In the 2009 movie, The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke plays a has-been professional wrestler who is fading into oblivion. He has a heart attack and is told he can never wrestle again. His only friend is a stripper played by Marisa Tomei, who thinks of him more as a client than as a friend.
The movie is full of Christian imagery. Rourke’s character has a tattoo of Jesus on his back, the name Job inked on his middle finger, and he enters the final match wearing a white fleece.
Tomei’s character discusses the Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ, with the wrestler, seeing a similarity between the suffering Jesus endured for our sins and the suffering the wrestler is enduring. She even quotes the prophet Isaiah’s passage about the Suffering Servant. Somehow, most movie reviewers missed the Christian Implications when they reviewed The Wrestler. That probably doesn’t surprise you.
What might surprise you is that the Apostle Paul saw Christian implications in wrestling about 2,000 years before anyone even thought about making this movie.
So, since Paul brought it up, I’d like to write a little about wrestling.
Not the WWE Smackdown we see on Pay-PerView. Instead, I’m talking about the ancient form of wrestling that was well-known among the Romans and Greeks when Paul was writing to the church in Ephesus.
Wrestling matches at that time didn’t involve multiple tag-teams in bright Spandex outfits hitting each other in the back with folding chairs. In Paul’s time, two men would try to pin each other on the ground, with the winner holding his hand on the loser’s neck.
Winning was very important — not because the victor would get endorsement contracts from the local chariot or sandal company — but because losing was not a good option.
Typically, the loser’s eyes would be gouged out, leaving him blind for life.
The Ephesians would have understood the image immediately, especially since the word Paul used to describe the struggle was most commonly used to mean “wrestling match.” They understood the enormous price to be paid for losing.
The translation our readings are in is the New Revised Standard Version. The word it uses to describe our action against evil powers is “struggle.” Other translations use different terms that mean similar things.
In the New King James Version, the verse reads:
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood…”
and the New Living Translation reads:
“For we are not fighting against people made of flesh and blood…”
The word in Greek that Paul wrote was “pale,” which appears just once is the entire Bible, and has the primary definition of “wrestle.”
There are many words for “struggle” but Paul chose to use the word for “wrestle” instead. The words are similar, but in modern usage we tend to think of struggle as mental or emotional, as in “struggling to makes ends meet in a bad economy” or “struggling to pass a math class in school.”
The image of wrestling with an idea isn’t as common anymore, so we tend to think of only physical things when we use the term “wrestle.”
I think that’s exactly why Paul used the word that means wrestling — to give us that physical image before taking it away from us.
Christians were being persecuted pretty heavily around Paul’s time. In fact, Paul had been a pretty bodacious Christian killer himself until just a few years before writing this letter.
A pretty popular pastime in that region was pitting unarmed Christians against gladiators and wild animals. Many Christians were slaughtered in the arenas, and the Ephesian Christians were quite aware that they could easily suffer the same fate. So the gladiator armor or soldier armor was a pretty familiar concept to them.
In the arena, they would face someone wearing armor and they would have none of their own. Or they would face wild animals, again with no protection of their own. When Christians would be competing against flesh and blood — it wasn’t a fair competition. They had no chance of even surviving, much less winning. When Christians competed against physical beings, it meant they would be slaughtered as sport for the audience.
Paul wanted the Christians in Ephesus to know that the physical battle for their life was unimportant compared to the spiritual battle for their soul. The spiritual battle they could win, if they would trust God, believe in Him, and keep the faith. God would provide the strength — the armor — for them to defend against the enemy. It’s an on-going struggle. One-on-one wrestling — no tag teams; no time outs! We worship as a community, but we wrestle alone!
Paul is giving the Ephesians a no-holds-barred look at the seriousness of their enemy. Our battle against Satan and his army of demons is not some minor skirmish that will just leave us wounded spiritually. We don’t get a medevac flight to a safe zone when we surrender to temptation. We don’t become part of some big prisoner exchange on Judgment Day if we lose our souls to Satan.
The stakes of our spiritual wrestling match are even higher than the stakes of a physical wrestling match. That’s what Paul was showing them.
In the spiritual wrestling match, however, the armor advantage will be ours instead of our opponents.
In every other use in Paul’s letters, he uses the term flesh, or flesh and blood as a reference to our fallen, sinful nature as human beings.
For example, in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (5:16-17), the English Standard Version reads,
… Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh…. (ESV)
The New International Version, or NIV, translates the word for flesh into Paul’s intended meaning. So in the NIV translation we read:
…Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. (NIV)
Paul uses the Greek word for flesh 105 times, almost always as a reference to our sinful nature. Likewise when he uses the term “flesh and blood.”
In this one passage of this one letter, Paul deliberately switches the position of the words to read “blood and flesh” instead of “flesh and blood,” to emphasize that this time he is referring to the idea of physical beings instead of our sinful nature.
He is telling the Ephesians that the type of armor they would use against physical beings like gladiators or wild animals is useless in this battle, because our enemies are not physical beings.
Paul describes the armor that God provides us for the spiritual warfare we will face, using the imagery of the physical armor they were all very familiar with already.
The first part of the armor is the belt of truth:
The belt used in armor was cinched tightly, to keep it firmly in place while they fought. The rest of the armor was attached to the belt. If the belt was not tightened snuggly around the waist, the armor would slide around, exposing them to enemy strikes and falling apart. Not a good way to win a fight. Paul tells us to consider God’s truth as the ultimate centerpiece of our own armor.
The second item is the breastplate of righteousness. This means we should be clothed in the righteous of Jesus Christ, not in our own righteousness. What we consider righteousness will not protect us from temptation. Only God’s righteousness is truly righteous.
Remember, we’re the ones who invented the idea of “situational ethics” and “business ethics.” Our idea of righteousness has some serious flaws. The righteousness of Christ is perfect.
Third, we have shoes made of the Gospel of peace, which means we’re ready to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to others. You only need shoes if you are walking somewhere. If you don’t go anywhere, you don’t need shoes. None of us put on our hiking boots to sit on the couch and watch TV.
We only put them on when we hike through rough terrain. Likewise, since Paul tells us to put on shoes made of the Gospel of peace, we’re expected to walk in them, to evangelize.
The fourth item is the shield of faith. The Roman imagery would have been a full-sized wooden shield that the warrior would be protected by. The shields in Paul’s time were about four feet long and two feet wide.
They were made of two thick pieces of wood that were glued together, wrapped with linen and covered with thick leather, and then bound with iron at the top and bottom. No weapon at that time could penetrate a shield like that.
Paul was telling the Ephesians that faith in Jesus Christ will protect the Christian warrior every bit as much as the Roman shield protected its user.
The fifth part of the armor of God is the helmet of salvation. When we let God control our mind, when we lead our thoughts toward things of the spirit instead of things of the flesh, when we accept the protection God offers us in holiness, we are protected by a helmet of salvation. In Paul’s time, helmets were made of a tough metal like bronze or iron.
The sixth piece of the armor is the sword of the spirit. Despite what you see in the paintings and stained glass windows, the sword of the spirit is much shorter, about the length of a dagger. It’s used in close combat only, not from many feet away like in fencing or swashbuckling.
The short sword, like the Word of God, is double-edged, cutting both ways. It strikes some with conviction and conversion, and others with condemnation (Psalm 45:3,5).
Those are the six parts of the Armor of God that we usually see in the posters or book illustrations.
Paul tells us to put on the whole armor of God, and then our artists paint an incomplete picture of the armor.
Paul was a Pharisee, a high-ranking rabbi and Jewish leader who understood the symbolism that was associated with certain numbers. The numbers three and seven symbolize sanctity, completeness, and holiness in Judaism. Visions of Heaven show the angels referring to God as “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Three levels of praise are all the Hebrews had. We would say holy, holier, or holiest; The Hebrews used “Holy,” “Holy, Holy,” or “Holy, Holy, Holy.”
The number six is incomplete. Creation was incomplete until the seventh day. In Revelation, the number 666 can be calculated to represent three sixes, a completed level of incompleteness, perfect evil.
It seems irrational then for Paul, a Jew, to illustrate the complete Armor of God by listing a number of items that symbolize incompleteness. Paul would have added a seventh item.
And he did. Despite telling us that we are fighting spiritual enemies instead of physical ones, we still think of the armor in physical terms.
In the final part of the passage, Paul tells us to “Pray in the spirit at all times.” He tells us to put on the full armor of God; He never says anything about taking it off.
We are told to always wear the armor of God for our spiritual protection. Putting your armor on during the battle isn’t the best warfare method. Praying at all times is the final piece of our armor that holds it all together. Praying for ourselves, for the rest of the saints, and for the boldness of our preachers is the seventh part of
our armor.
It’s hard to show that in a painting or stained-glass window. So we lost track of that part of our armor over the centuries. I’d say the Church hasn’t done very well in its battle against evil over the centuries either.
Many people blame religion for the evil in the world, but more people have been killed by their own godless governments in the past century than by all the religious wars combined. Joseph Stalin killed about 60 million of his our people, with Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev adding a few million to the pile themselves. Adolph Hitler murdered about 23 million people.
Mao Zedong starved or slaughtered about 77 million Chinese people. His predecessors had killed about 10 million. Pol Pot, Tito, and other atheist leaders add about 19 million more to the list. These are atheistic government leaders killing their own people in the last century. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
Without prayer our armor is incomplete, and we are not fully prepared to battle the evil in our midst. Prayer through the Holy Spirit is our secret weapon. It’s the power that holds our spiritual armor together and repels our adversary. It’s the one weapon in our arsenal that is both defensive and offensive. It’s the only weapon in our arsenal that is just as effective or long-range combat as it is at close-range.
A few years ago I decided to jump out of a perfectly good airplane just for the fun of it. In most sports, you’ve got some room for failure before there’s a chance of serious injury. In baseball, if I miss a grounder, the only thing hurt is my pride.
In track, if I missed a hurdle…, well, OK, that one could be pretty painful, but usually there’s no danger involved.
In skydiving, however, you’ve got two choices:
error-free—or splat!
I’m scared of heights, so I decided that skydiving would be good self-therapy to help me overcome my fear. Thankfully, the skydiving club realized that in the excitement of overcoming my fear of plummeting to earth at 120 miles an hour, I might forget to pull the ipcord to open my parachute.
Actually, I probably would have pulled it while I was still in the plane.
So, they hooked my harness to an instructor who had the parachute, ripcord, and expertise. However, since I was in front, I was the one who had to step out of the plane at 17,000 feet.
It was quite a leap of faith for me, but I did it. I had to face that fear on my own—no one else could step out of that plane for me. I had to trust that the equipment and guidance provided to me was sufficient to get me through.
That was a lot of trust, because sometimes humans fail. Sometimes parachutes don’t open. But God never fails.
He is always there for us. And if he says he’s given us all that we need in order to fight Satan and win, we can have faith in his word.
As Christians we can’t avoid the battle. There are no “conscientious objectors” in the war against evil. You may think you can just avoid the battle by going to church and staying home, not stepping out into the mission field.
When I was studying church growth in seminary, our instructor mentioned the passage we read today, and told us that the enemy is just as real today as he was in Paul’s time, and that he gets very active when we start doing things like building new churches, expanding current ones, bringing Jesus to the unchurched. He pulls out all the stops and tries to shut us down. Reducing the population of Hell really ticks him off.
Our instructor had been involved in creating hundreds of new churches in many different countries and was a high-level district evaluator for the Southwest Region, including San Diego. He had taught that class four times.
The first time he taught it, his grandfather died during the first week of the 10-week class.
The second time he taught it, his step-father died during the first week of the class.
The third time he taught it, his family endured another personal trauma, also during the first week of class.
This fourth time, in the two-week intensive class, more devastating problems occurred in multiple churches under his jurisdiction than at any time in his 20 years of ministry experience — serious problems that could close some churches — all during the first week of class.
And that was just for teaching other people how to start new churches! Imagine what Satan plans for you when you actually start taking souls away from him!
Think about this for a moment. Where would you say the most dangerous place in Jerusalem was the night Jesus was arrested?
It was right there in the Upper Room with Jesus. At the Last Supper, Jesus predicts His own betrayal. In John 13:27, the apostle says, “As soon as Judas took the bread (from Jesus), Satan entered into him.”
Now picture this: Jesus has dipped a piece of bread and personally hands it to Judas. And while Judas—an apostle who was hand-picked by Jesus—is mere inches away from the Son of Man, from God himself, Satan jumps into him!
And we think we can fight him on our own? That we can overcome temptation by our own will power? Against a being that’s willing to tempt and even possess someone who’s sitting next to God?
Who are we kidding!? The only hope we have in defeating an enemy like that is by putting our trust in God. By putting on Jesus Christ Himself. The armor of God: truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, his word through the Holy Spirit, and covering ourselves in prayer continuously.
Jesus promised to be with us always. Even though we have to wrestle with our sinful nature and the enemy alone, Jesus is still with us, giving us strength, power and protection.
The battle rages on, everywhere in this world. No place is safe from evil. That’s why we have to be vigilant and ready for battle at any time. Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. Stand firm and know that you will be victorious in the name and power of Jesus Christ.
Grace and Peace,
Fr. Austin