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 We continue our inventory of the armor of God – the subject of this coming Sunday’s lesson, by taking up the “shield of faith” (Ephesians 6:16).  Elsewhere, faith and love are described as the “breastplate” (1 Thessalonians 5:8).  In the apocryphal book, The Wisdom of Solomon, righteousness is compared to a breastplate, while “holiness” is the “invincible shield”. (Wisdom 5:18-19)  Our translation of the Wisdom is from the LXX and therefore is Greek, rather than Hebrew.  The word translated in the NRSV as “holiness” is osiothta ( hosiotes) which might better be translated as “sanctification”.  So, we have faith being compared to both breastplate and shield, with righteousness also being compared to a breastplate, and holiness and sanctification being compared to a shield.  Confused yet?

But wait – doesn’t Ephesians tell us that the battle is already won (Ephesians 1:20-23)?  If that’s so, why are we putting on the armor of God to begin with?

Well, we get back to that problem of understanding the eternal while bound by time.  Christ’s sacrifice took place in our world, our dimension – that’s what the incarnation was all about – but his redemptive work also took place in the eternal, cosmic dimension outside of time, in the realm of the divine.  Christ was/is present at the Creation, was/is seated at the right hand of the Father, was/is present in the “Kingdom of Heaven” and the “New Jerusalem” even though from our time-bound dimension these things appear to have taken place in the “past” or are things that will occur in the “future”.  We are promised that the two realms will ultimately be one, that this time-bound (time-doomed) world will be healed once and for all and that we will be healed as well: not just in spirit, but physically.

In the meantime (no pun intended) we still live in a world in which the “ruler of the power of the air” is at work (Ephesians 2:2).  Keep in mind that the people who lived at the time this was written, like the people who lived at the time Isaiah and the other books of the Bible were written, did not believe that God lived in a “heaven” that floated among the clouds up above us.  Their concept of “heaven” – of the abode of God – was similar to our concept of other dimensions (they just expressed it in different terms than “string theory”).  So Paul and the other early Christians understood that the redemptive victory of God over evil had occurred at the cosmic level and that the Kingdom of God was therefore present in this world and through the Church (through us) the redemptive work would be allowed to occur “on earth”.  You have to be careful here – just as Paul and others had to be careful in the 1st Century – because you can easily start thinking in gnostic terms of dualism (i.e., that this world is evil and God’s eternal realm is good and never the twain shall meet).  Why would that be a bad thing?  Because that can lead to us focusing on the “next world” and abandoning this world as hopeless.  This is exactly the sort of belief that led to troubles in the early church that Paul fought and wrote against.

We are charged – commissioned – to be disciples of Christ.  We are commanded to love one another as he loved us and to spread the good news to the ends of the earth.  That good news is not only about salvation that is to occur in some other dimension, but about what N. T. Wright has referred to as “God’s  rescue mission for the world” – a mission in which we all have a critical role to play.  We  must understand that God created the world, that he loves this creation and wants to see it healed – not abandoned to the forces of evil.  To that end, we are to put on the armor of God – including truth, righteousness, holiness, sanctification, and (the focus for today) faith.

This business of trying to understand God, eternity and his eternal plan is something that is beyond our ability to grasp from a worldly, logical perspective.  There are some things that we can’t see, that require faith.  Faith is what allows us to stick to it after that initial realization of God’s redemptive power to justify us through grace.  Faith is the enduring fruit of grace that enables us to manifest belief in tangible works of piety and concrete works of compassion.  Faith is what allows us to seek to please our Maker by loving God with all our heart and soul and by loving our neighbor as ourselves – even as Christ loved.  Faith is the shield beneath which we move on toward perfection – to setting our selves aside in favor of God and others.  Indeed, to setting our selves aside in the sense of sanctifying grace: of “holiness”.   In that context, let’s take a look at today’s scripture from Hebrews:

35 Do not, therefore, abandon that confidence of yours; it brings a great reward.
36 For you need endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.
37 For yet “in a very little while, the one who is coming will come and will not delay;
38 but my righteous one will live by faith. My soul takes no pleasure in anyone who shrinks back.”
39 But we are not among those who shrink back and so are lost, but among those who have faith and so are saved.
1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
2 Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.
3 By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.  Heb 10:35 – 11:3 (NRSV)

Faith is our shield against “the flaming arrows of the evil one” (Ephesians 6:16).  When you think of faith as a shield, what are the sorts of things that you would list as being protected against?