Materials
The David Series: Our Lives Before God
Slaying Your Giant
I Samuel 17
by R. Todd Bouldin
Today
we turn to perhaps the most well known story in the Bible, and like all
such stories, we come up against the challenge of familiarity. The story
of David and Goliath may have been one of the first Bible stories you
learned as a child, and the song we just sang perhaps was one of the first
songs. I remember wanting a sling when I was a child so I could hurl rocks
like David hurled at Goliath – thankfully I never hurled them at my parents or friends. This story captivated my imagination and it still does. What I did not understand then was that this story is not about a battle taking place on the fields of Elah but a battle taking place first in my own heart.
Prayer - O God, the battle belongs to You. Renew our vision today that we may see Your heavenly armies surrounding us, ready to deliver us from the giants within and without. Bring us to our knees beside the still waters so that we can find courage to stand and announce Your victorious Name. Amen.
After young David was anointed king by the old judge Samuel, it appeared that nothing had really changed. Saul was still reigning as the only crowned king. Samuel left Bethlehem and returned to Ramah. David returned to the fields where he cared for sheep. The Philistines were still threatening to annihilate Israel as a nation. Things were still pretty much the same as they always had been – it appeared. Even when God anoints us for His work, sometimes there are still battles to be fought and a time for waiting that has to be observed.
Today the story resumes as a great, decisive battle is about to begin in the Valley of Elah. The Philistine soldiers are on the mountainside, and the Israelite soldiers are camped on the other opposite mountain side. Down in the valley lumbers a huge man named Goliath. He is wearing a bronze helmet. His coat of bronze weighs 5,000 shekels. He has a huge sword at his side, a javelin on his back, and he can spin his enormous spear like a baton twirler can effortlessly twist a baton. Goliath cries out to the Hebrews, “Today I defy the ranks of Israel. Give me a man that we may fight together.” Then we are told, “When Saul and all of Israel heard these words, they were dismayed and greatly afraid.”
You been there? You can see all the forces of temptation, or of illness, or of opposition mounting up against you on the other side? Sooner or later all of us have to face a giant. Maybe it is a sin that you can’t seem to conquer, a colleague at work who stands in the way of your progress, a looming disease that won’t go away, or a giant wound from a broken heart. Maybe it is a mound of bills or a giant injustice you feel compelled to confront.
You cannot respond to the call to live a biblical way of life without facing giants in your life and in our society. As a people who have committed ourselves to living a biblical way of life, we are facing huge giants who shape our culture: Hollywood, political figures, teenage magazines, pop psychology, and postmodern ideologies. These giants are sometimes forces for great good in our society, but they also can be giants who threaten to annihilate the values that we wish to teach our children by claiming that there are no absolute values, only preferences. Like Goliath, they “defy” the church and its talk about sin and righteousness, good and evil. For some of these giants, there is no sin except calling someone a sinner.
There are other giants we face in our society. Homelessness in our country has been on the rise for several years. AIDS has ravaged many African countries. Affordable housing for the poor and middle classes is hardly available in Ventura County. Crime and violence are plagues on our society. So are religious legalism, racism, and materialism. There are plenty of giants in our own lives and in our world that deserve a confrontation.
But how should you respond? Are you going to join Saul and his armies in being afraid? Are you going to give up the call to live as the anointed one of God and let the giant take over? Or are you going to take a stand and announce the victory of God?
It is at this critical juncture that David enters the picture. Notice how his entry is so subtle and ordinary. Goliath’s introduction in the story is terrifying and extraordinary. David, who saves Israel, is introduced so quietly, again as a shepherd boy, and almost as if we the readers are not aware that he is the anointed one of God. He is a shepherd boy turned errand boy who was supposed to bring supplies to his brothers who were fighting in Israel’s army.
When David saw that the king and all the army were terrified of one man, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Was there no one who would take on the giant? What kind of world were they living in? After all of God’s miraculous actions to deliver Israel, here they were, holed up and trembling on the opposite mountain with no response. I wonder at that moment if David did hear those words that Samuel had told him when he was anointed, “Thou art the one.” Do not keep looking for someone else to do what you are called to do. “Thou art the one.” So David goes to King Saul and offers his service saying, “Let no one’s heart fail because of Goliath; your servant will go out and fight with this Philistine.” Saul said, “”But you are just a boy. He asked for a man to fight him. Who are you?”
It is bad enough that Goliath scoffs at your attempts to overcome the giant in your life, or when you try to make a difference. The harder part is when you are belittled by the people who are supposed to be on your side. “Who are you to take on City Hall? Do you not know that you can’t beat the bureaucracy?” “Who are you to take on management about our company’s ethics? You’re just a secretary here.” “Who are you to challenge an injustice? You don’t have a law degree.” David doesn’t protest that he alone is qualified to do battle. All he says is that the same God who allowed him to pull a lamb out of the mouth of the lion and the bear will deliver him again.
Then it gets even worse. Saul who has been ridiculing David offers to help him. After all, he is the king of Israel, and he can’t take the political risk of looking weak before this boy of courage. So, Saul places his armor on David: his helmet, his coat, his huge sword. When Saul is done trying to fortify David, the young shepherd literally can’t move under the weight of all his protection. You see the irony? Saul had a lot of protection and security, but beneath his armor lay a heart of fear and insecurity. The giant that caused Saul so much fear was not standing in the Valley of Elah – his giant had been wakened from within, and all he could do was fall back on the protections that Goliath and all the other nations chose – armor and weapons. Arrayed in all his armor, Saul had become just like them. But David casts off this false security and knelt beside a babbling brook where he got in touch with the center of the universe and the center of his soul.
Once you decide to take a stand, after the warnings and teasing are over, the next thing you are going to get is a lot of people trying to protect you with their weapons and advice. “You have to be political,” they will say. “You need to read Machiavelli, or Attila the Hun, or Sun Tzu, or whatever the management book is the rage right now.” Armor will paralyze you – what you have to do is renew your faith in God. You have to do is find the center.
I believe the only reason David wasn’t afraid of Goliath like all the other people wearing armor that day was he had spent most of his life taking care of sheep. He was out of the mainstream of culture. No one had told him to be afraid. Out there in those fields, it was just him, God and some sheep, and occasionally a lion or a bear. He hadn’t been watching a lot of television. He didn’t take culture seriously enough to be aware of the giants. All he knew was that God had been faithful in the past, so He would be faithful in the crisis of the present. No one had told him differently. And so David dumped all of the king’s armor and knelt down beside a brook to pick up five smooth stones for his slingshot.
While the biblical text spends much more time developing the story to this point than it spends telling about the actual battle, I believe this moment is the center of the story. It is not David’s victory over Goliath that most illustrates the difference between the king God had rejected and the king God had now anointed – it was the moment when he cast off the armor of Saul and presumably knelt down beside that creek with all the armies watching to see what he would do. In this humble posture, David demonstrates his understanding of the center of the world. Everyone else was allowing Goliath to determine the center. Goliath dominated their vision of reality. The rest of the Hebrews soldiers were encamped along the mountain of their fears, while one young boy was about to change the history of Israel, and in so doing, the world. But he first had to find a new center of gravity, a new vision of reality, by kneeling down beside a brook when everyone else thought the real battle was out on the field.
If you are going to slay the giants in your life, you have to start by getting a new vision of reality. That begins when you can return to the childlike faith, an almost naive faith, that you first experienced when you heard this story. You have to believe that it is God at the center of your world and not the giants. If Goliath is ever going to be defeated, it will have to be God who slays him. Management books, political skills, determination and shrewd acts will not slay him. Neither will your worry or tears. Prayer is the only thing that centers your life. When you choose to put aside your securities and kneel at the babbling brook, you have to remember the words of David, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” Prayer is where you find the center.
When Goliath took a look at David, he scorned him, “Am I a dog that you come at me with sticks?” But David said, “The Lord does not save by the sword and spear. The battle belongs to The Lord. He will give you into my hands.” The greatest mistake we often make in going after giants is to think that we have to look like giants if we are going to defeat them. Remember that Saul too was a big man, head and shoulders above the rest. But to defeat a giant you do not have to be a giant, or even dress up like a giant wanna be. Neither do you have to use the weapons of a giant. You do not have to be mean, or political or angry. What you have to do is believe that the battle belongs to The Lord.
This story is really not about David, and it certainly isn’t about Goliath. This story is about the faithfulness of God – The God who has delivered us in the past can still defeat the giants that loom before us. This story is about two different visions of reality. For Saul, Goliath was the center of gravity, and really, Saul was at the center of Saul’s universe. That’s why selfishness can lead to fear. You’ve got to keep yourself in charge. For David, God was in the center of Israel, and in the center of his vision of the way things are. God was the reality with which David had to deal; giants didn’t figure largely in David’s understanding of the world – not the real world where God was the deliverer, and this God would snatch the lamb out of the mouth of the lion just like He always had done.
Until David walked into the Valley and knelt beside that brook, the only options for Israel seemed to be a bullying giant or a fearful king. David opened up a “third way”: God’s ways, a God-blessed imagination. Notice here how he casts off the armor of Saul, the second hand conventions that everyone expected. He went to the center, and there he found a world dominated by God and not by giants, and it freed up his ability to respond authentically and creatively to the crisis caused by this giant. It will happen for you too when your world is God-dominated and not Goliath-dominated. David was so convinced that he ran toward the giant, slung a stone into his forehead, and the giant came crashing down on his face. Then David cut Goliath’s head off with his own sword. The Philistines fled. The armies of Israel pursued them. And Israel was saved that day by a shepherd boy with a sling and a stone.
The only person that was in touch with reality that day was David. He was the only fully human person in the Valley of Elah that day because he knew where the center was. He knew that the battle really did belong to The Lord. If you have spent time in solitude and prayer, kneeling beside the water of life, finding the true center, then you too can start slaying your giants. You’ll be ready, and the world will never be the same.
Senator John McCain writes in his autobiography, Faith of our Fathers, that when he was a prisoner of war in a Vietnamese prison camp, he would often be subjected to interrogation by the camp commanders in their effort to get information from the prisoners. He often wondered if he would die in that horrible place. "After one difficult interrogation," McCain writes, "I was left in the interrogation room for the night, tied in ropes. A gun guard, whom I had noticed before but had never spoken to, was working the night shift. A short time after the interrogators had left me to ponder my bad attitude for the evening, this guard entered the room and silently, without looking at or smiling at me, loosened the ropes, and then he left me alone. A few minutes before his shift ended, he returned and tightened up the ropes. "On Christmas Day, we were allowed to stand outside our cells for five minutes to exercise or to just look at the trees and sky. [That] Christmas, a few months after the gun guard had inexplicably come to my assistance during my long night in the interrogation room, I was standing in the dirt courtyard when I saw him approach me.
"He walked up and stood silently next to me. Again, he didn't smile or look at me. He just stared at the ground in front of us. After a few moments had passed he rather nonchalantly used his sandaled foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We both stood wordlessly looking at the cross until, after a minute or two, he rubbed it out and walked away.” (pp. 227-228)." In that moment John McCain was reminded that whatever happened to him he had a Savior--One who had also faced torture, pain and even death and came out victorious. That empty cross traced on the ground by the sandaled foot of a fellow Christian reminded him of the promises of his faith that the battle for his deliverance belonged not to him but to God.
So my friends, whatever the giant you are facing today, I encourage you from the words of Paul, “Be strong in The Lord and His mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything to stand.” Amen.
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