Part 2 of the series “Written For You, Not To You,” on the proper way to read the Bible.
Every Sunday school flannelgraph got this wrong, and I say that with love, because I grew up on those flannelgraphs. A small shepherd boy stands in a dry valley. A giant roars across the way. The boy picks up five smooth stones, winds up, and drops the monster with a single shot. And then the lesson lands. “What are the giants in your life? What is the Goliath you need to face? Pick up your stones and be brave.”
I understand why we teach it that way. It preaches. It is also almost exactly backward.
Because if you read First Samuel 17 the way it was written, you are not David in that story. You never were.
Look at where you are actually standing
Set the scene the way the text sets it. The armies of Israel are lined up on one hill, the Philistines on the other, and the valley of Elah between them. For forty days the giant comes out and issues his challenge, and the whole army of God, including the king who was head and shoulders above every other man in Israel, sits frozen in fear. “When Saul and all Israel heard these words of the Philistine, they were dismayed and greatly afraid.” First Samuel 17:11.
That is you. That is the church. Those are the people of God, cowering, unable to save themselves, waiting for a champion who has not come. If you are anywhere in that valley before the fight starts, you are on the hillside with the trembling army, not down in the grass with the stones.
And then a deliverer comes. He does not come from the ranks of the soldiers. He comes from outside, from the fields, unlooked for. He is the anointed one, and the Hebrew for anointed is mashiach (מָשִׁיַח, H4899), the word that becomes Messiah. He fights the battle the people cannot fight. He wins a victory they could only receive, not earn. And when he wins, the enemy is defeated for all of them, and they walk in the triumph he bought.
Now tell me that story sounds like a lesson about your willpower.
The hero has a name, and it is not you
This is the pattern the whole Old Testament keeps drawing, over and over, in different ink. A people who cannot save themselves. A champion who comes from the outside. A victory the people receive as a gift. It is Moses at the sea. It is the judges. It is David in the valley. And every time, the pattern is pointing forward, past the human deliverer who always eventually fails, toward the one who never would.
David is not in that valley to teach you to be brave. David is in that valley to show you Christ. The lesson is not “be more like David.” The lesson is “you have a David, and His name is Jesus, and He walked into a valley you could not walk into and won a fight you could not win.”
When you make yourself the hero, you don’t just misread a chapter. You cut the wire that connects it to the gospel. You take a story that was meant to make you fall to your knees in gratitude and turn it into a story that sends you to the gym to work on your courage. One of those readings produces worship. The other produces exhaustion.
The tell that you have done it
Here is how to catch yourself. When you read a Bible story and the takeaway is mainly about what you should do, be, or try harder at, stop and ask a second question. Where is God in this story. What is He doing. Who is He showing Himself to be.
Because the Bible is not first a book of heroes to imitate. It is a book about a God who saves. The people in it are not models on a runway. They are, most of the time, a mess. Abraham lies about his wife. Jacob cheats his brother. David, our giant-killer, later stands on a roof and destroys a family to satisfy himself. If these are your heroes to copy, God help you. They are not. They are real people caught up in the story of a faithful God, and the point of the story is always the God, not the people.
There is a word the New Testament uses for the way the old stories point forward. Paul calls them a typos (τύπος, G5179), a type, a pattern, a stamp pressed into wax that shows the shape of something still to come. The events were real. And their shape was prophetic. David was a real king with a real sling, and he was a stamp in the wax, and the shape in the wax was a cross.
So where does that leave you
It leaves you in a far better place than the flannelgraph did. Because a lesson about being brave enough to face your giants will hold you exactly as long as your courage holds, which, if you are honest, is not very long. But the good news that a Champion has already come, from outside, unlooked for, and has already won, does not depend on your nerve at all. It depends on His victory. And His victory is finished.
You are not David. You are the trembling army on the hill, and the stone has already flown, and the giant is already down.
Now go and live like the battle is won. Because it is.
Next in the series. If we are not the hero, then who was this actually written to? Next post, we open the mail. We are going to read a New Testament letter the way its first readers did, as a letter to somebody else, and discover that this is exactly how it starts speaking to us.
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