The gardens of God

See the garden in perfection:
Home of Adam, home of Eve!
See them, in their proud rejection
Of God’s covenant, forced to leave.
Death and sin have come upon us,
Grief and toil, our daily bread;
But praise God for his great promise:
There’ll come one to crush sin’s head!

See the garden, darkness creeping
Into hearts and souls and minds;
See the Man of Sorrows, weeping
At the next day’s dark designs.
See him taste the dereliction
Borne for us upon the tree;
The cup of sin and cursed affliction
He will drain to set us free!

See the garden, day is dawning
On the tomb whose body lives;
See the women, gone their mourning,
Run with joy that Jesus gives!
We in him, by faith, have risen,
Raise a shout of victory;
Praise him for the Gospel given:
Jesus, Lord of history!

(Philip Walker, 2006)

The writing of this was occasioned by the BBC hymn-writing competition, but it was a good opportunity for me to express, in a way I'd not tried before, some of the stuff I'd been coming to realise over the preceding months. (18-02-2007: I edited this post title to make it stand in line with further reflections of a similar nature, and added a category.)

The full armour of God

John Halton has a brilliant post on Ephesians 6:10–17. This is a write up of how I read the verses 12 to 17 of that section. You'll notice that it's functionally almost exactly the same reading as John's, and indeed there's no real disagreement between us; I just think there's a little bit more precision we can achieve without, as John rightly cautions, losing the poetic aspect of this passage. My thanks, incidentally, to John for explaining the first couple of verses in this section, which I hadn't thought about.

This reading struck me during a Christian Union meeting, where the speaker was talking about an aspect of this passage ("the belt of truth", I think it was), and it was a fairly standard evangelical reading, which takes each of these things and turns them into things we must wield in order to win the fight against the "spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places".

The start of the process, which snowballed quite rapidly, was to recall that when I read "truth" in the New Testament, my first question is, "Could this be Jesus?" Upon realising that you could well ask that about every aspect of this armour, it occurred to me that this is precisely how the armour works. Let's look at it together.

• Therefore take up the whole armour of God. One of the strongest descriptions of our armour doesn't actually talk about armour per se, and is found in Psalm 18:2:

  The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,
  my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
  my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

  We can see a couple of the themes of our Ephesians passage coming through in this verse, and we would do well, then, to consider that if the Lord is our shield and our salvation, then in fact, our entire passage is an invitation to put on Christ and a declaration of all that he has done.
  
  
• Fasten on the belt of truth. We are to put on the belt of truth; but as Pilate asked, what is truth? Jesus had, of course, already answered this earlier on in that gospel account; John 14:6 records that Jesus himself is the truth.
  
  
• Put on the breastplate of righteousness. Within Pauline thought particularly, and the pattern of all Scripture more broadly, it is none other than Christ who is for us our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption.
  
  
• Put on as shoes the readiness given by the gospel of peace. I refer you to the title of a recent book by John Piper, God is the Gospel. His contention, supported by Scripture, is that in the gospel, God offers us nothing less than himself. More pointedly, this is the gospel of Christ, and in his gospel, he offers us himself: his righteousness, his wisdom, his strength, his all. It would be remiss of me to ignore the link between this particular section and Isaiah 52:7, a verse which is, in my opinion, clearly Messianic. We not only are shod with Christ and his gospel, we are treading in his own footsteps.
  
  
• Take up the shield of faith. Who is our shield? We have seen this already, of course. And who is the source and object of our faith? Well, the same one as its author and perfecter, surely; our faith is given by Jesus and fixed on Jesus. We are best shielded by our faith when we hide behind our Lord and Saviour.
  
  
• Take the helmet of salvation. Again, we have already seen David's opinion, shared by the apostle Paul, as to who our salvation is. Again, this is none other than Jesus himself, who is our salvation.
  
  
• Take up … the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. The only offensive weapon in the list, the sword of the Spirit—the word of God. Two options here face us, but in reality, they are only one. Supposing that the word of God were to mean God the Word, we would see immediately that we are to fight only in Christ's strength and that, indeed, it is he who fights through us. Let us then adopt the lectio difficilior, that by "the sword of the Spirit", Paul has in mind as a direct object the Scriptures. Then what shall we say? That we can consider the Scriptures apart from Christ; that the word written is to be set apart from the Word Incarnate? Me genoito! By standing firm on and holding fast to the Scriptures, we are, in fact, standing on holding to the one to whom they testify, Jesus Christ.

In short, would you be protected against your true enemies, the powers of sin and death and hell? Then put on Christ. Would you seek to fight for Jesus? Then he shall fight through you. Would you flee temptation and look for refuge in a safe haven? Then be found in Christ, for it is he who does all this for you. Amen?