And so, I want just to look with you at strategy, through Christian warfare, in defeating Satan. Ralph Erskine, an old Scottish divine, already said that there is basically two choices in battling Satan: fight or flight. If you are very strong in a given area, you might want to take him on. Head on. In the strength of Christ and fight him. If you are very weak in a certain area, you want to flee. Most of the time we want to flee, because we are not as strong off as we think we are. Let me give you an example, let us say you are recovering alcoholic. Satan would love to get you to be an evangelist in a bar. But you do not have the strength for that. Someone else, who is not the least tempted with alcohol, and has a big heart for people, might be called to be an evangelist in a bar, and fight Satan head on in that atmosphere. But now you may have another gift. Another strength where you can fight Satan head on. But where you are weak, you flee.
So, there is basically three strategies for fighting Satan. There is, what I call: strategic retreat. That is running for shelter to Christ. You flee Satan, because you know he is powerful. You know the Bible has this wonderful text about conies. I preached on them once. I had no clue what conies were. Conies are actually like little rock-rabbits. And it says that they make their home in the rocks. It is just an amazing thing. I was in Australia once, and we came around the corner of a road, and all of a sudden there was a pile of rocks there and all kinds of rock-rabbits. And I just preached on the conies a couple of weeks before. So, I got really excited. I lifted up my camera to take a picture. And just that little movement of my hands scared all the rock-rabbits away, into the rock. Nothing to take a picture of. But you see, that illustrated the point in my sermon that rock-rabbits see the least sign of danger and they indent themselves in the rock. So, Christians who see the least sign of danger, should take shelter in Christ immediately. That is strategic retreat. The second way to fight against Satan is to exercise an unyielding defence. And that is what we are going to look at for the first half of this article, from Ephesians 6:1–24, because the first pieces of armour, that Paul talks to us about, are defensive weapons. We stand and fight and conquer and drive Satan out in the strength of God’s defensive armour. But the third strategy is an attacking offense. And that is what you find in Ephesians 6:14–18, where Paul describes five pieces of armour that we use to defend against Satan and then three ways to offensively fight him. So, we want to briefly walk through, just some attention to each of these eight pieces of armour: five defensive and three offensives.1
Joel Beeke
13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.