January 03, 2012

Impregnable

On the corner of our property we have three large golden-tipped arborvitae shrubs growing closely together. In the summer I hate to trim them because they sting and are loaded with spiders and cobwebs. In the winter when they are covered deep with snow they appear to be one large rolling mound of dirt. I came home from the store last week and found two middle school boys with their sleds having a grand time using my arborvitaes as a ramp, while a third boy was poking his head up through the dense branches. I sent them packing and now I’ll have to wait until spring to see how much damage was done to my flattened shrubs. We don’t always know why kids do the things they do, but after some thought I realized that these boys had their armor on. They were so well dressed and protected for their winter sledding that a romp through the prickly bushes didn’t faze them in the least. I’m thinking that’s the same way I should be feeling when I put on the Full Armor of God.

1 comment:

Steve Corey said...

Gail;

-----It might be useful to cast a thought towards the fact that armor is impregnable, not the wearer of it. The wearer of armor remains as puny and weak inside the armor as he is outside it. We can see this fact in the eventual shedding of the tin suit once the bow, crossbow, and later, the musket began piercing it with sufficient force to make a mess of the guy inside. Armor does not make the poor chap anything more than he can be without it. It merely protects him.
-----All good metaphors are worth only so much. Carry them too far and they begin to miss their target concepts. This fact that armor merely protects the wearer without strengthening him rests right upon the boundary of being carried away from the target of Paul‘s metaphor. I say it is at this boundary, not across it, because there is great utility in understanding that the truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace, faith, salvation, and the Sword of the Spirit protect the wearer. The wearer's perceptions of these don't. God’s mind is filled with concepts, too, and they are actually real. Our minds are not his mind and our thoughts are not His thoughts. So, He knows these and we learn them.
-----It is the armor as God knows it which protects us. The truth, righteousness, gospel, faith, salvation, or Sword as we think them does us no good at all beyond their similarities to what God has defined them to be. Only in as much as our perception of truth is like what He knows to be true, only in as much as what we consider righteous approximates what He defines to be righteous, only in as much as the gospel by which we walk, the faith from which we dare, the salvation in which we abide, and the Sword with which we proceed are understood by us at least similarly to how He meant them is there actual strength in the armor. It is the armor of God because He fashioned it, not us.
-----Unlike actual armor, this armor of God indeed makes the wearer stronger. It is not just a shell around him. Putting on this armor is putting in mind concepts more like God’s while abandoning concepts less like His. So what its wearer knows as truth becomes truer, what he considers righteous becomes more right, yeah, his gospel becomes more peaceful, his faith more real, his salvation more desirable, and his Sword more graspable. The wearer becomes stronger because his mind proceeds to work more like God meant it to think about what He makes things to be.

Love you all,
Steve Corey