![]() ![]() Our position in the world, our ignorance of the future, the heaped-up magazines of combustibles within, needing only a spark, all lay us open to unexpected assaults, and the temptation comes stealthily, ‘as a thief in the night.’ Nothing is so certain as the unexpected. The tiger’s roar is the first signal of its leap from the jungle. We may be like soldiers sitting securely round their camp fire, till all at once bullets begin to fall among them. These evil days are ever wont to come on us suddenly they are heralded by no storm signals and no falling barometer. They may also arise, without any such change in circumstances, from some temptation coming with more than ordinary force, and directed with terrible accuracy to our weakest point. Joy and prosperity are as sure to occasion them as are sorrows, for to Paul the ‘evil day’ is that which especially threatens moral and spiritual character, and these may be as much damaged by the bright sunshine of prosperity as by the midwinter of adversity, just as fierce sunshine may be as fatal as killing frost. For us, such times of special danger to Christian character may arise from temporal vicissitudes. In a long winter there are days sunny and calm followed, as they were preceded, by days when all the winds are let loose at once. The interpretation which makes the ‘evil day’ co-extensive with the time of life destroys the whole emphasis of the passage: whilst all days are days of warfare, there will be, as in some prolonged siege, periods of comparative quiet and again, days when all the cannon belch at once, and scaling ladders are reared on every side of the fortress. ![]() Most of us feel but little the stern reality underlying the metaphor, that the whole Christian life is warfare, but that in that warfare there are crises, seasons of special danger. We must be ready for times of special assaults from evil. ![]() Our present text constitutes the general introduction to the great picture which follows, of ‘the panoply of God.’ The vulgarest and most murderous implements assume a new character when looked upon with the eyes of a poet and a Christian. The Roman legionary, to whom Paul was chained, here sits all unconsciously for his portrait, every detail of which is pressed by Paul into the service of his vivid imagination the virtues and graces of the Christian character, which are ‘the armour of light,’ are suggested to the Apostle by the weapon which the soldier by his side wore. It reappears, in a slightly varied form, in the Epistle to the Romans, where those whose salvation is nearer than when they believed, are exhorted, because the day is at hand, to cast off, as it were, their night-gear, and to put on the ‘armour of light’ and here, in this Epistle of the Captivity, it is most fully developed. It is found in a comparatively incomplete form in his earliest epistle, the first to the Thessalonians, in which the children of the day are exhorted to put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. Ephesians 6:13The military metaphor of which this verse is the beginning was obviously deeply imprinted on Paul’s mind. ![]()
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