David and Goliath

1 Samuel 17
            All the obvious lessons have been made about David and Goliath.  We note that David is but a child.  We know this because he was not called up for military service.  Now, in Numbers 1, everyone from 20 up was counted for military service.  I don't think we can say that that rule held into David's day, but still, we have David who is at best a teenager.  But this child is braver than the rest of the Israelite army.  He at least has the confidence of his own abilities and even more of the Lord, who is with him.  And we've probably all heard the sort-of 'Veggie Tales' approach to the thing:  little people can do big things, too.
            The bigger thing to see is the 'typological' sense of the story.  It goes something like this:  Israel faces an unbeatable foe and needs a champion, which they find in David, who uniquely relies on the Lord.  But Israel's story echoes the much bigger story of humanity.  Humanity, too, is faced with an unbeatable foe--death, the curse for sin, a corruption that no human endeavor will ever remove.  We need a champion, and we find that champion in Jesus.  Jesus fully relies on His heavenly Father in facing the terrible foes of sin and death.  Unlike David, this combat costs Jesus His life.  But His faithful obedience to the Father is vindicated on the third day when He rises from the dead, leaving death as dead as Goliath.
            A helpful image might be to think of the great stories of the Old Testament as waves crashing on the beach, trying to wash away some foul thing that someone has carved in the sand.  Some waves are small; some are huge; some come tantalizing close to washing that filth away.  But Jesus is the great wave, the one that crashes well above the the foulness and erases every reminder of it.  David's story is a pretty good size wave.  We see a lot of Jesus in him.  But Jesus is always the one we're looking for.