The Believer's Armor, Part 2: The Breastplate of Righteousness

It seems to me the key to all of this is the breastplate of righteousness. If there is not righteousness in your life, the chances are you're not going to have commitment. If there is not a genuine righteousness in your life, you're not going to have the shield of faith, the shoes of peace. You're not going to have the helmet of salvation, and you're not going to wield the sword unless you are committed to righteousness in your life. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Imagine if the indicator lights on your car or the reminders on your phone didn't go off when they were supposed to. You could very well kiss your car's engine or an important business deal goodbye, all because you didn't get the warning you needed. As a Christian, you have a warning system that keeps you from trouble. It's a system that Satan would like to jam with interference or destroy it altogether. You'll learn about that warning system today on Grace to You. As John MacArthur continues his compelling look at the believer's armor based on Ephesians chapter 6.

And now with a lesson, here's John. We've been studying the great truth in this text related to the believer's war with the forces of hell. As Paul has outlined for us in the book of Ephesians, the tremendous power and resource of the Christian. He doesn't want us to get overconfident. He doesn't want us to dwell with any illusion that because of our resources it'll be easy.

Because we have been blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies, because we are able to do exceeding abundantly above all we can ask or think, because we can be filled with the Spirit of God, because we can allow the Spirit to fill us with His might, because all of these resources are ours and because we have the very truth of God in our hands and because God's ultimate sovereign design is to produce good works does not mean that it'll be easy to live the Christian life. And so having said all of that, he has yet to say this in verse 10, finally my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in the heavenlies. Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand. Stand therefore having your loins girded about with truthfulness and having on the breastplate of righteousness and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.

Above all, taking the shield of faith with which ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God. Now in this passage, as we have seen for the last several weeks, the Apostle Paul outlines for us the strategy, the plan, the enemy, the whole area of the believer's warfare. And the sum of it all is that we must, as it says in verse 11, put on the whole armor, repeats in verse 13, take unto us the whole armor if we are to be victorious. This then is a passage of critical nature in the life of a Christian. No matter how adept your theology is, no matter how solid the foundation of your comprehension, no matter how much you know about the Scripture, how much you have of information regarding God's truth, you are still potentially a loser because this is a war that is won and fought really on a day-to-day basis. So all of the resources that you have intellectually, in addition all of the resources that you have spiritually in the power and presence of the Spirit of God can be set aside even by a believer to the point where we begin to lose the battle. And so does Paul remind us that we must be very much aware that the Christian life is war. And the sooner we learn it, the sooner we will experience the victory that God has for us. Now we saw last time, if you'll look back at verse 14, the first piece of armor. Paul says as he envisions a Roman soldier in his full battle regalia, stand therefore having your loins girded about with aletheia.

And primarily we said he has in mind here truthfulness or an attitude of readiness, commitment without hypocrisy. The term here having your loins girded is associated in Hebrew thinking with the idea of readiness or preparedness. The Jewish people for literally centuries have indicated a readiness to move out with the phrase gird up your loins.

When they left the land of Egypt at the time of the Passover, they were instructed to gird up their loins. This is a very common phrase in Jewish thought. The Apostle Paul is calling for the very same thing in a spiritual sense. Peter says, for example, in 1 Peter 1 13, gird up the loins of your mind. In other words, get your mind ready for the things of God.

That's what Paul is saying. A Jewish person preparing for a trip wouldn't go on the trip with his garments flowing in the breeze. He would gird his loins with a belt, pull his garments through that so that he was pulled together ready for motion, for movement. The same thing was true of a Roman soldier.

He would take his tunic, pull it up through this belt that was tied tightly so that his garment wouldn't get in his way as he was in the battle. And so what our Apostle Paul is telling us is that we must have a readiness for the battle. We must be prepared and committed for it. And so we suggest to you the idea here is commitment. You know, one of the things that happens as a church begins to grow like ours, people begin to be added on a periphery that's further and further out, further and further away. As the church gets larger and larger and larger, it seems as though there is on a general basis a diminishing of commitment at the extremities.

Because those people don't feel a part of the core and they become sort of spectators, the commitment level begins to diminish. And it becomes incumbent on us to constantly challenge people to commitment because the more grace grows, the greater the potential impact, the greater the resistance of the enemy, the more desperately the commitment is needed, you see. General Zonik Shaham is an Israeli general who has a string of battle credits as long as your arm and is quite a man, not a Christian man, a very Zionist orientation, one who believes in the sovereignty of the State of Israel and who has a high regard for the great tradition and history of that great people. And I was privileged to have lunch with him and to tell you the least of it, he is indeed a fascinating person. I asked him several questions about many things and then he said to me, he said, I appreciated your sermon.

I came in and heard you preach last Sunday. And he said, I appreciate what you said about commitment because he says commitment is the whole issue with us. He said, people think we are a super people, although we have super intellect or super strength and that's why we win, but it really is commitment. And then he added, and by the way, he said, what you said about girding up your loins, meaning commitment and readiness and preparedness is exactly right.

We still use that phrase. He said, let me give you an illustration of this. He said, I have a friend in the San Fernando Valley who's a Jewish man and he had a son and his son desired to come to Israel to live there. And so he came and lived, I think, on a kibbutz. And he said after several years there, I guess two years or something, he reached the age where he would have to enter the military or return to the United States. And he said, frankly, feeling that like other Americans he would choose the life of ease and return to America rather than get into the Israeli army. He said, I was surprised to find that he entered the army. Well, the next thing I knew I received a letter from him asking for a private appointment with me because I knew him and I assumed that like any American boy he would say, look, General, you know me and I know you. Let's make this thing as easy as we can.

Find me a desk job, get my feet up on the desk and so forth and so on. And he was going to come to ask a favor. Well, he did. He said he showed up at the office and this was his request. He said, General, he said, my assignment in the army is too easy. He said, this isn't what I want. He said, I want to be in the finest, most strategic, diligent, difficult regiment in all the Israeli army.

What is it and how do I get in it? And the General informed him about the fact that it was a front line crack regiment of paratroopers that have the most precarious duty and are the front line dropping into wherever the battle is going to be before anybody else. And he said, that's the group. But he said that what it takes to be in that group is incredible. He said it closes finally with four days of relentless all day long marching, climbing up the mount that leads to Masada in the middle of the desert, carrying your full pack. That's just the end of it all. He said, that's what I want.

He signed up and not long after that he completed the training, lying flat on his stomach, unable to move his body for not one muscle would function, but he made it. General Shacham said to me, that's why we win. We win because people like that are committed. And that is essentially what the Apostle Paul is saying to us in this whole concept of the belt of truthfulness. People, this is war.

It is... the world deludes us with the good life, but we are in the middle of a spiritual battle and we will win when you get serious about the battle. I believe there is no limit to what God can do other than our own lack of commitment. And I think that's really where it has to all begin, as Paul has pointed out. You'll notice again in verse 14 that he says a Roman soldier will also have on a breastplate and Paul calls it the breastplate of righteousness. No Roman soldier in his right mind would ever go into a battle without his breastplate. Even if he could fight off the personal foe that he was fighting with, he might get shot through with an arrow coming from the other forces and hit him in a vulnerable area, so he would always wear a breastplate.

And surely in a hand-to-hand combat anyway, he'd be vulnerable here and there would be some blows that would be parried if he were protected. And so Paul looks at a Roman soldier going into battle and he says not only is he committed and has his loins girded up, his belt is on and he's serious about movement, he's going to get in this thing to win it, but he also has his vital area protected. Now Roman soldiers had different kinds of breastplates. Some of them were made out of linen, a very heavy linen that hung down very low and it would be covered with...they would take the hooves of an animal and they would slice them into slices rather thinly and then they would hang them, hooking them together so that it was almost like a horn using an animal's horn kind of material, either from the hoof or from the horn. Additionally they sometimes used a chain mail kind of thing. Sometimes they would use the linen and they would hang little pieces of metal on it. And then of course the most familiar one that we know about is the great molded metal almost chest plate that goes all the way from the base of the neck to the top of the thighs covering all that vital area, the one you see with the eagle on it or SPQR or whatever and we associate with a Roman soldier.

And this was of course to protect this very vital area. Now frankly I've tried through the years as I've examined the armor of the Christian to see if there's any hierarchy of priority, if there are any more important than others. And that's very, very difficult to do, well nigh impossible, because you have to put on the whole armor, right? The whole armor. Each piece is specifically geared to accomplish some certain and absolutely essential factor.

So we cannot say that one is specifically ranking first, another second, another third. And yet it seems to me that the key to all of this is the breastplate of righteousness. If there is not righteousness in your life, the chances are you're not going to have commitment. If there is not a genuine righteousness in your life, you're not going to have the shield of faith, the shoes of peace. You're not going to have the helmet of salvation and you're not going to wield the sword unless you are committed to righteousness in your life. And righteousness is just a way of saying a right relationship to God. Unless things are right between you and God, that seems to me to be bottom line. Commitment actually is born out of that.

It's when you get right with God that the commitment takes place. Now let me just talk about this concept of the breastplate of righteousness for a minute. Obviously you know that in a battle the area you've got to protect is right in here.

The helmet would protect the head area and in the kind of battle that they would fight hand to hand they were using a short sword and it wouldn't be the kind that you could cut somebody's head off with. So this was the vital area here. And what they were endeavoring to protect was the heart area up here and then the lower area which the Jewish people used to call the bowels. It meant the midsection where all the other organs are, functional organs of the body. And so a breastplate covered two vital areas, the heart and the bowel area.

Now to the Jew this had a great significance. Symbolically the heart represented the mind. The Bible says, as a man thinketh in his what? Heart, so is he. Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts. The heart is the thinking aspect of life. The heart in Hebrew terms or symbols means the mind.

The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Thinking is associated with the heart. The bowels are associated with feelings and emotions.

It talks about the bowels of compassion or shutting up the bowels of love and not loving someone properly. And this is because emotions give us feelings in our stomach, don't they? Emotions hit us in the stomach. We ache in our stomach when certain emotions are felt. And so to the Hebrew this is a good way to demonstrate it. The heart then means the thinking process and the bowels refers to the emotions.

And if we can draw that across to our imagery in terms of the armor, this is what we're saying. Satan wants to attack a believer in two areas primarily. One in his thinking, two in his emotions.

One in the way he thinks and feels, another in the way he responds emotionally. And the believer must be protected because this is where Satan makes his attack. He feeds your thinking processes with false information. He feeds your emotions with false information. He wants to cloud your mind with false doctrine, lies, religious untruth, anything he can. And he wants to appeal to the wrong parts of your emotions. He wants to elicit evil emotional responses.

He wants to twist and pervert your affections. And so the sum of it is this, people, listen. If you protect your thinking and your feeling from the attacks of Satan, you're impregnable. You'll try to confuse your mind with false doctrine or you'll try to confuse your emotions to make you long for, lust for, feel after and have affection for the wrong things. Now if you just take the mind and the emotions together, they encompass everything that causes us to act. They encompass the concept of knowledge. That's the first key to responding.

You've got to have a certain amount of knowledge. Understanding, conscience, will, desires, drives, affections, feelings, emotions, all those things that cause us to act are protected by the breastplate of righteousness. Satan moves into your life and he has some things he wants to do. He wants to snatch away the Word of God from your mind and fill it with lies, right? Fill it with perversion. Fill up your mind with garbage. Fill up your mind with a morality that isn't God's. Fill up your mind with a theology that isn't God's.

Fill up your mind with all kinds of untruth and half-truth. So he attacks the mind. He wants you to wrongly understand things. He doesn't want you to interpret things rightly. He wants you to say about sin, oh, it's not so bad. So he literally drowns you in a sea of it so you become very tolerant of it and he entertains you with it so that you don't think it's as evil as it really is.

So he has you laughing at sin on your television or in the movies. He has you hearing it put to beautiful tunes and music so that it clouds and confuses the clear thinking of your mind. From there he moves to destroy your conscience, to get you to do things that you shouldn't do, to sear a conscience that once warned you that soon will not warn you any longer. He wants to debilitate your will, breaking down your will. He wants to confuse your emotions by causing you to feel wrongfully toward things. He wants to corrupt your desires.

He wants to draw your affections to the wrong things. And all of this attack comes by Satan in that vital area. And simply does the Apostle Paul say, it's protected by righteousness, by righteousness. Protect your thinking and your feeling, and you're impregnable against Satan. Now, what is the righteousness of which Paul speaks?

What is he really talking about? There are only three possible things to consider. One would be self-righteousness, two would be imputed righteousness, and three would be practical righteousness. Either he's talking about our own self-righteousness, he's talking about the righteousness of Christ given to us, or he's talking about living out the righteousness of Christ given to us. We'll look and see which is the case. Let's look first of all at the concept of our own righteousness. There are some people who think they're all right just because they're good folks, you know.

Why? What does Satan ultimately want to do to somebody? Think about it. What is Satan's ultimate goal with individuals?

Well, I'll tell you what it is. It's to cast them into an eternal kingdom with him. Satan's ultimate goal is to draw men into hell with him, to keep them back from coming to God. He does not want to populate God's kingdom. He does not want people bowing to Jesus Christ. He does not want citizens of heaven. He wants to populate hell.

He wants to populate his own dominion. And so Satan's ultimate goal is to destroy, to put into hell. Now, this is what Satan will do, but there are some people who say, well, my own righteousness will be sufficient to prevent that.

Satan wants to mess up your life all along the way, and there are some people who think they're good enough to handle it. In the time of the Bible, the Pharisees were that way. They thought they were good enough. They thought they could make it, and that's why in Matthew 5.20 Jesus said, except your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you'll never enter the kingdom. They were wrong.

They weren't good enough. For by grace are you saved through faith, that not of yourselves. It is a gift of God, not of what?

Works. You can't do it, and yet they thought they could. In Luke chapter 18 we find the typical attitude of a Pharisee, a legalist, somebody who thinks he can make it by his own goodness. We have people like that today. In fact, every religious system in the world apart from Christianity is based on the fact that man can do it himself, that he can be good enough on his own. And so in Luke 18 9, a certain parable the Lord tells, two men went into the temple to pray.

One is a Pharisee and the other is a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God I thank thee that I am not as other men, extortioners, unjust, adulters, or as this tax collector. In other words, I'm so glad I'm so good. I'm so happy about me, aren't you?

I've done it on my own. I've arrived. I'm self-righteous.

I fast twice a week, and you only had to fast several times a year, but he was really going at it. I give tithes of all that I possess. And there on the corner was the tax collector beating on his breast saying, God, be merciful to me, a sinner. Jesus said, I tell you, that's the man that went down to his house justified rather than the other. For everyone that exalts himself should be abased, and he that humbles himself should be exalted. Another word for justified is made righteous.

Who is really righteous? The man who thought he could do it on his own or the man who knew he couldn't? Jesus said the man who knew he couldn't. He could call the story a good man that went to hell and a bad man that went to heaven.

As long as you think you can do it on your own, you're stuck with your self-righteousness, you do not have a breastplate. You will never defend yourself against Satan. He'll cast you into hell forever.

Even though God has the ultimate right to do that, Satan is the one who allures. All the best you can do doesn't make it. Isaiah 64 says, all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.

That's the best we have. If you hope by your goodness to get into heaven, you are the most deluded person of all. In Romans chapter 3 and verse 10, we read these very provocative words. There is none righteous, no, not one. If it had just said there is none righteous, somebody would have said, except me. So the Bible says, no, not even you, not one. There is none that understandeth. There is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way. They are together to become unprofitable.

There is none that doeth good, no, not one. The word unprofitable means to go sour like milk. The whole human race has gone sour. There's nobody righteous, nobody good in the whole thing. As a result, it says in the end of verse 19, every mouth is stopped and the whole world is guilty before God.

Why? Verse 23, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Self-righteousness is not the breastplate of righteousness.

You will be a victim of the forces of hell for sure if you're trying to cover yourself in your own righteousness. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. The title of his current study on Grace to You, The Believer's Armor. John, one of the very first series I ever heard you teach was Ephesians chapter 6, The Believer's Armor.

And we return to this series every few years, and I think it's helpful to do that. We've typically done it because Satan never eases up from his spiritual attacks, and we're committed to equipping believers for those spiritual challenges. And in that effort, we're grateful to God for how He's expanding our reach to believers who speak languages other than English. Yeah, that's been an amazing part of the development of Grace to You over the last decade or so. Yes, with regard to The Believer's Armor, I would just remind people that the Apostle Paul said we're not to be ignorant of Satan's devices. And so we have to repeat this.

We have to go back to it periodically so that we aren't ignorant of his devices. And how wonderful that we have been able to get this material translated into multiple languages. And this is what we call our Grace Reaches Out, GRO for short.

And a little bit of background on that. It was 2013 that we launched the initiative called Grace Reaches Out. And the objective of this is to translate a collection of our most important fundamental basic sermons into languages other than English. And the total number of sermons to be translated into these languages is about 600 sermons. The GRO project is one way we're fulfilling Grace to You's purpose statement, which is to make our Bible teaching available to as wide an audience as possible. And specifically, GRO expands the scope of our Bible teaching to people who otherwise would be out of reach because of language barriers.

Let me get more specific. The work on the first four languages—Arabic, Chinese, French, and Portuguese—is about 90 percent complete. These sermons are available for free downloading, and you can access them right on our website, gty.org. That's right, you can access them in Arabic, Chinese, French, and Portuguese. Go to the website, click on Sermons, scroll down the page, and you'll see on the right side a heading for Grace Reaches Out, and there you'll find links to the available sermons in those other languages. And now, work in the Russian language is well underway, and Farsi or Persian is even in production.

The goal is to eventually broadcast these other languages on radio and other media outlets in the regions where these languages are being spoken. So we need you to pray for the translation work and the revoicing of those translations in those languages, that it would lead to many coming to Christ and growing in grace and in the knowledge of Him. That's right, and thank you, John. And friend, if you want to play a strategic part in giving believers across the globe access to biblical truth that transforms lives, thanks for expressing your support when you contact us today. Call us at 800-55-GRACE or write to Grace To You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. You can also make a donation at our website, gty.org. And thank you for all that you do to support Bible teaching in your community and in communities around the world. Thanks especially for your prayers, your most important ministry to us. Again, to express your financial support, call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org. And while you're online, I encourage you to see for yourself all the translation work that's been done so far. Perhaps you or someone you know could benefit from John's sermons translated into Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and even Farsi. You'll find those on our website. We also have books and the MacArthur Study Bible translated into most of those languages.

Find out about all of that at our website, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the staff, I'm Phil Johnson with a question for you. Whenever you are tempted to sin, anytime and every time, do you have a real choice not to sin? Consider that tomorrow when we're back with 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace To You.