The spiritual warfare passage represents the church as facing intense attack by the devil and his powers of evil. Paul uses an extended metaphor of a soldier who puts on the appropriate pieces of amour to heighten this image. In this case the solider puts on a belt, a breastplate, footgear, a shield and a helmet, and then takes up a sword. Arnold says that “the main point of this imagery is that Christianity should be understood as warfare and believers should prepare for this warfare just as any soldier would prepare for battle.”
- Survey of Passage and Context
Ancient thinkers often portrayed life or their work as a battle; in a world where virtually everyone knew about warfare, the image carried great weight. Paul draws on the particular
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In some parts of the world, Christians continue to visit other traditional religious practitioners because their new faith seems to lack power to confront the problems that their old faith addressed. Elsewhere, however, local Christians reading the Bible have recognized that God’s power is greater than that of its putative competitors and have learned to pray to God for their various needs.
- Concluding Comment
Our task is defensive, not offensive descried in Ephesians. We do not defeat Satan, but Christ. Our duty as outlined in Ephesians is to resist Satan, not to remove him. In spiritual warfare the battle is the Lord’s. At times, God simply commands His people to “stand still” and watch the Lord win the battle, without any human help. Here we wage the spiritual war, not in terms of grand battles and heroic actions, but in terms of simple faith as in the teachings of Paul in chapters 1-3 and in terms of our obedience to the commands of Paul as in chapters 4-6.
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God gives us all of the armor we need to defend ourselves. We are to have them on and be holding them and using them in spiritual warfare. It is our responsibility to have the armor of God on in order to be ready for attack. These weapons are more defensive weapons than offensive. The image provided by Paul shows a defensive position. It involves recognizing the separation of temptation and being prepared to face it.
In summary, there are two aspects in spiritual warfare which are the offensive and defensive ones. For the offensive part, demons are being casted out as shown in the passages in Mark and Acts. The deliverance ministry in the church practice this aspect. For all Christian, we should have the defensive aspect which is to put on the armour provides to us by God to defend ourselves against Satan.
Spiritual warfare is a war which must be waged by faith. It is a war that we need the strength and protection which God provides as in Ephesians 6. It is not a war to see which side will sin. As shown in Mark 5 and Acts 16. God always wins in spiritual
David and Goliath DBQ In 1 Samuel 17, David showed that he trusted God because he volunteered to fight because he believed the LORD would help him. Before David fought Goliath, David shouted to the giant, ¨And everyone gathered here will learn that God doesn’t save by means of sword or spear. The battle belongs to God—he’s handing you to us on a platter!”
Throughout All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul and some of his comrades wonder why they’re fighting a war that they have no relation to. Furthermore, that doesn’t give them a sabbatical for going home, even though they aspire to go home to their families. In the book, Paul and the other soldiers are taught that the country they are fighting against is their enemy, and whenever they are to approach any of the “enemies” they are to tranquilize them promptly. Just because you are fighting against a country that you believe is atrocious or corrupt, doesn’t mean that an individual on that side is in that manner. Nevertheless, a book should not be judged by a cover.
In the book, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque,in the epigraph he states,” Even though they may have escaped [the] shells, [they] were destroyed by the war”(Remarque Epigraph). The soldiers were destroyed in many ways, and one of them is that although they would return home they would still be thinking of the war and of the front, be it in thoughts of their friends, or nightmares. Also those that return home may not know what to door even if they can do anything. This is shown throughout World War One, in which this book was written. This is show in the book when “Müller…
The internal wars inside people’s minds is often ignored in comparison to the wars of the world. Mankind defiantly does not look within to inspect our flaws and demons. The dangerous aspect of it all is they descend in the deepest parts of human hearts and transcend through people’s thoughts, words, actions. There is unmerciful pain in dealing with individual demons. People certainly go through their own trials and tribulations which give them insight and wisdom into their true selves, so they can conquer and vanquish their inner wars; however, if humans let their demons hold the power of their minds, it will eventually take a detrimental toll on them.
In addition, the entire situation that Paul goes through when his father “drags [him] along to a table with a lot of others. ”(p. 166) He sees that they don’t understand what war is like at all, as when “a head-master shakes hands with [him] and says: ‘So you come from the front? What is the spirit like out there? Excellent, eh?
Through connecting psychological principles with accentuated rhetoric, Jonathan Edward’s delivers “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” initially stirring the First Great Awakening. The basis of his sermon relies on a mix of imagery and rhetoric with an impassive delivery to condemn those currently who do not have the spirit of God striving within them. He further sentences those who resist and sin, by speaking of God’s sovereignty with severity, using graphic metaphoric language, thus hyperboles descriptions of God and the fate of the congregation. On his pulpit, Edwards portrays a God himself, who harshly opposes all human order for holding a sense of security, for these efforts inspire rebellion and self-reliance, which leads to blind
The Struggles of a Soldier The brutalities of war are shown through a soldiers experience through a war. In the book All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque tells the story of a group of friends in World War 1. Remarque uses the protagonist, Paul, to display the brutalities of war by experiencing some of them himself. Brutalities of war are expressed through Paul’s experience of the war harming soldiers by negatively impacting their physical bodies, making it hard for soldiers to reintegrate themselves into society and, damaging their psychological health.
In his sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Jonathan Edwards describes a wrathful God who detests the humans he created. Edwards uses fear, imagery, faulty logic and his own authority to sway listeners to follow his word. The image selected presents a blend of both the setting of the sermon and much of the imagery used within it. The image effectively draws out this imagery and portrays the sermon with both vibrance and tension.
I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater evil" (77). Lewis also shared his belief that the Christian case for Pacifism rests on certain Dominical utterances, such as "Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
He claims, “You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it... you have...nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing too keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you have ever done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment” (21). Through the use of repetition, the preacher emphasizes his belief that there is nothing man can do to avoid the wrath of God. However, he believes there is a way to lessen that wrath.
What once was considered scandalous was now a normal activity. “C.S. Lewis was signally aware of spiritual warfare. He explored this in many of his writings, but it was especially The Screwtape Letters that fired the imagination of personal spiritual warfare” (Potgieter). How can mankind fight against the devil and his temptations? He cannot do it alone.
As Paul returns home he is,”Afraid they [topic of war] might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them” (Remarque 165). Paul feels no pride from his time in war, he instead fears that they may consume him He is afraid of war, he doesn’t want to hear it or be a part of it. Paul questions,”what is there that is sacred to me” as he loses hope in what he once believed. He lost the respect he had for his role models as they failed to fulfill the empty promise of glory and stole away the youth and childish dreams he once had. Paul loses much more than he gains, leaving a hole in him that will always remain empty.
Such events in the front has shaped his perspective in human beings, he has lost that compassion he used to held. Paul parents also realize that his life will never be the same. Also another piece that supports this evidence is Paul openness towards his feelings when seeing dying patients at the hospital:”...and all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things, all my generation is experiencing these things with me. ”There for showing that all the cruelty Paul has suffered of the war is tag along the same experience towards his
The soldiers stand aside by the wall to form a clear path for Theo and Kee. Originally Soldiers are the symbol of authority; however, in this scene they become less powerful by the character blocking. Theo looks at the soldiers in a higher position while he’s protecting Kee. This makes the viewers recognize the moment when Theo has the dominion of the
In the novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front”, Remarque retells the story of World War One from the viewpoint of the German soldier, Paul Baumer. Throughout the novel, Paul experiences the atrocities of this war, but unfortunately the effects of the war were worse than he had imagined. The war took a toll on the life of every single soldier, affecting their futures and families. However, the camaraderie the boys had formed allowed them to survive and ultimately was the only positive outcome of the war. Remarque includes sections throughout the novel that emphasize this deep bond that the soldiers share with one another.