The Shield of the Lord

• ” It literally means it it doesn’t end. So in in Deuteronomy 33 and 29 it says, “Happy art thou, O Israel, oh people saved by the Lord, the shield of thy help. And who is the sword of thy excellency?” So again, God is speaking in the in the framework that he is saying because I am thy shield, you are protected. I’m your help. And then in 2 Samuel chap 22, and there’s a lot of verses that that touch on this subject, but I’ve just extracted a few that I thought would help us today.
• 2 Samuel 22 and3 says, “The God of my rock, in him will I trust.” And then he ends it with this, and this is why he’s going to say, “In him I trust. He is my shield.” Now, we can go to let’s let’s move over into the New Testament because I kind of want to just build a line of of of thought here.
• Ephesians chapter 6 and 16. And a lot of you are familiar with this. This is the portion of scripture that is dealing with the armor of God. And of course, you know, he’s the helmet of salvation. and your loins gird about with truth. Your feet shall with the preparation the gospel of peace, the breastplate of righteousness. And then it ends and it says, “But above all,” in other words, all of those are great, but he said, “Even above those,” he said, “take the shield.
• ” And then he names it. He says, “The name of the shield is faith. out of all of these this armor here when God’s given us a description of it, faith is is not a weapon. It is a defense. And when he’s talking here in Ephesians 6, he says, “Above all, taking the shield of faith.” And then this is he gives an explanation on why he says because wherewith with your shield of faith you shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.
• So Paul is using a a military picture here because [clears throat] in in his time the enemy, the Romans would take their arrows and they would dip them in like a a pitch or a resin that was highly flammable. And then they would set them on fire and then they would shoot them at the enemy, at the Israelites. And it wasn’t just to kill them, but it was to strike fear in their heart, set them on fire, scar them, burn them, dehabilitate them, all of those things.
• And so Paul says [clears throat] in the spirit realm, the enemy is going to fire things at you. He’s gonna shoot at you. And he said, “If you have the shield.” Now, you know, and then when we started this out, God is talking to Abraham. He said, “I’m your shield.” And it’s interesting that that when we think of Abraham, we call him the father of faith.
• So, no wonder the shield is not ever mentioned until the 15th chapter of Genesis because God is talking to a man of faith. And he says, Abraham, he said, “Your faith becomes your protection. It is what’s going to keep the enemy from taking you out and from destroying you.” You say, “Well, pastor, you know that that’s wonderful and and I I wish I had that.