A Sling and a Stone

When my sons were young, my sister gave each of them a slingshot ... you know the kind, the Y-shaped piece of wood with a strong rubber band and a little pouch to hold the rock. She also gave them a target to pin onto a tree so they could play with their slingshots without breaking out a window or aiming for each other ... in theory that was her idea anyway. But boys will be boys, and without fail, each time Matt and Brad would head out into the back yard for slingshot target practice, it wouldn't take long until they would begin stretching the rubber bands on those pieces of wood and popping each other with stones. And without fail, I would take the slingshots away from them and tell them they couldn't have them back until they learned and understood that they absolutely could not shoot at each other. And also without fail, the boys would beg to be given another chance and every single time I gave the slingshots back to them, they would inevitably end up firing away at each other and lose their slingshot privileges once again. I suppose that's the nature of all of us in some way ... to repeat our mistakes over and over and over and fail to learn a lesson that should be so easy to comprehend.

One of my favorite Bible stories is that of David and Goliath, perhaps because it's a story where the underdog wins. The account of the battle between the two men is found in 1 Samuel 17. Saul and his army of Israelites are facing the Philistines at the Valley of Elah. Twice a day for 40 days, Goliath, the champion of the Philistine army, comes out of his tent, walks between the lines of the two armies and challenges the Israelites to send forth a champion of their own to fight him and allow the battle to be decided based on the outcome of the fight between the two. Saul and all of his men were afraid of Goliath ... enter David, the young shepherd boy who has brought food for his older brothers who are soldiers. David accepts the challenge issued by Goliath, but he turns down Saul's offer to wear the king's armor and approaches Goliath with a sling and five smooth stones he chooses from a brook. The rest of the story is ... well ... it's history. David hurls one of the stones from his sling, smacks Goliath in the head and kills him.

There are so many lessons in the story of David and Goliath, too many to list them all in this post. But as I read the story aloud to Ollie as we sat on a bench on the side of the trail yesterday afternoon, a couple that I've never thought about before came to my mind. Unlike my sons all those years ago, David didn't turn his sling against his brothers ... not against his biological brothers or against his fellow Israelites. He threw the stone against the enemy, against the giant who had terrified even the king. He didn't laugh at the soldiers for their fear or belittle their inability to win the battle or scorn them for the length of time they had been stuck in the war zone. He stepped up and helped ... he volunteered to fight the giant ... he threw the stone against the enemy ... against the giant who had terrified even the king. And here's the other thing ... David wasn't afraid of Goliath's size or swagger or stinging insults ... this little shepherd kid wasn't afraid of the giant champion of war because he knew that the battle belonged to God and his job was to help his brothers, to do what they could not, to sling the stone toward the giant.

As Ollie and I walked home, I couldn't help but think once again about my boys and their slingshots, and about the way they would always shoot at each other. I also thought about how upset I would get with them about it, about how much it scared me that one of them would seriously wound the other, about how frustrated it would make me that they didn't obey me. As those thoughts washed through my mind, I began to think about how God must feel when we hurl stones against our brothers and sisters in the Lord ... stones of discouragement, stones of judgment, stones of gossip, stones of despair, stones of fear, stones of criticism. I wondered how it must hurt His heart when we don't step up to help one another, when we aren't willing to fight the giants that threaten to overtake our fellow soldiers, when we fail to recognize that the battle belongs to God and our job ... our job is to sling the stone.

"Then David said to the Philistine, 'You come to me with a sword, a spear, and a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have taunted. This day the Lord will deliver you up into my hands, and I will strike you down and remove your head from you. And I will give the dead bodies of the army of the Philistines this day to the birds of the sky and the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord does not deliver by sword or spear; for the battle is the Lord's and He will give you into our hands.'" 1 Samuel 17: 45-47.