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Dalton SDA Church

Chester Clark

In Battle Array

Today, we're talking about the experience of Israel.

I've entitled our time together in battle array.

We're not going to be looking in totality at the experience of David and Goliath, a familiar story.

But as I was reading the story of David and as I was talking and praying about the passage here, I realized there's a lot of lessons that we can find even in the first few verses of this chapter.

The situation is that Israel is surrounded by heathen tribes.

Some of them have had the light of heaven shining upon them for over 400 years.

While Abraham was sojourning, he gave testimony of the God of heaven, the truth of heaven.

And yet many of these nations developed even more sinister, you might say, ways of even offering their children as burnt offerings to their gods.

It was a corrupt, evil, degenerate society that Israel found themselves in.

And as they took possession of the Promised Land, there was instructions by God that some of these people were to be eliminated.

Now we can say all we want to say about it today.

We can try to go back and apply today's ethics and morality and all the rest to that time and say, well, God didn't know what He was doing, but the reality is my Bible tells me that God gave instructions.

And I think there are some things historically, scientifically, morally, et cetera, that we may not completely understand about the situation of that day.

And I'm willing to leave that with God, okay?

And so, what we do see happening is that those instructions were not ultimately carried out, and by the way, there were those who converted to worshiping the true God and they were not destroyed.

So there was room for repentance, there was room for redemption.

But the Philistines became so synonymous with troubling Israel that we sometimes use it as a euphemism or as an expression to talk about the things that haunt us, the Philistines in our lives.

That's how proverbial they were in their harassment of Israel.

And here we find the story in 1 Samuel 17 of the Philistines gathering together to battle.

And we're going to be looking at it here, but we're going to start by bowing our heads for a word of prayer, and then opening our reading of God's word.

Father, we thank you that you've given to us your Word.

We thank you for the chance to study it today and to learn more about it, to learn more of how we can apply the things that we've learned to our lives.

And so we ask that as we have gathered here today, that your Spirit would bless us, teach us, encourage us, strengthen us, that we might be better men and women and boys and girls for having spent time in the Bible.

Our scripture is chapter 17 of 1 Samuel, and beginning with verse 1, Now the Philistines gathered their armies together to battle and were gathered at Soco, which belongs to Judah.

They encamped along between Soco and Azica in Ephesdamum and Saul and the men of Israel were gathered together and they encamped in the valley of Elah and drew up in battle array against the Philistines." Now this is really the phrase that caught my attention as I began reading this passage.

I suppose a battle array, and by the way I have no military experience to draw from, but I'm just imagining, okay, as a preacher, I'm imagining that battle array has something to do with organizing for battle.

It has something to do with setting up and lining up and preparing for battle.

It also may have something to do with posturing for the enemy.

I mean, after all, battle array, you would want to convince your enemy that you've got something going on over here, right?

So, they've lined up in battle array, and this reminded me of a historical fact from way back around 1944 in the World War II history, the history of the Ghost Army.

The Ghost Army was a United States Army Tactical Unit during World War II.

It was officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, or Operation Quicksilver.

There were 1, 100 men that made up this unit, and they were given a unique mission within the Allied forces From a few months after D-Day when they landed in France until the end of the war They basically put on a traveling roadshow Their job was to convince the enemy there was an army there.

They would impersonate other allied units to deceive the enemy.

They had inflatable tanks, sound trucks, they made fake radio transmissions, they had scripts and pretense, and they staged more than 20 elaborate battlefield deceptions convincing Germany that as many as 30, 000 soldiers were present at 1 time when it was really just the 1100 of them running around and putting on a show.

Here's a picture of 1 of their inflatable tanks, the Sherman M4 tank.

They had inflatable tanks, cannons, jeeps, trucks, and airplanes.

The men would come and inflate with air compressors and they could have in a few hours a simulated airfield set up with all of the support troops, the guards, the tanks, and everything else.

They would not just set up this, they would do it actually within sight of enemy lines.

So they would camouflage the tanks as if they were real tanks, but not camouflage them too well because they wanted them to be seen.

They would actually, after they had pushed into a district, they would go in convoys and they would put trucks, you know, like the people carrier trucks, they would go through the towns and villages with trucks.

And they didn't have enough soldiers to fill the truck so they just put 2 soldiers at the back of the trucks and some dummies for the rest and they would actually go in circles and just keep going through the towns and the spies that would be in the towns would have the idea that there was a lot more of them there than there were.

Because they were impersonating specific army divisions, they would actually learn the style of the radio operators, the Morse code style of the radio operators.

So as a division of soldiers, thousands of soldiers would move out of an area, the ghost division would move in and their radio operator would carry on as if nothing had changed, sending fake messages, Convincing the enemy that this whole division of army soldiers was still there of course They also had a sound unit they they recorded all kinds of military sounds back here in the US.

And they had speakers and generators such that the sounds could be heard for 15 miles from where they were playing the sounds.

And they could mix the sounds to match whatever it was they were trying to simulate was going on in their fake airbase.

Now this was all top secret at the time, in fact there's still some aspects of it that are classified but it was mostly declassified in the last 20 years or so, a movie's been made of it, but the question I had was how much actual, how many victories did these inflatable tanks actually win?

I'm sure they had a purpose and a part to play, but they were really just a spoof army.

They really just were meant to make the enemy think they were all there.

The Bible records the Philistines were on 1 side of the valley and the Israelites were on the other side of the valley.

We call it the Valley of Elah, and there you can still go today and there's a stream that runs through, particularly when it rains hard, it's usually dry.

But on 1 side Israel was camped, on the other side the Philistines were camped.

And the Bible says they were in battle array.

Well, This was not a time of national borders as you know, those are fairly recent in human history.

National borders are a fairly recent phenomenon.

These were city-states basically and the 5 cities that made up the Philistine nation, Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath.

These were the 5 cities of the Philistines that when we talk about the Philistines, these are the people that we are talking about.

The kings of these cities were the Philistines.

And so they're gathered here and by the way the Valley of Elah is right here that we're talking about.

These are different battles, historic battles that were fought between the Philistines and Israelites but this is the 1 we're talking about right here.

And if you were to go there today, this is the area, in fact this hill is where it's believed the Israelites would have been encamped and over here the Philistines and the creek is between here and the road that the Philistines eventually would flee down is this valley here back to their territory.

And so this was a significant challenge to Israel.

If we look back in our Bibles, we find in beginning in verse 3, the Philistines stood on a mountain on 1 side and Israel stood on a mountain on the other side and a valley between them.

And a champion, verse 4, a champion went out from the camp of the Philistines named Goliath from Gath whose height was 6 cubits and a span.

He had a bronze helmet on his head and he was armed with a coat of mail and the weight of the coat was 5, 000 shekels of bronze.

And he had bronze armor on his legs and a bronze javelin between his shoulders.

Now the staff of his spear was like a weaver's beam and his iron spear had weighed 600 shekels and a shield bearer went before him." Now if you don't know what all of those different measurements are, you just should be impressed.

He's got big armor, he's got a big sword, he's got a big spear, and this is not an ordinary human being we're talking about here.

We'll visit that a little later in our series.

But the reality is that this was a giant who was terrorizing the armies of Israel.

He came and stood and cried out to the armies of Israel and said to them, why have you come out to line up for battle?" Notice he did not say, why have you come out for battle?

He said, why have you come out to line up for battle?

Because as day after day after day passed, there was no battle.

But they might as well have been blow-up M4s.

Why have you lined up for battle, he says.

Am I not a Philistine and you the servants of Saul?

Choose a man for yourselves and 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 Philistine said I Defy the armies of Israel this day.

Give me a man that we may fight together.' Then Saul and all Israel heard these words of the Philistine, and they were dismayed and greatly afraid." Now this didn't just happen once or twice.

It happened morning and evening for nearly 6 weeks.

They were lined up for battle, but there was no battle.

They were in battle array, but nobody was moving.

And as I thought about this, I thought of the proverb I've heard out west a little more.

The little saying people have when someone talks a lot, but doesn't have the ability to back up their talk.

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In Battle Array

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