Hello and welcome-or welcome back-to Renaissance Woman where, this week, I continue my study of Ephesians 6: 10-18a: the passage where the Apostle Paul describes the Whole Armor of God.

As part of my study, I have been reading William Gurnall’s The Christian in Complete Armour.  This is quite a tome and I haven’t made as much progress as I would like.  The book is already bristling with flags and full of underlined passages.  One passage I both underlined and flagged is: “God does not parcel himself out by retail, but gives his saints leave to challenge whatever a God hath, as theirs; and let him, whoever he is, sit in God’s throne and take away his crown, that can fasten any untruth on the Holy One; as his name is, so is his nature, a God keeping covenant for ever.  The promises stand as the mountains about Jerusalem, never to be removed; the weak as well as the strong Christian is within this line of communication.  Were saints to fight it out in open field by the strength of their own grace, then the strong were more likely to stand and the weak to fall in battle; but both castled in the covenant, are alike safe” (Gurnall, Page 30).

This passage has stayed with me.  So much of what I hear other Believers say is opposite to what I hear the Holy Spirit saying.  Believers are so busy with conducting spiritual warfare or ushering in the kingdom and those with greater abilities are heralded as being great in the kingdom.  Those who don’t have the same resources or abilities are not declared less in the kingdom but are described as a different part of His Body with a different function.  Equally important, just different: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’…” (1 Corinthians 12:15-26).  The message I hear-and it may not be what anyone intends to convey-is to know your place.  Be content with whatever that place is and, if you are not content, you can hold onto the promise that the first shall be last and the last first when Jesus comes back and it’s time to hand out rewards.  What sort of help that is to you now, in your day to day life in a world that is truly filled with tribulation, only you can really say.  It’s no good to me.  I see the truth of what William Gurnall wrote 400 years ago: were we to take to the field in our own strength, there are those who are far more likely to stand in battle than others.  Abilities and opportunities have not been spread evenly between individuals.

I have been thinking about the Parable of the Talents more and more over the course of this study.  The Parable appears in the Gospel of Matthew with a similar Parable in the Gospel of Luke.  In Matthew’s telling, the Master gives one of his servants five talents, another two, and another one, each according to his own ability.  Luke’s telling is a bit different: the Master calls ten servants and each one gets 10 minas though, when the Master returns, only three servants report to him.  There is no mention of ability in Luke’s version though it’s similar to Matthew’s in that one servant saw far more of a return on his investment than the other two so perhaps ability is inferred.  I have always heard these Parables taught in terms of ability: some of us are ten talent people, others are five, and some of us are single talent people.  I will say the Parables are also always taught that the ten talent people are not better than the five or one talent people: the only one admonished in the Parables is the servant who did nothing at all with the talent.  Still, I always sat in the pew certain I was a one talent person rather than a ten talent person.  Not only that, I was possessed with a deep fear that not even God thought I was enough.

This fear only rooted itself deeper as I was forced to come to terms with the effects of my car accident and also forced to admit the truth: my abilities were not remotely equal to those of other people.  There is a saying, “Everyone has the same 24 hours per day” which is supposed to be motivational but isn’t to a person struggling with physical limitations and the effects of a TBI.  These Parables deserve dedicated studies of their own.  For the sake of staying focused on my current study, I will only say I have had to rethink these Parables as my attention has been drawn to passages I don’t remember seeing before, no matter how many times I read through the Bible.  These passages speak of being filled with the fullness of God, being made complete in Jesus Christ, lacking nothing.  I will quote only one as it’s from the same Epistle as my study passage:

“…I bow my knees to 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” (Ephesians 3:14-19).

It is that last bit “filled with all the fullness of God” that has been ringing in my ears for months now and is the phrase I thought of when I read William Gurnall’s words.  “God does not parcel himself out” and “both castled in the covenant, are alike safe”.  I’ve been writing about covenant verses contract in my last few posts.  A contract is an if/then document whereas a in a covenant, both parties give themselves to each other.  Nothing is held back.  If one party needs food, protection, defense, whatever; the other party commits to provide it up to his very life and vice versa.   In this New Covenant that is now ours, of which Jesus Christ is the mediator, by the very meaning of “covenant”, our God has given Himself to us.  And, He has not given a little bit of Himself to this person and a little bit more to that person and then a whole lot to that person over there because, wow, look at how able they are!  No!  As Peter said, “In truth I perceive that God shows no partiality” (Acts 10:34). 

If this is true, and it has to be because it is written in black and white in the pages of the Bible, what about the Parable of the Talents?  Malcolm Smith has a teaching on The Parable of the Talents and he pointed out how the goods belonging to the Master and delivered to the servants could be seen as a metaphor for the Master giving the servants his life.  Looking at the Parables in those terms, I wondered about the line “according to his own ability”.  If the Master is Jesus, the goods are His life, and He is One who shows no partiality, why does it look like-in Matthew’s version at least-He does indeed show partiality?  Each servant is considered to have a different level of ability and is therefore given a different amount of the Master’s goods.  I discovered something interesting when I looked up the Greek word translated “ability”.

There are three occurrences of “ability” in the Strong’s Concordance and each one translates a different Greek word.  The Greek in Acts 11:29 is euporeo (G2141) and means “to be good for passing through, to have pecuniary means.”  The Greek in 1 Peter 4:11 is ischus and means “forcefulness, might, power, strength”.  The Greek in the Parable as related in Matthew 24:15 is dunamis (G1411) and the Strong’s defines it as “force, specifically miraculous power (usually by implication a miracle itself)-ability, abundance, meaning, might (-ily, -y deed), (worker of) miracle (-s), power, strength, violence, mighty (wonderful), work.”  Dunamis is most often translated as “power”, for example; it is the word used in the Lord’s Prayer, “…thine is the Kingdom and the power”, and is also the word used in Luke 9:1 when Jesus sent out His disciples: He gave them “power (dunamis) and authority”. 

 The fact that the word for “ability” in the Parable of the Talents is dunamis absolutely blew my mind.  As I said, this is something worthy of devotion but I hope you can see, as I saw, that the “ability” of the servants was not something inherent in themselves.  Both the goods and the ability came from the Master. 

I wonder if this Parable isn’t pointing out something I’ve come to suspect; that each one of us Believers has the same “ability” in that each one of us possesses the fullness of God in Christ Jesus.  In that respect, we are equal.  We are not equal in the level to which we have come to know this to be true, appropriate it for ourselves, and see it expressed in our lives.  This is, I believe, a matter of choice.  Many of my fellow believers, too many, are content with being saved and knowing about God.  He has given Himself to us in covenant.  How much of Him do you desire?

What does this have to do with the Whole Armor of God? You may well ask.  This post is what I have received, so far, in my asking this question: if we are made to stand in the power of the Lord and His might, if the Whole Armor of God is describing the way we live in this New Covenant, and thus the Whole Armor of God is an expression of the Life of Christ in us and through us, why does Paul say to “put on” and “take up” the Armor?  I wondered if there wasn’t a conflict here.  I am beginning to see there is no conflict and I hope to continue to share that in the upcoming weeks.

Until then, I leave you with a bit more from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.  May the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation, open the eyes of our understanding that we might know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints (that’s us!), and what is the exceeding greatness of His dunamis toward us who believe.  May we each one know what it means to be filled with the all the fullness of God and may we give the glory to the One who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the dunamis that works in us.

Hallelujah!  Hallelujah!  Amen.

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

References

Parable of the Talents: Matthew 25:14-30, Similar Parable found in Luke 19:12-27

Gurnall, William, The Christian in Complete Armour, Seventh Printing, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Massachusetts, 2021

Strong, James, LL.D., S.T.D., The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville Tennessee, 1990