Facing the Giant

Series: Beloved Rascal

1 Samuel 17:1a, 4-12, 19-23, 32-49 (50-51)

July 1, 2018

William G. Carter

Israel loved King David. The nation never tired of telling stories about him. He was a monumental figure, the second of their kings and by far the greatest. And as my parents told my little brother, also named David, the Hebrew name means “beloved.” Indeed, he was, as my brother is. For the next five weeks, we are going to hear and learn from some of the David stories, including a few that the church has been a bit reluctant to tell.

The Philistine came on and drew near to David, with his shield-bearer in front of him. When the Philistine looked and saw David, he disdained him, for he was only a youth, ruddy and handsome in appearance. The Philistine said to David, “Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?” And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. The Philistine said to David, “Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the field.” 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. This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army this very day to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth, so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord does not save by sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord’s and he will give you into our hand.”

This story is the one that everybody knows. It inspires action figures and pictures in children’s Bibles. When I was a kid, it even inspired the Lutherans to create a Claymation children’s show with a little boy and a talking dog. There is something here for the kids: the little guy takes on the giant and he wins.

There is something here, too, for the adults. The little nation of Israel, small and disregarded, found a hero in this shepherd boy who triumphs over the enormous Philistine. David is just a kid, sent by his father to deliver some lunch boxes to his brothers, who were serving in the army of Saul, who was king of Israel at the time. The brothers are in the battle lines against the Philistines, and the battle isn’t going so well.

It’s not that there has been a great loss of life. In fact, as the story begins neither side has struck against the other. The battle lines are formed: Team Israel, small and ragged, over here; Team Philistine, strong and mighty, over there. They face one another, shake their swords, and grunt at one another, when suddenly Goliath steps up.

Israel’s never seen anybody like that. That giant is about ten feet tall. He’s covered with armor plating. His spear is enormous, and the iron tip on it must weigh fifteen or twenty pounds. And he’s ugly – the Bible doesn’t say that, but you know he has to be ugly. So, he’s big, and he’s ugly, and he has a big mouth. While David drops off the food, he hears Goliath mouthing off.  

“I can take you all,” he says. “There is no way you Israelites will win this war. Look at how big I am! Look at how impressive I am!” Then he proceeds to insult them, demean them, denounce them, dismiss them, and he makes all this noise before the battle even begins. This went on for forty days. It was a battle of words. Every day, Goliath was step out, strut his stuff, and insult the Israelites. What do you expect? He’s a Philistine.

When John Cleese and the guys of Monty Python wanted to insult somebody back, they said, “This is just the sort of blinkered philistine pig ignorance that I’ve come to expect from you non-creative garbage.” That, and “Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries.”

Words, words, words. No action, just a lot of words. That is all the Philistine has going for him: an endless heap of insults. That, and he’s nearly ten feet tall.

David hears all this: the forty days of insults, the put-downs and the swaggering. In response, he has only one word in his repertoire: God.  Goliath speaks garbage, David speaks of God. There’s a world of difference between them.  

When the giant sees little David, he makes fun of him: “Am I a dog that you come after me with a stick?” David could have insulted him right back and said, “You’re no dog; you’re worse than a dog.” But he doesn’t say that. He says, “God who delivered me from the teeth of the lion and the claws of the bear, will deliver me from this Philistine.”

Goliath of Gath says, “Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the field.” As Eugene Peterson translates, “Kid, you’re going to be road kill.” Yet David says in response, “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.”

Do you see the shape of the battle? The oppressor, the giant, inflates himself with a lot of words. The hero of the story – we already know David will be the hero – speaks first and foremost of God. God has protected him against the wild animals before. God will deliver him from this wild-eyed Philistine. For David, it’s all about God.

This is the primary lesson that Israel draws from the story. They are God’s people, claimed in God’s promises to Abram and Sarah, marked in God’s covenant, released from Egyptian slavery by God’s power, and led out of chaos by God’s Torah instruction. God is bound to them, and David knows this in advance. That’s why he doesn’t need to rely on all that armor that King Saul wants to put on him. He has the blessing of God.

So, David preaches a short sermon on judgment and then he lunges toward the giant. He whirls the sling around his head and hits the bullseye, right in the middle of Goliath’s forehead. The giant falls on his face like an eight-hundred-pound statue. David pulls out the giant’s sword. It’s so heavy he can barely lift it over his head, but he gives it a swift swing – whhht -- and then looks up to see the Philistines running away.

Like I said, this is the story that everybody remembers. If they don’t know anything about the Bible, they probably still know about the story. It’s David against Goliath, Bethlehem against Rome, the American colonists against King George, Rosa Parks against the white people of Montgomery and Martin Luther King against Bull Connor and his dogs, it’s the 1962 New York Mets against the 1961 New York Yankees. We know the story: it’s the little guy against the big, well-armored, well-funded enemy, and the little guy wins.

What we might miss is how the little guy wins: he relies on his wits, rather than his words. He is small enough that the giant figures he is insignificant, but his small size works to his advantage. Goliath is loaded down with a hundred pounds of armor. His defensive system makes him slow to move, while David is agile. His spear is so heavy he needs a separate soldier in front of him just to hold his shield.

Not only that: there’s recent medical evidence to suggest that Goliath had trouble with his eyesight. It’s in the story. He says to David, “Have you come against me with sticks?” David is holding only one stick, his sling. And the medical experts tell us that, given the pituitary malfunction that creates enormous growth, there is usually blurred vision.

As Malcolm Gladwell says in his book on David and Goliath, that’s why the giant has a shield bearer – to guide him out onto the field. Which is to say, he may be big, and he’s certainly ugly (Philistines are always ugly), but Goliath has some built-in flaws. With all his swaggering insults, he can’t even see his own flaws – which could be why he spends most of his ink in this story saying nasty things about David and his tribe.

And, of course, Goliath, despite his probably poor eyesight, misreads the situation entirely. He is dressed for armed combat and he’s up against a shepherd boy. The shepherd boy has fought off wild animals with just a sling . . . but don’t think for a minute it’s “just a sling.” He whirls that contraption around his head, lets the stone fly. From a hundred feet away, the stone would have been hurled “at a velocity of thirty-four meters a second – more than enough to penetrate the skull and render him unconscious or dead.”[1] The whole conflict would have been in a few seconds.

I recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s book. It is well-written, like all his other books, and he listens to this three-thousand-year-old story deeply enough to draw a lot of lessons from it. We can learn, for instance, about the importance of courage. As he declares, “Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.”[2] Witness, he says, the city of London standing up to the Nazis in World War 2 and still fighting, even after the city was repeatedly bombed.

Or a civil rights leader like the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a black Baptist preacher in Birmingham. His house was bombed by the KKK one night, and a police office pulled him out of the wreckage. The cop said, “Reverend, I know these people. They are vicious. If I were you, I’d get out of town.”

Shuttlesworth said, “Well, officer, you’re not me. Go back and tell your Klan brothers that if the Lord saved me from this, I’m here for the duration. The fight is just beginning.” A few months later, he takes his daughter to enroll in an all-white high school. He is met by white men with brass knuckles, clubs, and chains. They screamed at him, called him names, smashed the windows of his car. He went to the hospital, discovered he had minor kidney damage, checked himself out, and stood in his pulpit to tell his church he had only forgiveness for his attackers.

You know, my friends, it’s a brutal world out there. There is a lot of hatred, a lot of angry words, plenty of insults, and even a few giants. But what can they do to us if the God of David is with us? What could ever separate us from the love of God, which is revealed to us in Jesus, the Son of David? And what might we accomplish if we are faithful, persistent, agile, resourceful, and clear-eyed about what God wants this world to become?

So, Israel remembers David, the resourceful shepherd boy who stands up to the ugly giant. This is the best-known story about him, and we will hear more stories in the next four weeks. The Bible moves on quickly from here; Israel does not gloat about David’s victory over the giant; there will be plenty more ups and downs yet to come.

But when Israel does remember the story one more time, in a glued-together psalm, written down hundreds of years after the moment and placed on David’s tongue, there are these final words from that beloved rascal: “I took away disgrace from my people.” (Psalm 151:7, Greek version). Disgrace is taken away, finally and ultimately, and grace steps in.

Grace always steps in. The giant may be on the battle field, but the God of grace is with us. And grace will win. See you next week.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (New York: Little, Brown, 2013) p. 11.

[2] Ibid, p. 149