No self-respecting soldier expects a war to end with a single battle.
With few exceptions, wars tend to be long, drawn-out campaigns. A skirmish here, a clash there. Troops moving from location to location, vying for control of strategic chokepoints, employing tactical maneuvers or else hunkering down to weather an enemy assault. Each battle contributes to the final outcome of the war, but very few battles actually end the war.
And so each of us must be prepared to “endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ” (2 Timothy 2:3). This is a long campaign—a lifelong campaign—and there will be many, many battles.
Paul knew that better than most. Before describing the pieces of the armor of God, he highlighted the reason we wear it in the first place: “Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand” (Ephesians 6:13).
We talked about this when we looked at the sandals—in English, “the evil day” sounds like a single occurrence. We brace for the arrival of a single evil day, withstand it, and emerge victorious. However, in Greek, “The definite article in such a phrase does not isolate a solitary occasion, but denotes distinct occasions of the one class in question” (The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges on Ephesians 6:13).
In other words: evil days can come more than once. They can come over and over again. That’s no surprise—we know this from our own experience and from biblical accounts. After failing to entice Jesus to sin, Satan “departed from Him until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13).
The key here is “until an opportune time.” That’s Satan’s approach. He doesn’t give up after one failed assault—he retreats, he regroups, and he comes back later to try again. And when those evil days come, we take up the whole armor of God and fight, knowing that we have been equipped by God to hold our own and drive the enemy back.
But not every day is “the evil day” Paul wrote about.
We need to wear the armor every day, it’s true. We can never let down our guard.
But not every day sees us repelling Satan’s latest assault. Not every day demands 110 percent from us.
When Paul wrote “having done all, to stand,” he used a verb that means “having wrought out” or “being quite done”—the implication being that, at the end of the assault, we soldiers are still standing, having performed to the fullest everything required of us in those trying moments.
How exhausting.
Those words remind us of something that’s easy to overlook when we’re talking about the armor of God: in this war, it’s easy to get worn out. And sometimes, the most exhausting part won’t be the fighting. Sometimes, it’ll be the moments in between the fighting. The recuperating in between assaults. The moments the adrenaline starts to leave our system and we find ourselves ready to collapse.
Elijah the prophet felt that exhaustion. At Mount Carmel, he had exposed and defeated 450 false prophets of a false god. The crowd of onlookers saw the true God send fire from heaven at Elijah’s request, and they fell on their faces shouting, “The LORD, He is God! The LORD, He is God!” (1 Kings 18:39). The false prophets were executed, and God ended Israel’s long drought. This was a defining moment in Elijah’s tenure as a prophet of God.
When Queen Jezebel heard that her false prophets were dead, she “sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, ‘So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time.’ And when he saw that, he arose and ran for his life” (1 Kings 19:2-3).
Elijah was tired. On the heels of his greatest triumph, he panicked and fled. Collapsing under a tree, he begged God to let him die: “It is enough! Now, LORD, take my life, for I am no better than my fathers!” (verse 4). When God asked why Elijah had fled, Elijah explained that he had “been very zealous for the LORD God of hosts” (verse 14), but found himself alone and afraid. As his zeal gave way, exhaustion—and hopelessness—began to set in.
Paul didn’t write about zeal as a component of the armor of God—but Isaiah did.
Isaiah’s people were morally bankrupt. When we looked at the belt of truth, we saw the sad state of his entire nation: “Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands afar off; for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter” (Isaiah 59:14). And in response, God took action:
“Then the LORD saw it, and it displeased Him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor; therefore His own arm brought salvation for Him; and His own righteousness, it sustained Him. For He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation on His head; He put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and was clad with zeal as a cloak” (Isaiah 59:15-17).
Like Paul, Isaiah shows us the armor of God—only in this account, it isn’t just armor from God. It is God’s. This is what He wears into battle. The breastplate of righteousness and the helmet of salvation are here, and it’s abundantly clear where they come from. His own arm brought salvation. His own righteousness sustained Him. God alone is the exclusive source of these things. We wear them into battle, but they work because God fashioned them for us.
We also see two other components of this spiritual panoply: garments of vengeance and a cloak of zeal. The garments, of course, are not for us—God claims those expressly for Himself when He tells us, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay” (Romans 12:19). It’s not our place or our job or even our concern to make sure others are repaid for the wrong things they’ve done. God promises to take care of that—at the right time, in the right way, and after extending the right amount of mercy.
The cloak of zeal, though, is a different story. Zeal is for us—and we’re not just allowed to have it. We must have it.
Not all zeal is created equally. Sometimes, it can actually be dangerous. In fact, the primary Greek word for zeal, zelos, simply conveys a sense of passion or strong feeling. The word mimics the sound of water boiling, because zeal is a burning emotion, and burning emotions can get us into trouble as easily as they can offer us a sense of purpose and direction.
Paul acknowledged that many of his contemporaries had “a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge” (Romans 10:2). That zeal led them to crucify the Son of God and persecute His Church. Paul warned the Galatians of false teachers who “zealously court you, but for no good; yes, they want to exclude you, that you may be zealous for them” (Galatians 4:17).
On the other hand, after Jesus drove the moneychangers from the temple, the disciples remembered an Old Testament prophecy: “Zeal for Your house has eaten Me up” (John 2:17). Paul told Titus that God set us apart to be “zealous for good works” (Titus 2:14). He told the Galatians, “It is good to be zealous in a good thing always” (Galatians 4:18).
Zeal—passion, intensity of feeling—is a good thing . . . when it’s aimed in the right direction. It gives us the boost we need to get where we need to go.
So, where are you going?
What are you zealous about?
Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). What do you treasure? What matters the most to you in the whole wide world?
That’s where your heart is. And that’s where your zeal is too. That’s what you’re going to be passionate about; that’s what will motivate you and spur you on when times get tough.
As always, our older Brother set the example for us. Jesus was “eaten up” with zeal for the house of God. Are we? Are you? Am I? Is that our driving passion? Is the house of God what we care about more than anything else in this life?
If it’s not, something else will take its place in our lives—and the prospect of all the battles ahead of us will become increasingly exhausting.
It turns out the Roman soldiers had a cloak as well—and it, too, played a vital part in their campaigns.
Several roles, actually. It was made from a heavy, unwashed wool, which gave it the obvious benefit of providing warmth on colder days. But the wool was more than thick—its natural oils made it virtually waterproof. When the rains came, the cloak helped keep the soldiers from getting waterlogged or catching a cold.
It served another purpose too. Soldiers didn’t get to go home once a battle was over. A campaign could see them spending months or even years on the road, often away from any sort of permanent shelter or bed. And so the cloak often became an impromptu bedroll—a large blanket capable of retaining heat and providing some degree of relief from rocky, uncomfortable ground.
The cloak wasn’t an offensive or defensive piece of equipment. It had no function in battle—but there’s no denying that cold, wet, exhausted soldiers struggle to perform as well as warm, dry, well-rested ones.
Our cloak—the cloak of zeal—functions on a similar principle. In the middle of a spiritual battle, it’s easy to stay focused and aware of what’s on the line. Exhaustion, distraction, weariness, doubt, fear—these are things that often come for us between the battles, in the moments when we have room to breathe and time to think.
It’s in those moments when the cloak of zeal does its best work.
Paul may not have written about the cloak specifically by name, but he did write about the effect of the cloak. This was a man who knew what it was like to be (literally and figuratively) beaten down during spiritual warfare:
“From the Jews five times I received forty stripes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods; once I was stoned; three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been in the deep; in journeys often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of my own countrymen, in perils of the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in weariness and toil, in sleeplessness often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness—besides the other things, what comes upon me daily: my deep concern for all the churches” (2 Corinthians 11:24-28).
Through all of that, Paul kept his focus—and his zeal. The man who experienced those things was the same man who wrote, “Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12-14).
Paul faced more spiritual battles than most of us can even imagine. And between those battles, he had opportunity after opportunity to let all that weariness, toil and sleeplessness convince him to abandon his post and leave the war behind.
He stayed because of zeal.
He stayed because of zeal for God’s house. He stayed because he was determined to “lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me.” It didn’t matter who betrayed him or persecuted him. It didn’t matter how far he had to travel or what accusations he had to endure or what comforts he had to do without. He was headed toward the Kingdom of God, “the prize of the upward call,” and nothing—nothing—was going to dissuade him from that goal.
Elijah’s story didn’t end after he ran from Jezebel. Atop a mountain in the wilderness, God helped Elijah refocus on his purpose and his mission. He sent Elijah back out with another job to do (1 Kings 19:15-18). Centuries later, when Jesus was transfigured before the disciples, it was the image of Elijah that appeared alongside Jesus and Moses (Matthew 17:1-8). This was no mistake—Elijah hadn’t failed after Mount Carmel. He just faltered. He had been zealous for God, and with God’s help, he returned to that zeal.
That’s the power of the cloak. It keeps us warm in the bitter winds of difficult trials. It keeps us dry when the rains come and drench our expectations. And when we find ourselves exhausted and worn out, it offers us the promises of God as a shelter to rest and recharge before the next battle.
Paul was right. As good soldiers of Jesus Christ, we must be prepared to endure hardship.
The cloak of zeal makes that possible.
