Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 323 · November 19
All This Assembly
“And all this assembly shall know that the LORD saveth not with sword and spear: for the battle is the LORD’s, and he will give you into our hands.”
A dry streambed at the bottom of a valley with a ridge on either side of it. The Philistines stood on a mountain on the one side, and Israel stood on a mountain on the other side. Two armies in the seats, forty days of one man walking out morning and evening, and nobody going down.
Your verse is a speech, delivered at the top of a boy's voice, to everyone on both hills. That all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel. And all this assembly shall know that the LORD saveth not with sword and spear. The audience includes the men behind him who have stood there six weeks with their weapons, and the men opposite who have been enjoying it.
Then watch what he is holding while he says it. A staff, five smooth stones, a sling. He is not disarmed, and afterwards he takes the giant's own sword and finishes with that. The claim is about where saving comes from, and it never says the tools go unused. Israel kept saying it afterwards, in songs and in speeches, to people who did own armies. I will not trust in my bow, neither shall my sword save me. Hezekiah, with an Assyrian army outside Jerusalem and his own troops mustered in the street, told them the same thing: With him is an arm of flesh; but with us is the LORD our God to help us, and to fight our battles.
Which sends you back to the two ridges and the reason for the duel. Those hills would have learned nothing from a fair fight between champions; that was the arrangement everybody had agreed to, and it would have proved only that one man was stronger. What they got was a result no assembly could explain by looking at the equipment. The killing was the smallest part of the day. The knowing was the point. The crowd was never the scenery.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 323 is Refuge and Fortress (Psalm 91:2).