Subject: With Fear and Trembleing |
Bible Note: Hi, dispen4ever... This Greenwood fellow certainly stretches Paul's metaphor much farther than the Apostle would have ever imagined. Paul would never have guessed that the human head contained the seat of consciousness -- in his day, the universal opinion was that human conscience resided in the heart. It also amazes me how people take this metaphor of the armor, pulling it out of context. Ephesians, like many of Paul's epistles, contains indicatives and imperatives. The first half of the book is full of indicatives, the second half full of imperatives. In other words, the imperatives arise directly out of the indicatives. All the commands of Scripture are rooted in doctrine. If we lose sight of the doctrine -- or neglect it entirely as Greenwood has done -- the imperatives give rise to pointless legalism. (Of course, that ends of appealing to the masses, which might explain why such teachers manage to continue to pull down a salary.) These things are only the beginning of problems with this article. No, if resisting the devil is not based in the complete and ongoing work of every member of our Triune God -- as the prior chapters of Ephesians state -- we simply lade our readers with another problem arguably more serious than the first! In Him, Doc |