The Armor We Wear

Snow falls on this Veterans Day. It may well have done so on the 11th day of the 11th month so many years ago when the First World War concluded with a treaty. Someone then coined the phrase The War to End All Wars. It wasn't. Perhaps a reading of the Bible might have prevented that little slogan that so badly failed. WWI was terrible, but in the Bible Jesus tells of wars and rumors of wars before the end. We may need to give those folks from long ago a break though. The Revelation speaks of conquest, war, plague, and famine. The time before the war, the great war, and the influenza epidemic right after that war may well have seemed that a fourth part of the world had indeed suffered under the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Then along came the great depression as though to confirm the famine part. Had we lived in those times, we might well have thought the end had come, the tribulation started and Jesus on the way with the hosts of Heaven.

So where do we stand in relation to eternity on this Veterans Day? Several of us have served in those wars and rumors of war, all of us have lived through it. Earthquakes shake the ground in diverse places. Persecution happens all over the globe. Yet, Jesus has not come to take His beloved home. We soldier on.

Indeed, Paul used the model soldier of the Roman legions to issue all of us a set of armor for the war we fight daily. A breastplate of righteousness, polished and gleaming. Not our righteousness but the imputed righteousness of Christ Himself. The helmet of salvation - not earned, but given to us, protecting our head and the wonderful mind inside. A belt of truth to protect our softer parts, and who is the Truth but Jesus our Lord! Feet, those important carriers of us when all mechanical things have failed, shod with the gospel of peace. A shield of faith to protect everything and a weapon of unsurpassed potency that is the Word of God.

We celebrate today those who served in our nation's armed forces, and we do well in that, but in Christ all of us are veterans of the most important war, the war to choose eternal life.

Bucky