The main point of the exhortation is this previous preparation. It is
clear enough that it is no time to fly to our weapons when the enemy is
upon us. Aldershot, not the battlefield, is the place for learning
strategy. Belshazzar was sitting at his drunken feast while the Persians
were marching on Babylon, and in the night he was slain. When great
crises arise in a nation's history, some man whose whole life has been
preparing him for the hour starts to the front and does the needed work.
If a sailor put off learning navigation till the wind was howling and a
reef lay ahead, his corpse would be cast on the cruel rocks. It is well
not to be 'over-exquisite,' to cast the fashion of 'uncertain evils,'
but certain ones cannot be too carefully anticipated, nor too sedulously
prepared for.
The manner in which this preparation is to be carried out is distinctly
marked here. The armour is to be put on before the conflict begins. Now,
without anticipating what will more properly come in considering
subsequent details, we may notice that such a previous assumption
implies mainly two things--a previous familiarity with God's truth, and
a previous exercise of Christian virtues. As to the former, the
subsequent context speaks of taking the sword of the Spirit, which is
the word of God, and of having the loins girt with truth, which may be
objective truth. As to the latter, we need not elaborate the Apostle's
main thought that resistance to sudden temptations is most vigorous when
a man is accustomed to goodness. One of the prophets treats it as being
all but impossible that they who have been accustomed to evil shall
learn to do well, and it is at least not less impossible that they who
have been accustomed to do well shall learn to do evil. Souls which
habitually walk in the clear spaces of the bracing air on the mountains
of God will less easily be tempted down to the shut-in valleys where
malaria reigns. The positive exercise of Christian graces tends to
weaken the force of temptation. A mind occupied with these has no room
for it. Higher tastes are developed which makes the poison sweetness of
evil unsavoury, and just as the Israelites hungered for the strong,
coarse-smelling leeks and garlic of Egypt, and therefore loathed 'this
light bread,' so they whose palates have been accustomed to manna will
have little taste for leeks and garlic. The mental and spiritual
activity involved in the habitual exercise of Christian virtues will go
far to make the soul unassailable by evil. A man, busily occupied, as
the Apostle would have us to be, may be tempted by the devil, though
less frequently the more he is thus occupied; but one who has no such
occupations and interests tempts the devil. If our lives are inwardly
and secretly honeycombed with evil, only a breath will be needed to
throw down the structure. It is possible to become so accustomed to the
calm delights of goodness, that it would need a moral miracle to make a
man fall into sin.