For forty days Goliath comes out morning and evening to shout the same challenge, and all Israel, its king included, stands frozen on the opposite hill. Israel had watched God part a sea, topple a false god in his own temple, and send an earthquake through a Philistine camp with two men and a cliff. Forty days into this standoff, that history has gone quiet in their memory. Fear, given enough time, erases what a nation once knew about its God.
David is not even at the battlefield. He is in Bethlehem with the sheep and arrives only because his father sends him with bread and cheese for his brothers. What he hears is the challenge Israel has been swallowing for a month: 26"Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?" It is a theological question. Everyone else sees an impossibly large man, and David sees a man defying a living God.
His brother Eliab turns on him for it, accusing him of presumption. David does not fight back. 29"Was it not but a word?" He turns and asks someone else the same question.
When Saul sends for him, his first answer is honest doubt: 33"You are but a youth." David answers with testimony and no bravado. Lions and bears, faced alone in the ordinary course of shepherding. 37"The LORD who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine." His confidence was built quietly across years nobody watched, long before this moment required it.
Saul offers his armor, and David straps it on, tries to walk, and cannot move. 39"I cannot go with these, for I have not tested them." He goes out with a staff, a sling, and five smooth stones from the brook. Saul's armor was borrowed strength dressed to look like courage, and David walks out in the only armor that had ever proven itself to him.
Goliath answers with contempt: 43"Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?" David replies with words that reach past the valley into the theology of the book. 45"I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts." And then the line the chapter builds toward: 47"the battle is the LORD's." David states aloud before two armies what kind of God Israel serves, the God whose ark humiliated Dagon and whose thunder routed the Philistines. He is remembering what the rest of the camp let fear talk them out of.
One stone, one strike, and the giant who terrorized Israel for forty days is down. The army that cowered suddenly finds courage and routs the Philistines, the pattern seen at Michmash: God moves first through one person of faith, and everyone else's courage follows.
A straight line runs from this valley to another giant, sin and death, standing undefeated over the human race. Christ came in weakness to a cross that looked like total defeat, and there he won the battle no sword or spear could win.
Ask what giant you have been staring at for forty days, and what you know about God that fear has been talking you out of.
Prayer
Father, we stand frozen on the hillside, fear talking us out of everything we know about you. Thank you for every David you have sent, and for the greater deliverance you accomplished in Christ, who faced the giant none of us could face and won it for us. Remind us that the battle has never belonged to our strength. It has always been yours. In Jesus' name, amen.