‘Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’ - Ephesians 6:17

The famous figure of speech in which Paul compares the life of a Christian with a Roman soldier, found in Ephesians 6, would almost certainly have had Hebraic connotations in the mind of Paul. As a prisoner, possibly in Herod’s palace at Caesarea, and under Roman guard, the analogy was undoubtedly a fitting one, and yet Paul may have also been drawing upon a passage found in Isaiah 59 concerning the end time coming of Yahweh.

I’ve come to see more and more, that faith is a determination. It is something we must pick up when we wake up in the morning, and carry with us through our day, like a shield of protection. Of course, comparing faith to a shield is not an original thought and the apostle Paul, writing from prison to the Ephesians (in his great comparison between the Christian life and the dress and service of a Roman soldier) says, ‘In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one’ (Ephesians 6:16).