce many kinds of apoplexy. Let me just turn with you to the third, and with this we finish. “Your feet shod,” he says, “with the equipment of the gospel of peace,” or the “readiness,” as the New International Version has it, “of the gospel of peace.”

Now that seems to refer in some way to steadfastness and resoluteness because the shoes, the boots, or whatever they were that the Roman soldier wore—and people have various views on this—they do seem to have been the kind of shoes that were studded to give two things. They gave stability in the fight. So again and again you get this word “stand.” “Having done all, stand, stand against the wiles of the devil.” The reason you are able to stand is that you have gospel shoes on. That's the principle.

Somebody said the gospel shoes are to keep you from getting cold feet, and I suppose really that's very true. It's to enable you to have stability in the fight, but it is also to enable you to have mobility in the battle because the shoes that the soldier wore in the battle were shoes that gave him mobility. They didn't drag him down. They enabled him to move swiftly.

Really, these are the two areas that most people think the apostle is speaking about here. Some have thought that it was the assurance which comes from the gospel of peace, of having peace with God, and therefore the peace of God. This is an essential element in facing the evil one who seeks to destroy our peace so often, does he not?

It also refers, as people have thought, to the gospel shoes being for the sake of carrying the gospel in terms of witness to others. That certainly is borne out by Scripture, such as the prophecy, “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace.” It speaks of the mobility in going to take the gospel to other people. But the two are really held together, you see, because the shoes which give us the stability which comes from the gospel of peace, giving us the assurance of peace with God, is an assurance that applies both to our stability and to our mobility for witnessing.

A lack of assurance of salvation produces instability in our Christian living, doesn't it? When people are not sure, they become unstable. They're uncertain and they become unstable also, and there is an instability about the person who has a lack of assurance. But it also produces a silence in witness because you can't bear witness about something that you're not sure of.

I was having that very problem on Tuesday. I had a policeman at the door the other day—not a frequent happening at the manse, I may say—but he came to the door and said to me, “I have a summons for you.” I wondered where I'd been parking that I ought not to have done, and the policeman said, “You're required to appear at Dumfries Sheriff Court at 10:00 on Tuesday morning as a witness to an accident that I'd forgotten all about that took place ages ago.” I'm going to have some difficulty about not just being silent because I'm not assured of the truth. When you're not sure, it produces silence in witness as well as instability in character.

That's why the apostle says, “Get the gospel shoes on then.” It flows on from the previous piece of armor of the breastplate of righteousness, you see. God wants His people to rest in this knowledge that they have peace with God through Jesus Christ, that being justified by faith, we have peace with God. Not we hope for it, but we have it. The gospel which proclaims peace is a gospel which gives us this grounding of assurance.

Oh, my dear friends, how greatly we need to have this in our own lives, this assurance that will produce steadfastness and resoluteness. We greatly need to cry to God for this, that He will set us resting on the right foundation, that He will put us upon Christ crucified, on His finished work and righteousness alone, with nothing added, so that we may say, “Here I stand.”

Is that where you stand this evening? If you were to go out of this world tonight, as well as out of this church, is that where you would be standing, on Christ the solid rock? Well, if that's so, then you can have a steadfastness and resoluteness in the world. God knows how much we are needing Christian men and women who have this resoluteness, who have to stand for something in the world. Stand up for Jesus, we're going to sing presently. Are you standing in the right place this evening?

Have you come onto that ground, the gospel ground, at all? Because I do want to plead with you with all my heart that you will get onto gospel ground tonight if you've never done it before. That is, get to Jesus, rest on Jesus. “I lay my sins on Jesus, the spotless Lamb of God,” and rest on Him through all eternity. You will have peace, stability, security, and victory over the devil. Let's pray together.

Lord our God, we thank Thee for furnishing us with such glorious armor. We remember that the Lord Jesus Himself fought the powers of darkness clad in that very armor. We bless Thee for the glorious victory which He has obtained, not for Himself, but for us. He has given us the victory and we glory in it this evening, not with any empty triumphalism, but with the glad assurance of the children of God. We pray that Thou wilt take us out to be victors for Christ's sake. Amen.

Mark Daniels: You're listening to Hear the Word of God with the Reverend Eric Alexander, a minister in the Church of Scotland for over 50 years. To access more Bible teaching from Reverend Alexander, visit hear the word of god dot o-r-g, where your generous contribution will help us sustain and grow this ministry. That's hearthewordofgod.org. You could choose instead to mail a check to this address: 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 17601. Or call 1-800-488-1888. This program is a presentation of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. I'm Mark Daniels. Thank you for listening. Please join us again next time for Eric Alexander and Hear the Word of God.