The Gospel According to Samuel: The Battle is the Lord's (1 Sam 17:1-11, 32-51)

Hello, friends.

This is Pastor Creighton.

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Today we continue our sermon series, The Gospel According to Samuel.

Beloved, the Lord saves not with sword or spear, for the battle is the Lord's.

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, your name is the name that charms our fears.

It bids our sorrows cease.

It is music in our ears and life and health and peace.

Lord Jesus, would you speak to us again through your word and Holy Spirit?

Incline our hearts towards you.

Help us to see your saving promises again for what they are, to set our hearts upon them.

And Father, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts be always pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

Please do be seated.

Well, as we journey through the books of 1st and 2nd Samuel together in our sermon series, we've come today to perhaps the Sunday school classic, David and Goliath.

Who doesn't love David and Goliath?

It captures our imaginations, doesn't it?

I mean, we use it like an adjective now, right?

We describe a sports franchise as a David or a Goliath.

We describe a plot of a film like a David and Goliath story.

We love David and Goliath, and I love David and Goliath.

I love David and Goliath so much, I've prepared not one but two sermons on David and Goliath, and I'm going to preach them both.

And I can tell you're really worried right now.

The first sermon, well, let me say this.

There's two sermons you can preach off of this text, depending on which role we cast ourselves in.

What role are we supposed to play in the story?

Who are we supposed to identify with?

The first sermon assumes that we cast ourselves in the role of David.

We might say the underdog, the hero of the story.

This is a sermon called Slay Your Goliaths.

We all face Goliaths, don't we?

It might be the bully at work or down the street, it might be an obnoxious boss.

It might be our financial situation, it might be low self-esteem, but we all of us experience towering adversity.

So we take up the smooth stones of hard work, courage, and self-confidence, and we let God direct them right into the forehead of our opponent, whatever it is that challenges us.

So the application of this sermon is this: go be like David.

Do more David stuff.

Faith is what it takes to rise to the challenge, so discover that faith, which might just be faith in yourself.

Now there's truth here.

I don't want to pretend like there's not.

It's true we do faith face Goliaths.

It's true we're left feeling helpless and powerless in the face of towering adversity.

And it is true that hard work and courage and confidence can be virtues that the Lord uses, means that the Lord uses to bring about desirable ends.

But I want us to look very carefully at what the text of 1 Samuel 17 itself says.

And if you have your Bibles or if you have your order of service in front of you, I encourage you to take that out.

I want to ask us what sort of faith we see here in 1 Samuel 17.

See, it's not faith in our own capabilities, our hard work, our courage, or our confidence that is animating the people of Israel.

Actually, in verse 11, we see that Israel is cowering with fear in the face of Goliath.

And in verse 16, which we didn't read, we read that Goliath comes out each and every morning for 40 days to taunt Israel.

This sort of faith is not animating Israel.

It's not even animating Israel's king Saul, who should be Israel's champion.

He should be the one rushing out to meet Goliath as the representative of his people, but he too is quaking in his boots in verse 11.

And as we'll see, this kind of self-generated self-confidence is not even the sort of faith that's animating David.

So the question for us this morning is who would we really be when the battle lines are drawn?

If we were looking out and seeing the Philistines, I'd like to think I'm David.

I'd like to think I'd be rushing out to face my Goliath.

But the truth is, I'm really more of an Israelite.

I'm a quaking in my boots kind of guy.

I'm a shrink back and hope that someone else takes care of it, kind of guy.

This is what brings us to my second sermon, which I'm not calling slay your Goliaths.

I'm calling it the battle is the Lord's.

You see, I think 1 Samuel 17 challenges my own predisposition to self-reliance.

In the face of my Goliath, I think if I can muster up the right stuff, I can take them on, and God will come alongside me to just give me a little bit extra.

No, it's this sort of self-reliance that we see on display in the person of Saul and in Israel.

And the real result of that is fear.

We are left quaking in our boots against a foe that we cannot hope to overcome ourselves.

So it's not faith in ourselves that we need, it's rather a faith that trusts in God alone that will save.

A saving faith trusts in God alone to the glory of God alone.

Saving faith trusts in God alone to the glory of God alone.

This is the faith I'm convinced we see in 1 Samuel 17.

David says to Goliath in this climactic encounter, this day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, I will strike you down and cut off your head.

And he goes on to say, the purpose of all of this is that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and all this assembly may know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear, for the battle is the Lord's.

So, in other words, David clearly understands who the hero of this story is, and it's not himself.

It's the Lord.

It's the God of Israel.

David's faith saves him and all of Israel because it's faith alone that grasps onto our saving God.

So there's three things I think I want us to see in this text.

I think that the author wants us to see in this text.

Three things to see about this faith that saves us in the face of our Goliaths.

Faith that saves depends not on our own power, but on God's power.

Faith that saves remembers God's saving character, and faith that saves relies upon God's promise.

Faith that saves depends upon God's power, remembers God's character, and relies upon God's promise.

And friends, that is good news for us this morning.

It's good news because we discover true confidence and assurance, not something that we're trying to work our hardest to generate for ourselves, but a genuine assurance in knowing the living God for who he is for us.

So, friends, faith that saves depends upon God's saving power.

Only faith in the Lord will do, not in ourselves.

Let's look at the first 11 verses here.

In verses 1 to 3, the battle lines are drawn.

The Philistines are longtime enemies of Israel.

We met them a couple of weeks ago when we looked at chapter 4 together.

And Israel suffered a defeat against the Philistines.

They decided we're going to take the Ark of the Lord out like a little superstitious token, and that for sure is going to guarantee us the victory.

And they suffered an even worse defeat than they had suffered previously against the Philistines.

They learned that true faith is not superstition.

Philistines are here challenging Israel again, and this battle is taking place about 15 miles or so outside of Bethlehem.

For our reference, 15 miles outside of Port Perry, that puts us at about Oshua.

And maybe this sounds about right for Oshua.

But here we go.

In verse 4, we meet the big guy.

We get quite the description of Goliath, the Philistine's champion, from verses 4 to 7.

This word champion is fascinating because in Hebrew it literally means a certain man in between.

That's who Goliath is.

He's the Philistine's in-between man.

He's over nine feet tall.

His armor is 125 pounds, let alone the description of all his weaponry.

The big takeaway here is this is not just a big guy.

This guy is a flipping war machine.

He eats UFC fighters for breakfast.

And he's coming after Israel.

So he offers this defiant challenge.

Goliath stood and shouted to the ranks of Israel, verse 8 Why have you come out and drawn up for battle?

Am I not a Philistine?

Are you not servants of Saul?

Choose a man for yourself, let him come down to me.

If he is able to fight with me and kill me, then we will be your servants, but if I prevail against him and kill him, then you shall be our servants and serve us.

And the Philistines said, I defy the ranks of Israel this day.

Give me a man that we may fight together.

So this is single man conflict that Goliath is challenging Israel to.

This is not an uncommon practice in the ancient Near East, rather than an all-out bloody warfare.

One champion is going to step out as a representative of his people and challenge a champion from the opposite side so that they can do battle and determine the outcome of this warfare.

Goliath is a historical person, but the author casts him in an interesting role.

The author casts him not just as a Philistine or even a Philistine champion, the author casts him as the Philistine, quite specifically, which is something to consider.

He's representative, he's not just a member of the Philistines, he's representative of all the Philistines, of all things, all people, all nations that oppose God and are set against God's people and assert their own power.

This Goliath towers as a symbol of opposition to God.

Goliath defies Israel, but in doing so, he's not just taunting a nation.

He's rather asserting his own superiority against their God.

This God who's committed himself to Israel.

Goliath is saying, You guys are toasts, because I'm better.

So, how are Saul and Israel doing at this point?

Keep in mind, when uh Israel demanded a king of the prophet Samuel, they wanted a king like all the nations, to go out and fight their battles for them.

So here you go, Saul.

Now's your moment, right?

What's he up to?

When Saul and all Israel heard these words of the Philistine, they were dismayed and greatly afraid.

So at the very least, you'd think Saul would be like all the other nations.

Let's do this.

Let's go for it.

This is not a warrior king, he is quaking in his boots, and it is so clear why that is.

Just two chapters previous, chapter 15, Saul's disobedience has been rejected by the Lord.

Saul is no longer God's appointed king.

He's lost that right.

He's forgotten his God, and he's forgotten God's saving power.

He's lost perspective entirely, as has the nation he's leading.

So Saul gives the readers a negative example here.

He's someone who relies upon his own power and he despairs.

He's someone who's forgotten God's mighty power to save.

Saul has become self-reliant, but his own self-reliance, he knows, isn't good enough.

So what are you going to do?

Despair.

See, I've got to be honest, this hits me especially because I'm a sort of self-reliant person, and therefore I'm often a very fearful person when it comes to overwhelming odds and challenges.

It's a remarkable thing about faith that removes us from the context of our own self-reliance, takes us out of ourselves and sets our hearts upon a power that's greater than ourselves.

That's the sort of faith we see here in our gospel reading.

A blind man who cries out to Jesus, Jesus, son of David, which itself is very significant, Jesus, son of David, have mercy upon me.

And he asks to be healed.

This blind man gets it.

He sees quite clearly what the true nature of faith is.

No matter what he thinks he may do for himself, he cannot restore his own sight.

He needs to come to a power greater than himself to do for him what he cannot do for himself.

Such is the nature of faith.

Saul should see that so clearly.

Saul should look back at the history of Israel and at his own calling and see that his God is a saving God.

But no, Saul has slipped into self-reliance, and so he slips into fear.

Self-reliance doesn't cut it.

In the face of true Goliaths, self-reliance and self-generated self-confidence is not what it takes to win the battle.

Rather, we surrender our self-reliance to God and we depend wholly upon his power to save.

We remember what Isaiah writes in chapter 66, that God will bless those who have humble and contrite hearts and who tremble at his word.

We practice not self-reliance or self-generated self-confidence.

We practice a dependency upon God.

We call to mind God's saving power.

And we don't we sing, our God is mighty to save?

This is what we keep in our vision at all times.

Saving faith depends upon God's power, not our own.

So we skip forward in the text a little bit in our reading this morning.

What we skipped over was this scene between David and his brothers.

David, we saw last week, is anointed king of Israel in chapter 16.

The spirit, we know, is with David in a way that the spirit has departed from Saul in chapter 15.

So now David is running food to his brothers on the battlefield while still tending to his family's flock.

Verse 16, we learn that Goliath goes out every morning and offers this challenge to Israel.

In verse 23, David sees Goliath's challenge for the first time.

And verse 24, he sees Israel shrink back.

So David gives his very first speech in the Bible, in which he asks, Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?

Goliath may be a big guy, but David understands something.

David understands that Israel's God is bigger still.

And he's wondering, have you forgotten that?

The covenant and all of God's promises belong to us, not to Goliath.

You're acting, Israel, like you don't know your God.

See, it's David's faith that shows us something about saving faith.

Saving faith remembers God's saving character.

It takes confidence from a right memory of God, a right knowledge of God, not generating the right stuff within us.

So look at the difference here between David and Saul.

David says to Saul, let no man's heart fail because of him.

Your servant will go and fight this Philistine.

David is ready to go, not because he thinks, yeah, I could take this guy, but because he knows Israel's God.

He gets a really paternal but pretty patronizing response from Saul, who tries to talk him out of it.

It essentially boils down to something like, David, seriously, you can't be serious, right?

But David's past experience as a shepherd bears witness to God's saving character.

David says to Saul, I went after lions, I went after bears, I struck them, and delivered the lamb, my flock, out of his mouth.

And in verse 37, David says something very important.

So the question we might ask was so is it David or is it the Lord who delivered lambs from lions and bears?

And the answer is simply this.

Yes.

David's confidence is in God's saving character.

If he has saved his servant in the past, and he has given his people his promise, then surely the Lord will save this nation of Israel in its time of need.

See, this is not to be presumptuous.

It's practicing what one commentator calls theocentric thinking.

There's a$5 word for ya.

Theocentric means God-centered.

David's thinking is different than Saul's in that David's thinking revolves around who God is, God's saving character.

Theocentric thinking, God-centered thinking is this: it's memory plus logic.

Memory of God's saving actions that represent his saving character in history, plus logic in the present.

If God's done that in the past, surely God will remain committed to his purposes in the present.

As then, so now.

Maybe we're reminded of 1 Samuel chapter 7 that Bishop Charlie shared with us.

1 Samuel 7 · chapter mention

Didn't Israel raise an Ebenezer to mark as a memorial God's deliverance?

Hitherto the Lord has helped us.

We need those Ebenezers, don't we?

We need to raise those memorial stones that tell us that God shows up in wild ways to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

And so I was so delighted to hear so many stories come from New Song's past.

The stories that were shared over video or stories that have been shared personally.

These witness to God's saving character, how God has shown up and done for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and we take that confidence and assurance with us into the present, knowing that God remains committed to his saving purposes.

See, it's practiced theocentric thinking, God-centered thinking, that reminds us that even though Goliath might not fall with a thud before our eyes, at least not in the way we would expect, God is still working out his plan of salvation.

So remembering God's saving character, David is confident to be Israel's champion, their man in between.

And what a difference between David and Saul.

David is theocentric in his thinking, but Saul is self-reliant in his thinking.

So David gets suits up, and I love this scene in verses 38 to 40.

David puts on all the armor that Saul gives him, because I gotta think in Saul's imagination, this is the best thing he's got in mind.

A self-reliant guy is gonna give you the best he has to go out there, march out, and meet the enemy.

But it's way too big for him.

I have to just think that's a funny scene to watch.

And David's thinking, there's no way I'm marching out into battle with this.

See, this isn't to say that God doesn't use means or that it's not prudent to prepare, as though we shouldn't, you know, receive medicine for something that an ill that we have, because, well, I'm not gonna put my trust in you know man made self reliant means.

No, there's prudent preparation, but it's clear where David's heart is here.

David's heart trusts in God, not in himself.

He knows that the battle belongs to the Lord, no matter what he's wearing.

Saving faith depends upon God's power and it remembers God's saving character.

As we head into the final battle here, here's the third thing we see.

Saving faith relies upon God's saving promises.

This is a faith that rises to the challenge.

Verses 41 to 44, Goliath sees David and he says something very similar to Saul.

You can't be serious.

I'm going to squash you, make you into jelly, and eat you on my toast.

At least feed you to the birds of the air.

The Philistine cursed David by his gods.

That's what we read in verse 44, and that's so important for us to catch.

It's clear that this is more than just a contest of champions.

This is cosmic spiritual warfare.

This is the false gods of the Philistines against the living God, the Lord, the Lord God of Israel versus the false gods of the Philistines.

And where is David's confidence?

It's in the Lord.

We read earlier, David says to the Philistine, again, You come to me with a sword and spear and with javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.

This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head, and I will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear, for the battle is the Lord's.

See, Goliath has not just challenged the natural national sovereignty of Israel, he has defied the living God, and David's concern is for God's own glory.

This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, that all the earth may know there is a God in Israel.

See, David at this moment understands what Israel has forgotten.

We read in Exodus chapter 6 that God promises his people, I will take you to be my people, I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.

Exodus 6 · chapter mention

In other words, God says, I am committed to you, Israel.

I am committed to deliver you.

And God's character being faithful as it is, that will not change.

So David understands that the Lord saves not with sword and spear.

The Lord is capable to perform that deliverance himself.

The battle is very brief in verses 48 to 49, thunk and plop.

But it's the cosmic war of words that is more important.

The Philistines flee in verses 50 to 51, and what a reversal from verse 11.

The people of God shrunk back out of fear, having forgotten their God, but relying upon God's saving promises, David has won for Israel this day, the victory, and now the Philistines flee.

Friends, saving faith trusts in God alone to do for us that which we cannot do for ourselves, to his glory alone.

So if we were to find good news in this text, it matters which sermon we're preaching.

Because if I preach slayer Goliaths, the good news is only as good as you're capable of.

If you can summon up enough courage, enough self-confidence, enough hard work, then you can go at your Goliaths.

But try your best, and God does the rest is not what 1 Samuel 17 is trying to tell us.

Like frightened Israelites in verse 11, we are licked apart from God saving us.

What we need is a man to stand in between, in between us and utter defeat.

So instead, if we understand that the battle is the Lord's, that faith ultimately rests in the God who saves us, then salvation comes not from our power, but rather his power, which, as Paul writes, is made perfect in our weakness.

See the good news here, friends, is that we have a champion.

We have a man in between who has won the victory over the powers of sin and death and hell, the real Goliaths, that we cannot win for ourselves.

David, Israel's anointed king, is meant to point us to a greater anointed king to come, Jesus Christ, our man in between, our mediator and our champion.

See, in Christ God definitively shows his saving power.

Paul writes in Romans chapter 1, I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

See, it's through the good news of Jesus that we see God's power on full display, not through our capabilities, but through the cross and resurrection, which is for us God's power to save, helpless and afraid though we are.

It's in Christ that we see God's saving character.

It's in Christ that we encounter the character of God, who is to us love.

In a famous chapter, 1 John chapter 4, John says, God is love.

1 John 4 · chapter mention

And with this in mind, John writes, In this, the love of God was made manifest among us that God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.

In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he has loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.

What is God's character revealed to us in Christ?

God is love, and he does who he is.

So theocentric thinking in Christ bears in mind that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not die, but will have eternal life.

It remembers this and calls it forth into the present.

If God has won for us the victory, then I can have confidence that I will have victory in Christ.

Even if my Goliath doesn't go down with a thud in front of me, the victory belongs to the Lord, and that gives me confidence.

The cross stands as a reminder of God's saving character to us in Christ.

He who endured the cross has surely won for us the victory, and we will enjoy that victory forever on the last great day.

Finally, Christ shows us God's saving promise.

I'm always struck by John chapter 11.

John 11 · chapter mention

Lazarus, Jesus' dear friend, Martha and Mary's brother, has died.

And Martha goes out to meet Jesus as he comes into the town.

And Jesus gives Martha in the midst of her grief, in the midst of her defeat, in the midst of her helplessness and hopelessness, a promise.

I am the resurrection and the life, Jesus says.

The one who believes in me will live, even though they die, and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.

See, there are times, aren't there, where our Goliath, ultimately death, doesn't seem to go down with a thud.

We experience fear, we experience anxiety, grief, and mourning, and what do we do with that?

We look to the cross.

And we remember that just like David took the enemy's sword and put him to death with it, Jesus has taken the weapon of the enemy, death itself, and put our enemy to death.

So that by his resurrection we too may have new life.

This is for us a resurrection promise.

Our man in between has conquered death, so that through him we too shall certainly be united in a resurrection like his.

Our battle belongs to the Lord, and faith lays hold of this promise.

So, saints, we are saved by faith that trusts in God alone for our salvation.

Oh, the night has been won, and I shall overcome, yet not I, but through Christ in me.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

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