Just One Story VI: It’s Not About David

Let’s wrap up this series about David and Goliath. The message to this point has been important, but the final lesson is more important yet. The most important lesson from the story of David and Goliath for the church is that this story is not about David, but about God. We are naturally self-centered and try to make everything about ourselves, but that is not what our faith is all about. Our focus cannot be on us, but on God.

Several years ago I was at a family gathering in the home of a relative who had small children. I was having a hard time participating in the family festivities because I had lost my voice to fall allergies, so I was simply watching the children do what children do when in the house–watch television. Mom of the house had put a “Christian” children’s video on and the children were enthraled. It wasn’t quite Barney the Dinosaur, but almost. The video was loosely about David and Goliath. The video did a credible job of teaching the raw events of the story, but when it came time for the “moral of the story” it missed the point completely. For the sake of family harmony, it was probably a good thing I had lost my voice. My relatives are good people but probably would not have appreciated my response.

The video taught that the moral of the story of David and Goliath was that God could use them no matter how small they were. That is backward. It made David the hero of the story rather than God. It effectively said that David killed Goliath for God rather than God killed Goliath for David. Sadly, the video reflects current theological thought. It focuses on us rather than on God. God always works to glorify himself. That is why he works in the way he does, so that all will know it is he doing the great works, so the focus will be on him. God used a small boy to defeat Goliath so that all would know it was the Lord at work not the Israelite army. Compare this to the story of Gideon. Gideon had assembled an army of approximately 32,000 men, but God told him, “The people with you are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hand, lest Israel boast over me, saying, ‘My own hand has saved me.’” (Judges 7:2) Ultimately, God defeated the Midianites with a mere 300 men using torches, jars, and trumpets. Again, God’s lesson was that the victory came from him and that he does not save with sword and spear.

We are naturally self-centered and make everything about ourselves. That usually gives us too much credit. The story of David and Goliath and of many, if not most, of the stories in the Scripture teach that God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. They are not about our service, but about God’s gracious provision for his people. We cannot save ourselves. Only God can do that. We cannot change lives. Only God can do that. Furthermore, God will do that in ways we can neither understand nor duplicate. In the events surround David and Goliath, God was teaching King Saul and his army to get their eyes off of themselves and put them on him. The Israelite army did not need more training in order to defeat Goliath. They needed a God that was bigger than Goliath.

A self-focused faith can only result in a shallow, insipid practice of that faith. As James would ask, “Can such a faith save him?” Of course not. In his book Christless Christianity, Michael Horton begins by saying,

It is easy to become distracted from Christ as the only hope for sinners. Where everything is measured by our happiness rather than by God’s holiness, the sense of our being sinners becomes secondary, if not offensive. If we are good people who have lost our way but with the proper instructions and motivation can become a better person, we need only a life coach, not a redeemer. We can still give our assent to a high view of Christ and the centrality of his person and work, but in actual practice we are being distracted from “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2). A lot of the things that distract us from Christ these days are even good things. In order to push us off-point, all that Satan has to do is throw several spiritual fads, moral and political crusades, and other “relevance” operations into our field of vision. Focusing the conversation on us—our desires, needs, feelings, experience, activity, and aspirations—energizes us. At last, now we’re talking about something practical and relevant. ¹

He goes on to say,

I think that the church in America today is so obsessed with being practical, relevant, helpful, successful, and perhaps even well-liked that it nearly mirrors the world itself. Aside from the packaging, there is nothing that cannot be found in most churches today that could not be satisfied by any number of secular programs and self-help groups.²

Horton is correct. We need more than just good teaching. We need a savior to save us from the righteous wrath of God, and that can only come by focusing on God rather than on ourselves.

May “he who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” (Revelation 2:11)

Notes
1. Michael Horton, Christless Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2009), pp. 15-16.
2. Horton, pp. 16-17.