Hello Readers and welcome-or welcome back-to Renaissance Woman and another post on the Shield of Faith!

I had thought last week’s post would be the last on the Shield of Faith but, as I received some feedback on last week’s post, I found one more post was necessary.

What is the Shield of Faith?  The Old Testament refers to God Himself as our shield.  Genesis 15:1 records the word of the Lord coming to Abram in a vision and saying, “Do not be afraid, Abram.  I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward.”  Deuteronomy 33: 29 says this: “Happy are you, O Israel!  Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord, the shield of your help…”  There are passages in various Psalms that describe God as our shield.  I want to focus on three separate passages that stood out during my study.  The first I’ve already touched on in last week’s post: Psalm 3:3 says, “But You, O Lord, are a shield for me” and the Hebrew word translated “for” could accurately be translated “around me” or “about me”. Indeed, the New American Standard has “about me” and the New International “around me”.  This Hebrew word (#1157 in the Strong’s Concordance) also carries the meaning of “within”: a thought I will return to in a moment.

The second passage is Psalm 91:4.  Some translations render this passage as “his truth shall be thy shield and buckler” while others have it as “his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart”.  The Amplified covers all its bases and has this verse as “His trust and His faithfulness are a shield and buckler.”

The third passage appears in three different books of the Bible.  The first is 2 Samuel 22:31: “As for God, His way is perfect; The word of the Lord is proven; He is a shield to all who trust in Him.”  The second appearance is Psalm 18:30: “As for God, His way is perfect; The word of the Lord is proven; He is a shield to all who trust in Him.”  The third is Proverbs 30:5: “Every word of God is pure; He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him.”

John 1:1 states “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  In John 14:6, Jesus describes Himself as “the way and the truth and the life.”  Holding this in mind, I return to the passages of scripture I’ve shared and wonder if they aren’t saying something far and above anything I’ve ever heard before.  Are these passages expressing separate thoughts?  The way of the Lord is perfect, His word is proven, and He is also a shield or is it saying The way of the Lord is perfect, His word is proven, and then the “He” that is a shield and buckler is the He who is the way and the word?  Is the truth and faithfulness that is a shield and rampart some attribute He bestows on us or is the shield and rampart He who is faithful and true?

I listen a great deal to Malcolm Smith and one of the points he stresses over and over is 1 John 4:8; “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”  “He does not have love”, Bishop Smith says, “He is it!”  I think of this when it comes to these passages of scripture and Jesus.  Jesus does not have the word: He is it!  He does not show us the way: He is it!  He does not simply tell us the truth: He is it!  He does not have faithfulness: He is it!  He does not give us a Shield of Faith: He is it!

And, He wasn’t all of these things sometime in the past and then will be these things again sometime in the future.  He is all of these things in us now.  How is this possible if He is seated at the right hand of the Father, received by heaven until the times of the restitution of all things? (See Ephesians 1:20, Acts 3:21).  If Jesus is in some far off heaven somewhere and we are down here waiting for His second coming, how is He all of these things now?  Doesn’t the Bible say our inheritance is reserved in heaven for us? (1 Peter 1:4).

Yes, it does.  However, the Bible also says we are established in Christ, sealed, and given the Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee (or earnest, or downpayment-2 Corinthians 1:21-22).  This Spirit is the Spirit described by Jesus in Chapters 14-17 of John’s gospel.  There is another promise in John 14:23: “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.”  “We love,” John says in his first letter, “because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19) and “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us” (Romans 5:5).  I can’t help but to quote 1 Corinthians 6:19 again: “Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?” 

In John 14: 18-20 Jesus says, “I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.  A little while longer and the world will see Me no more, but you will see Me.  Because I live, you will live also.  At that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.”  The rest of the New Testament tell us of all that is ours because we are In Christ and Christ is in us.  Now.  This moment.  He is in us and we are in Him! The Father and Son have made Their abode in us!  How?  Because we are joined to the Lord and are of one spirit with Him!  (Back to 1 Corinthians 6).

Our Shield of Faith is Jesus Christ and we know this is the truth because the Spirit bears witness in our hearts it is so which brings me back to my thought at the beginning of this post.  The Hebrew word in Psalm 3:3 translated as “for”-thou art a shield for me-also carrying the meaning “within”.  In Christ we live and move and have our being.  If we believe that, it is not too difficult to picture Him as a shield surrounding us.  We are hidden in Him and His life quenches the fiery darts of the wicked one.  But there is another picture I admit I am just coming to see and understand and that is that Jesus Christ is a shield within us.  Jesus says, “’He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’ But this He spoke concerning the spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive;  for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” (John 7:38-39). 

The river is a symbol I find throughout the Old and New Testaments.  One of my favorite passages is Psalm 46:4: “There is a river whose streams shall make glad the city of God”.  I find this same river in Revelation 22:1; “And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb.”  The River also appears in Ezekiel 47 where the prophet is first brought in up to his ankles, and then his knees, and then his waist, and then he must finally swim in it. 

There are passages of scripture where both the word and the Spirit are likened to water (See Isaiah 44:3, John 4:14, 1 Corinthians 12:13, John 15:3, Ephesians 5:25-27).  Faith is our response to who God has revealed Himself in Jesus.  The scriptures are of immense value in that revelation but, the Word is alive in us now.  We live in union with Him via His Spirit in us who speaks what He hears.  That word is energizing vitality.  It is living water within us, water that fill us to overflowing and flows out to the world around us.  I cannot say it too many times: our Shield of Faith-that Shield that is Christ Jesus Himself-does surround us on every side but it is also a river of life within us.

When the fiery darts of the wicked one come seeking to shake our faith and to convince us our God is something different than the One revealed in Jesus Christ, the river of living water that wells up from within us and flows out from us not only quenches them but I daresay sweeps them away. 

There is so much more to be said on faith and the word and I anticipate unearthing even more treasures as I move on to study the rest of the Whole Armor of God.  Until next week, I close with Paul’s prayer in his letter to the Ephesians: “Therefore, I ask…the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith: that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height-to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

Hallelujah!  It is so! 

Amen.

Unless noted otherwise, all Scriptures are quoted from The Holy Bible, New King James Version, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 1982

References     

The Comparative Study Bible, Zondervan Bible Publishers, The Zondervan Corporation, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1984

Strong, James, The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, TN, 1990