Ephesians 6:1 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

In Ephesians 6:10-17. St. Paul sums up his practical exhortation in that magnificent description which has ever since laid hold of Christian imagination, both in metaphor and in allegory. He paints the Christian life as a battle against spiritual powers of evil, waged in the strength of the Lord, and in the panoply of God. We trace the germ of this great passage first in St. Paul’s earliest Epistle (1 Thessalonians 5:8-9), and then in the later Epistle to the Romans (Romans 13:12). In both these cases the image is of soldiers starting from sleep at day-break to arm for the fray in the morning light. But it is characteristic of the more elaborate and thoughtful style of this Epistle, and of the circumstances under which it was written (in the watchful presence of the full-armed Roman “soldiers that kept” St. Paul), that the image there briefly touched is here worked out in full beauty of detail.