Spiritual Battle

 reetings to  you all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,

     Ephesians 6:11-12 says, “ Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.  For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” 

     Yesterday was Monday after having preached on Sunday.  Maybe I said something that the demons didn’t like because I felt a lot of fighting going on within me yesterday.  The message was a simple message of salvation because at my age, my last message could be any day now.  I had preached on Philip in Acts 8 and the conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch and how he was reading from Isaiah, chapter 53 and how Philip preached unto him, Jesus.  So, the message itself was simply about Jesus and how He can be our Savior.  We had taken a detour from Ephesians and just spent more time on the gospel message.

     Yesterday’s spiritual fighting brought into remembrance, however, another passage from Ephesians, the one listed above where Paul describes in clear detail the necessary pieces of the Christian armor.  He also mentions that we are not fighting against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world.  If you could hit one with a fly swatter or throw something at them, it might seem more advantageous, but it is not a physical fight but a spiritual one.  The hordes of Satan’s army are continually doing whatever they can to stop the gospel message and they can use all sorts of devices and methods to thwart the message of the gospel.   C. S. Lewis in the Screwtape letters gives such a fictitious example of how it is to be played out in the life of a new believer.  Why, they might just go to church with you and be sitting right on the edge of the pew in front of you keeping your attention to the texting on your phone, or the disturbance at the other end of the pew.  The word, “wiles” is one that denotes “methods” that Satan uses in his deliberate disturbing of the gospel.  Paul however, goes on to describe all of the spiritual pieces of the armor with the only offensive piece being thing the “sword of the Spirit, the Word of God.”  Thayer defines this sword as, “small sword, as distinguished from a large sword.”  It is small, as the fight is close as Paul writes, we “wrestle.”  There would be no space for a large broadsword, so the smaller one is the weapon of choice.  Paul also defines it as the Word of God.  It speaks even of Jesus in the wilderness when he used the Word of God in the defense of Satan’s temptations.  We should be doing the exact same thing. When you were saved, perhaps they failed to mention, “Oh by the way, you are now in a spiritual warfare.  Dress accordingly.”  Praise God for the armor that He has supplied for the fight in which we are all involved.