(7.) Soldier, Priest – The Belt of Truth
(7.) Soldier, Priest – The Belt of Truth.
“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For this struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm, then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.” (Ephesians 6:10-20).
The “belt” of the High Priest was actually a beautiful sash, or girdle, tied around the priest’s waist to hold his garments together. It was embroidered material with blue, purple, scarlet and white colored yarns and linen. The “belt” of the Roman soldier was simply a long piece of leather tied around their waist tightly so the other pieces of his battle equipment didn’t get in the way of his fighting.
The original Greek wording of this piece of armor is not to “put on the belt of truth.” Instead, Paul declared that we should “gird up our loins with truth,” or “have your loins girded with truth.” To gird your loins meant at that time to tuck your long tunic or robe into your girdle, or belt, that is around your waist. So “girding up” was done every day… hitch your tunic up and tuck it in, which is only common sense. If one didn’t gird their loins, one would not have the freedom of movement needed to take long strides, or run, or work, or fight. That was the whole purpose of that belt around your hips… to remove the hindrances of those long, restrictive tunics worn by everyone in those days. This very common practice turned into a sort of metaphor, an idiom used by everyone to say: prepare for action, get ready to move, do what you need to do in readiness for work and movement. These days, one might say roll up your sleeves, hitch up our pants, be on your toes, tighten your belt, keep your eyes peeled, or the classic Boy Scouts motto: Always be prepared.
“This is how you are to eat your meal in Passover night: with your cloak tucked into your belt (with your ‘loins girded’), your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hands. Eat it in haste; it is the Lord Yahweh’s Passover.” (Exodus 12:11).
The first time in Scripture we see the command to gird up our loins was when God was giving directions to the Israelites in preparation for the historic Passover night in Egypt. God told them to get ready to leave at a moment’s notice. So then, for the Israelites to obey God and gird their loins was a sign of faith in Him that God would fulfill His promise. To refuse to gird one’s loins was a sign of unbelief and an apparent lack of confidence in God’s promise of deliverance. Scripture mentions the girding of loins often, including Elijah (1 Kings 1:8), Jeremiah (1:17), the righteous woman (Proverbs 31:17), and Job (38:3). Jesus tells His disciples in Luke 12:35 to gird up their loins and be dressed ready for service, and to keep their lamps burning. In all cases it described someone in the state of readiness to come what may. The Christian would do well to live in the spirit of Passover this way… be ready to obey the Lord’s directions; be prepared to serve Him when the time comes; be free to move at the signal of the Lord’s word; make sure you have the freedom of movement needed to fully follow what God wants us to do.
Who better than Mavis and Levon to sing us into this truth… “When the Lord gets ready, you got to move.”
Mavis Staples & Levon Helm – “You Got To Move” – YouTube
LYRICS
Refrain: You got to move, you got to move, you got to move, child, you got to move. When the Lord gets ready, you got to move.
- You may be high, you may be low, you may be rich, child, you may be po’. But when the Lord gets ready, you got to move.
Refrain
2. You see the woman that walks the street, you see the policeman out on his beat. But when the Lord gets ready, you got to move.
Refrain
3. (added later) You may be lame, and you cannot walk. You may be mute and you cannot talk. But when the Lord gets ready, you got to move.
Refrain
“Therefore, gird the loins of your mind (‘prepare your minds for action’), be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as He who called you is holy, so you be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:16; Leviticus 19:2)
St. Peter makes a significant addition to Paul’s discussion of spiritual warfare. Peter advised us to “gird up the loins of our mind.” Could we have better marching orders as we prepare for our battles with the devil? For the devil tends to attack our minds before anything else, he likes to mess with our head: sowing seeds of doubt; creating confusion in our thinking; blatantly, and sometimes very convincingly, lying to us; making us uncertain in our beliefs; dissuading us from even believing there is a truth. So Peter highlights the fact that in our Christian life, it is a sin to be mentally lazy and complacent. Laziness in our thinking plays right into the hands of Satan. Instead, we are to be ready to outthink our opposition. We are not to settle for intellectual mediocrity in any way. We are to have our loins girded by committing ourselves to the truth of Jesus. We are to have a settled conviction of the truth so that it is a much-used reference point in the warfare of the mind. We are to be clear thinkers, we are to have our minds engaged at all times. We are to have our loins girded in order to be agile and free in our thinking, and ready to fight the devil. The belt of truth will guard our minds as we prepare for battle. This is the first piece of equipment that Paul mentions regarding the full armor of God, and for good reason. We simply are not ready for the devil’s clever warfare if we are not mentally prepared and thoughtfully ready for action. Knowing the truth intimately and walking in that truth is the first vital piece of spiritual protection for us.
Biblically speaking, what does it mean to “know’ the truth so that it can be used in this inevitable warfare with the evil one? The Hebrew concept of truth, “yada,” was embraced by the early Christians, and is jam-packed with meaning. On the one hand it implies acquiring something factual through the intellect. It is mentally grasping some piece of knowledge and remembering it. When you know something, your mind says, “I got this.” So on the one hand, knowing is a mental exercise. But on the other hand yada is so much more. Knowledge is actually a relationship word in the Scripture. The Bible says that one can only know something through personal involvement, through an intimate experience with whatever or whoever is known. Knowing something involves a heartfelt focus, an intense investment. To know something is to care for it, to give oneself over to it. Knowledge is a personal experience with the truth, a union with whatever is known to be true. To know is to have a committed understanding of something or someone. One doesn’t know something unless it has changed the knower. Knowledge of Scripture is like this, or knowledge of someone. When Jesus talked about knowing Him and thus knowing the Father, it is this very experience He’s talking about. A knowledge of Him that is personal, intimate, committed. Knowing Him in a way that changes us. Knowledge that involves giving ourselves over to Him in a deeply personal way. Head knowledge is not sufficient, because it leaves the knowledge in the abstract. Limiting our knowledge to religious principles, doctrinal statements or theological propositions doesn’t go deep enough. Too many of us stop at talking about God, instead of talking to God. Intellectual knowledge is a dead end if disconnected from a personal relationship with God. Knowing God, and thus knowing truth, requires a personal investment, an intimate involvement. Otherwise, it’s all just an idea. And God can tell the difference. The worst words any of us could possibly ever hear at the End is, “Depart from me, I never knew you.” (Matt. 7:33).
We are best prepared for anything the devil throws at us as we mature in our relationship with the Spirit of Truth, the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our inner beings. Included in our complete transformation by the Spirit in us is the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:1-2). And to that end it is vital for us to “love God with all our minds,” as Jesus told the Pharisees in Matthew 22:37. To wrap the truth around us, we learn to love that truth. To love the truth, we ask the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, to teach us how we can grow in learning how to love God with all our minds, the God who Himself is the author of all truth. Let’s face it, truth is a vague concept and needs to be unpacked a bit, doesn’t it?
TRUTH: That which is merely common knowledge to God; the True Reality that has established reality; that which can never be changed or altered; that which is universally trustworthy; that which is established fact and filled with trueness; the fundamental essence of that which is indisputably real; God the Father is Truth, and God the Son is Truth, therefore the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth.
As we refer to the Spirit of Truth, are there some ideas that might help us in the spiritual warfare described by Paul in Ephesians 6? The longest conversation that Jesus had with His disciples is known as His Farewell Address, found in John 13-16. There is no doubt that Jesus chose His last words carefully and underlined them with special importance. He spoke of His leaving, among other things, which saddened His disciples very much. But then Jesus sought to encourage His disciples by declaring that when He leaves, He will be giving them a unique gift, the Gift of a lifetime, His Holy Spirit. Significantly, Jesus referred to His Spirit as the “Spirit of Truth” three times in His farewell words. We learned some fascinating and profoundly helpful aspects of the Holy Spirit in these words of Jesus near the end:
(1.) The Spirit of Truth will dwell within us forever. He will be accessible and helpful at all times, and will remain as close to each of us as our next breath;
(2.) The Spirit of Truth is largely unknown in this world, which is blind to the truths of God;
(3.) The Spirit of Truth is sent to us by Jesus from the Father. In other words, in this Trinitarian mystery, the Holy Spirit was commissioned by the Son and given to us directly from the Father;
(4.) The Spirit of Truth can only be released to us if Jesus returns to the Father in heaven. When Jesus goes, the Spirit comes and stays;
(5.) By revealing the Truth of Jesus Christ, the Spirit of Truth, among other things, will convict of the truth of our sinfulness, of our need to look for Christ for our righteousness, and the truth of the eternal judgment of the evil one;
(6.) The Spirit of Truth will guide all believers into all the truth of Christ, into whatever special truths there are to know about Jesus. In this role of guide, He will teach and instruct us, will reveal and remind us of what is to be known of the Lord;
(7.) The Spirit of Truth submits to the Father and the Son and doesn’t even give Himself the authority to speak on His own. The Spirit speaks only of what He has heard from Christ. The Spirit is the ultimate listener, will hear the word of Jesus, and will declare those truths to us;
(8.) The Spirit of Truth is Good News for us! We are not abandoned or left alone to fend for ourselves. We don’t have to stumble blindly through the Christian faith trying to figure out what we are to believe, what we are to do next, how we progress spiritually, how we prepare for eternal life with God, what the Scripture has to say to us. Good News! The Spirit of Truth will live in us to do all that needs to be done, with our cooperation, as He takes us in triumph to the finish line! The fact is we can only understand spiritual truths when we are able to discern them through the Spirit of Truth.
(9.) The Spirit of Truth has already absorbed from Jesus what is in the mind of God by virtue of their intimate fellowship with each other. The Divine Three do not keep secrets from each other, and they all know what is on each other’s mind. They are so intimately in union that they are eternally indivisible, and somehow inside each other. The Spirit knows everything the Son knows, who knows everything the Father knows, who knows everything in the universe there is to know. What a wondrous mystery!
Is there something concrete we can point to as Christians that sums up the gospel truths that we will bind to us in the warfare Paul refers to? Fortunately, yes, there is a summary of Christian belief that was written in 300 AD or so by the leaders of the Christian church at that time. They were trying to help believers distinguish between the falsehoods that were becoming popular and the truth as found in Scripture. There were a number of such creeds, but the Nicene Creed is a wonderful summary. We would do well to gird our loins with this statement of truth.
THE NICENE CREED
“We believe in one God,
The Father, the Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth,
Of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
The only Son of God,
Eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
True God from true God,
Begotten not made,
Of one Being with the Father.
Through Him all things were made.
For us and our salvation He came down from heaven;
By the power of the Holy Spirit, He became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
And was made man.
For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
He suffered death and was buried.
On the third day He rose again in accordance with the Scriptures;
He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge to living and the dead,
And His kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Give of Life,
Who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son He is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic (universal) Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
And the life of the world to come. Amen.”
This is a statement of truth in the God of the holy Scriptures. It is a summary of the bedrock foundation of our Faith. If you are looking for the truth that you can wrap around yourself in spiritual warfare, this Creed is it. Let this truth be our belt, giving us the freedom in the Spirit and the spiritual knowledge needed to knock the devil and all his grimy filthy demons back on their heels. When we live into this knowledge of God’s truth, the devil doesn’t stand a chance.