EPHESIANS 6:10-12 PRINCETON CHRISTIAN CHURCH 06 OCTOBER 2024
Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Tuesday, June 6, 1944, 6:30 a.m.: 5,000 ships carrying 160,000 Allied Troops approached the southern beaches in France for the largest invasion in modern history, what we know now as D-Day.
Some of the men who survived the invasion said that they remember the steady stream of appeals being broadcast over the ship intercoms in the final minutes as the ships approached the French beaches.
• ‘Fight to get your troops ashore. Fight to save your ships. And if you’ve got any strength left, fight to save yourself.’
• ‘We may die on the sands of France, but we will never turn back.’
• Another one: ‘This is it. Pick it up. Put it on. You’ve got a one-way ticket, and this is the end of the line.’
Over 2,500 Americans died that day, many in a span of about 15 minutes. As the boats reached the shores, disembarking soldiers had to crawl over the bodies of other soldiers to get ashore.
Images like that make us grateful for the men and women who have given their lives for the cause of freedom, but I share it to emphasize that the men who approached the beach at Normandy that day had no delusions about what they were walking into. None of them thought they were going to an exotic beach in France for a vacation.
They knew they were walking headfirst into the onslaught of an enemy who wanted nothing more than to destroy them.
At the end of his letter to the church in Ephesus Paul pulls back the curtain on life and shows us that we are in the midst of a battle with an enemy no less fierce.
The tragedy is that many of us have no idea we are even in a battle.
We approach life as if it were a vacation rather than a war, like a playground rather than a battleground.
But it’s not. And you and I might wish all day long it were, but that doesn’t change the fact that we really are in a battle with a real enemy. And unless we wake up to that, we’ll probably end up as one of the casualties.
Those soldiers who showed up on that beach in France were prepared. They didn’t show up on D-Day with a beach towel and a rubber ducky, but that’s how many folks spiritually showed up for this battle—not equipped for the battle.
So, Paul starts his conclusion to the book of Ephesians by saying, “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, (not earthly powers) against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Ephesians 6:12
Let’s start here with the obvious: Paul believed in an unseen spiritual realm.
And, of course, Jesus did, too.
Jesus spent a substantial portion of his ministry in direct conflict with the demonic and summarized his whole ministry as “proclaiming liberty to captives”.
Captives, of course, imply that there is someone or something you are captive to.
So, Paul just picks up right where Jesus left off.
Throughout Ephesians, he refers to the believer’s life as a struggle, a fight, and warfare against evil forces.
He’ll end the letter to the church in Ephesus with a list of weapons we need to engage in that warfare.
C.S. Lewis said,
“When it comes to the demonic, people usually fall into one of two errors—Either they take him altogether too seriously or they don’t take him seriously enough.”
Maybe you’ve known some Christians who fit into that first category. They blame Satan for every inconvenient circumstance—a dead car battery, a traffic jam, a price increase at the grocery store – “bread is $3 a loaf.” And here’s the granddaddy of them all ---"Satan’s trying to ruin my budget so I can’t tithe.”
But others commit an equally dangerous error—they ignore him altogether. Not only does that ignore a significant theme in the Scriptures, but it also raises questions about whether what Jesus said is true.
Ignoring the demonic forces would be like storming the beaches of Normandy with no clue there was an enemy with machine guns pointed right at you!
But you know the truth – Satan could care less whether or not you believe in him,
because he’s not after your recognition; he’s after your eternal destruction.
In 2 Corinthians, Paul calls him “an angel of light,” which means he’ll transform himself into whatever form is best suited to deceive you, even if it means you mistake him for an angel of God. In fact, I am sure he jumps up and down with joy when someone sees him as an angel of God.
Peter says,
“Be alert and of sober mind because your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” Peter 5:8.
That tells us me two things:
• First, Satan is like a hunter, and hunters don’t want to be seen by their prey. Satan doesn’t want to be seen either.
• Second, Peter calls Satan a lion. Which means Satan is part of the cat family. Cats are known to pounce on people without notice.
But just because you can’t see him doesn’t mean he isn’t there.
In 1864, a physician named Ignaz Semmelweis stumbled onto a theory we now call ‘germ theory.’
In those days, everyone thought diseases would spontaneously generate in the body because there was something wrong with the body, like having too much blood or getting too hot or something like that.
So, doctors would go from patient to patient without ever washing their hands.
They might go from working on a person with a deadly disease to delivering a baby - which is why death rates in the hospitals were so incredibly high.
Semmelweis began to suspect that they were carrying diseases with them, in small particles invisible to the human eye. He didn’t know what to call them, so he called them “microbes,” literally “little pieces of flesh.”
The doctors wouldn’t accept the theory because the idea that all this destruction was caused by something you couldn’t see just seemed unbelievable to them.
It seems so obvious to us now, but nobody in those days thought that way.
He tested his theory by having just the interns wash their hands with water, and a little chlorine before delivering babies and found the mortality rates went down dramatically.
Many Christians are equally naïve when it comes to what’s happening in their lives because they are just as disbelieving of what they can’t see.
Although we can’t physically see Satan, if we just look around us, we can see evidence of the demonic everywhere.
I think all of us can look back at events in our lives and see how certain temptations were just too perfectly timed and specifically tailored for us for those times to have been merely coincidental.
Maybe the wrong person was put into your life at just the right time.
Or questions were planted in your head to throw you off track?
Or did the suspicion in your heart come at just the right time?
Or the perfect storm seemed to happen in your marriage?
Or maybe you can explain away all that—“Well, the reason my wife and I had these problems is because our personalities are not suited for each other,
Or “The reason I struggle with these temptations is because my dad did, too.”
All those events are us wrestling, not against flesh and blood, but against rulers,
authorities, and spiritual evil in high places.
God tells us about these things in Ephesians 6: 18 -To make us more alert.
When you recognize there is more to your temptations than lusts or doubts or relational problems, that an Enemy is strategizing your destruction, it will make you more aware.
It’s not just about lust, or weakness, or personality conflicts—
It is demonic. He comes for us when we are tired or when we are down.
He seduces us with the lusts of the flesh.
He’s there waiting for us when we have done well.
It is then that he whispers in our ears to try to puff us up by making us believe how awesome and special we are, how we have accomplished something fantastic without any help from that pesky God.
And so, Paul concludes his letter to the church in Ephesus – and to us - by reminding them/us of the presence of these spiritual forces in an attempt to turn them, once again, away from trusting in themselves.
He says, 6:10,13
“Finally, be strong in the LORD, and in the strength of his might… Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.
There are two important phrases there:
STAND FIRM
First, you can’t escape this fight: There are only two places in the Christian life from which Paul says a Christian can and should flee:
sexual immorality
and
the love of money.
Someone has said it this way: “When it comes to moneys and honeys, you get out of town.”
In other words – flee, run away from them!
Everywhere else, you have to learn to stand firm because you can’t escape.
But, in most situations, we have to learn to stand firm in the battle, not run away from it.
BE STRONG IN THE LORD AND IN THE STRENGTH OF HIS MIGHT Ephesians 6:10
This has nothing to do with your physical strength or power.
It is instead, about HIS might and power within you.
In fact, in this battle, your strengths are more often liabilities because those are the places and times when you forget to depend on God. And forget to lean on his strength.
If you feel weak and unqualified to engage in the spiritual realm, that’s a good thing because you are more likely to lean on God’s power in those places and in those times.
It is right that weakness is an advantage in the Christian life because dependence upon God is the objective.
If dependence upon God is the objective, then weakness is an advantage because those weaknesses are places where you most naturally depend on God.
You see, here’s something important to remember here:
In verse 11, Paul begins to tell us what we must have in our reach to combat the evil one.
These pieces of armor are not hindrances to us.
They are, in fact, ways of applying the Gospel Paul has written about in this letter to the church in Ephesus.
The more important idea is that
the Gospel should cover every part of your body and life because where the Gospel has fortified you, Satan cannot attack you.
Putting on those pieces is how you fulfill Paul’s command in vs. 10 - to be “strong in the Lord.”
You see, the gospel message that Paul has taught now in these 6 chapters is that you were weak, sinful, walking in darkness, and spiritually dead before God saved you.
You could only be saved when you realized that you didn’t have the strength to save yourself, and if you were going to be saved, HE was going to have to do it.
In the same way, you gain spiritual power when you realize, “I don’t have the ability to overcome Satan in my life. I am going to have to trust in God’s grace and power to do it.”
So, we are supplied with pieces of spiritual armor. And these are where we apply the gospel of dependence on God’s grace to an area of vulnerability or weakness in our lives.
This armor is available to us when we submit our lives to Jesus Christ, repent of our sins, confess Him as Lord, and are buried with Him in baptism.
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