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With this post, I am starting a new series on the Armor of God. In January, I spoke about the Israelite war cry: Rak Chazak and how we need to be warriors who will stand for the truth and the Gospel of Christ. But how do we do that? We need equipment. We can’t just jump into battle empty handed. We need a means of defending ourselves against a spiritual enemy. We need Armor and we need weapons. Paul describes some of the weapons God has given us in Ephesians 6:10-18. In the next six weeks, I will go into detail about each of the pieces of the Armor of God. I will describe what the piece of armor does for the physical body and then describe how the armor works for us spiritually.

First, we need to address what kind of war we are in. This is not a standard war with guns and bombs. Our battle is not against flesh and blood but against the principles and the powers and the spiritual forces of this dark world. This spiritual war has greater stakes, is fought on a grander scale, and has more implications than any physical battle we fight. And when we fight, Paul pleads with us to stand firm, hold our ground, and when the battle is over, to remain standing. And to do that, we can’t use our own weapons. They won’t work. We need God’s equipment.

The first piece of equipment listed in Ephesians is the Belt of Truth. First, what is a belt and what does it do? Then we can dig deeper into what truth is and what it does. A belt today is what we use to hold our clothes up and hold them tight to our bodies. We are supposed wear a belt with our pants because that helps keep them from falling down. We also often hang things off the belt such as cell-phones, or a tape-measure, or a tool. In Paul’s time when he wrote Ephesians, the belt did even more than that. The belt kept the soldiers tunic from flapping around all over the place in battle. That also kept enemy soldiers from being able to grab the tunic easily. And it gave them the greatest amount of flexibility and mobility with the clothes they wore. You cannot move easily with your clothes moving around on their own. The belt is also where a solider carried his weapons. The sheath for a sword is held at the belt. Any extra daggers, axes, or other weapons were held by the belt. Even today’s soldiers use belts to carry their magazines of ammunition.

There’s more. The belt was used by any person of any trade to carry the tools of their trade. From a carpenter to a fisherman, to a tradesman, to any job. The belt represented the tools of the trade, the livelihood of the person. When two men decided to partner together for a business, they would often trade belts, signifying that “what I have is yours and what you have is mine”. Does this not sound like marriage? Where two become one? When we become Christians, we trade our belts with Christ. He gets all of our skills and abilities, and we get all of his. Just let that sink in for a minute. Now let us explore truth. Paul saw the connection. Everything that a belt does for us, it is the same for truth. It is the truth that keeps us held together. It is the truth that keeps us from veering to the right or to the left. Did you know that if you were to try to send a space probe to the moon or to Mars, that if your angle of trajectory at the launch was off by just a fraction of a degree, that your probe would miss its target entirely? Why? Because over distance, the slightest error slowly propagates to be bigger and bigger and bigger. Truth keeps us within the target window, as long as we heed its word.

Truth is also the source of all of our equipment in the spiritual realm. That is where it is stored and how we carry it. I will get to the Sword of the Spirit in a few weeks, but it is the Belt of Truth that carries and holds the Sword of the Spirit. Think about that. You need one piece of Armor to have the other. If we are not rooted in the Truth that God reveals to us in Scripture, our belt will not hold us together nor will it hold the weapons we need. We cannot wield the Sword of the Spirit if we are living a lie. We have to be living the Truth just to hold the weapon.

The Belt of Truth is also the belt that Christ trades with us. We give him our tools of our shortcomings, our livelihoods of our selfish desires, and he gives us his tools of his Righteousness, his perfection, and the infinite source of his resources. We must learn how to use those tools, but if we do not have the Truth in us, we do not even carry the tools, let alone have the ability to use them. How can we use God’s tools if we don’t have a means of carrying them? The Belt of Truth is our anchor, our standard, our guide. Without the Belt of Truth, we are easily susceptible to the whims of the enemy as they try to capture us and lead us away from our source of strength and power: Jesus Christ. Let us stand firm with it bucked around our waist, holding us secure, able to give us the greatest amount of mobility, and carrying all the tools we need to do the work of our Lord. Next week, I will discuss the next piece of the Armor of God: the Breastplate of Righteousness.