besides all these, taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one. 17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Eph. 6:16,17
This group of verses that I have been meditating on deals with our battle in this world is not with unbelievers but rather the power behind them. In Edge of Tomorrow, my favorite Tom Cruise movie, the world was battling drone aliens and losing badly, but thanks to the blood of an alpha being spilled on him as he was dying, the day kept being reset allowing Tom Cruise to become a better fighter and leading him eventually to the Omega alien, the controlling force behind the drones and alphas. His ultimate battle was against the Omega rather than all the others. The same principle was seen in Matrix 3 where if Neo defeated Agent Smith all the other robots would stop their invasion and also in Game of Thrones where if the Night King was defeated, all the white walkers would stop. You see, Hollywood understands this principle that there is an ultimate evil controlling force in this world and it is Satan and our fight is with him rather than people.
Satan has several plans of attack. We saw previously that if he can get us to be quiet either by isolation or fear of being different, he has neutralized us and he can move on to other targets. If he can destroy us by ruining our righteousness or testimony by succumbing to his temptations to sin, we will become ineffective and our light goes out. If he gets us to believe we have our truth and they have theirs and lets just get along, he has wiped us out.
In this passage, Satan wants us to lose our faith - to doubt our salvation. If he can do that we won't pray, we won't value the Word of God, we won't witness - in all, we won't be a problem for him. Do you have doubts about the truth of Christianity? Lately it seems teachers are encouraging us saying, "It's OK to doubt. Everyone doubts. Look at Jesus in Gethsemane. Look at Gideon's fleece. Look at the disciples going back to fishing and cowering in a room not believing the women's testimony. Look at the prayer meeting for Peter's release from prison. It's normal to doubt." I'd rather hear preachers quoting Jesus saying to Thomas, "Stop doubting and start believing!", and then addressing these doubts to melt doubts into shields. One original quote I have (to quote myself, ha-ha) "I'm 99% sure that the gospel and Bible are true but I'm 100% sure that the devil put that 1% of doubt in my mind." There is tons of internet content available to help you doubt your doubts from Mike Winger and the Bible Thinker to Cliff Knechtle and his son doing apologetics answering kids on college campuses shoot the same flaming arrows of the devil at them.
Lastly, how well do you know your Bible? Did you know that Satan can destroy you with God's word? He succeeded with Eve and he failed with Jesus. With Eve he said, "Did God really say?" and he distorted God's words and she bit. With Jesus, he misquoted a Psalm and Jesus didn't fall for it. God's word has power to fight Satan. In the aforementioned Game of Thrones the Night King couldn't be hurt by anything except dragon glass. Everything else was ineffective. In the same way, the Bible is the only weapon that works. It's amazing how little we know it. Satan loves that and even tries to get us to lessen its value by doubting Genesis, authorship, translation errors, relevance of Old Testament, Paul expressing opinions vs. inspiration, etc. I even wonder if 90% of the body coming to Church without a physical Bible but having the App on their electronic device is devaluing the Bible. Am I just showing my age? Maybe - maybe not.
Are you a force to be reckoned with or are you on the bench sidelined? We need warriors. pick up your Bible and let's go!
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