June 24, 2018 Sermon: “Formidable Enemies”
Responsive reading: Psalm 9
Leader: The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.
People: Those who know your name trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you.
Leader: Sing the praises of the Lord, enthroned in Zion; proclaim among the nations what he has done.
People: For he who avenges blood remembers; he does not ignore the cries of the afflicted.
Leader: Lord, see how my enemies persecute me! Have mercy and lift me up from the gates of death, that I may declare your praises in the gates of Zion, and there rejoice in your salvation.
People: The nations have fallen into the pit they have dug; their feet are caught in the net they have hidden.
Leader: The Lord is known by his acts of justice; the wicked are ensnared by the work of their hands. The wicked go down to the realm of the dead, all the nations that forget God.
All: But God will never forget the needy; the hope of the afflicted will never perish. Arise, Lord, do not let mortals triumph; let the nations be judged in your presence.
Scripture: 1 Samuel 17:1-49
Now the Philistines gathered their forces for war and assembled in Judah. 2 Saul and the Israelites assembled and camped in the Valley of Elah and drew up their battle line to meet the Philistines. 3 The Philistines occupied one hill and the Israelites another, with the valley between them.
4 A champion named Goliath, who was from Gath, came out of the Philistine camp. His height was six cubits and a span. 5 He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore a coat of scale armor of bronze weighing five thousand shekels[b]; 6 on his legs he wore bronze greaves, and a bronze javelin was slung on his back. 7 His spear shaft was like a weaver’s rod, and its iron point weighed six hundred shekels.[c] His shield bearer went ahead of him.
8 Goliath stood and shouted to the ranks of Israel, “Why do you come out and line up for battle? Am I not a Philistine, and are you not the servants of Saul? Choose a man and have him come down to me. 9 If he is able to fight and kill me, we will become your subjects; but if I overcome him and kill him, you will become our subjects and serve us.” 10 Then the Philistine said, “This day I defy the armies of Israel! Give me a man and let us fight each other.” 11 On hearing the Philistine’s words, Saul and all the Israelites were dismayed and terrified.
12 Now David was the son of an Ephrathite named Jesse, who was from Bethlehem in Judah. Jesse had eight sons, and in Saul’s time he was very old. 13 Jesse’s three oldest sons had followed Saul to the war: 15 but David went back and forth from Saul to tend his father’s sheep at Bethlehem.
16 For forty days the Philistine came forward every morning and evening and took his stand.
17 Now Jesse said to his son David, “Take this roasted grain and these ten loaves of bread for your brothers and hurry to their camp. 18 Take along these ten cheeses to the commander of their unit. See how your brothers are and bring back some assurance from them. 20 Early in the morning David left the flock in the care of a shepherd, loaded up and set out, as Jesse had directed. He reached the camp as the army was going out to its battle positions, shouting the war cry. 21 Israel and the Philistines were drawing up their lines facing each other. 22 David left his things with the keeper of supplies, ran to the battle lines and asked his brothers how they were. 23 As he was talking with them, Goliath, the Philistine champion from Gath, stepped out from his lines and shouted his usual defiance, and David heard it. 24 Whenever the Israelites saw the man, they all fled from him in great fear.
25 Now the Israelites had been saying, “Do you see how this man keeps coming out? He comes out to defy Israel. The king will give great wealth to the man who kills him. He will also give him his daughter in marriage and will exempt his family from taxes in Israel.”
26 David asked the men standing near him, “What will be done for the man who kills this Philistine and removes this disgrace from Israel? Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?”
27 They repeated to him what they had been saying and told him, “This is what will be done for the man who kills him.”
28 When Eliab, David’s oldest brother, heard him speaking with the men, he burned with anger at him and asked, “Why have you come down here? And with whom did you leave those few sheep in the wilderness? I know how conceited you are and how wicked your heart is; you came down only to watch the battle.”
29 “Now what have I done?” said David. “Can’t I even speak?” 30 He then turned away to someone else and brought up the same matter, and the men answered him as before. 31 What David said was overheard and reported to Saul, and Saul sent for him.
32 David said to Saul, “Let no one lose heart on account of this Philistine; your servant will go and fight him.”
33 Saul replied, “You are not able to go out against this Philistine and fight him; you are only a young man, and he has been a warrior from his youth.”
34 But David said to Saul, “Your servant has been keeping his father’s sheep. When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, 35 I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it. 36 Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the living God. 37 The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine.”
Saul said to David, “Go, and the Lord be with you.”
38 Then Saul dressed David in his own tunic. He put a coat of armor on him and a bronze helmet on his head. 39 David fastened on his sword over the tunic and tried walking around, because he was not used to them.
“I cannot go in these,” he said to Saul, “because I am not used to them.” So he took them off. 40 Then he took his staff in his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of his shepherd’s bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached the Philistine.
41 Meanwhile, the Philistine, with his shield bearer in front of him, kept coming closer to David. 42 He looked David over and saw that he was little more than a boy, glowing with health and handsome, and he despised him. 43 He said to David, “Am I a dog, that you come at me with sticks?” And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. 44 “Come here,” he said, “and I’ll give your flesh to the birds and the wild animals!”
45 David said to the Philistine, “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. 46 This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head. This very day I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel. 47 All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give all of you into our hands.”
48 As the Philistine moved closer to attack him, David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet him. 49 Reaching into his bag and taking out a stone, he slung it and struck the Philistine on the forehead. The stone sank into his forehead, and he fell face down on the ground.
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This breathtaking story of a spectacular victory by an unexpected hero is one of the great stories of the Bible. Armies, a formidable giant and a shepherd boy…. It is memorable to every child who has ever heard it. It is so familiar and broadly known that there is instant recognition whenever someone refers to a contest as a “David versus Goliath” kind of match up.
We generally read this story as a miracle of God’s supernatural empowering of a simple, ill-equipped, youthful adolescent to do something beyond his training, equipping, and skill in the face of a very mismatched battle between the Philistines and the Israelites.
The Philistines were an aggressive, warmongering people who occupied the territory southwest of Israel between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The Philistines are first recorded in Scripture in Genesis 10 in a list of the patriarchal founders of seventy nations descended from Noah (Genesis 10:14). The Genesis record also tells us that that the Philistines had contact with both Abraham and Isaac as early as 2000 B.C. (Genesis 21:32, 34; 26:1, 8).
They are mentioned too in the book of Exodus shortly after the Israelites crossed the Red Sea: “When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter. For God said, ‘If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt’” (Exodus 13:17). So we know that the Philistines had a long and fearful reputation and God’s people were certainly not ready to take them on so early in their journey to become a mighty nation led by God.
In the book of Joshua we read that around the 13th century B.C., during the days of Samuel and Samson, the Philistines advanced inland from the coast of Canaan and built five key cities: Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gath, and Ekron (Joshua 13:3). Each of the five cities was governed by a “king” or “lord” (the Hebrew word for their leaders is also translated as “tyrant”). These kings operated as a coalition of equals. Each king exercised autonomous control of his city, but they worked together in times of national emergency (Judges 16:5). Their civilization and dominance in the region played a pivotal role in the lives of Samson (Judges 13:1; 14:1), Samuel (1 Samuel 4:1), Saul (1 Samuel 13:4), and David (1 Samuel 17:23).
The Philistines were known for their innovative use of iron, which was superior to the bronze used by the Israelites for weapons and implements. The Israelites were forced to rely on the Philistines to purchase, sharpen and repair their iron tools (1 Samuel 13:19-21). With their more advanced armaments and aggressive military posture, the Philistines’ presence was an impediment to Israel’s development as a nation. For nearly 200 years, the Philistines harassed and oppressed the Israelites, often invading Israel’s territory. The Israelites simply could not defeat the Philistines’ overwhelming military might.
The Philistines worshiped pagan gods and carried images of their gods into battle. They were also superstitious people who learned the hard way about the power of Israel’s God through their disrespect for Israel’s ark of the covenant. (1 Samuel 5:1-12).
The fame and respect they had from their superior metallurgy were balanced by the infamy of their production and consumption of alcoholic beverages, especially beer. Ancient Philistine ruins contain numerous breweries and wineries, as well as countless beer mugs and other drinking vessels. Samson’s wedding feast when he married the Philistine woman Delilah, recorded in the book of Judges, refers to the Philistine practice of holding week-long drinking parties.
The Israelites frequently referred to the Philistines as “uncircumcised” (Judges 15:18; 1 Samuel 14:6; 2 Samuel 1:20), meaning, at that time, those who had no relationship with God. They were not God’s chosen people and were to be strictly avoided as a contaminating evil.
In the end, however, this strong and historic culture was assimilated into Canaanite culture. They eventually disappeared from the biblical record and from history altogether.
At the time of David’s encounter with Goliath, the Philistine culture in Canaan was at its zenith…… culturally advanced, dominant, feared, and militarily superior. No wonder our band of farming and herding conscripted soldiers in the emerging young nation of Israel quaked and stalled, wringing their hands and wondering when and how God would come to their aid.
Then comes young David on the scene. Brash, inquisitive, faith-filled, and incredulous at what he was seeing played out before him…….God’s people stymied by a heathen!
He came to bring rations from home for his 3 brothers. He wanted to stay and watch the action…..but there was no action…..just a trembling stand off as the brazen and daunting Philistine warrior taunted them, challenging them to send out any one of them to dual in hand to hand combat. The Philistines stacked the deck. They defined the terms of battle in a way that would protect their numbers and give them an advantage pitting their largest and best-equipped warrior against the best the Israelites could muster.
Conventional wisdom is that this was the lopsided battle of battles……the strong against the weak…..the powerful against the powerless…..the seasoned soldier against the youthful upstart. No one would have given favored odds on David winning in one-on-one combat with Goliath.
But David came at this with no preconceived notions. He asked questions around the encampment, he assessed the situation, and he made a decision that there was a strategy that he alone was well qualified to carry out. And…..he trusted God. God had never failed him before. David had battled other formidable enemies in the hills and valleys where he herded sheep. Bears and lions in a one-on-one battle requiring strength and skill…..enemies far more, swift, cunning and every bit as deadly as Goliath. David was courageous and full of faith, but he was one more thing, too. A deadly slinger…..a sharpshooter with stone and slingshot. He didn’t even have to get within the distance of Goliath’s javelin throw to hurl his ammo against what looked to him like nothing more than an oversized target.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote the handbook on how small competitors with an entrepreneurial spirit tackled much larger enemies and succeeded. He described how they, like David, knew their strengths and used them with skill and wisdom to bring their competition to its knees.
Gladwell’s book titled “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants”, starts with this ancient story as the primary text, then shows how the principles employed in this battle are the same ones available to all of us in the battles we face against outsized giants.
But the main principle of the storyline was set before this story even began….in 1 Samuel 16. When the Lord sent Samuel to Jesse’s house to anoint the one who would become the successor to Saul years before he would ascend to the throne, Samuel assumed that the tallest, oldest, handsomest, and strongest brother was the one. But the Lord said to Samuel:
“Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7) The Lord might just as well have said the same thing to Saul and all the brothers and others standing on the hill opposite Goliath. And in fact, that is exactly what David heard in his heart as he looked across the valley at the enemy.
Gladwell’s observations reframe the text of this battle for us. He writes:
David and Goliath is “about what happens when ordinary people confront giants. By “giants” I mean powerful opponents of all kinds – from armies and mighty warriors to disability, misfortune, and oppression. Each chapter tells the story of a different person – famous or unknown, ordinary or brilliant – who has faced an outsize challenge and been forced to respond. Should I play by the rules or follow my own instincts? Shall I persevere or give up? Should I strike back or forgive? “
Through these stories Gladwell explores two ideas. The first is that much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty. And second is that we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness. And the fact of being an underdog can change people in ways that we often fail to appreciate; it can open doors and create opportunities and educate and enlighten and make possible what might otherwise have seemed impossible. We need a better guide to facing giants – and there is no better place to start that journey than with the epic confrontation in the Valley of Elah.” (end quote)
Goliath was expecting a warrior like himself to come forward for hand-to-hand combat. It never occurred to him that the battle would be fought on anything other than those terms, and he prepared accordingly. To protect himself against blows to the body he wore the best his culture had in armor, heavy and impenetrable. He had three separate weapons, all optimized for close combat……a thrusting javelin made entirely of bronze, a sword, and as his primary option, he carried a special kind of short-range spear with a thick metal shaft weighted to allow it to be released with extraordinary force and accuracy. Can you see why no Israelite would come forward to fight Goliath?
Then David appears. Saul tries to give him his own sword and armor so at least he’ll have a fighting chance. David refuses. “I cannot walk in these,” he says. Instead he reaches down and picks up five smooth stones, and puts them in his shoulder bag. Then he descends into the valley, carrying his shepherd’s staff. Goliath looks at the boy coming toward him and is insulted. He was expecting to do battle with a seasoned warrior. Instead he sees a shepherd – a boy from one of the lowliest and least respected of all professions – who brings his shepherd’s staff against Goliath’s sword. “Am I a dog,” Goliath says, gesturing at the staff, “that you should come to me with sticks?”
What happens next is a matter of legend. David puts a stone into the leather pouch of a sling, and he fires at Goliath’s exposed forehead. Goliath falls with a thud. David runs toward him, seizes the giant’s own sword, and cuts off his head. “The Philistines saw that their warrior was dead,” the biblical account reads, “and they fled.”
This battle is won miraculously by an underdog who, by all expectations, should not have won at all. This is the way we have told the story over and over for centuries. It is how the phrase “David and Goliath” has become a metaphor for improbable victory. And, as Gladwell observes, the problem with that version of the events is that almost everything about it is wrong.
Ancient armies had three kinds of warriors. The first was cavalry – armed men on horseback or in chariots. The second was infantry – foot soldiers wearing armor and carrying swords and shields. The third were projectile warriors, or what today would be called artillery: archers and, most important, slingers. A slinger had a leather pouch attached on two sides by a long strand of rope. They would put a rock or a lead ball into the pouch, swing it around in increasingly wider and faster circles, and then release one end of the rope, hurling the rock forward.
Slinging took an extraordinary amount of skill and practice. But in experienced hands, the sling was a devastating weapon. In the Old Testament book of Judges, slingers are described as being accurate within a hair’s breadth.” An experienced slinger could kill or seriously injure a target at a distance of up to two hundred yards. The Romans even had a special set of tongs made just to remove stones that had been embedded in some poor soldier’s body by a sling. Imagine standing in front of a Major League Baseball pitcher as he aims a baseball at your head. That’s what facing a slinger was like – only what was being thrown was not a ball of cork and leather but a solid rock.
Historian Baruch Halpern argues that the sling so important in ancient warfare that the three kinds of warriors balanced one another, like each gesture in the game of rock, paper, scissors. With their long pikes and armor, infantry could stand up to cavalry. Calvary could, in turn, defeat projectile warriors, because the horses moved too quickly for artillery to take proper aim. And projectile warriors were deadly against infantry, because a big lumbering soldier, weighed down with armor, was a sitting duck for a slinger who was launching projectiles from a hundred yards away.
Goliath was heavy infantry. He thinks that he is going to be engaged in a duel with another heavy infantryman. When he says, “Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the birds to the heavens and the beasts of the field,” the key phrase is “come to me.” He means come right up to me so that we can fight at close quarters. When Saul tries to dress David in armor and give him a sword, he is operating under the same assumption. He expects David to fight Goliath hand to hand.
David, however, has no intention of honoring the rituals of single hand to hand combat. When he tells Saul that he has killed bears and lions as a shepherd, he does so not to boast about his courage but to make another point as well: that he intends to fight Goliath the same way he has learned to fight wild animals – as a projectile warrior, using his sling.
He runs toward Goliath. Without armor he has the advantage of speed and maneuverability. He puts a rock into his sling, and whips it around and around, faster and faster at six or seven revolutions per second, aiming his projectile at Goliath’s forehead – the giant’s only point of vulnerability. A ballistics expert with the Israeli Defense Forces, did a series of calculations showing that a typical sized stone hurled by an expert slinger would have hit Goliath’s head with the velocity that was more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him unconscious or dead. In terms of stopping power, that is the equivalent to a fair-size modern handgun. “We find, “ Hirsch writes, “that David could have slung and hit Goliath in little more than one second – a time so brief that Goliath would not have been able to protect himself and during which he would be stationary for all practical purposes.”
What could Goliath do? He was carrying over a hundred pounds of armor. He was prepared for a battle at close range, where he could stand, immobile, warding off blows with his armor and delivering a mighty thrust of his spear. He watched David approach, first with scorn, then with surprise, and then with what can only have been horror as it dawned on him that the battle he was expecting had suddenly changed.
“You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, “ David said to Goliath, “but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I will strike you down and cut off your head….All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord’s and he will give all of you into our hands.”
Twice David mentions Goliath’s sword and spear, as if to emphasize how profoundly different his strategy is. Then he reaches into his shepherd’s bag for a stone, and at that point no one watching from the ridges on either side of the valley would have considered David’s victory improbable. David was a slinger, and slingers beat infantry, hands down.
“Goliath had as much chance against David, “ wrote one historian, “as any Bronze Age warrior with a sword would have had against an opponent armed with a .45 automatic pistol.”
Think about the scene from Indiana Jones of the adept and expert swordsman felled by a single shot from Jones’ revolver.
Why has there been so much misunderstanding around that day in the Valley of Elah? On one level, the duel reveals the folly of our assumptions about power. The reason King Saul is skeptical of David’s chances is that David is small and Goliath is large. Saul thinks of power in terms of physical might. He himself was the tallest man in Israel when he was anointed king. He doesn’t appreciate that power can come in other forms as well – in challenging rules or assumptions, in substituting speed and surprise for strength. Saul is not alone in making this mistake.
But there is a second, deeper issue here. Saul and the Israelites think they know who Goliath is. They size him up and jump to conclusions about what they think he is capable of. But they do not really see him. The truth is that Goliath’s behavior is puzzling. He is supposed to be a might warrior. But he’s not acting like one. He comes down to the valley floor accompanied by an attendant, a servant walking in front of him, carrying a shield. Shield bearers in ancient times often accompanied archers into battle because a soldier using a bow and arrow didn’t have a free hand to carry any kind of protection of his own. But why does Goliath, an infantryman ready for sword on sword single combat, need to be assisted by a third party carrying an archer’s shield?
What’s more, why does he say to David, “Come to me”? Why can’t Goliath go to David? The biblical account emphasizes how slowly Goliath moves, which is an odd thing to say about someone who is alleged to be a battle hero of infinite strength. In any case, why doesn’t Goliath respond quicker to the sight of David coming down the hillside without any sword or shield or armor? When he first sees David, his first action is to be insulted, when he should be terrified. He seems oblivious to what’s happening around him. There is even a strange comment after he finally spots David with his shepherd’s staff: “Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?” Sticks? Plural? David is holding only one stick.
What many medical experts now believe is that Goliath had a serious medical condition called acromegaly caused by a benign tumor of the pituitary gland. The tumor causes an overproduction of human growth hormone, which would explain Goliath’s extraordinary size estimated at 6’9”. One of the common side effects of acromegaly is vision problems. Pituitary tumors can grow to the point where they compress the nerves leading to the eyes, with the result that people with acromegaly often suffer from severely restricted sight and double vision. Why was Goliath led into the valley floor by an attendant? Perhaps because the attendant was his visual guide. Why does he move so slowly? Maybe because the world around him is a blur. Why does it take him so long to understand that David has changed the rules? Because he doesn’t see David until David is up close. “Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field, “ he shouts out, and in that request there is a hint of his vulnerability. I need you to come to me because I cannot locate you otherwise. And then there is the otherwise inexplicable question: “Am I a dog that you come to me with sticks?” David had only one stick. Goliath’s statement suggests that he saw two.
What the Israelites saw, from high on the ridge, was an intimidating giant. In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem. What appears daunting and indefeatable may simply need to be considered from other strategic positions and with trusting confidence that God has already gone before us to prepare us for the battle.
David came running toward Goliath, powered with courage and faith. Goliath was blind to his approach – and then…. he was down…. too big and slow and blurry –eyed to comprehend the way the tables had been turned. All these years, we’ve been telling this story with the same wrong assumptions made by Saul and the brothers on the hill across the way.
Instead of being the story of a miracle of God’s supernatural empowering of a simple, ill-equipped, youthful adolescent to do something beyond his training, equipping, and skill, this is the story of a faithful person, called to use the skill he already had been prepared to employ who was not frightened off by difficult circumstances, but who saw them for what they were….. an opportunity to glorify God by simply doing what he does best.
What lessons can we learn about facing the giants in our lives from David’s assessment and response to the situation that stymied the Israelites? When faced with giants can we trust that God has prepared us already and that he will lead us?
The next time you hear the David versus Goliath story, don’t think of an underdog. Think instead of a confident competitor who is happy to be underestimated, willing to set his own rules of engagement, and who knows the true source of his strength and equipping…… To God be the glory! Amen.