To Win the Battle

Ecclesiastes 9:11

The race is not to the swift
    or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
    or wealth to the brilliant
    or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

12 Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come:

This morning I was reading in 1 Samuel 17.  It’s a story full of questions and wonder and passion and faith.  As mentioned in another blog: Family Ties, David was going from group to group asking what would be the reward for killing the giant Goliath.  The soldiers all set out wealth and honor and the hand of a princess as the prize to be claimed.  They all knew the answer, so it wasn’t really a foreign idea or a new question, obviously.  David would leave one group as soon as he got an answer and go to another.  That fact was always odd to me since he was going to be the one to ultimately accomplish the feat.  But if you read it as though you’ve never read it before, it might seem that David was trying to inspire confidence and action within the heart of some would be champion.  There were no champions to face Goliath among the army of Israel.

  What David said was overheard and reported to Saul, and Saul sent for him.

 David said to Saul, “Let no one lose heart on account of this Philistine; your servant will go and fight him.”

 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.”

 But David said to Saul, “Your servant has been keeping his father’s sheep. (I’m sure that statement caught Saul’s confidence right off.)  When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, 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. 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.  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.”

There were stories aplenty passed from generation to generation of victories and intervention by God on Israel's behalf.  David had learned to trust and follow God as a shepherd boy.  When he was first introduced to Saul he was described as a warrior and yet he’d never fought in an army.  His son Solomon would in his old age pen the words at the opening of this write.  They most likely came from the heart of his father the warrior king.

In Psalm 33, David wrote:

  No king is saved by the size of his army;
    no warrior escapes by his great strength.
   A horse is a vain hope for deliverance;
    despite all its great strength it cannot save.
  But the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him

It becomes obvious that the message of this encounter with a lethal opponent is that with God you will succeed at any task where trust meets need.  David didn’t use Saul’s armor to protect himself.  He knew that his protection was in God or it wasn’t.  He knew that his victory would be in God or it wouldn’t.  That’s why he could approach a giant with only a shepherd’s staff and 5 stones.  It makes a great story.  But what if you can’t believe that much?  We often feel that faith is a quantitative substance and some of us have it and others don’t.  And yet, God addresses that issue within scripture as well.

Isaiah 30: 15  This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says:

“In repentance and rest is your salvation,
    in quietness and trust is your strength,
    but you would have none of it.”

I must admit that I want to see the miraculous.  I want God to come in like the waters in Lord of the Rings.  I want instant harmless undemanding results by just asking.  I want God’s favor in my fights without any test.  You know, there have been those moments in my life.  They were awesome.  Yet there have been many times when a fellow soldier had to lift my head out of the dirt to see that the enemy was vanquished.  And some people have died in the process.  If my hope is only in my own desire, if my pride is only in my reputation, if earthly destruction is my only fear, then I will not see the power and deliverance of my God.

When Esther’s "I can't" message was reported to Mordecai, Esther 4, he sent back this answer: “Do not think that because you are in the king’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape.  For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”

I’ve always thought of the statement in Ecclesiastes “Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come:” to refer to death and perhaps it may ultimately.  But today I reconsidered it.  We each have pivotal roles within our own time and chance that call us in a day, in an hour to be champions: more than the average human seems capable of.  How can we win that war?  Will we trust, commit and quietly say “This enemy will fall because he has defied the armies of the living God”? Or will we stand back and wait for the best from another champion?