The Old Testament is the book of illustrations; the New of explanations, of teaching.  In the Old, teaching is largely by kindergarten methods.  The best methods, for the world was in its child stage.  In the New the teaching is by precept.  There is precept teaching in the Old; very much.  There is picture teaching in the New; the gospels full of it.  But picture teaching, acted teaching, is the characteristic of the Old, and precept teaching of the New.  There is a wonderfully vivid picture in the Old Testament, of this thing we are discussing.  But first let us get the teaching counterpart in the new, and then look at the picture.

Turn to Ephesians.  Ephesians is a prayer epistle.  That is a very significant fact to mark.  Of Paul’s thirteen letters Ephesians is peculiarly the prayer letter.  Paul is clearly in a prayer mood.  He is on his knees here.  He has much to say to these people whom he has won to Christ, but it comes in the parenthesis of his prayer.  The connecting phrase running through is—­“for this cause I pray....  I bow my knees.”  Halfway through this rare old man’s mind runs out to the condition of these churches, and he puts in the always needed practical injunctions about their daily lives.  Then the prayer mood reasserts itself, and the epistle finds its climax in a remarkable paragraph on prayer.  From praying the man goes urging them to pray.

We must keep the book open here as we talk:  chapter six, verses ten to twenty inclusive.  The main drive of all their living and warfare seems very clear to this scarred veteran:—­“that ye may be able to withstand the wiles of the devil.”  This man seems to have had no difficulty in believing in a personal devil.  Probably he had had too many close encounters for that.  To Paul Satan is a cunning strategist requiring every bit of available resource to combat.

This paragraph states two things:—­who the real foe is, against whom the fight is directed; and, then with climactic intensity it pitches on the main thing that routs him.  Who is the real foe?  Listen:—­“For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood”—­not against men; never that; something far, subtler—­“but against the principalities”—­a word for a compact organization of individuals,—­“against powers”—­not only organized but highly endowed intellectually, “against the world-rulers of this darkness,”—­they are of princely kin; not common folk—­“against the hosts of wicked spirits in the heavenlies”—­spirit beings, in vast numbers, having their headquarters somewhere above the earth. That is the foe.  Large numbers of highly endowed spirit beings, compactly organized, who are the sovereigns of the present realm or age of moral darkness, having their headquarters of activity somewhere above the earth, and below the throne of God, but concerned with human beings upon the earth.  In chapter two of the epistle the head or ruler of this organization is referred to, “the prince of the powers of the air."[25] That is the real foe.