“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 6:10-11)
Ephesians is Paul’s theological treatise on the Trinity, salvation, and the church. It’s about the most important things in the universe. He grounds our love for one another in the deepest underpinnings of all being: the community and operations of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The three Persons of the Triune God are in every passage as the foundation for our life together. Salvation means being restored to relationship with this God, and knowing this God means transformation in our daily relationships. It’s a letter about unity on a fairly mundane level—yet, we discover that this unity has cosmic significance. Unity in Christ is the point of all reality.
The devil is against our unity. Throughout the Scriptures he seeks to drive a wedge between God and his people. In order to dismantle the community that God is working to build, the devil looks to tear down God’s reputation in our sight. The word “devil” (Gk: diabolos) means slanderer or liar. When he comes after us, to destroy us, he aims at obscuring or slandering the truth of who God is. As the serpent in the Garden, he could have harmed the woman physically, but that wouldn’t have been nearly as destructive as tearing her apart from God. In accomplishing that he would also ruin her relationship with the man. The devil’s real goal is division. He hates true community and intimacy. And he wins when he gets us to join his side in his war against God, when his propaganda convinces us that God should be distrusted. If we’re disconnected from the Heart of Love that stands at the center of the cosmos, everything else falls apart, to the devil’s delight. By nature now (as sinners) we are his allies… or, rather, his children… or, rather, his slaves.
“Satan establishes his moral lordship mainly through lies” (David Powlison). The only way the devil can really hurt us—drive a wedge between us and God and bring serious division among us—is by painting a false image of God for us. He is against our knowing God as he truly is. So the devil wants you to believe that God is out to get you, that he’s a cruel, sadistic, oppressive tyrant, which means you should be suspicious of his authority, and run. Hard. Pursue autonomy. Take matters into your own hands. Live like a good resistance fighter, a rebel.
The devil wants you to believe that God has abandoned you, that—even if he does exist—he’s withdrawn, distant, uncaring. You should resent him like a disowned child, and live however you want to live.
The devil wants you to believe that God is just so boring, a complete killjoy. If it’s pleasure you’re after, you really should look elsewhere.
The devil wants you to believe that God is like a disappointed boss. You can keep your position around here if you’d just try a little harder.
The devil wants you to believe that God is sappy sweet, so affirming that he’ll let you get away with anything. It really isn’t that big a deal when you sin.
Then, when you do sin, the devil wallops you with a fearful image of God as so strict, so unforgiving, that you—being entirely unworthy—could never hope to find acceptance with him. So you’d better hide from God. In fact, hide your true self from everybody. Including yourself. That’s what’s best.
The devil wants you to believe that God is not for you. So you’ll need to be entirely for yourself. Look out for Number One.
The devil wants you to believe that repentance is out of reach, that it’s actually unhealthy for you to deny yourself, deny your desires, deny who you are. Living for the kingdom will just suck the life out of you. You should just follow your passions and be true to yourself.
The last thing the devil wants is for you to confess your sin, because he knows that God is merciful, and he doesn’t want you to discover his forgiveness and acceptance and love.
The devil doesn’t want us to stay together and love one another. He wants us to be suspicious of each other, to find reasons to distance ourselves from each other. He delights in estrangement and divorce. He achieves his goals when he cuts our tether to the God of love. When we walk away from each other, he rubs his hands together and dances.
Ultimately, the devil wants you to believe that you cannot truly know God. Sure, maybe God sent his representative to be “the face of the divine,” but you can’t actually be sure what God is really like, behind the Name, behind “the mask.” His craftiest lies are to separate Jesus and God in our understanding, to take the deep and wonderful doctrine of the Trinity and spin it in order to remove God into the impenetrable mists of unknowability.
But the devil’s got a weakness: the truth. “One little word shall fell him.” He would paint for us a false image of God, which means all we need to do is fall back on the truth. In our wrestling with the devil we are locked in mortal, desperate, hand-to-hand combat with an enemy far greater than we could possibly handle on our own. But the truth is, we’re not on our own. God is for us. God is with us. In the Lord Jesus Christ we have the victory.
Paul is solving for Genesis 3 when he shows us how to stand against the devil and his schemes. The devil has us in his grip when he convinces us of his lies about God. We are his willing accomplices against the truth and love of God. But God promised to put enmity between us and our evil ally, to crush the devil’s power through the Seed of the woman. Because God is who he is, faithful and true to his Word, he sent his own Son to be born of a woman, the virgin Mary. We were under the devil’s thrall, but “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). He took our human nature, he gathered us to himself through his Incarnation and Baptism, to rescue us from the evil one. He stood fast as our Champion against all the deceits, temptations, and accusations of the devil. He wore God’s own armor—because he is God—and won the day, which meant our reunion with God and, ultimately, cosmic unity. Now, in spite of the devil’s best efforts, there is the Church. Community, intimacy, and love are at work in the world.
Now we know the truth. Because of Christ we know what God really is like—exactly what the devil can’t stand. Jesus Christ is God’s good and true Word, the knowability of God. “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him… Whoever has seen me has seen the Father… I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:7, 9). The doctrine of the Trinity means that God is preeminently knowable; in himself he is the Knower and the Known One in Glorious Mutual Knowledge. And we know him to be good, reliable, wonderful, delightful, gracious, forgiving, and loving—even to his enemies. “While we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10). The one, true God was willing even to sacrifice his own Son to repair the breach we caused when we sided with the devil against him. The devil can lie about it, but he can’t change the reality of God’s love for you. We believed the lie, and withdrew from God when there was no good reason to do so; but the truth of the Gospel is that God drew near to us, even when he had every reason not to do so. “Christ being our friend, it is no matter who is our enemy” (Richard Sibbes).
So we know how to prepare for battle. Don’t be caught off guard, finding yourself in a fight with the devil without God’s own armor, the armor that he wore in the person of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. “Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.” It might sound strange, being strong in another person’s strength, but it’s the way God means for us to live—in Christ. We look to the Lord Jesus as our Champion, and we live in his victory, vicariously, through faith. We can’t handle cosmic powers of evil on our own, but we’re not on our own. We are in Jesus Christ, who has already ascended “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion” (Eph. 1:21). In him we have “the belt of truth,” to protect us from the devil’s lies. In Christ we have “the breastplate of [God’s own] righteousness,” to ward off his accusations that God would never accept us sinners. In Christ we have “as shoes for [our] feet… the readiness given by the gospel of peace,” so “let all condemnation cease! Let guilt have no more claim! Let the devil lose all dominion!” As we take up “the shield of faith,” through which we are united to Christ, we have a refuge in him; our life is hidden with him in God, unassailable in heaven. With “the helmet of salvation” we “keep our heads” in battle, our focus deliberately fixed on the Triune God of our salvation. And we have “the sword of the Spirit… the Word of God,” which shall fell the slanderer.
Now, the result of our salvation isn’t so that we may stand individually against the devil, but that we may stand together, with God and with each other in the Church. It is this community, after all, that the devil opposes. Because God has stood in solidarity with us in the Person of his Son, we stand in solidarity with each other. It is a beautiful expression of humanity in Christ that directly reflects the nature of the Trinity, where each Person is in, with, and for the Other. A commitment to solidarity is exactly the thing the devil hates. We stand in solidarity with each other in the truth of the Gospel when we pray with and for each other.
“… praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel…” (Eph. 6:18-19)
For Paul, “the mystery of the gospel” is the revelation that, in Christ, God has restored our unity. It’s the truth we must hold to, corporately… the truth the devil wants to rip away from us. It is only as we are gathered around the truth of the Gospel as we have it in Word and Sacraments, gathered by the Spirit in common prayer, that we may stand together against the devil and his schemes. So we resist exclusivity and elitism. We pursue transparency and vulnerability. We confess our sins to God and to each other, and we help each other to be assured of God’s forgiveness and true reconciliation in Christ. We spur one another on to love, good works, and Gospel proclamation for the sake of the spiritually untethered, that all may be re-grounded in the God of love. And in doing so, we stand. And the devil has lost his game. Amen.
