Take...the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Like the shield of faith, this is a mobile item. It isn’t worn; it is used. In most aspects it doesn’t do much defending. It is mostly for the purpose of attacking. Going back to the issue of old movies, we saw two swordsmen fighting. They were striking each other’s sword a lot. Why were they doing that? One swordsman swings his sword trying to cut his opponent’s head off and the other one blocks it with his sword or shield.

When the sword is used to block an opponent’s swing, then the sword is being used in a defensive manner. When the sword is used in a defensive manner, it is basically acting as a shield. However, it is best to only use your shield to block off satanic attacks. Because, when you take up the shield of faith, you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one; the sword of the Spirit doesn’t do that.

We will only be considering the offensive aspects of the sword. You may have seen people take their breastplate of righteousness off and try to beat people over the head with it. But, that isn’t the kind of study we are trying to look at here. We are looking at the most common, correct ways of using the armor of God.

In actual spiritual combat, the sword of the Spirit is almost exclusively used as a weapon of attack. Our shield of faith is almost exclusively used as the instrument of defense. 2 Cor 10:4 (NIV) The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.

In the shield of faith study, we spent some time studying the natural flow of Jesus’ use of the sword of the Spirit and the shield of faith. We looked at the block/strike method as He defeated all of Satan’s attempts to cause Him to sin during His temptation in the wilderness. The material in the section on the shield of faith covered some principles that are going to be used to build this part of the study. It will be assumed that, that information has already been read and understood.