Sermon Outline

INTRODUCTION
What is God up to in the world? We saw last week that God is at work to perfect His people, to bring them to maturity, and to glorify us and the world. But the Bible also describes God's work in the world with the word "righteousness." Paul claims that the gospel is all about the revelation of God's righteousness, and Jesus pronounces blessing on those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Establishing righteousness means making war against unrighteousness.

THE TEXT
"Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. . . ." (Ephesians 6:10-18).

RIGHTEOUSNESS
"Righteousness" sometimes refers to individual obedience to God, but it often means something broader. "Righteousness" means "justice" or "right order." To say God is establishing righteousness means that He's putting a sin-corrupted world back together again. To do this, He not only works through the Spirit to produce the fruits of the Spirit, but also judges and destroys His enemies. God is a Warrior, and His purpose in the world is to defeat all his enemies.

WARFARE AND CHRISTIAN LIFE
Christians are called to be partners with God in the work of establishing and extending the righteousness of God's rule. When we are justified, we are put into a right relation with God, but we are also deployed into a battle to establish righteousness on earth. Throughout Scripture, the life of faith is depicted as a life of battle. Abraham battled against kings in the land to rescue lot; Moses led people in battle, and Joshua conquered the land; David, the man after God’s own heart, was a lifelong soldier. Even the Old Testament saints who were not soldiers were militant in their faith - think of Samuel and Elijah and Jeremiah. Jesus is the Greatest of the Holy Warrior of Scripture, taking on the greatest enemies of all - Sin, Death, and the Devil.

This militancy is not confined to the Old Testament. Christians too are called to be warriors of Christ. In fact, the "armor of God" to which Paul refers is not so much the armor that God gives as the armor that He Himself uses in His warfare (cf. Isaiah 59:16-21). Like our Lord, we take on the greatest enemy, confident of victory: "We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers" (Ephesians 6:12), and our weapons are not fleshly but spiritual (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). Through Jesus, we overcome Sin and Death. While this includes struggle with the sin in our own members (Romans 6), it also involves struggle for justice in the world, a passion to see God's righteousness established.

WORSHIP AND WAR
Paul lists prayer among the weapons of Christian warfare, and Scripture teaches more broadly that our worship is an act of war. Many of the Psalms were composed by a warrior to be sung by warriors, and 2 Chronicles 20 and other passages show that worship involves calling on God to rise up against His and our enemies.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, August 14, 2006 at 08:33 AM

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