Hold the Hill

Welcome! Today we continue our series on spiritual warfare, called The War. The overall message of this series is that we are indeed in a war, and that God has provided instructions in Scripture for us on how to not only survive but be victorious in this war. Our main text for the series in Ephesians 6:10-18, but we are also looking at many other supporting passages as well.

Our past messages have taken us through Ephesians 6:10-12. By way of context and review, here are these verses:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. – Eph. 6:10-12

These verses tell us quite a bit about The War. We are told who our enemy is – it’s not a particular person or group of people; in fact, it’s not a human being at all. Our adversary is the devil, who, along with the demons, or fallen angels, that follow him, is quite real and active in our world. He is a schemer, the passage says; that is, he is a master tactician in The War, using any and all means to advance his forces. And his forces are many and mysterious, described here as rulers, authorities, and powers, and also as spiritual forces of evil.

I want to spend a little time today talking about the devil’s schemes. I think this is important to talk about because I think a lot of people misunderstand this. I want to give you a concrete example – my afternoon on Friday.

I went out for lunch, taking my car off campus. Because I didn’t have much time, I confess I grabbed some fast food, which I ate in my car. I have had a practice for some time of trying to “reset” my life at lunch, which I often do by reading a spiritually nourishing book. At present I am reading an autobiography about Nepali missionaries, At the Foot of the Snows, by David Watters that is both deeply encouraging and convicting. Incidentally, it also has a lot to say about spiritual warfare.

Anyway, I had a great time reading a few chapters and finishing my lunch, and then I turned the key to restart my car and go back to campus, and – click, click. No ruhr, ruhr, rurh, vroom. In fact, no ruhrs at all! Not good!

Now, I’m not very mechanically inclined, but I have replaced automobile batteries before. However, this is a relatively new car, and I’ve probably only opened the hood once, when I bought it. I have someone else change the oil and do maintenance. The other thing I should mention is that this is my second Honda Odyssey, so I have all kinds of memories of where things were in the first car (but they don’t apply to the new one). So, the first challenge was to even find the lever to pull to open the hood. It’s not marked very well, but I finally found it. At this point I began to notice how hot I was.

I opened the hood and – wait, where’s the battery?! Why does everything look so unfamiliar? Oh, yeah. This is my new car – not the old one! But, seriously, where’s the battery? I couldn’t find it! I opened the little manual I keep in the glove box, and under battery, all it talked about was how to change a remote battery and a car key battery. No help at all. So I looked some more, and finally realized it was under some kind of air intake thing. Seriously?! So I have to take the car apart to even get to the battery? And what are these weird fasteners holding this air intake thingy in place? I’m sure I don’t have a tool to remove those!

So I called Mimi at this point, and I also texted Jonathan a photo of these things. He didn’t know what to do with them either. At this point I realized I was next to a church, so I thought maybe somebody there could help me. The door was locked so I knocked, and they asked through an intercom what I wanted. I said my car wouldn’t start. They said they didn’t have any tools, so sorry, and ended the conversation. I knocked again but they wouldn’t answer. I wanted to tell them I had cables for a jump, but didn’t get the opportunity. So I went back to the car.

I’m going to try to accelerate this story. The short version is that I made a lot of ineffective decisions and mistakes, and the whole process took much longer than it should have. We ended up having to take two trips to an auto parts store plus two to a hardware store, and the traffic on Highway 123 was absolutely horrible, and we went through it again and again and again. I wasn’t comfortable jumping the battery because it was clearly leaking, and I dropped and lost a nut, but I also somehow forgot that I could have called the auto parts store first. Anyway, with my son Jonathan’s help, we finally got everything done.

So where were Satan’s schemes? I think a lot of people would say it was Satan’s scheme that the car stopped working. I don’t really think so. Stuff gets old. Stuff wears out. Batteries die. Some might say it was Satan’s scheme to make the traffic so terrible despite it not being a football weekend. Again, I don’t think so. Or it was Satan’s scheme to make it so hot – now that sounds like him, right? No.

I can tell you Satan’s schemes. It was his scheme to make me feel like a loser for taking so long to figure out how to remove the fasteners holding the air thingy. It was his scheme to make me speak rudely in frustration to Mimi. It was his scheme to get me even grumpier when I smashed a finger trying to get the extremely heavy battery out of the place it was seated in the car. It was his scheme to make me begin to get grumpy at the person in the church who didn’t help. It was his scheme to make me harbor feelings of grumpiness at the many, many people in the same lot who didn’t offer to help (even though I didn’t ask them). It was his scheme to make me feel like a loser for making decisions along the way that made the process take longer than it needed to. It was his scheme to make me feel like a complete klutz when I dropped and lost the nut. It was his scheme to make me feel terrible after I laughed after Jonathan and I realized we had both smashed the exact same finger on the same hand trying to get out that battery (it was actually genuinely funny – Jonathan laughed too – I had no reason to feel terrible). And it was his scheme to make me feel like a complete idiot when I realized that I had been noticing for several days that the car was revving more slowly when I started the car, but I had attributed that to my imagination. It was his scheming that made me start to play the old familiar “If only” game where I beat up on myself for not realizing something that I imagined everyone else would have realized. Those were Satan’s schemes!

Where was my armor? Good question! Remember, I had just read a few chapters of this amazing autobiography! It seems like I took it all off once the car didn’t start! Too hot, I guess!

Let’s go back to the passage.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. – Eph. 6:10-12

We are also told what to do in this passage. We are to be strong in ourselves, right? We are to go to the “spiritual gym,” whatever that is, and work out, right? We are to get big spiritual biceps, powerful spiritual thighs, and impressive spiritual washboard stomachs, right?

Well, no. We are told to be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. This is something completely different. The “spiritual gym” won’t help with this at all. So how do we do this?

Well, we need to put on our armor, right? I guess we need to make our armor first, you know, kind of how in the Star Wars movies you know the Jedi had completed his training once he had learned how to build his own lightsaber. So we need to find some tools to make our spiritual armor, right? I’m not sure exactly what we need – it depends on the materials we are working with. We might need spiritual chisels, hammers, maybe knives, maybe a spiritual furnace and spiritual water to temper metal, and so on, right?

Well, no. We don’t need to make our own armor any more than we need to build up our own strength. We are to put on the armor of God; that is, it’s His armor. He made it for us. It’s already in our size. We have to do what? Put it on!

That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? That certainly sounds a lot easier than the two alternatives we have discussed. Future weeks will tell us what we need to do, how we put it on. I think we will see that it is neither easy nor difficult, but it requires commitment to put it on and keep it on. The temptation each day will be to not bother with the armor, to go into the day unarmored, unprotected. That is a really bad idea.

So once we are all armored up, what does the passage tell us to do? To go running into the enemy’s camp, sword drawn, shouting something incomprehensible at the top of our lungs? After all, we’ve got the armor on, and it’s God’s armor, so it’s pretty impressive.

Actually, again, no. We are told to take our stand against the devil’s schemes. How do you take your stand against something? To understand this, let’s go on to the next verse.

Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. – Eph. 6:13

So we are told, again, to put on the armor, again, the armor of God, not armor we make for ourselves, and, again, the full armor, not just some of it, but all of it. Paul is repeating himself. Why? Probably for the same reason that I sometimes repeat myself when I teach electrical engineering: because I know that people won’t do what I say! There are mistakes students make semester after semester, year after year, and I see these when I grade my tests. So, in my lectures, I actually tell students that such-and-such is one of the most frequent mistakes, and I encourage them to write something about this in their notes. Does this help? I’m not sure. These things remain the most frequent mistakes. Perhaps it would be even worse if I didn’t warn them. I don’t have the heart to experiment one semester and try not giving these warnings to see if it goes even worse.

Paul, led by the Holy Spirit, and almost certainly also within his own experience and God-given wisdom, has seen believers fall to Satan’s schemes again and again, and he knows that it is because they don’t put on the full armor of God.

And so, before we go on, I feel it is my duty to say that not putting on the full armor of God is one of the most frequent mistakes Christians make when it comes to the time of testing. And so I encourage you to write something in your notes about this! I am speaking to myself here as much as to you. We need to put on the full armor of God! Every day! What it is exactly we will learn in future weeks, but more than anything I want us to apply Ephesians 6. I want us to apply it so thoroughly that we the leadership don’t even think about teaching on Ephesians 6 again until such a time that there are so many new people that we decide that they need to hear it too. I want to be able to look back after this series is over, for years and years, and be able to say that the body really took Ephesians 6 to heart, and they ever since that time, put on the full armor of God, thereby becoming strong in the Lord and His mighty power, so that although trials and tests come, Satan has no effect on them!

I need to challenge you here. Do you believe this? That is, do you believe that if you faithfully, day by day, put on the full armor of God (whatever that is – which we will find out in the coming weeks), do you believe that if you do this, you will be able to stand your ground?

Now some of you may object at this point and say, “Well, the verse doesn’t say that you will be able to stand your ground! It only says that you may be able to do this!” Well, the Greek verb here is in what is called the subjunctive mood, which does in fact give the possibility of one outcome or another, dependent on conditions and circumstances. But when the condition or circumstance is given in the same sentence, what it means is that if you do what the condition says, then it will happen; whereas if you don’t, it won’t. Here, this is exactly the grammatical structure we have; if you faithfully put on the full armor of God, you will be able to stand, but if you don’t, you probably won’t.

So what about this whole “stand” thing rather than go in and attack? To gain perspective on this, it helps to understand more about the Roman army. Much of what I am going to mention here is based on writings of Flavius Vegetius Renatus, especially something called De Re Militari (The Military Institutions of the Romans) written around 390 AD.

The basic smallest Roman military unit consisted of eight soldiers plus two servants, making ten. Their basic military formation was two rows of 4 men, each about 3 feet apart from one another. These groups were formed into larger groups, the details of which I won’t go into here. But alongside one group of 8 would be another group of 8 and then another, and so on, and you would also have multiple groups of 8 depth-wise. Each soldier was fully armored, wearing the kinds of armor we will see in the following verses and talk about in later weeks. This armor, worn and used properly, strongly protected the soldiers against most kinds of attacks. Eventually the battle would come down to close proximity combat; interestingly, Eph. 6:12, when it says our struggle is not against flesh and blood, is using a Greek word for “struggle” (also translated as “wrestle”) that describes exactly this kind of combat. A soldier’s job was to defend his immediate space around him, maintaining formation. Breaking formation was an absolute no-no, and soldiers went through intense training learning how to keep formation at all costs. In other words, the soldier’s job was to “stand his ground”! Now he had a sword (and a sword is listed later in Ephesians 6), but his sword was a short sword for close-in combat (and this is also the sword described in Ephesians 6).

If you have some experience in the game of Chess, you know the value of well-placed, well-coordinated pawns; in the right formation, they make it almost impossible for the other side to attack, despite their being the weakest pieces on the board. That’s us!

Now, Paul does not explicitly mention this idea of a group formation in Ephesians 6, but when he talks about how all we need to do is stand our ground, it is almost certain that this is what he has in mind. The Romans conquered the world using this strategy. It was incredibly effective.

And one of the interesting things you see in Vegetius’ book is a great confidence in the effectiveness of these methods. Proper training was important, of course, and how the generals moved the pieces on the board was also quite important, but at the core, this fundamental method worked so well that you had “professional” soldiers who did not really worry much about dying or being injured. There is a great theme of confidence that permeates Vegetius’ writings.

By resorting to this military analogy, I believe Paul was seeking to instill this confidence as well. In fact, confidence is a major thread running through all of Ephesians. This is not a book like I Corinthians where Paul is pointing out a bunch of problems that need correcting. Ephesians 1 is all about our position in Christ, which, once we understand it, should give us great confidence, not in our own abilities, but in God and in what He provides for us. Paul’s message is that, in Him, we can stand!

Now a good question to ask is how far to take this military analogy of the group of eight (and groups of groups) staying in position. Does this apply to the church? I would say yes, absolutely! The church, and hopefully you all understand that when I say the church I mean people, specifically, born-again believers in Christ, certainly not a building, the church is not meant to be a bunch of completely independent people doing their own thing. If we are each under Christ, and we are led by God through His Spirit, He will assemble us, so to speak, “in formation.” And in formation, as group after group assembles into a larger whole, we become, at least, God intends that we become something like the invincible Roman army; we become something so effective that we do not suffer “casualties,” and we take ground and defeat Satan at every turn.

I should probably say that I use “casualties” here in a spiritual sense. I am not saying that we won’t die from car crashes or cancer or all the other things that people die from; of course, we all die, eventually (unless Christ returns before we do die). What I mean is that we don’t fail morally, we don’t fall on the battlefield spiritually. Because, just as with the Roman army, it is essential that we keep in formation, that we stay in line, that we hold the hill. In the Roman army, when one person falls, the people around him now have a severe problem; they have a much greater area to defend, more than they can reasonably do so!

The same is true for us, for the church. When just one of us falls, the effect is never limited to just that person; it also affects everyone around them. When a family member falls, it affects the entire family. When one of a group of friends falls, it affects all of their friends. When a pastor falls, it affects the entire church, even multiple churches. Whether we like it or not, in God’s army we are connected, and our standing or falling never only affects us; just as in the Roman army, it also affects and can bring down those around us. This is a sobering truth.

Satan, of course, knows this. The analogy of him in I Peter as a roaring lion is right-on, because a lion also seeks out the weakest member in the herd. Satan is going to look for the soldier with no armor on, or, failing this, the one with partial armor, or the one not choosing to remain in formation.

I’ve confessed to you my misadventures on Friday, but please understand that Satan can do far, far worse. He destroys marriages. He ruins relationships between children and parents, between siblings, between friends. He destroys churches, even entire denominations. He knows that he can get entire “armies” to fall by working one “weak link” at a time.

We need to hold the hill. With God’s armor on, we have it easy. I was recently reading about color sergeants in the Civil War. They were tasked with holding up their regiment’s flag in battle. This was a critical task, because battlefields were noisy, confusing, smoke-filled places, and the regimental flag showed soldiers where they needed to be. The color sergeant had carry the flag wherever the regimental officers directed, holding it high so the soldiers could see it. This made them primary targets by the other side, and the job therefore had a very high mortality rate. It was considered a high honor to be chosen to be the color sergeant, and only the bravest soldiers were selected.

The website civilwar.org has an article about the Battle of Little Round Top, and I want to read a little from it:

Late in the afternoon of July 2, 1863, on a boulder-strewn hillside in southern Pennsylvania, Union Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain dashed headlong into history, leading his 20th Maine Regiment in perhaps the most famous counterattack of the Civil War. The regiment’s sudden, desperate bayonet charge blunted the Confederate assault on Little Round Top and has been credited with saving Major General George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac, winning the Battle of Gettysburg and setting the South on a long, irreversible path to defeat.

The article goes on to say that although Chamberlain’s bayonet charge was definitely an important part of the victory, credit should also go to the color sergeant:

Twenty-five-year-old Color Sgt. Andrew J. Tozier […] quickly emerged as an unlikely hero, and he was later awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery. […] As the 20th Maine’s center began to break and give ground in the face of the Alabama regiments’ onslaught, Tozier stood firm, remaining upright as Southern bullets buzzed and snapped in the air around him. Tozier’s personal gallantry in defending the 20th Maine’s colors became the regimental rallying point for Companies D, E and F to retake the center. Were it not for Tozier’s heroic stand, the 20th Maine would likely have been beaten at that decisive point in the battle.

The color sergeant was basically helpless, unprotected, highly visible, fully exposed to the enemy. Contrast that with us: if we put on the full armor of God, our situation is about as different as that of the color sergeant as night and day. This is not about our bravery. It is about God’s armor!

But like Tozier, we need to stand firm, hold the hill, even when we see the enemy approaching. We can trust God to protect us, if we have on the full armor of God. I am reminded of multiple verses from the Psalms:

Praise be to the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle. He is my loving God and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield, in whom I take refuge… - Psalm 144:1-2a

This goes so well with the Ephesians passage; the focus is again on what God provides. Here, He Himself is our shield. Notice that this promise too is conditional on our appropriating the promise; we must take refuge in Him. This is parallel to the idea that we must put on the full armor of God.

With God we will gain the victory, and He will trample down our enemies. – Psalm 108:13

Again, these enemies are not flesh and blood; they are not our bosses or coworkers or annoying family members! The enemies we are talking about may cause these people to be thorns in our side, but we need to try to look past the human side of our trials.

Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.” Surely He will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you will find refuge; His faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. – Psalm 91:1-4

This entire Psalm is filled with military references; I encourage you to read it. Again we see the idea of God providing our protection, even being our protection. But again, it is conditional. We must appropriate the promise. We must dwell in the shelter of the Most High; that is, we must abide in Him.

Scripture is filled with this duality between how God does what we cannot and how we still have a role to play; we must yield to Him. In Ephesians 6, the way we do this is, figuratively, we must put on the whole armor of God so that we can withstand the attacks of the enemy. But it is His armor, not ours, and it is powerful, far beyond anything we could do in our own strength. And using the Roman military analogy, which Paul definitely seems to have had in mind, we see that we do not stand in isolation, but person to person, together.

I want to close with a video of some actual US marines singing a worship song in a way that to me embodies this idea of standing firm together in Christ.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjZ_IlP9c5A&authuser=0