Tuesday, Wednesday 31

Scripture: But David said to the Philistine, “You come to me with sword and spear and 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.(1 Samuel 17:45).

Observation: Goliath is no match for David. With God on David’s side, Goliath is the unknowing underdog. Within the span of three chapters, 1 Samuel 15-17, the prophet Samuel rejects Saul’s claim to the throne because Saul did not obey God’s command to destroy the Amalekites but instead saved the most valuable plunder for himself and his men, in defiance of what Samuel had explicitly told him to do; then Samuel selects David to be the new king of Israel, though covertly so Saul won’t discover it and kill both Samuel and David, and despite David being a shepherd boy, the eighth and youngest son of Jesse and a “diamond in the ruff” who would be unremarkable and forgotten by history had God not sent Samuel to find him; and here in 1 Samuel 17, Saul bites off more than he can chew in his ongoing war with the Philistines and must face an opponent in Goliath that no soldier in Israel is willing to face, so instead of a solider, God sends a shepherd: David. The Philistine army sent a lone champion to battle a champion of Saul’s choosing, the ancient equivalent of a duel, and the last man standing would have the victory of the entire battle. The Philistine champion, Goliath, was “six cubits and a span” tall (1 Samuel 17:4); that’s almost ten feet tall. Goliath wore bronze armor and bronze chain mail and wielded a bronze javelin, in addition to this sword and spear. That his armor and weapons were made forged of bronze is a key detail. The battle took place at the dawn of the Bronze Age, around 1000BC, with the discovery of the bronze smelting process and the widespread use of bronze in weapons and tools. The Philistine army had incorporated this latest technology in their weapons of war. However, the Israelites were behind the times and either did not use bronze or did not know how; instead, they used older Iron Age technology. In our times, the Philistine technology and Israel’s technology would be like robotic GPS-enabled drones doing battle with bows and arrows. David, a shepherd boy with zero experience in war, while taking food to his older brothers in the military camp, told Saul he could take on Goliath. David came at Goliath with no armor and no weapons save for a sling and stones. Modern readers may not know that in the right hands, sling and stones make a lethal weapon. Shepherds could pick off a wolf or a lion from a distance, and ancient armies used those trained in sling and stones as archers. Sling and stones are old technology from the stone age, but nevertheless effective in hunting and battle alike. Therefore, the battle of Goliath and David is a battle of the latest advancement in warfare technology against a pebble flung by a leather strap. Plus, there’s the little detail in 1 Samuel 17:43 where Goliath says that David is coming at him with “sticks,” plural, when David in fact was holding only one stick, his shepherd’s staff, which allows for the possibility that Goliath suffered from giantism, an actual medical condition that made him huge in size but carried with it many side effects, including poor eye sight and eventually blindness. In other words, Goliath was no match for the pebble he probably couldn’t see. Slung by a shepherd like David, the pebble would have been as lethal and precise as a bullet and almost as fast. There are so many layers to the story: David is small and Goliath a giant; Iron Age technology up against the Bronze Age; shepherd versus warrior; the best weapons money can buy against stuff you can find on the ground; quiet strength versus blind hubris- but we must not miss the most important layer of all, that of God choosing to use what the proud and the powerful would call small, weak, and nobodies to achieve God’s purposes and win God’s battles.

Application: The application here has already been said, but it’s worth repeating. The proud and the powerful of the earth will assume that pride and power will win the day. It sounds obvious, doesn’t it? The latest technology and the strongest brute force and the most money and the best-looking and the largest size should win every battle, right? Might is right, right? But God chooses to work in a different way. God chooses to work through the David’s of the earth. God choses to achieve God’s purposes through the somebodies whom the proud and the powerful call nobodies, yet it is precisely because they are humble and humbled that they are strong in heart and choose to wield their inner strength by means of moral courage, compassion for the weak and the oppressed, and creative uses of that which they are gifted in and which big bullies, in their hubris, tend to overlook. Or as Psalm 138:6 says, “For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly; but the haughty he perceives from far away.”

Prayer:

Artist Behind All Things, You know my heart, and therefore, You know my hidden compulsions. You know when I wanted to be more like Pontius Pilate, who could make people obey him with a snap of his fingers; or like Caiaphas, who was respected, approved of, celebrated, put on a pedestal; or like Simon, who went on adventures and brought home wild stories of brave deeds and lived to tell the tale because he, unlike his best friend, loved to a point shy of dying; or like Judas, who took the reins of leadership because he believed he could do the leader’s job better than the leader; or like the soldiers who gambled for Your clothes, who could hide behind anonymity and go to bed at night believing their hands were clean. You know full well how grimy the surface of my heart has become. I have become Goliath, blinded by the allure of “Might is right.” Wash me of pride, that original festering germ breeding more sins within me. Wash me today, for the sake of Your Son. Onward we go: amen.