Chaos, it’s everywhere and it seems to be getting worse. Father Don will share 5 chaos’ we are experiencing right now how they are influenced by the wickedness in the heavenly places.
He’ll share the meaning of the Armor of God and how you can protect yourself from the schemes of the devil in these dark days.
Transcipt
Hi and welcome to the full armor of God podcast. I’m your host, Father Deacon Don Purdum. I want to thank you for joining us in this new adventure to rediscover faith and to talk about what it means to live the Christian life in a culture that is hostile to our faith.
This podcast is going to take us on a journey of understanding the world around us and how the Orthodox Christian tradition calls us to put on the full armor of God daily as we fight against the spiritual powers of darkness in the heavenly places.
Now I don’t know about you, but over the last four or five years I have sensed and felt the sky over the world and over America continually grow darker with every passing year.
It really became noticeable during the pandemic. Now make no mistake. What we’re experiencing is just as much spiritual as it is physical. Now I’m going to get into this in upcoming episodes. But let’s look at the number of types of chaos that have been injected into our way of life and how do we respond to that chaos?
How do we embrace the fullness of Christ and live in a way that brings honor and glory to him while remaining true to our faith in the midst of a challenging or almost impossible way of living in the United States today?
So what do I mean by that?
Well, let’s just kind of jump into it. Let’s look at the different kind of chaos that we are all living with and experiencing. They are profound. They are dark and they are evil. And each one of these things individually and cumulatively are designed by the enemy for the purpose of not just distracting God’s church, but eradicating the Christian life from society.
Now I don’t mean to say that this is something new under the sun. There’s nothing new. This has been going on for thousands of years, right?
But there is something new that’s going on as we approach that day when Jesus Christ will return for his bride. I believe more and more we are looking at a situation that you could see in Revelation’s chapter 2 and 3 when we look at the seven churches that Jesus specifically talks to. And the first one in Ephesus, he says, “You did all of these great things and you have great faith, but this I have against you. This one thing you left your first love.”
And then you go through a series of six other churches with one in the middle being Philadelphia that he has nothing against this church has remained true to its groom. And by the time you get to the last one in Laodicea, what you see is a church that has gone completely apostate.
The enemy’s design for us right now across the globe, it’s not just happening in America, it’s across the globe, is to water down and make our faith impotence.
It’s to keep the church from representing the one it belongs to.
So how? How is this happening right now?
What should our response be to this?
Well first, we have political chaos running ramparts in the United States right now. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that families and friends and co-workers and businesses are all at odds with one another over politics in some way, shape, form, or manner. And all of these different chaos as I’m going to mention ahead in a few minutes, they all interact together in some way.
This is what makes this moment in time so unique.
But you have political chaos, we had that 2020 election, we had the politics of vaccines, we have the politics of insurrection, we have the politics of erosion of trust and faith in government to the degree that those on political, the different aisles of the political spectrum, they can’t even acknowledge each other anymore as fellow Americans.
Some on both sides of the aisle even believe that violence to accomplish its mission is acceptable.
Since the Civil War this is new. It certainly wasn’t a part of American politics in the 20th century. We’ve seen deceitfulness, we’ve seen decay of morals in government. Amongst two presidents now, the former president and the current one who the former may become the current one, who knows what’s going to happen with all that mess.
But here’s what is going to happen.
Regardless of who wins or loses, there is going to be an intensifying political chaos that so is its seed of anarchy in our culture and it will divide even more. But we don’t just have political chaos.
We also have societal chaos.
We have seen over the last number of years a rise of racial tensions that we haven’t seen since the civil rights era of the 1960s. Protests, destruction, all kinds of bad things happening in the name of protest, in the name of racial inequality as well as equity. We have class warfare running rampant.
The LGBTQ+ movement has not just overtaken society, it’s also overtaken too many of our churches and left them in that apostate condition that it is my prayer for them they would repent and turn back to the Lord Jesus Christ.
It’s even said now if you don’t embrace this evil transgender movement that seeks to erode or eradicate our identities because that’s what Satan is doing. He’s undermining through the culture our identity and our identity as a human race was established by God that we were made in his image and his likeness. And when you will wrote that which is the whole goal of the LGBTQ+ movement is to erode any trace of God’s identity in us.
Well you better watch out. I don’t know that God’s going to allow that to go on for too long.
What about artificial intelligence and the restructuring of societal norms? I mean think about this for just a second. AI has the potential to eradicate 70, 80% or more of all jobs in the next 5 to 10 years. It is not good for man to not work. The Bible affirms this over and over again that when we don’t work we find other ways for mischief. Other bad things can happen.
We have economic chaos.
Inflation has eroded people spending power to the degree that even the middle class looks more impoverished than it ever has. The poor are getting poor. The middle class are getting poor. At the same time the rich who are smart with their money, I’m not faulting them. This is not a problem with rich people. They are inherently getting richer though.
My question for the wealthy, especially amongst those who are Christian wealthy individuals, how are they using their wealth to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ?
I wrote an article yesterday on faithandtruth.org about the idea of the parable that Jesus gives in Luke, of setting aside and doing what’s right for others, especially how are the wealthy helping those who are not wealthy?
How are they using their resources for the gospel instead of for their own desires?
The economy is only going to get worse with the Federal Reserve. I don’t know if they’re going to tighten the interest rates if they’re going to go up, but all I can say is 2024 buckle up. It’s going to be quite a ride economically.
We’ve already seen a lot of job loss announcements. Big tech, big bank, city just put out 20,000 plus jobs are about to disappear in the US. It’s Citibank. Manufacturing jobs are being lost. The Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, predicts that predicted in December that in 2024, 7.4 million people are going to lose their jobs.
Many economists predict it’s going to be substantially worse as the economy continues to contract.
Economic chaos.
Here’s some interesting numbers that I just discovered today. According to the Smithsonian Institute, 47 volcanoes, that’s 47. Think about that. volcanoes around the globe are currently in an eruption status. Think about all of the different types of gases that are being thrown up into the atmosphere right now.
What we are doing to the atmosphere in terms of our own pollution, it pales into comparison to anything that all of these volcanoes are doing. We could dip back into the political chaos, see how these things start to overflow.
What about environmental chaos?
We can neglect and just presume that all of what we’re experiencing in the atmosphere is related to human activity without considering that there are other things going on.
What about earthquakes? We’re seeing a massive number of earthquakes being recorded across the globe and even in the last couple of weeks in the United States across the country. So there’s environmental chaos.
Do you start to see how all of these things are overlapping with one another, political chaos, social chaos, economic chaos, environmental chaos, and there’s one more. And this is a big one.
There’s numbers and rumors of wars.
Two years ago we saw Russia invade Ukraine and that whole thing is still ongoing. Now, have Israel and it’s war that’s expanding, not just to Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran is stepping up. They attacked one of our, they attacked facilities in Iraq yesterday, meaning the Iranians hoped to get back at America for our support of Israel, because remember, they call us the great Satan and Israel is the greater Satan.
So it’s not just that though but there are also wars all throughout Africa. We’ve got uprisings in parts of South America.
Folks, all of these things work together. If something catastrophic enough happens with Russia or with China or with Israel think of what that does to the economies and how that can tip things into some very devastating economic situations, and if these things implode and fall apart at some point in the future whether it’s this year, next year, 10 years, 100 years, whenever it is; at no point in time has technology ever made it easier for us to experience the real possibility of the end times.
Think of the mark of the beast. I don’t know exactly what that could look like, but we know that in Great Britain they’re implanting chips into children’s bodies because of abductions so that if a child was abducted they could find the child.
Think about how they could weaponize these chips for you to access your money. That if all these cryptocurrencies, if the governments come together and create their own individual cryptocurrencies, which is happening, think about how if you don’t do what the government tells you to do they can cut you off from your money supply. They can affect your ability to buy food, to buy shelter, to pay for clothing and for other necessities. They could cut you off from your jobs.
Now I’m telling you folks the days are growing darker.
That doesn’t mean it’s imminent today but it means we’re sure getting there a lot quicker than any of us would have expected 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.
These things are now all working together in the spiritual heavens.
These are in motion, they’re in play.
We’re going to read about that in just a minute.
But here’s the point and why the podcast. All of the stuff that’s going on, so many of us are restless, so many of us are living in fear, so many of us are deeply anxious about what’s going to happen and at the same time we’re turning from God.
They say that right now churches are in massive decline.
There are more churches closing their doors than there are opening by a factor of 2, 3, 4, 1. I forget what the number is but it’s significant. People are turning from God and at the same time there’s a thirst or there’s a hunger for God.
This is a place to come if that’s what you’re looking for.
This is a place to begin to understand who God is, what is happening and how do we as Christians, how do we deepen our faith, how do we walk by faith and not by sight regardless of what happens to us, how do we trust God despite all of the things that are happening?
You know the earth is groaning for its creator, it just is. We see it all throughout the environment.
At some point some things got to give and who is looking into the spiritual places for the answers?
While the politicians fight, and the activists fight, and people fight amongst each other, Satan is going about his business steadily eroding our trust in our faith in Christ who is really our only one hope. He is our hope.
Think about this for a second.
If God came from heaven to earth in a miraculous virgin conception and was born, 100% God and 100% man united together in one. That he lived a redemptive life for 33 years and in that life he learned that he could identify with us in all ways, not for his benefit but for hours… I will give my life for Jesus Christ.
Will you?
Will you knowing that he made the ultimate sacrifice that when he was put up on that cross? And he bore our sins. Matthew said that the sky is dark and so black that it was like night. And that was the moment that all of the sins of the world passed present and future bore upon the Son of God as he paid the price for our sin. And when he died as the Nicene Creed of Burns, he descended into hell separated from his father because that is what hell is, to be separated from the presence of God.
That kind of torment being removed from his warm embrace, from his glory and from his love. And on the third day he rose from the dead. He conquered death itself. And afterward he ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the father and all power, glory and dominion.
What a great God that we have. Let me put this in a perspective for just a minute. One of the people I really love listening to that I’ve grown to appreciate and many of you have as well who listen to a different podcast or watch YouTube videos or reels is Australian Bishops, Mar Mari Emmanuel. He is so unapologetic. It is so rewarding to listen to him. But this is what he says. This is how he explains the difference in our faith from all of the other faiths.
Whether it be Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism or any other kind of ism for that matter, new age ism, whatever. The difference between all of those other religions and ours is this.
All those religions, they’re trying to take a bad person and make them a good person, which we know is an impossible feat.
Why do we know that?
As for the Bible, the inspired and fallible word of God, it tells us that we are all sinners. And Romans 3: 23 reminds us that the wages of sin is death.
See sin is the absence of holiness.
It’s the rebellion from God. And in our absence of holiness is nothing but darkness. But in him, as first John reminds us, is the light.
See, holiness is to be without sin. What Jesus did for us is He took us from death into life.
That my brothers and sisters is the difference.
That is the difference of our faith compared to all the others.
All of the others can only try to take a bad person and make them a good one.
Ours takes a dead person through Jesus and makes them alive.
This is serious business folks.
There is something happening in the spiritual realm.
The church’s impotence. When I say the church, I just mean broadly churches all over America.
Its impotence is on display for us all to see.
When we prefer to hang pride flags from our buildings, instead of honoring the Lord Jesus Christ and calling people to repentance for their sins, we know that the time is near.
Our faith is about to be tested in ways unimaginable to generations before us.
Are you ready to stand firm for your faith?
Are you ready to accept what is coming?
Because the Apostle Paul asked us to do just that.
I want to talk for just a few minutes before we close about the full armor of God. Because being that this is what this podcast is all about, this is what is going to be discussed in the thematic elements over and over again of how do we put on the full armor of God to both be defensive and offensive?
So let’s look at this Ephesians chapter 6, verse 10 through 18. Begetting in verse 10, “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might, put on the full armor of God so that you will be able to stand firm against the Lord. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world, forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness and the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the full armor of God so that you will be able to resist in the evil day and having done everything to stand firm, stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace. In addition to all, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God. With all prayer and petition, pray at all times in the Spirit. And with this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints.”
So, let’s think about this for just a minute. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. We’re going to come back to it in future episodes, but I just want you to think about what the Apostle Paul is telling us to do as we grapple with what it means to walk by faith and not by sight.
How do we live this life knowing that the influence around us wants us to walk away from Christ?
How do we do this?
This whole thing that just feels overwhelming, scary, even lonely.
He says, “Be strong in the Lord and the strength of His might.”
See, the Lord is stronger than you. He’s stronger than anything. He is the creator of it all.
Be strong in the strength of His might, not your might, in His might.
How?
By putting on the full armor of God so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. See, the devil is who he has always been. He’s always scheming. And the way he’s scheming today is look at all of the chaos that we’ve already just mentioned. The political, societal, economic, environmental, and war chaos going all around us.
And it just keeps coming faster and faster and more furiously than the time before. His schemes are in full view for us to see. But we’re not fighting against flesh and blood Paul says, but against the rulers, the powers, and the world forces of this darkness.
We are all under the influence of the devil.
See, the bottom line here is is that we are up, I guess Paul says again, against the spiritual
forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Did you know on the other side in the immaterial world, the angels and the demons, this is real, folks?
This is talked about in the Old Testament and God did not change. The Old Testament has a lot of relevance for us today. And one of those relevance is knowing that in the heavenly places, there is a spiritual battle happening between all of the different kinds of angels and Satan in all of the different kinds of demons. And all of these schemes, the angels for you, my brother and sister, are there to protect you. You have a protector in an angel.
And this is another way to be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might because He has given every means for us to trust Him. So walk by faith and not by sight and to just be strong and bold.
So what is the armor of God?
How do we stand firm against the schemes of the devil?
Well, He uses this imagery beginning in verse 14 of a Roman soldier’s uniform to explain the armor of God to us. I mean, if He were to do this today, He probably would do it very differently in terms of how He would write about this. It might be an army soldier’s uniform that we have today, but nonetheless, right? Stand firm having girded your loins with truth.
What will set you free?
The truth.
What will empower you, the truth?
But what is truth?
Is it this subjective thing that’s out there?
No, no, no, no, no, no. That is another scheme from Satan. That is a pure lie. All of this moral relativism and my truth is my truth and your truth is your truth and nonsense that we keep hearing.
Truth is truth and lie is lie.
The only truth is Jesus Christ. That is the only truth. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me.”
Period, end of discussion.
Know the truth.
Be convinced of this truth, because if you are not, you will not stand up against the schemes of the devil.
If you think about when Jesus was in the wilderness for his 40 days of temptation, when Satan came
to him, Satan tried to tempt him with scripture, little fragments of truth that he would give Jesus, but he never finished the statement. He never finished the passage.
And Jesus’ response was always deep to Satan in those 40 days of temptation. You say, “But the Word of God says…” He finishes what Satan didn’t. Satan will use scripture to try to convince us of things that are not true.
For example, Satan asks, does God not love LGBTQ people? Does God not love them? Does God not want them to fellowship with Him? Does God not want them to live who they were born to be?
Do you hear it?
Jesus came from heaven to earth to redeem us from our sins to those who would trust Him by faith and then in that faith, exercise it. As James says, “Faith without works is dead.”
In the schemes of the devil, we don’t live according to the scripture as he presents it. Instead, we live according to God’s rules, not man’s rules.
Love is so manipulated in the name of Christ right now. The greatest love is that Jesus gave His life up for us, that we might have fellowship in a relationship with Him. He is holy. He has always been holy. He will always be holy. He is always going to call us to that same standard, knowing that we can’t quite meet it because of our sinful nature. We are sinners.
And yet while we were sinners, Christ came and died for us.
The truth. We must gird our loins with the truth. And having put on the breastplate, excuse me, the breastplate of righteousness. Think about it. The breastplate was designed to protect the heart. It protected it from arrows and other means of ways that an enemy would try to kill a soldier. That breastplate protects the heart.
Brothers and sisters, protect your heart. May your heart always have the affections of Jesus Christ. May your heart always seek Him and His kingdom. And all righteousness will be given to you.
Protect your heart. The breastplate of righteousness. Now I need to note this because Paul is quoting this Old Testament passage here of Isaiah 59:17, right? The breastplate of righteousness.
What is righteousness?
Righteousness is not an attribute. It’s an action. So holiness is an attribute. That is God’s character. Righteousness is taking God’s character and putting it into action. It is the act of being holy.
It is the act of doing right and choosing not to do wrong. It is the act of choosing not to sin. That is righteousness.
So holiness is a character or an attribute. Righteousness is an action based on holiness. It is the act of being holy.
And having shot your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace. See everywhere you go, every step you take, if you are living this life, this Christian life, you are taking the gospel with you everywhere you go.
And this gospel brings peace. It doesn’t bring chaos. It doesn’t bring anarchy. It doesn’t so distrust.
Why?
Because it’s truth and it’s righteous.
Everywhere you go, you take the gospel with you. It’s a part of you. Every step you take, it doesn’t follow you. It’s with you. It’s in you.
Verse 16, in addition to all, taking up the shield of faith. The shield of faith. See, there is a shield. It is only used when in the action of battle. There is an battle happening. You are using it to protect yourself or even to go on the offensive in some situations.
But the shield of faith, it extinguishes the flaming arrows of the evil one.
Why?
Faith is like, imagine that invisible shield that you see in the superhero movies, right?
Whatever the case, maybe you get my point, right?
Your faith is your shield. It is impenetrable when you choose to exercise faith. That’s why faith without works is dead. James said, You show me a man who has faith and I will show you the works of their faith. But I’ll show me a man who has no works and I’ll show you a man who’s got no faith.
Take up the shield of faith. And finally, take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. The helmet of salvation, that helmet protects your head. It protects what you know in your head to be true. It protects all of you in your mind.
Have you ever thought about your conscious mind and your subconscious mind? Where did it come from? It’s immaterial. How did it get there?
It’s not like somebody just, you know, put a chip in a computer, right?
Your brain is so amazing, but how did your conscience get there?
What is a conscience?
We’ll talk about that another time, right?
But the helmet of salvation protects that conscience and that subconscious. It protects the truth that you know through the Word of God. And then you have the Spirit, the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.
How do you put all this into action now?
With prayers and petitions, pray at all times in the Spirit. And be on alert with all perseverance and the petition for all the saints.
Two things I’m going to say about this and then I’m going to wrap up.
Prayer. Prayer is what dresses you up.
Prayer is the means by which we acquire authority. Prayer equals communication with God. If you’re not communicating with God through His Word and through your prayer and through
the liturgy of the church, then the full armor of God becomes very little armor.
Prayer is what dresses you in the full armor of God.
Only in prayer is their dependence upon God.
We’re going to look at Daniel 9: 2-19 another day, because it really fleshes all of that out for us. And by knowing God, we know how to pray through the liturgy. We know His grace. We know His mercy. We know, back to Ephesians 6:10, how to be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might.
You cannot do this on your own. You will never live the Christian life on your own. That is the second part of this. Be strong in the Lord and the strength of His might through the full armor of God through prayer, which is what makes it all work. And then there’s one last piece of this.
“With this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and the petition for all the saints.”
Are you in the body of Christ?
Are you in His church?
Are you receiving the liturgy?
Are you receiving the sacraments?
Are you on guard?
Are you spiritually in tune with everything going on around you in the heavenly places?
You will not be in tune with those things if you are not engaged in God’s holy church. If you are not engaged with the sacraments and if you are not engaged with the liturgy. It’s that simple. It is that simple.
The full armor of God works in conjunction with God through Christ and through each other
in the church.
All right, folks. I’m going to get into more of this at another time and we’re going to talk about this together, about what this means with the full armor of God, with everything going on around us. We’ll talk about contemporary issues. We’ll talk about where our faith is being stretched in ways unimaginable. What’s happening out there in the world? And how does the full armor of God complement this?
So until the next time, I’m looking forward to sharing with you.
If you want, jump over to my website at faith and trust.org. You’ll get all the links to our social media pages where you can engage with us and I am really looking forward to this series together to all of the episodes that are coming so that together we may put on the full armor of God and walk by faith, not by sight. [MUSIC]