THE ARMOUR OF GOD
by Linda Cowan & Christine Arnold
All our readings from the epistles over the past month have come from the book of Ephesians. I started to ask myself what I actually know about Ephesus and the Ephesians and it didn’t add up to a whole lot.
As a child, I had a beautiful old Bible, inherited from a grandparent perhaps. I’m not sure, but I pulled it off the shelf this week and had a look at it. As well as the whole Bible, it had three hundred pages at the back of it entitled, An Illustrated Bible Treasury. In the days when we all took our Bibles with us to church and carefully looked up the Bible readings, this Bible was a great help when the sermon became less riveting and I could while away the minutes, and often half hours learning about the coinage of Bible times, the astronomy of the Bible or Birds of the holy land. It included right at the very back coloured maps, one of which was labelled Scene of Paul’s Journeys and of the Early Churches. I spent some time looking at those maps, so I think I know where Ephesus was (and still is)but I know very little about the place so I thought I should find out some more about Ephesus, and also some more about who wrote the letter to the people of Ephesus.
I had always assumed that the writer was the apostle Paul who we know well as the Pharisee who persecuted the church until he met God on the road to Damascus and was blind for three days. Paul then became a missionary and made three major missionary journeys travelling around the coast of the Mediterranean Sea telling people about God and helping them to start churches.
Well, I think I’m right that it was Paul who wrote the letter to the Ephesians and he probably wrote the letter about 61 or 62 AD(CE) which is 30 years after Jesus died. There have been some question marks about this because Paul doesn’t use the names of the people of Ephesus in the letter and the very early manuscripts have a gap in the address slot, but people who know say the style of writing in the letter to the Ephesians suggests very strongly that this was Paul at work.
So this letter is special. Paul wrote it while he was in Rome under house arrest. He had the opportunity to send a letter to Ephesus with Tychicus who was travelling that way. There would be no doubt that he would be keen to make this contact. He had spent two or three years working in Ephesus so his bond with the church there was a strong one. These were people he knew well.
So what do we know about Ephesus? We have seen where it is located on what is today the west coast of Turkey, but what sort of place was it? In 61 AD Ephesus was a big seaport with a population of about half a million people. It was wealthy because it was on the major trade routes to and from Asia. It was a centre for learning and it had a lot of temples. It was a centre for the imperial cult where the people worshipped the Roman emperors as if they were gods, and it also had a huge temple to the goddess, Diana, which was one of the seven wonders of the world. The people of Ephesus were said to have had a fascination with magic and the occult.
Ephesus was also the capital of the Roman province of Asia and there would have been a strong military presence there. That’s why Paul’s image of putting on armour that we heard about in our New Testament lesson is such a good one for the Ephesian people.
It’s not hard to appreciate that it would have been hard to be a Christian in Ephesus. With so many heathen temples around, staying firm to what you believed would be a daily challenge. The Roman authorities regularly persecuted Christians too so being a Christian required a huge commitment. Other beliefs were without a doubt easier and safer to follow. That’s why the Christians of Ephesus really needed to put on the “armour of God”.
I think we can imagine how great it must have been when Tychicus arrived with Paul’s letter, how the early Ephesian Christians would have poured over it (LETTER COMING FROM PAUL), and the encouragement that it brought to this infant church. This letter, which was important enough to be preserved for posterity, strengthened these persecuted people in their faith and gave them the encouragement to continue against all the odds.
But I wonder – what is Paul saying in this letter to us today? ………
Paul writes “Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armour of God so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.”
The dictionary gives definitions of strength as “the ability to withstand or exert force” and “a source of power.” Another word that can be used in this context is protect which means “to defend from trouble.”
So, what are we protecting or strengthening ourselves against? Paul mentions rulers, authorities, cosmic powers, and the spiritual forces of evil. Some of these may still apply today, others may be more perplexing to us. There are governments and rulers in the world who exert power and rule for their supremacy over others. They do not consider the effect on the world as a whole, only that they must be the most powerful. Even while our own governments aim to do the best for New Zealanders there are times when government departments seem to forget the effects of their policies on individuals.
There are businesses that operate to make bigger and bigger profits which benefit a few rather than many. They exploit people and resources to do this. Cosmic powers and spiritual evils may be harder for us to interpret. But they could be feelings of despair and internalized voices that whisper against love and drain our hope. We only need to listen to the news or read the newspaper to lose hope about what is happening in our country and world today. Wars and conflicts, droughts and floods, job losses, and the lack of resources for education, health, and welfare. Also, in this environment, we can become apathetic as we get used to knowing about poverty, abuse, and exploitation without doing anything about them.
Paul wrote to the Ephesians using a metaphor they would understand to instruct them how to be strong in their Christianity. He used a Roman soldier as his metaphor as they were a common sight in Ephesus. What are things that we could use as metaphors to show us how to strengthen our faith? Today and in our environment, the physical things that we use to protect us are – facemasks, sunblock, hats, jackets, raincoats, and shoes. We are not using symbols of war but symbols of our everyday life. These can be symbols for defending human dignity, confronting hate and prejudice, and affirming love.
What do these symbols represent?
- Facemasks may mean for us to observe before we speak so as to respect others.
- Sunblock could represent the values that give us protection and make things happen the right way. Things like justice and truth.
- Jackets make us feel warm and good. This gives us the resources of kindness, caring, and happiness to reach out to others in love.
- Raincoats let the water flow off us. Perhaps this represents that we should repel the apathy and despair that can fester in our communities.
- A hat protects our head, maybe this reminds us that God is protecting us and giving us the courage to do more than we can do on our own strength.
- Shoes are so that we can take the path that God leads us on.
As Christians what resources do we have available to us to strengthen our faith and empower us for God’s service in this world?