Silly Points of Note

The Power & Importance of This Level 2: David and Goliath

The first part of this piece can be found in another book titled The Power of This Level. We can summarize it (the first part) as being a piece that dwells on the fact that getting to the next level can only be done with tools from the level you are at already.

I would like us to highlight on something we looked at from that piece when we inferred to the combat between David and Goliath.

We said that both of them were on the same level because they were actually facing each other. And this is in spite of the fact that they were coming with different issues. We want to dwell on this a bit more and hopefully show how God is on your side to see to your victory in the situations that come your way.

Now they were on the same level. This is a fact. However, there were many things that were different about these two individuals.

Early Days

Goliath had been a warrior from his youth. He was a giant and would have been someone that would have been handpicked to do great things in the field of combat. That is, it would have seemed natural that this was a born champion, someone that the enemy would be scared of and he would have been trained with this in mind.

We have heard of people who showed amazing abilities from tender ages and were giving all the tools for them to excel in that ability. Stories abound of those who went on to actually excel. Goliath was a warrior from his youth, which means he would have been selected and set apart from before his youth. They already knew he was going to be a star.

David was not given much in his early days. He was the one that looked after the sheep. He was so not in the scheme of things that they either forgot to invite him to a stately dinner the family was hosting or concluded that his presence was not really important.

They did not notice anything in him that would have made the family to start investing time and money to develop. This was so unlike the situation of Goliath.

Experience

Goliath was already battle hardened. These were days when kings when to war seasonally. That is, there was a time in the year that had been set out for war i.e. if we take what the scriptures says literally. And even if we do not, war was an intricate part of their lifestyle and for the scriptures to say that a man has been a warrior from his youth, this, mind you, was coming from the enemy i.e. the Israelites, then we can take it that he had fought in many wars.

Again, Saul was not a man in his youth when he told David about the reputation of Goliath. He was also the King, meaning he had real and relevant intelligence on the enemy. He knew their strengths and weakness and he was not just talking for the sake of it or relaying myths and legends about Goliath.

David did not have experience of war or combat with an individual. He was too young to be enlisted in the army. He was that young.

Weaponry

Goliath was not using standard issue weapons. They were custom made and so unique that they had to be annotated. David in any practical sense did not have any weapon that any self-respecting soldier would call a weapon. To make matters worse, he rejected Israel's finest armory when he turned down the King's weapon.

Support Structure

Behind Goliath was Philistine's finest. They were men who had been used to fighting wars. They were an organized unit that had been under the banner of kings and lords for as long as they could remember.

Israel on the other hand had judges prior to this time and was more or less a volunteer force that only came around when there were issues. Saul was their first king and it was the first period in their lives since the early years of Ancestor Joshua that they would under an unified and organized banner. They were not as used to being a fighting unit as the Philistine's were. So the support structures were completely different.