SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/3/2019
11:09 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-4 “The Sword of the Spirit”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Ephesians
6:17b
Message of the
verse: “and take the Sword of the
Spirit, which is the Word of God.
We continue to look at the sermon that John MacArthur
preached in 2008 on the Sword of the Spirit:
“Now having said
that by way of a broad look at Scripture, let’s look more directly at the sword
of the Spirit. And I guess maybe to start with, I would say that this is a weapon that is both defensive
and offensive as any sword is. You would have to say that a rifle is
purely an offensive weapon; it’s not a defensive weapon. You don’t sort of
defend yourself with a rifle; you use it only as an offensive weapon, shooting
something far away from you. But a sword in your hand was used perhaps more
often to parry a deadly blow than it was to inflict one. For every blow that
you might inflict that would cause the death or the wounding of your enemy, you
may have staved off a dozen or more attacks against your own life. So this is
both a defensive and an offensive weapon.
The word sword is machaira, a very
common word in the Greek and used a number of times in the New Testament. It
refers to a small sword, a small sword meaning anything from 18 inches down to maybe
a foot long, even falling into the category of a dagger, a different word than rhomphaia which was the great long three or four-foot long
sword that would be yielded with two hands. This is the kind of a sword that is
in the hands of the Roman soldiers who came to capture Jesus Christ. It was a
machaira that is mentioned in Matthew 26:47.
This was the sword that every Roman soldier carried with him all the time. To
put it in the modern vernacular, he didn’t always have his rifle but he always
had his pistol, he always had the small weapon. This, by the way, is the same
kind of sword that Peter used to whack off the ear of Malchus. It is a machaira
according to Acts 12:2 that killed James, the brother of John. Machaira were used to slay many
of the heroes of faith. The word machaira is used to describe the slaughter of
the heroes of faith in Hebrews 11:37. So
it’s a very common weapon. It would be a lethal kind of weapon, much like some
of those lethal knives that you see carried by people who have murderous intent
in their minds. The sword which Paul has in mind is very familiar. In this
case, however, it is the sword of the Spirit, tu pneumatos (?), may be used in
an adjectival sense. It
could be the spiritual sword if we use it as an adjective. Or it could be what we would
call a genitive, genitive of origin, a sword given by the Holy Spirit.
I think the context might support both, that what we have here is a
spiritual weapon that is essentially given to us by the Holy Spirit because the
Scripture is authored by whom? The Holy Spirit. We just read that, 2
Peter 1, men moved by the Spirit wrote the Scripture. So it is possible
that it could be seen in its genitive sense, that is a sword given to us by the
Spirit, it is also that it could be seen as an adjectival sense, that it is a spiritual
sword, that is it’s a sword to be wielded in the spiritual dimension. It is a Spirit-given, spiritual
sword.
In
fact, that ties so wonderfully into a text that I refer to a lot,
and I’ll do it again because it’s germane to the point, 2 Corinthians 10,
a little...it seems to me a little understood text. Second Corinthians 10 verse
3, “Though we walk in the
flesh, we do not war according to the flesh.” What he means by that is
we walk in the flesh, he’s not talking about sinning, he’s simply saying we’re
humans; we live in a human body. We are human but we don’t engage in war with human weapons, for the
weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh. If they’re not of the
flesh, then they must be spiritual. If they’re not carnal fleshly and human,
they must be spiritual. And so this is exactly the same thing. This is making
war with a spiritual weapon. And he goes on to say, “This
weapon which is not fleshly is divinely powerful.” That again leans us in the
direction of understanding this as a spiritual weapon, provided by the Holy
Spirit.
In
this imagery, however, it is something more than just a dagger. It is
something more than just a small sword. This is a weapon powerful enough to destroy a fortress.
And the word there means just that, a massive stone fortress. We assault these fortresses not
with human weapons but with weapons that are not even a part of the flesh but
rather have as their source and their power divine character. And as a
result, we are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against
the knowledge of God.
What
are the fortresses that we attack? They are speculations, logismos in the Greek, ideas, theories,
viewpoints, any lie, anything that’s anti-God, any concept, idea, theory,
viewpoint, religion, philosophy that is raised up against the knowledge of
God. So in this sense we are seeing the offensive power of
spiritual truth. The weapon is clearly the truth because the only thing
that displaces error is truth. The only thing that smashes what is raised up
against the knowledge of God is the true knowledge of God. The only way to
bring down lies and deceptions, these ideologies, these anti-God concepts and
bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ is to bring the truth.
And that’s found in the Word of God. So it is a formidable weapon that we have.
And we expand the idea of
that weapon, moving from the passage in Ephesians 6 to this one, and now
we see it in its great power to bring down an entire fortification. This
would be human fortifications in which people have become imprisoned, wrong,
damning ideologies, anti-God viewpoints. So we use spiritual weapons, namely
the truth, the truth always found in the Word of God, to smash the anti-God
lies and to bring every
thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
Our weapon in that sense, (you can go back to
Ephesians 6 now), our weapon in that sense is a spiritual weapon. And it
is the Word of God. It is the truth. We have a spiritual sword given to us by
the Holy Spirit and it is an awesome weapon. Our sword was not forged on human
anvils or tempered in earthly fires. It is a weapon of divine origin provided
for us by the Spirit of God to give us a powerful and effective instrument to
use against everything that is raised up against the truth. Fleshly weapons, frankly,
are useless in such a combat. And again, what is it? It is the Word of God that is
sharper as Hebrews says, than any other sword. And in itself is a
two-edged sword, it cuts every way you use it. It is alive, it is powerful,
dynamic, effective, it penetrates, it judges, krino is used in Hebrews 4:12,
and no one escapes its power. So it is an offensive weapon. At
the same time, it is a defensive weapon. It is used against the thrusts
of Satan. We fight with it, not only to advance the truth into the fortresses
of deception in order to lead people to the truth, but we defend ourselves with
it as well. Every other
piece of armor covers some specific part of the body. The shield covers the
whole body if we crouch behind it. And the sword is like that. It is a very general weapon,
can defend us at any point where we are attacked.
What
is this telling us? That your defense is going to be to know the truth.
It doesn’t do you any good to own a Bible if you don’t know what is in it. It
doesn’t do you any good at all. To bring it down to what we’re talking about,
you’re talking about a dagger that has to be used in a certain way. You can’t
just pick your Bible up and flail it in the air. It’s not some great broad
sword. It has to be used with precision. If you’re in hand-to-hand combat, you
can be poking a lot of places and accomplishing nothing until you strike the
dagger at precisely the point that it needs to be placed in order to defend
yourself or to inflict that mortal wound. It has to be used with great
precision. We go forth into the kingdom of darkness, defending ourselves. And
when Satan comes at us, if we are ignorant of a certain area of biblical truth,
we are defenseless in that area.”
I have mentioned that whenever I listen to a sermon by
John MacArthur and then read the transcript of it I have to do some editing of
it as the way they do it at Grace To You is just print out every word that he
says, and so it is best to carefully read over the sermon and then do some editing
on it.
Our quotation from “Love in
Action” is from the book of Acts; Acts 11:26.
And when he [Barnabas] had found him
[Paul],
he brought him to Antioch. So it was
that
for a whole year they assembled with
the church and taught a
great many people.
11/3/2019 11:17 PM
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