To Stand Firm

Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. -Ephesians 6:13

This is a verse that has always stumped me. It's redundant, and the redundancy doesn't make sense to me. Too many "to stands" in there. Since it's a passage that's talking about going to battle, I took it to mean something like this:

Put on the armor so that when you're fighting you can stand your ground and fight back, and once it's over, be left standing. Not laying on the ground having been beaten to a bloody pulp.

That's the best I could come up with. But you know, the longer I sit in a passage, the more things there are that jump out at me.

Recently, I've been praying these verses over a friend of mine. As I was thinking about her battles and praying through this passage, a new interpretation came to me. In my Bible is a written note about this particular verse: "To stand" - to get ready for battle; the Lord will rescue and save me because He's already won!

I replaced "to stand" with "to get ready for battle," and here's what I got:

Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to get ready for battle, and after you have done everything [and fought], to get ready for battle.

Maybe Paul wasn't saying so much that we need to come out of the battle still standing on our feet. Maybe he was saying that our battle against evil is continual. Once we come out of the battle we're in now, we immediately prepare ourselves for the next.

After all, our fight is spiritual and we can't always see it coming. We don't get to call the shots and decide when we're ready to step onto the battlefield. The enemy is going to bombard us from all possible sides, especially when we're at our weakest.

And so we must get ready.