“David and Goliath” is one of the world’s best known Bible stories. It is the classic story of victory for the “underdog.” David and Goliath are now part of the global vocabulary. When a small company enters a new market, reporters call it a “David and Goliath” situation. This is a “feel good” story that we all love to love.
But this very familiarity creates a problem. We are so likely to hear this story wrong. We are so likely to apply it incorrectly to our lives. If we take the simple childlike version of this story and apply it to our grown-up lives, we could get a gross distortion of the Christian message. This story has an important message for us, but we have to be careful how we get there. Today, as we talk about David and Goliath, I want to offer us four cautions and one challenge.
First the cautions.
Caution #1: Don’t assume using God’s name leads to victory.
History is littered with people and nations who got this wrong. Even the Bible tells one story after another of people who misused God’s name in battle.
In the book of Numbers, when Israel finally got to the borderland of Canaan, they chickened out and decided to go back to Egypt. God told them to go into the desert for more lessons in faith, but the people changed their minds again and decided that they would try to fight the Canaanites after all. “‘Let’s go,’ they said. ‘We realized that we have sinned, but we are ready to enter the land the LORD has promised us’” (Numbers 14:40). They marched forward in God’s name as God’s people to the land God had promised, and they were soundly defeated. They used God’s name, but they were still not faithful to God.
