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“David, Goliath, and Spiritual Gifts”
Categories: Meditations
Recently, one of the brethren at Jackson Heights preached a sermon on David and Goliath. Though this is a familiar topic, he began it in an unusual way. He prefaced his discussion of the events of 1 Samuel 17 by reading 1 Samuel 16:13. He noted that from the time of his anointing, David was a spiritually gifted young man.
I think it’s likely that David’s giftedness had a far greater impact on his encounter with Goliath than we normally credit. Perhaps the problem is that we limit our awareness of spiritual gifts to the named gifts of the New Testament: tongues, prophecy, and so forth. David certainly was a prophet, but that didn’t help him a whole lot with his giant problem!
However, the Old Testament reveals that spiritual gifts could have physical dimensions. Most notably, Samson was a man who was able to do great feats of strength through the Spirit of the Lord. Similarly, in 1 Kings 18, Elijah is able to outrun Ahab in his chariot because “the hand of the Lord” was upon him.
David makes similarly impressive claims about his own divinely bestowed abilities in the Psalms. In Psalm 18:29, he claims the ability to charge and defeat large groups of enemies and to leap over walls. Vs. 33-34 claim that he has received the gifts of surefootedness, battle training, and superhuman strength from God. Claims like these appear in other Davidic psalms.
Traditionally, I’ve read these things as poetic license, hyperbole. Perhaps not. In fact, in light of David’s resume claims in 1 Samuel 17:34-37, probably not. There, David discusses his ability to fight and kill multiple lions and bears in defense of his father’s flock.
On our recent family vacation out West, I saw two bears. I saw them from a great distance, and I was quite happy about that. Bears are big, fast, tough, and designed by God to kill animals about the size of a human being. I have no interest in fighting a bear with anything less than a large-caliber firearm. Ditto for lions.
David, on the other hand, as a kid, is challenging, fighting, and killing lions and bears up-close and personal. He is grabbing the lion and the bear under the chin with one hand and hitting it over the head until it dies with the other. He’s not doing this with a sword or an axe. He’s doing it with a stick.
That ain’t natural, folks.
In short, it seems likely that David was already a supernaturally enhanced warrior by the time of his trip to the valley of Elah, and he knew it. What’s more, all the Israelites who heard his story and believed him knew it too. They were a lot savvier about what was and was not possible in hand-to-hand combat than we are.
For that matter, despite the fame of David’s use of the sling, I doubt things would have gone a whole lot differently if David had closed with Goliath instead. A bear can probably take as much punishment as an economy-sized armored human, and both the lion and the bear are faster. Goliath taunted David for treating him like a dog, but David likely would have beaten him like a dog.
All of this puts a different spin on the narrative of David’s faith in this story. Certainly David spoke and acted as a young man of faith. However, his faith was neither foolish nor unfounded. He knew that God could help him to do things no other man could do, he had experienced God’s help, and he was confident that God would help him again.
Today, God calls us to a faith that is similarly well reasoned. If we rush blindly into X, confident that God will help us to do X even though He has given no indication of it, we probably will get what we deserve. However, if we study His work and His promises and act accordingly, like David, we will find that He will not fall short of what He has promised.
