A Door in Your Hand

A burning arrow is an inefficient way to kill a man. It is heavier than a plain one, slower, harder to aim, and the fire adds almost nothing the arrowhead was not already going to do.

It was never meant to kill him. It was meant to make him drop his shield.

Wood and hide catch. An arrow that lodges and burns turns the thing keeping a man alive into something he is holding on fire, and the natural response — the sane response — is to let go of it and step out from behind it. Then the ordinary arrows arrive.

Paul knew exactly what those arrows were for.

In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one.

Ephesians 6:16

1. He chose the door, not the buckler

Greek had several words for shield and Paul passed over the small ones. The word here is thureos, and it comes straight off thura, the ordinary word for a door — the same noun behind "I am the door of the sheep." The shield was called a door because that is what it looked like.

This is the Roman infantry scutum: something near four feet tall, curved to the body, wood laminated and faced with leather. Not a disc strapped to the forearm for parrying. A slab you get behind. A soldier crouched behind one was covered from shin to eyes, and the leather facing could be soaked before an engagement so that a burning arrow would gutter out in it rather than set it alight.

Hebrew carries the same distinction, and the Psalms use it deliberately. There is the magen, the small round shield you meet in "the LORD is my shield," and there is the tsinnah, the body-length one that needed its own bearer to carry it. Look which one this verse reaches for:

For you bless the righteous, O LORD; you cover him with favour as with a shield.

Psalm 5:12

That is tsinnah. Not a shield he holds — a shield he is covered with, head to foot, the way you would be covered by a door laid over you. Paul is picking up something the songbook had already established about the size of the thing.

2. It is the only piece you have to hold

Read the list again and notice the difference between the pieces. The belt, the breastplate, the boots, the helmet — all of them are fastened on. Once they are on, your hands are free and you can forget they are there. Only two pieces stay in the hand: the sword, and this.

Paul's verb is analabontes, having taken up — the same verb he used three verses earlier for the whole armour. It describes an act, not a mood. You lift the shield. You do not feel the shield.

The phrase most translations give as "above all" is not a ranking. En pasin reads more naturally as in all circumstances, or along with all of these. The shield is not the most important item in the kit. It is the item you carry out in front of the rest of the kit, which is a different claim and a more useful one.

It also means a shield covers only the direction you are pointing it. You can be fully equipped and completely exposed on the side you are not facing. Peter says the same thing without the metaphor:

Resist him, firm in your faith.

1 Peter 5:9

Firm there is stereoi — solid, set, the root behind our word stereo in its old sense of solidity. Peter offers no argument to make. He gives a position to hold. Faith in this passage is not a feeling of confidence about the outcome; it is a thing in your grip that you keep hold of while frightened.

3. The verb is not deflect. It is quench

Paul does not say the shield turns the arrows aside. He says sbesai — to extinguish, to put out. The arrow is not bounced off into the grass. It goes into the shield, and there it dies.

So what is a flaming dart? Paul only tells us whose they are: tou ponērou, the evil one's. Everywhere Scripture gives that figure a job title, the job is accusation. Which brings you to a courtroom scene most people have never been walked through:

Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him.

Zechariah 3:1

Joshua is the high priest and he is standing in filthy garments. The accusation against him is not false. That is the pressure of the scene — there is nothing to correct.

Watch what the LORD does not do. He does not argue that the clothes are clean. He does not produce Joshua's record. He says, "Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?" — Joshua is already scorched, already pulled out of a burning, and nobody in the room pretends otherwise. Then he gives an order about clothing:

Remove the filthy garments from him. Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments.

Zechariah 3:4

The accusation is not refuted. It is quenched, by garments that came from somewhere other than Joshua. That is what a shield of faith actually does with a true charge. It does not talk you out of it. It puts it out.

4. The shield was built for a line

The scutum is rectangular and flat-edged for a reason that has nothing to do with one soldier. It was made to lock. Set side by side, overlapping, a row of them becomes a wall no single shield could be, and roughly half of what your shield is covering at any moment is the man standing next to you.

Now go back and look at the grammar of the passage. Every command in it is plural. Put on the whole armour — plural. Take up the whole armour — plural. Stand — plural. Take the helmet and the sword — plural. English hides this, because our "you" is the same word either way, and so the chapter gets read as a private devotional exercise in which a lone Christian straps on his gear each morning. Paul is not outfitting an individual. He is dressing a formation.

Which means you are not only responsible for the arrows aimed at you.

Exhort one another every day, as long as it is called "today," that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

Hebrews 3:13

Daily, and mutual, and for a stated reason: deceitfulness. The lie is a lie precisely because you cannot see it from inside. Nobody spots their own blind side. The man whose shield is burning is the last one in the line to admit he is about to let go of it, and the only correction available is the person beside him saying so out loud.

What to do with this

Three things, and they are small enough to do this week.

Name the arrow in the sentence it actually uses. A general cloud of dread cannot be extinguished, because there is nothing to hold the shield against. Write down the specific line — you have already ruined this, nobody would stay if they knew, God has helped other people and stopped at you. Written out, it is a claim. A claim can be answered. A mood just burns.

Answer it with clothing, not with argument. Notice how much energy goes into trying to prove the accusation false, and how often it is not false. Joshua's answer was never a better record. It was a change of clothes he did not supply. If your only defence is your own conduct, you are holding a shield made of the very thing that is on fire.

Get into a line. Say the sentence out loud to one person before Sunday. Not for advice — for the simple mechanical reason that a shield locks to another shield and a man on fire cannot see himself. And then take the other side of it: ask one person what is being said to them this week, and stand where they cannot.

The arrows will keep coming. That is assumed here; Paul does not offer a version of this where they stop. What he offers is a door, four feet of it, already soaked and heavy in your hands, and a line of people either side of you holding theirs. The fire goes out in the shield. It was always going to go out in the shield. The only question the enemy is really asking is whether you will still be holding it when it does.