Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church

The Helmet and the Sword

by Dave Wilkinson

Ephesians 6:17

February 13, 2000

The Apostle Paul is in Rome. He is chained to a Roman guard night and day. That’s the way it was from prisoners of the emperor. I’m sure it was very difficult. But Paul does not see this guard as the enemy. There is an enemy but this guard isn’t him. Paul sees the guard as a person God loves and desires to save. He sees their forced connection as a God-given opportunity to tell the good news about Jesus. The result is revealed in Philippians 1. Here Paul speaks of how the gospel is spreading throughout the Praetorian Guard -- the elite soldiers of the Emperor.

It almost had to happen. I mean, just imagine yourself as part of this Praetorian Guard -- by tradition a son of one of the great families of Rome. You are a pagan. You are very well content with your pagan ways. You like to drive your sporty little pagan trophy girlfriend in your sporty little pagan chariot to your pagan feasts and orgies with your pagan friends.

Then, disaster strikes. Your superiors assign you to guard Paul. There you are for hours at a time --chained to Paul. You hear him teach and preach and pray and dictate letters like the one we are reading. An ancient tradition tells us that Paul’s guards had to be changed with regularity as they converted to Christianity. To chain Paul to the elite sons of the empire was a very dangerous thing -- for the empire. Paul, apparently, made the most of the opportunity.

The Emperor Nero had the foolish opinion that Paul was in Rome as his prisoner. Paul knows better. Paul knows that he was in Rome not as the prisoner of the emperor, but as the prisoner of Jesus Christ. He feels bound with far stronger chains than any his jailers might create.

Paul knows that he was engaged in a battle. But His enemy isn’t the soldier of Rome. The enemy is the one he describes to us in Ephesians 6:12 where he tells us: "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of this wickedness in the heavenly places." We looked in detail at these verses on January 9 and 16.

As Paul talks to the Ephesian Christians about this conflict, his gaze turns to the soldier who is chained to him. He looks at the equipment of this soldier and he thinks of the equipment given the soldier of Jesus Christ -- the armor of God, which is given to us for the conflict.

We have spoken over the last few weeks of the first four pieces of the armor God gives us. We have spoken of the belt of truth -- the truth of Jesus Christ -- which holds us together and keeps the rest of our armor in place. We have spoken of the breastplate of righteousness -- not our self-righteousness but the righteousness of Jesus Christ given to us as a gift of God. We have seen how this gift is meant to protect our emotional life. We have spoken of the shoes -- the preparation of the gospel of peace -- which equips our wills for the conflict. Two weeks ago we looked at the shield of faith, which is meant to protect us against all of the flaming, deadly darts aimed against us by "the evil one."

Now, this morning, let us consider the final two pieces of our armor. Paul writes in Ephesians 6:17: "And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God."

The Roman soldier’s helmet, which Paul equates with salvation, was usually made of a tough metal like bronze or iron. An inside lining of felt or sponge made the weight bearable. Nothing short of an ax or war hammer could pierce the heavy helmet. In some cases, a hinged visor was added to protect the face. Helmets were decorative as well as functional and some had magnificent plumes or crests.

Now earlier we saw that the breastplate is the protection of our emotional life. When you figuratively put on Christ as your breastplate of righteousness, you have a confidence in all He has done for you which protects you from a sense of guilt and unforgiveness. The shoes, as we have seen, equip our will. They enable to move forward for God when everything is us but our faith says "quit."

But the helmet is designed for the head. This is the God’s equipping of our intellectual life. Paul calls it he helmet of salvation.

Paul isn’t talking here about the the salvation of the soul. He is not speaking of the salvation, which is already an accomplished fact in our lives. He is, instead, speaking of a salvation which is yet to come to us -- the salvation like that he speaks of in Romans 13:11 where he wrote that "salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed." This salvation is the salvation of our minds. It is a realigning of the thought patterns left twisted by the fall. In other places, such as Romans 12:1-2, Paul speaks of being transformed through the "renewal of our minds."

What is the renewed mind able to see that the unrenewed mind is clueless about? It is able to see the salvation of God -- the fact that God is working out His purposes even now in our lives and in the history of our world. The renewed mind sees that this world will be delivered from its bondage when Christ returns to establish His kingdom. The renewed mind recognizes that all human schemes to obtain harmony are fated to fail, but that even in these failures, Jesus Christ continues to work out His plan. This awareness of salvation is a helmet because it keeps your brain clear. It it keeps your head straight, even when the world is plunged in darkness and confusion. It allows us to have a meaning for living -- even when our favorite football team takes a nose dive and the forces of darkness temporarily triumph. Salvation — the protection of our intellectual life — gives us the long view -- the realistic view.

British writer Dorothy Sayers is perhaps best known for her mysteries. But she had another side to her writing that she considered her true vocation. This was her writing as a Christian.

In one of her books, Creed or Chaos, she offers this insight into the meaning of the helmet of salvation. She writes: "the people who are the most discouraged and made despondent by the barbarity and stupidity of human behavior are those who cling to an optimistic belief in the civilized influence of progress and enlightenment. To them, the appalling outbursts of bestial ferocity in the totalitarian states and the obstinate selfishness and stupid greed of capitalist society are not merely shocking and alarming. For them, these things are the utter negation of everything in which they have believed. For the Christian, this is not so. He is as deeply shocked and grieved as anybody else but he is not astonished. He has never thought that highly of human nature left to itself. He has been accustomed to the idea that there is a deep interior dislocation in the very center of human personality, and that you can never, as they say, ‘make people good by act of Parliament.’

Sayers continues: "The delusion of the perfectability of mankind through a combined process of scientific knowledge and unconscious evolution has been responsible for a great deal of heartbreak. It is, as bottom, far more pessimistic than Christian pessimism, because, if science and progress break down, there is nothing left to fall back on. Humanism is self-contained. It provides for man no resources outside himself."

As Christians, we should have an understanding that God is working out His purpose and therefore we should not be devastated when human programs end as failures -- when the Great Society and the New Deal and the Fair Deal and all the other fancy names for human progress end up in the same swamp time after time. When we read in the newspapers of wars and famines we should care more deeply than anyone for those who are suffering and do what we can to help. But we should not be surprised or lose our faith because of the war or because of the famine. They are exactly what Jesus told us to expect. We know that wars are madness and that we should lend every effort within our power to avoid them. But we should not lose our moorings when war comes despite the best human efforts, for our Lord has told us that we are living in a mad world that’s groans under the weight of sin. We know that demonic forces can arise and possess parts the world from time to time and that all human schemes to control them will ultimately fail.

The helmet of salvation --what Paul calls the helmet of the hope of salvation in 1 Thessalonians 5:8 -- tells us that these things are happening and will continue to happen, but that a salvation is also coming. It is not merely that it will finally end all right but that the good ending is being put into place right now. Jesus is the Lord of history. He is at work in the same events that the world views with such confusion.

Jesus Christ is in charge and that fact is salvation. That fact should give us a great sense of security -- both as we read the morning paper and as we face uncertainty about our own place in God’s plan and purpose. Jesus is in charge -- in us as well as in the world.

With this helmet of salvation we are given one last piece of equipment. It is unlike the others in that it is not armor for protection. It is a weapon for attack. It is the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.

The Roman sword, the "gladius" like gladiator, was about two feet long. It was sharp pointed for thrusting and double edged for cutting. Paul says that our sword is the word of God. This is expanded on in Hebrews 4:12 which tells us that "the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two edged sword and piercing as far as the division of the soul and the marrow and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart."

The Word of God is called the Sword of the Spirit because it is the Holy Spirit who is commissioned to guide us in its use. Jesus promised in John 14:17 that He would work in us as the Spirit of Truth. He puts the sword into our grasp and enables us to use it.

But we can only make use of the sword as we pick it up. There is a great need for believers to develop skills in the Word of God and be equipped to use the Bible as a sword against error and as a means of communicating the truth. Many of our contemporary ways of engaging in spiritual conflict lack power because we leave out the Sword of the Spirit which is the word of God. The alternate equipment is about as suitable and effective as an issue of water pistols to halt the advance of an armored division.

But with the Sword of the Spirit, the word of God, we have a weapon suitable for the task we face. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, "The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, we have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."

There are two words for "word" in the Greek language. There is "logos" which refers to the expression of God -- the logos who became flesh in Jesus Christ. The second word is "h-rema" which refers to a specific saying of God, a passage or a verse, that has power as applied to a specific situation. "H-rema", the specific application of the specific word is the term that Paul uses here to describe our sword.

This sword of the Spirit is the saying of God applied to a specific situation. It is the great weapon placed in the hand of the believer. Maybe you have had some experience with this. You are reading a passage of scripture and suddenly it jumps off the page and leaps into your life. You can’t get away from it. Or, perhaps, you’ve been asked a question or are asking yourself a question and are about to say that you don’t have the answer and suddenly you are given the answer through a portion of scripture that is brought into your mind. Or, perhaps, you have been about to succumb to some temptation or another when you are brought back to God by a scriptural statement that won’t leave you alone. I’ve had all of those experiences.

The scripture is the Spirit’s sword. He uses it to penetrate people’s defenses and barriers against the gospel. He uses it to prick their consciences and stab them spiritually awake. He puts His sword into our hands for resisting temptation and for evangelism. Every Christian evangelist or personal witness knows that God’s word has a cutting power that goes way beyond normal, human words.

I can testify to this by my own experience in being in Bible Study and leading Bible study. People are brought alive and renewed and empowered and brightened when they expose themselves to the Word of God. Sometimes, frankly speaking, the scripture brings them pretty low before it builds them up, but the ultimate result is always joy. If you want to be a better person than you are, then I have no other road to show you than the road of the word of God. It has the power to do the job. It is the only weapon we have and it is the only weapon we need. I could ask for nothing greater for this congregation than that every one of us be involved in an ongoing study of the scriptures with the goal of personal application of God‘s word to our own lives. That’s why I hope that eery last person here will be part of a small group for the 50 Day Adventure that is getting under way.

You see, whether we like it or not, we need the sword as we need the rest of the armor.

Paul tells us that in a very real sense those of us who believe in Jesus Christ are engaged in a battle. But the forces we face are not clothed in flesh and blood. They are not human agencies. Rather they are the deadly, malevolent spiritual hosts of wickedness, invisible and dedicated to our destruction -- not for our own sake but because we are beloved of God.

"Therefore," Paul writes, "take up the full armor of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand firm, therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace in addition to all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all of the flaming missiles of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God."

There you have it -- the standard issue equipment of the soldier of Jesus Christ. Check your equipment. If you find that you are short any items, I’ll be glad to help you get in touch with the supply officer. His name is God. He wants you to have absolutely everything you need for the struggle at hand.