Hope From the Word

Bill Luebkemann: Don't say that couldn't be the case. That's impossible, that's crazy. Some people say, "Well, there you go. There's that Bible again, just all made up a bunch of stories, it couldn't even be true." Look, on 20/20 or whatever, they had pictures of this guy that lived like during World War II or something that was eight feet and something tall. It certainly could have happened back in these days as well.

Guest (Male): All of us have encountered difficulties that we've had to contend with, but when was the last time you went looking for trouble? No, we're not talking about breaking the law, but rather, making our presence known to a person or group of people who defy God or the things God loves.

Today on Hope From the Word, Pastor Bill Luebkemann will take a look at the familiar story of David and Goliath. Pastor Bill will show us that the story is about honoring God whom we love and serve even in the face of trouble. Let's head over to 1 Samuel 17 for today's message.

Bill Luebkemann: You'll open up to 1 Samuel chapter 17. We’re looking at this story of David and Goliath and maybe we'll get through the whole story tonight. I'm hoping to, anyway. We've been tracking along here since we started this book. The last number of chapters have been about Saul, but we saw last week in chapter 16 that Samuel anointed David as king. Nobody really knows it yet except David.

We saw that the Jewish historian Josephus said that Samuel whispered this in David's ear, that he was making him king. It doesn't really say here. At this point, it's really unclear who knows about it, but at the end of chapter 16, it was very interesting. David wound up working for Saul in his palace, playing the harp for him every time an evil spirit came upon him.

Saul was a guy who the Holy Spirit left. God took His spirit off of Saul, put the spirit on David. David is destined to become the king, but he doesn't actually take over for like 25 years. So, there is a long time when David is waiting for God to work out His will. During that time, Saul tries to kill him. David never tries to kill Saul. He goes out of his way to be polite to Saul, to protect him. He even kills the guy who kills Saul because he doesn't think it was that guy's job to do that.

We see that in no way does David hurry up and try to hurry along God's plan, unlike Esau and his mother, Rebecca. I was listening to Chuck Smith this morning on 90.5—did I mention 90.5?—and he was talking about how Esau and his mother, Rebecca, were conniving together to expedite the will of God. It was already God's will that Jacob was going to get the blessing and Esau wasn't going to get the blessing, and they didn't need to worry about how it was going to happen.

But when Jacob called for Esau to come in, bring him some fresh venison, have a barbecue, and pass along his blessing, Rebecca got all worked up and concerned and they decided to go into conniving mode to steal the blessing when who knows what God would have done if they had just let the Lord work through that.

I thought of that many times today as we were trying to negotiate some details with these radio transmitters, how much we can try to bring things about in our own power or how much better it would be if we just left it be and let God bring it out in His power. Do we really trust God? Are we really willing to allow Him to do it and say, well, if He wants us to have a transmitter there, we're going to have one? We don't need to worry about what this one's going to do to that one, and if we buy this and sell that? Honestly, it's like playing chess and I never was good at that.

It seemed to me like that message that I heard Chuck speak this morning was for me and you kind of get the idea here that David in his life does things the same exact way. Now when we left off last week, David was in the service of King Saul, playing the harp for him, which was kind of like a guitar. It was not one of those things, he wasn't sitting on a cloud strumming what we call a harp today. When the evil spirit came upon King Saul, David would play the guitar and the spirit would leave. The Holy Spirit was upon David now and not upon Saul anymore.

So, verse 1 of chapter 17, now the Philistines gathered their forces for war and assembled at Sokoh in Judah. They pitched camp at Ephes Dammim between Sokoh and Azekah. I make no claim to know how to say these words, by the way. Saul and the Israelites assembled and camped in the Valley of Elah and drew up their battle line to meet the Philistines. The Philistines occupied one hill and the Israelites another with the valley between them.

The Philistines were enemies of Israel for more than 400 years. I don't exactly know for how long, but they keep popping up over and over and over again and the Israelites keep fighting them. The last battle's been a couple of decades before this and the Jews never really got a good clean victory over the Philistines. They came up in the story of Samson and in other places.

The Philistines were always their enemy and they decided one day that they're going to make war against Israel. It was them making war against Israel, not the other way around. It says here that the Philistines got together, they were the ones that gathered their forces and they assembled and pitched camp. They did a provocative thing. They are setting out for the battle. They are pitching their camp right on the border close to Israel. "We're going to come in and have you guys for lunch," is kind of what they're saying here.

Saul gets all the Israelites together and they camp there also. They have a battle line and it's in the bottom of a valley. That valley is still there today. It's a well-known place. There's a stream there. Some people say it would only have had water in it when it was rainy season and it would have been dry the rest of the time. That might explain where David got the smooth stones that we're going to see. You have both parties on opposing hills.

Maybe they're afraid to attack each other because in order to go down and cross the stream and go up the other side, you'd be a prime candidate for an arrow from the enemy. So they're camped out there just taunting and tormenting each other as we're going to see for 40 days. The Philistines on one side, Saul and the Israelites on the other side. Saul being head and shoulders above all the other Israelites, being a man that had won some battles previously, but being a guy now that no longer has the spirit of God on him, he's now a scaredy cat.

He's not going to do anything but sit there and shake, rattle, and roll in his boots. So there they are, the Philistines on one side, I just want you to get that picture. The Philistines have this guy named Goliath. He is called a champion. That literally means a man between. You can get the concept here, it's a man between two armies.

He's the guy that comes out there and stands in the middle, a champion named Goliath, who was from Gath. He came out of the Philistine camp. He was over nine feet tall. I think the King James says six cubits and a span. Some people think that was nine foot nine. I've read estimates anywhere from eight foot eight to nine foot nine.

He was over nine feet tall. He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore a coat of scale armor of bronze weighing five thousand shekels. That's around 125 pounds. On his legs, he wore bronze greaves and a bronze javelin was slung on his back. His spear shaft was like a weaver's rod and its iron point weighed 600 shekels. His shield-bearer went ahead of him. Think of a spear point of 15 pounds. Think of something the weight of a bowling ball shaped into a point at the end of a spear and this was what this guy had with him.

Look, if you think that people can't be that tall, well, you're wrong because the Word of God says he was over nine feet tall. But beyond that, there are contemporary stories today of people who are that tall. I saw on the TV not too long ago a news story about someone and some gland was wired wrong in their body. Was it their pituitary gland? This guy was like eight feet something and he lived in the 20th century and they had pictures of him and everything. He just kept growing and growing and growing because the gland didn't know when to shut off.

This gland kept going and the guy kept getting taller and taller and taller and eventually he died under his own weight. Now you could say, well, how could this happen? Why wasn't the guy dead already? Well, maybe he was a young guy, maybe he was going to die, maybe his pituitary gland went haywire, maybe he was going to be dead anyway. I don't know the answer to that question. All I know is that there are people who lived in the 20th century that were similarly tall.

Also, there were people that lived back then that were tall because the Word of God says so. But also, if you look back in Genesis chapter 6, I want to call your attention to this section here that happened before the time of the flood. You're probably familiar with it. In verse 1 of chapter 6, "When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and they married any of them they chose."

Then the Lord said, "My spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be 120 years." Any place in the Bible where it says sons of God that I'm familiar with, it always is referring to angels. When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were in the fiery furnace, the king said, "Who is that in there with them? He looks unto a son of God." If you look over in Job chapter 1, when it talks about the demons and the angels there standing before God at the beginning of Job, it refers to the angels there as sons of God.

Now, there are different interpretations on this here and you're entitled to have your own opinion on it, but it seems to me that what this is referring to is that the angels that came down and had sex with women and had children by them. That angels came down and married. Look at it again. "The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and they married any of them they chose."

Some people say, "Well no, that's not what it's referring. It's really referring the sons of God were descendants from Adam and Eve." Well, at this point they were all descended from Adam and Eve. Some people say the daughters of men were descended from Cain, who was banished from the garden after killing Abel, and the sons of God were descended from the other sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. That certainly is a possibility also.

But it seems to me that one line of reasoning here is that the sons of God were the angels that were marrying the daughters of mankind and they were producing offspring that were kind of half human, maybe. This is one of the things that led up to the flood and the account of Noah and the ark. Down in verse 4 of chapter 6 of Genesis, it says this: "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward, when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown."

We're talking about some race of people that was unnatural and it seems to me that one possible thing here was that the angels were producing offspring with women on the earth who were extra big and they became giants. The Nephilim here referring to giants that were on the land. This is one of the things that got the Lord mad.

Well, you might say, "Okay, supposing that is so, I'm not sure if I believe it or not, but supposing that is so, when the flood came, it wiped out everybody but Noah and his family, so that would have wiped them all out." But I want to call your attention back here in verse 4 of Genesis 6 where it says the Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward.

I think we can see that two of the daughters of Noah went into him? Remember after the flood? There were some races of giants that are spoken of after that. Now we could spend all night on that and we're not going to, but suffice it to say there were giants in the land when they left Egypt, went through the desert and the first time the surfing party went out into the Promised Land. What's the thing they came back and said? "There's giants in the land."

There were races of giants in this land and it appears like perhaps this guy Goliath was one of them. So, I wanted to give that to you as one possible plausible explanation for where this guy came from, but I wanted also to say well we've seen this kind of thing contemporarily in the 20th century so don't write it off as outside the question.

Don't say, "That couldn't be the case. That's impossible, that's crazy." Some people say, "Well, there you go. There's that Bible again, just all made up a bunch of stories, it couldn't even be true." Look, on 20/20 or whatever, they had pictures of this guy that lived like during World War II or something that was eight feet and something tall. It certainly could have happened back in these days as well.

This guy, this champion, this man between two armies, this guy named Goliath, he was from Gath and he came out of the Philistine camp and he scared the livin’ daylights out of the Jews. He was nine feet nine inches tall, or maybe he was only eight feet ten inches tall. Either way, I wouldn't want to be arguing with the guy. "You're not nine feet, you're only eight feet. Na na na na na." No, I don't think so.

He had a bronze helmet on his head and he wore a coat of armor of bronze weighing five thousand shekels. 125 pounds was his coat of armor that he was wearing. That's not the weight of his shield that his shield-bearer was wearing. That's the weight of his armor that he was wearing, 125 pounds. Look, I know 5,000 shekels, that's an approximation of what that is. Nobody knows that exactly for sure either.

He wore these bronze greaves on his legs, sort of like what your kid wears to play soccer, I would imagine, only these were bronze. He had this javelin and he had a spear that was more like a weaver's rod. It had an iron point as big as a bowling ball or as weighing as much as a bowling ball. Can you imagine what it would take to throw a rod with a bowling ball at the end of it any considerable amount of distance and would you want to be on the receiving end of that thing when it makes contact? I don't think I would.

This wasn't even one guy, by the way. This was unfair because he had his shield-bearer with him. We're going to see David didn't have any shield-bearer. So this guy would go out, Goliath, verse 8, Goliath stood and shouted to the ranks of Israel. So he went out there, scared the livin' daylights out of them. They're afraid to fire any arrows at him. Maybe he's too far away. Their arrows are not going to pierce his 125 pounds of armor there either.

He stood and shouted across looking at Israel. Goliath went down, there's the valley, the stream, goes back up the other side, there's the army, Saul and the army. 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. 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."

Then the Philistine said, "This day I defy the ranks of Israel. Give me a man and let us fight each other." On hearing the Philistine's words, Saul and all the Israelites were dismayed and terrified. This guy came down and he was taunting them. We're going to see here in a minute that this went on for 40 days, which by the way is a good number in the Bible. Time of testing, time of trial and tribulation. The Israelites spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness, time of kind of purging and cleansing.

He went out and did this for 40 days and he accused them, "What are you guys doing? Aren't I a Philistine and are you not servants of Saul?" Well, he missed the point here, you see. I think they were servants of Saul, but that was their problem. They should have been servants of the living God, not of Saul.

He said, "We don't have to do a battle here. We'll just have a one-on-one contest. You pick a man and my team will pick a man. We'll just have a one-on-one battle. We're going to do arm wrestling, whoever wins, the other team becomes their slave. Very simple. I'll kill him or he'll kill me. I'm a volunteer from my side. You get a volunteer from your side. We'll settle this out." He did this every day, we're going to see, for 40 days, more than once a day. They don't even keep their word, by the way. They don't become servants to the Israelites when they lose.

The Philistine here, here's one of his big mistakes: "This day," he said, "I defy the ranks of Israel. Give me a man and let us fight each other." On hearing the Philistine's words, Saul and all the Israelites were dismayed and terrified. It's interesting why it says Saul and all the Israelites. You'd be tempted to think that it says Saul and all the Israelites because Saul was the king and they were all under him and that's a good reason and yes, I'm sure that that's also true.

But consider this: we saw a number of chapters before that Saul stood head and shoulders above everyone else in Israel. So if this guy is the tallest the Philistines have to offer and he's going to do battle one-on-one with somebody, you'd think the Jews are going to be looking at Saul. Not just because he's the king, but also he's the tallest guy there. "Hey Saul, he's your height."

Well, it doesn't say Saul was this high, but if you're going to have a one-on-one battle and you want to have a chance of winning, you're going to send the best guy you got. Well, that would have been Saul. So Saul was terrified because he was the king, but I think he was also terrified because they were looking at him not just because he was the king, but because he was the guy that would be the logical guy to send, both because he was the king and because he was so tall, so big.

Now here we have this little guy on the other hand, David, the opposite. Verse 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 old and well advanced in years. Jesse's three oldest sons had followed Saul to war. The firstborn was Eliab, the second Abinadab, and the third Shammah.

David was the youngest. The three oldest followed Saul, but David went back and forth from Saul to tend his father's sheep at Bethlehem. So now we're introduced again to David, whom we saw in the last chapter was anointed the king. We saw in the last chapter he was pressed into service to play the harp for King Saul.

Now we are reminded that his father Jesse is an old man at this time and Jesse has eight sons. We saw the names of some of them in the last chapter because when Samuel was going to anoint one to be king, he went through all the seven oldest ones before he got to David.

We saw last week that Samuel, as spiritual as he was and as long as he'd been walking with the Lord and as much as he knew the Lord's voice, that we saw he still wanted to make king the biggest, tallest, most handsome dude there was. So he picked the first son of Jesse. The Lord said, "No, he's not the one." Then the second one came along and Samuel said, "Oh yeah, that's the one." No, that's not the one either. It seems like Samuel didn't even get it and he wasn't a young pup either at this time. I'm not sure that he was as old as Jesse.

So Jesse had eight sons, David was the youngest. It doesn't really say how old he was. Some people feel he might have been 15 or 12 or something in the last chapter when he was anointed king. This is at some later point. So it's not known here whether he's 15 or 25 or whatever, but he was still on the young side.

The three oldest sons, however, went with Saul to war. The youngest one, David, he went back and forth. Remember, he was serving King Saul playing the harp for him, but he went back and forth between doing that and tending his father's sheep at Bethlehem. So he still had a flock to take care of. So he spent some time with Saul at the palace, some time with the sheep. It seems like when Saul went to war, David wound up back with the sheep.

So he's out there tending his sheep, which he had been doing for many years as he was growing up. He was a shepherd and he was a good shepherd and he knew all about shepherding, which if you don't believe me, you can read Psalms sometime and you'll find out for sure.

This went on, verse 16, for a long time, for 40 days the Philistine came forward every morning and evening and took his stand. Every morning saying, "I defy the armies of Saul," and every evening, "Am I not a Philistine? Pick a man." And the next morning, "I'm a Philistine, where's your man?" And the next evening and the next morning and the next evening, 40 days. That's five weeks and five days. That's a long time to be doing that, but it doesn't say here that he missed any mornings or any evenings. He took his stand every day, every day, every day, every morning for more than a month.

Now it was about this time that this is what happened in verse 17: now Jesse said to his son David, "Take this ephah of roasted grain and these 10 loaves of bread for your brothers and hurry to their camp. Take along these 10 cheeses to the commander of their unit. See how your brothers are and bring back some assurance from them. They are with Saul and all the men of Israel in the Valley of Elah fighting against the Philistines."

Jesse here goes to his youngest son David, who's tending the sheep, tending the flock, and he's concerned for his oldest sons. He wants to know what's going on in the battle. What's going on in the war? Are my three sons still alive? They haven't IM'd me lately and maybe there's a power failure there. And besides, they might be hungry. We all want to make sure our kids eat well enough. If you have kids, you know what I'm talking about.

Jesse says to David, "Bring some food down there and be sure you bring some food for the commander also because he'll be hungry and plus maybe he'll help us out."

Guest (Male): You've been listening to Hope From the Word. We're currently in Pastor Bill Luebkemann's study of 1 Samuel. If you'd like to hear this message again, you have several options. Visit our website at ccmarlton.org or download the Hope FM app to your smartphone or tablet, or look for us wherever you find podcasts.

If you've been thinking about visiting Calvary Chapel of Marlton, where Bill serves as pastor, we'd love to have you. Our service times are on Sunday mornings at 10:00. We also meet midweek on Wednesdays at 7:00 PM. You can also livestream from home when you visit our YouTube channel at Calvary Chapel of Marlton. For more information, go to ccmarlton.org. We hope to see you soon.

Before the day is done, we'd like to connect with you, share a praise report, prayer request, or what you're learning from this series. You can easily email us from our website ccmarlton.org or just call us at 856-983-1662. There's more to come from Bill's study of 1 Samuel and we'll have that for you next time on Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel of Marlton.