David Learned the Stone Was Never His Strength

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Forty Days of the Same Voice

For forty days the Philistine walked out into the valley in the morning and shouted the same thing, and for forty days the army of Israel found somewhere else to be.

Goliath came out in scale armor that threw the light back, with a bronze helmet on his head and a shaft over his shoulder whose iron point weighed more than most men could swing. He did not want a battle. He wanted one man, and every morning he made the offer again in a voice that carried up both slopes, and every morning Saul's soldiers listened to it and did not answer.

On the fortieth morning a boy came down the hill.

The Shepherd Who Trusted His Arm

David had been sent from home with bread and cheese for his older brothers and had no business in the valley at all. He was carrying a sling and a shepherd's pouch, and he stopped at a streambed on the way down to pick out five stones, which is the act of a young man who has done this before and expects to need more than one.

He had reason to be confident. He had gone after a lion and a bear that took lambs out of his father's flock, and he had gotten the lambs back out of their mouths, and he had killed them both. He had spent years in hills where nobody was watching, throwing at rocks in the cold before the flock needed him. He knew exactly what the sling could do at that range.

Saul had tried to put his own armor on the boy and the boy had taken it off again. What Saul said as David walked away was not a strategy. "Go, and may the Lord be with you."

David went down with a leather pouch and an arm he had trained himself, and he was sure of the arm.

The Wrong Direction

The stone left the sling. The giant went down on his face.

That is the detail the old teachers stopped on, and they stopped on it because it is wrong. Strike a man in the front of the skull with anything and his head goes back and his body follows it. He falls away from the man who threw. Goliath was hit in the face and fell toward the boy who threw the stone, forward, flat, into the dirt at the bottom of the valley, and the ground took the weight of him.

There was a second wrong thing. The bronze helmet was on his head, and the stone went through it.

So the teachers put an angel in the air over that valley. Not to throw the stone, which David threw, but to carry it, to hold it on a line into the one part of the face that mattered and to drive it through metal that a river stone cannot break. David's arm was real. His nerve walking down that slope in front of two armies was real. The angel is what the sages heard in the direction of the fall.

David said it himself, later, in the plainest words he ever used about war. "I did not know how to fight. He taught me."

I Am Not the King

He had forty years after that to decide what the valley had meant, and he spent them handing everything back.

He was king, and he said he was not king, that God was king and had made him one. He was strong, and he said he was not strong. He was rich, and he said he was not rich, and that the greatness and the power belonged somewhere else. When he sat in judgment over the whole country and got the rulings right, he called himself the instrument and not the hand. When he talked about his wars, he refused the sentence any other king in that part of the world would have carved into a wall. It was not my strength that won. He helped me. He made me a fighter.

His son Solomon put the principle in a single line of instruction. "In all your ways, know Him."

Blessed Be the Lord My Rock

The psalm that gathers all of this does not begin with the giant or the crown or the city he took. It begins with a blessing, and then a list, and the list is not of David's titles.

My rock. My mercy. My fortress. My high tower. My deliverer. My shield. The one I trust in.

Seven names for God, and every one of them a thing David is admitting he was not. He was not his own fortress. He was not his own shield. Elsewhere he says something stranger and quieter about the same arrangement, that the day of his death and the day of his judgment were both hidden from him, and that this is why he sings.

An old man with a harp, hiding nothing, listing what held him up. In the valley he had counted five stones and needed one, and he never once said the arm that threw it was the reason he came back up the hill.