The Full Armor of Satan, Part One

(This was originally published on The Wheaton Record on November 17th, 2020.)

Paul encourages us to take up the armor of God, the “whole” armor of God, because we are disposed to forget certain pieces of it. We are called to wear the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word; for shoes, we’re called to put on the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace (Ephesians 6:14-17).

Often, to our own harm, we forget one or more of these. But that doesn’t mean we’re walking around naked. What if I told you that in the place of God’s armor, many of us, whether we know it or not, are wearing the Devil’s clothes? Indeed, Satan has his own suit of armor. In the first part of this series I will address the belt and the breastplate of Satan’s armory.

Instead of wearing the belt of truth, Satan would prefer you to put on a belt of almost truth, woven with every strand of sound doctrine except for the parts that might offend. Satan wants to prevent you from being like the Bereans, who, upon hearing the truths of Christianity preached, examined “the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). Satan wants you to keep your Bible closed and embrace the things that sound nice to your ears. The belt of truth is too tight for a soul obese with pride. Only Satan’s belt of almost-truth will fit.

Refusing to humble themselves in reverent submission before God’s perfect word, these half-truth folks never risk appearing narrow-minded because they abhor the narrow way. They disguise their unbelieving pride in the false-humility of open-mindedness, yet their unbridled open-mindedness, to use a popular expression, has allowed their brains to fall out. They find the words “Thus saith the LORD” repugnant yet find the serpent’s “Did God really say?” sweeter than honey (Genesis 3:1). Obstinance is the heartbeat of their liberal theology. They open their Bibles only to have their sinful desires and intuitions confirmed.

The Puritan writer and preacher John Bunyan also wrote about the Devil’s armory. In The Holy War, an allegorical novel from 1682, he likened the iron breastplate supplied by Satan, in contrast to the breastplate of righteousness supplied by God, to a hardened heart “as much past feeling as a stone.” The heart is hardest in the chests of the unregenerate, those who have not been born again. The unregenerate, the Bible tells us, “[do] not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14).

This was every single one of us before we were born again. Before God in his mercy “made us alive together with Christ,” we were “dead in our trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1, 5). But even though we cannot lose our salvation if we have it, we must be watchful over our hearts, seeking to walk sensitively with God and fearing grieving Him by our sins. We must keep our hearts from growing cold and desensitized towards God. We must seek to have them warmed daily by the fires of prayer, Bible-reading, and the corporate worship of God.