What Is the Armor of God? — Owen on Ephesians 6
⏱ 14 min read
What if the armor of God is not the thing you put on each morning, but the thing you have been standing inside the whole time and have only forgotten the name of? You have seen the diagrams — the belt, the breastplate, the helmet, the sword — printed on Sunday-school placemats and traced onto bedroom-door posters and sermon outlines you have heard since you were small. And the diagrams are not wrong. But the part of you that has worn the armor like a costume — putting it on at the start of the day and feeling, by lunchtime, that it has slipped off again — has been suspecting for years that the apostle meant something deeper than a checklist of pieces. He did. The older Puritan tradition knew he did. John Owen, more than any other voice in that tradition, walked the slow inside of what armor of God actually meant.
This essay reads three load-bearing passages from Owen’s Communion with God — the book the man wrote when he had stopped being a theologian arguing positions and had become, instead, a soul writing letters to other souls about how to actually abide in the love of the Father. The Everspring Devotionals on Anxiety is the contextual companion for the kind of week this article describes — the slow daily standing in armor that does not feel like armor because it is too quiet to look like one. For now, read slowly. The question what is the armor of God opens, in the older tradition, into a much larger room than the Sunday-school placemat ever suggested.
John Owen was a Puritan pastor and theologian, vice-chancellor of Oxford during the Interregnum, a man whose mind could carry seventeen Latin distinctions at once, and — this matters — a father who buried ten of his eleven children. The mortification of sin was not, for Owen, a theological hobby. The communion with God was not a topic for his next sermon. The armor of God was the thing he was standing inside while his children’s coffins were being closed. When he writes about Ephesians 6, he is not theorising. He is naming the thing that kept him alive.
The modern reading of the armor of God tends to be a putting-on exercise. Today I put on the belt of truth. Today I put on the breastplate of righteousness. The older Puritan reading is different. It is an inhabiting exercise. The armor is not a set of pieces you assemble at six in the morning. The armor is the whole posture of communion with the Father in which the soul stands all day — and the pieces of armor in Ephesians 6 are the apostle’s way of describing the different facets of that one inhabited communion. The belt, the breastplate, the helmet, the sword: not seven costume items, but the seven angles from which the same single thing — being in Him — protects you. Owen will not let you put on the armor without first stepping into the room.
The first passage: the love that endears the soul
“‘They that know thee will put their trust in thee.’ Men cannot abide with God in spiritual meditations. He loseth soul’s company by their want of this insight into his love. They fix their thoughts only on his terrible majesty, severity, and greatness; and so their spirits are not endeared. Would a soul continually eye his everlasting tenderness and compassion, his thoughts of kindness that have been from of old, his present gracious acceptance, it could not bear an hour’s absence from him; whereas now, perhaps, it cannot watch with him one hour. Let, then, this be the saints’ first notion of the Father, — as one full of eternal, free love towards them: let their hearts and thoughts be filled with breaking through all discouragements that lie in the way.”
— John Owen, Communion with God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly, and notice what Owen is doing.
He is locating the failure of the Christian’s daily armor in the wrong place. Men cannot abide with God in spiritual meditations, he says, and then names the reason — they have fixed their thoughts only on God’s terrible majesty, severity, and greatness, and so their spirits are not endeared. The word endeared is the load-bearing word. Owen is saying that the soul cannot stand inside the armor of God because the soul has not been endeared to the Father whose love the armor is. You cannot inhabit a love you have not stopped to notice. You cannot stand inside a tenderness you have only ever read about from a distance.
This is the older Puritan correction to the modern checklist reading of Ephesians 6. The armor is not pieces. The armor is the Father’s eternal, free love — His thoughts of kindness that have been from of old, His present gracious acceptance — and the soul that has not slowed long enough to be endeared by that love will not be able to stand inside the armor when the day pushes back. The pieces of Ephesians 6 are not seven items to memorise. They are seven facets of the one love you are being asked to inhabit, and the inhabiting begins with insight into His love.
Notice the sentence it could not bear an hour’s absence from him; whereas now, perhaps, it cannot watch with him one hour. This is Owen the pastor, not Owen the theologian, and it is the line that breaks the modern Christian’s heart, because most of us have been the second clause for years. We cannot watch with Him for one hour. The chair time has been short. The prayer has been thin. The Bible reading has been mechanical. And Owen, gently, locates the reason: we have not been endeared. The Father’s tenderness has not yet had time to register, and so the soul drifts toward absence as a default because the love has not had a chance to become attractive enough to keep it home.
For the woman who has been wearing the armor of God as a daily exercise and has been falling out of it by mid-morning for years — this is the first quiet correction. The armor is not a thing you put on. The armor is a love you are being slowly endeared to, in a daily watching with Him, until the not bearing an hour’s absence becomes the actual centre of your day. The pieces in Ephesians 6 are facets of that single endeared love. The belt of truth is the Father’s truth-toward-you. The breastplate of righteousness is His righteousness-given-to-you. The helmet of salvation is His salvation-as-your-mind’s-home. The sword of the Spirit is His Word as the voice you have been endeared by. You are not assembling seven costume pieces. You are inhabiting one love from seven angles.
If your week has been the kind of week in which the spiritual reading has gone mechanical and the prayer has thinned, how to pray when you’re under spiritual attack sits close to this paragraph, and the 100 Days of Faith Over Fear: The Slow Practice That Actually Holds walks the daily standing-inside-the-love at the speed Owen would recognise.
The somatic that goes with the inhabiting
Pause here. Owen would not have separated the body from the soul in this teaching, and the body is where the armor will either settle or slip.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet on the floor. Notice the chest — there is likely a small clench just below the breastbone, a held place where the breath does not fully reach. The clench is the body’s habit of standing on guard, even when no immediate threat is present. The Puritan armor is not a costume placed over that clench. It is a slow loosening of the held place, by the weight of the Father’s love finally landing in it.
Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the chest soften by a fraction — not by trying to relax it, but by allowing the slow exhale to do its work. Take one more inhale. On the exhale, let one phrase settle inside the chest: His thoughts of kindness that have been from of old. Do not perform the phrase. Just let it sit where the clench was. Stay with the exhale for thirty seconds.
Then continue reading. The armor of God, in the older tradition, lands first in the chest the modern day has been tightening, and the loosening of the chest by the slow received-ness of His love is the most basic somatic enactment of what Ephesians 6 actually means. The body has been wearing the wrong kind of armor — the held one — for a long time. The right kind is His love, and the body has to receive it before the soul will believe it.
The second passage: the comfortable persuasion
“To give a poor sinful soul a comfortable persuasion, affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections, that God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him, hath thoughts of tenderness and kindness towards him; to give, I say, a soul an overflowing sense hereof, is an inexpressible mercy.”
— John Owen, Communion with God
This is the central passage, and it is the line that, if read slowly enough, reorganises the question what is the armor of God from the ground up.
Owen is naming, with theological precision, what the armor of God is for, at its deepest level. The purpose of the armor is not battlefield victory. The purpose of the armor is to keep the soul in the comfortable persuasion — the overflowing sense — that God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him. The armor is what protects the inner room in which that persuasion can live. The adversary’s whole strategy, in the Puritan reading, is to dislodge the soul from this persuasion. The adversary does not need to topple your theology to topple you. He only needs to thin your sense of being delighted in by the Father, and the soul that has lost its comfortable persuasion will be on the back foot for the rest of the day no matter how many memory verses it can recite.
The armor, then, is whatever holds the persuasion in place. The belt of truth — the persistent knowledge that He is true toward me, which keeps the persuasion grounded. The breastplate of righteousness — the awareness that Christ’s righteousness is mine, which keeps the persuasion from being beaten down by the daily evidence of my own failure. The shoes of the gospel of peace — the daily walking in the peace He has already made, which keeps the persuasion travelling with the soul wherever it goes. The shield of faith — the held conviction that His love is real, which catches the fiery darts of accusation that try to dislodge the persuasion. The helmet of salvation — the mind’s home in being saved, which keeps the persuasion safe from the constant intellectual erosion of doubt. The sword of the Spirit — the Word as the voice that speaks the persuasion back to me when the day has tried to quieten it.
Every piece of the armor is in service of the comfortable persuasion. The armor is not seven things you wield. The armor is one persuasion you stand inside, with seven specific protections around it. The adversary’s whole work is the unmaking of the persuasion. The Father’s whole work, by His Spirit, is the holding of you inside it.
This is why, for Owen, the armor of God and the mortification of sin are not two separate doctrines but two faces of the same practice. The mortification of sin is the daily clearing-away of whatever has crept in to dislodge the persuasion — the small disordered loves that quietly say He cannot delight in me, look at this thing I just did. The putting-on of the armor is the daily standing inside the persuasion that survives the clearing — He delights in me, has thoughts of tenderness, is well pleased with me in Christ. The two practices, for Owen, are one daily life. Mortify; abide. Confess; receive. Sweep the parlour; sit in the room. The armor is what you wear while the room is being kept.
(For the longer-form daily practice, verse mapping examples — 5 verses mapped from start to finish walks the slow scripture-reading the Puritans would recognise as the holding-in-place of the persuasion, and prayer for protection tonight: 10 scriptures to pray before bed is the bedtime version of the same standing-inside-His-love practice.)
A short word on the Sunday-school version
The reason the Sunday-school placemat version of the armor of God leaves the adult Christian feeling under-equipped is not that the diagram is wrong but that it is incomplete. The placemat shows the pieces; the placemat does not show the room. The pieces of armor make no sense outside the room of communion with the Father — the comfortable persuasion, the endeared spirit, the overflowing sense of being delighted in. The placemat hands you seven items and asks you to wear them like fancy dress. Owen would hand you a room, ask you to step inside, and then point at the seven angles from which the room itself protects you.
The Everspring Devotionals on Anxiety is built on the room, not the placemat. Each evening, a short page, a verse, room for the honest sentence — the daily small re-inhabiting of the comfortable persuasion the Puritans named, for the woman who has worn the placemat version for years and is ready to step inside the room the apostle was actually pointing to.
The third passage: the soul brought into the bosom of God
“The soul being thus, by faith through Christ, and by him, brought into the bosom of God, into a comfortable persuasion and spiritual perception and sense of his love, there reposes and rests itself.”
— John Owen, Communion with God
This is the passage that resolves the question, and it should be read twice — once for the doctrine, once for the rest.
Owen is naming the final shape of the armor of God. The soul, by faith through Christ and by Him — not by its own effort, not by its own diagnostic skill, not by its own daily putting-on — is brought into the bosom of God. The verb is passive on the soul’s side. Brought. You do not climb into the bosom of God. You are brought. The whole movement of the armor of God, in Owen’s reading, is a being-brought, by Christ, into a room that you could not have entered by force, where the comfortable persuasion is the air and the spiritual perception is the light and the sense of His love is the warmth — and there, in that brought-into-ness, the soul reposes and rests itself.
The armor of God is, finally, a reposing. Not a wielding. Not a guarding. A reposing. The Christian whose armor is rightly understood is not a soldier crouched on the battlefield with sword drawn. The Christian whose armor is rightly understood is a soul reposed in the bosom of the Father, and the reposing is the protection. The adversary cannot reach the soul that is reposing in the bosom. The fiery darts strike the outside of the bosom. The persuasion holds. The day passes. The Christian, having reposed all day, ends the day still inside the room.
This is the line that turns the Ephesians 6 passage from a survival manual into a homecoming. What is the armor of God? It is the brought-into-ness of a soul, by Christ and by Him, into the bosom of the Father, where the comfortable persuasion is so overflowing that the soul reposes and rests itself while the day pushes against the outside of the room. The pieces of armor are the angles from which the room protects you. The room is the Father’s love. The bringing is Christ’s. The reposing is yours.
For the modern Christian woman whose week has been the daily picking-up-and-putting-down of an armor that never quite fit — Owen’s third passage is the gentle re-orientation. You have not been failing to assemble the armor. You have been told the wrong thing about what the armor is. The armor is the room you have already been brought into by Christ, and the daily practice is the slow reposing inside it. The pieces in Ephesians 6 will hold themselves around you when you stop trying to put them on and start, instead, to rest. The reposing is the warfare. The bosom is the armor. The persuasion is the standing-firm. Owen would not let the Sunday-school diagram have the last word on what the apostle meant.
(The sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers cluster sit at What Is Spiritual Warfare? — Bunyan on the Christian’s Real Fight and How to Fight Spiritual Warfare — Murray on Standing Firm, if the slow read wants to keep going.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotionals on Anxiety. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the daily small re-inhabiting of the comfortable persuasion the older saints named, for the soul learning, slowly, to repose inside the room the armor of God actually is.
The Everspring Devotionals on Anxiety carries Owen’s slow vocabulary — the endeared spirit, the comfortable persuasion, the bosom of God in which the soul reposes — into a daily companion built for the woman whose armor of God has been a daily costume and is ready, at last, to become the daily reposing the apostle was always pointing to.
