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Japanese The shield of faith is our trust in God and in what he has said. Paul tells us to take it up in Ephesians 6:16, so that we can “quench all the fiery darts of the wicked”: the lies, temptations and fears the devil throws at us. He pictures a Roman soldier’s tall shield.
The Bible’s first fiery dart is a question. “Yea, hath God said?” the serpent asks the woman in the garden (Genesis 3:1), and a moment later comes the lie it was preparing: “Ye shall not surely die” (Genesis 3:4). The same arrow flies in the wilderness. A voice from heaven has just said of Jesus, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17), and the tempter’s first words to him are “If thou be the Son of God” (Matthew 4:3). The darts aim at what God has said. Faith holds it up between us and them.
What does Ephesians 6:16 say?
The King James Version reads: “Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.” It sits in the middle of Paul’s picture of the armor of God, which begins, “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11). The belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness and the shoes of the gospel of peace come before it; the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit come after. The whole passage is explained in the armor of God in Ephesians 6.
“Above all” can sound as though faith outranks the other pieces. The older English translation of John Chrysostom’s sermons on Ephesians renders the phrase “withal,” as well as all these. Chrysostom (about 347–407), whose name means “golden-mouthed” for his preaching, explained what it tells us: “It means both in truth, and in righteousness, and in the preparation of the gospel; that is to say, all these have need of the aid of faith.” The shield guards the rest of the armor. “Of all the other armor, this is the safeguard,” he told his people; “if we have not this, they will be quickly pierced through.”
What was a Roman shield like?
Paul’s word is thyreos, from thyra, “door.” It means “a large shield (as door-shaped),” and it was used of the long Roman shield, the scutum, big enough to cover most of a man. Paul could have pictured something small to parry with. He chose the door.
The Greek historian Polybius, writing about two centuries before Paul, describes the Roman shield of his own day. Its “convex surface” measured “two and a half feet in width and four feet in length.” It was “made of two planks glued together, the outer surface being then covered first with canvas and then with calf-skin,” with iron edging at the top and bottom and an iron boss in the middle. One later shield has survived, from about two centuries after Paul. It was found in thirteen pieces at Dura-Europos, in present-day Syria, and the Yale University Art Gallery, which holds it, calls it the only surviving example of the curved legionary scutum. It is curved like half a cylinder, made of painted wood and rawhide, and about 105 centimetres tall, some three and a half feet. So the design changed over those four centuries, and the shield of Paul’s day came between the two. Either one covered most of a man, from shoulder to knee.
What were the fiery darts of the wicked?
The darts, bele, are missiles: arrows, darts or javelins. Paul calls them “fiery,” using a word for something set on fire. Burning arrows were a real weapon. When the Persian army of Xerxes besieged the Acropolis of Athens, Herodotus tells us, they took the hill called the Areopagus, “wrapped arrows in tar and set them on fire, and then shot them at the barricade.” It was the same hill on which Paul would later stand and preach to the Athenians (Acts 17:19–22).
“The wicked” in the King James Version is, in Paul’s Greek, “the evil one”: the devil, the one whose “wiles” Paul has just named. His arrows are not all alike. Scripture already knew that words can fly like arrows. The psalmist speaks of those who “bend their bows to shoot their arrows, even bitter words” (Psalm 64:3), and against “lying lips” he sets “sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper” (Psalm 120:2, 4), arrows with burning coals.
Chrysostom named the darts plainly. They are “both temptations, and vile desires,” and they are fiery “for such is the character of these desires.” They are also doubts: “many things does the devil dart in, to inflame our soul and bring us into uncertainty; as, for example, when some persons say, Is there then a resurrection? Is there a judgment?” We know these arrows. The whisper that God has forgotten us. The accusation that we are too far gone to be forgiven. The sudden pull towards a sin we thought we had left behind. The question at three in the morning: is any of it true?
How does faith act as a shield?
Faith quenches the darts by setting God’s word against them. Paul’s verb is the one used for putting out a fire. The arrow still comes, and it may still sting. But it lands on something that does not burn.
Readers have heard this faith in more than one way. Chrysostom took it in a particular sense, “not knowledge,” he said, “but that gift by which miracles are wrought,” and he pointed to Jesus’ words about faith that moves mountains. John Calvin read it as trust in God’s word, bound to the sword of the Spirit in the next verse: “the word is the object of faith,” he wrote, and “By faith we repel all the attacks of the devil.” That is the faith every believer is asked to hold up.
Jesus showed us how in the wilderness. Every time the tempter spoke, he answered with what God had said: “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Speaking those words is the sword of the Spirit in the next verse. Believing them, while hungry and alone, is the shield.
Abraham is the Bible’s great example. When God asked him to offer Isaac, the son of the promise, Abraham reasoned “that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead” (Hebrews 11:19). Paul says of him that “he staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; and being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform” (Romans 4:20–21). Chrysostom saw that test as one of the darts: “Seems it not to you to be fiery darts, when the patriarch burned with inward fire, as he was offering up his son?” Faith did not make the test easy. It put out the lie that God would break his word.
So Peter tells us how to meet the enemy who prowls “as a roaring lion”: “Whom resist stedfast in the faith” (1 Peter 5:8–9). And John gives the end of the story: “this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith” (1 John 5:4).
Is God called a shield in the Old Testament?
Many times, and this is the key to Paul’s picture. Long before Ephesians, the shield was God himself. “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward” (Genesis 15:1). “But thou, O Lord, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head” (Psalm 3:3). “The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped” (Psalm 28:7). “His truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day” (Psalm 91:4–5).
Proverbs joins the two halves: “Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him” (Proverbs 30:5). Faith is a shield because of what it holds on to. Our trust does not protect us by its own strength. It protects us because it holds up the God who is faithful, and his word, between us and the fire.
What if my faith feels weak?
Then hold up the faith you have, and ask for more. A father in the Gospels brought his son to Jesus and cried out with tears, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24), and Jesus “took him by the hand, and lifted him up; and he arose” (Mark 9:27). The shield does not have to feel strong in our hands, because its strength was never ours. Faith, like salvation itself, is God’s gift: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8), and we are “kept by the power of God through faith” (1 Peter 1:5).
Jesus knew Peter was about to fail him, and he said, “I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren” (Luke 22:32). Peter’s courage broke that night. His faith was carried by the prayer of Jesus, and it rose again. If you have been hit, and you feel the burn, you are not out of the battle. “Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2), we pick the shield up again.
How do we take up the shield of faith today?
We feed our faith on what God has said, because “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). When a dart comes, we answer it with a promise, as Jesus did: God has said he will not leave me; God has said there is forgiveness; God has said Christ is risen. We pray, which is where Paul’s armor passage ends: “Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:18). And we do not stand alone. Paul writes to a church, and his “ye” is plural: each of us takes up a shield, and we stand beside one another. We worship with other believers, confess to one another, and lift the shield for a brother or sister who has let theirs drop. For the daily struggle that all of this belongs to, see what spiritual warfare is and how to overcome.
Chrysostom’s charge to his people can be our prayer: “Let this our faith be such as shall cover and screen the whole frame.” The fire will come. Over it stands the word God spoke to Abram, and speaks to us: “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield.”
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