Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; January 12, 2025
Readings: 1 Samuel 17:4-11, 24-37 (children’s talk); True Christian Religion §§276, 122
Today’s talk is about letting the Lord help us overcome our pride. Because that’s what the story of David and Goliath is about, in its internal or spiritual sense. It’s easy to see that their confrontation is symbolic. One the one hand you have David, whose confidence in the Lord is so unshakeable. On the other hand you have Goliath—this terrifying person who defies the armies of Israel. So their confrontation represents a battle within our minds between something that is from the Lord and something that isn’t. In the teachings of the New Church, in a book called The Doctrine of Faith, we’re told that Goliath symbolizes conceit in one’s own intelligence (§52). And when you look at how Goliath behaves in the story, that makes sense. When we think that we know better than anyone else, our intelligence is gigantic—at least in our own eyes. And Goliath is arrogant. He’s sure he can defeat any champion that the Israelites put forward. He knows he’s intimidating, and he flaunts it.
Today we didn’t get to the part of the story where David actually fights Goliath: we won’t talk about their battle until next week. Today’s story brought us to the point where the army of Israel was willing to let David go out and fight Goliath. So today’s talk is about how we reach the point where we’re willing to let the Lord fight for us. It’s about reaching the point where we’re willing to let the Lord onto the battlefield.
And this is harder than we might think it should be—particularly when the demon that we’re struggling with is pride. Because pride’s whole deal is that it doesn’t want help—not from God, not from anyone. The Lord might be telling us that we could be happier if we did it a different way, but if we have too high an opinion of our own intelligence, we’re probably not listening to Him. How do we reach the point where we’re willing to let the Lord set our own pride in its place?
It’s really clear that David represents the Lord. The Lord Himself is called David in many passages in the Word—for example, in this prophecy of the Messiah from the book of Ezekiel: “I will establish one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them—My servant David. He shall feed them and be their shepherd” (34:23) Many passages from the teachings of the New Church confirm that David represents the Lord (SH §1888; Lord §43; cf. SH §4763.4, AR §174). The only part of this idea that’s a little bit challenging is that David is the hero of the story, and people tend to want to identify with the hero of a story. But in this story, the hero is the Lord—not us.
David is initially dismissed by everybody in this story. None of the other Israelites are open to the thought of him fighting Goliath. And this is a picture of something that we do to the Lord. We keep Him off the battlefield. We tell Him, “this isn’t Your fight.”
As for Goliath, it’s easy to see that he symbolizes a kind of pride. Goliath was a Philistine, and throughout the Word, Philistines symbolize faith that is divorced from charity (Faith §§49-54). To be in faith divorced from charity is to value the ideas that go with religion, but not the life that goes with religion. The teachings of the New Church say that, “In the Ancient Church all were called Philistines who spoke much about faith and who asserted that salvation lay in faith, and yet possessed nothing of the life of faith” (SH §1197). So Goliath and all of the Philistines stand for a mentality that’s very into ideas and not into doing anything with those ideas. But Goliath is specifically the champion of the Philistines: he fights on behalf of the Philistines. And the thing that champions this “ideas are all that matter” mentality is conceit in our own intelligence (cf. Faith §52). In other words, we don’t fall into this trap of thinking that ideas are all that matter unless we’re a bit too much in love with our own ability to figure things out.
We turn now to a reading from the teachings of the New Church—a reading that makes it even easier to see what this “Goliath mentality” is like. This reading comes from a section of the book True Christian Religion that explains why the human race needs the Word (§§273-276). This section says that we wouldn’t know anything about the Lord or eternal life if these things hadn’t been revealed to us. So if we think that we can discover the truth without any help from above, we’re deluding ourselves. We read: [§276].
This idea that we can figure it all out with no help from above—without needing to be taught by someone who knows more than we do—leads us to the kind of reckless confidence that we see in Goliath. Goliath was sure that nothing could knock him down… and he was wrong about that.
Of course, pride is something that we can have more of or less of. In its most extreme form, conceit in our own intelligence leads to a total rejection of God, because we’re convinced that we have no use for Him. But conceit can also take milder forms. It might show up simply as an inclination to tell the Lord, “Look, I’m busy figuring stuff out—You’re not what I need right now.”
To understand the rest of the story, we have to understand that this kind of pride can be a menace in anybody’s life… and that we can choose to separate ourselves from it. If we step back and look at the internal sense of the story as it’s been laid out so far, we have David, who represents the Lord, going out to fight Goliath, who represents our pride. And sometimes we can’t tell the difference between our pride and ourselves. So is the story saying that we have to let the Lord fight against us? Would a loving God even do that?
The thing is, that spirit of pride that Goliath symbolizes might be a real part of our spiritual landscape, but it doesn’t have to be us. The teachings of the New Church say, “it should be recognized that all evil flows in from hell and all good from the Lord by way of heaven” (SH §6206). We can make the evil that flows into us our own, but we don’t have to. We’re told:
… if [a person] believed what is really so he would think, the instant evil flowed in, that it came from the evil spirits present with him; and since that was what he thought the angels could ward that evil off and repel it. (ibid.)
When we recognize that there is pride within us, we can choose to say that that pride is who we are, and that we must just be bad people. Or we can choose to say that that spirit of pride is coming to us from hell, and that we don’t want it. So, when we look at today’s story, we can choose to identify with Goliath if we really want to. But we’ll probably feel better if we choose to identify with the army of Israel—with all of those people who were menaced by Goliath, the people that David fought for.
Of course, even the people of the army of Israel have their issues, in this story. They didn’t want David to fight for them. His brother Eliab accused him of shirking his work: he said, “I know your pride and the insolence of your heart, for you have come down to see the battle” (1 Sam. 17:28). King Saul told him, “You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are a youth, and he a man of war from his youth.” (v. 33). And David represents the Lord. These interactions are pictures of how we might respond to the Lord, when we find ourselves struggling with our pride. Like Eliab, we might try to chase Him away. Like Saul, we might tell Him, “you can’t help me with this.” That menacing, arrogant spirit that Goliath represents puts us into a state of mind where it’s difficult for us to accept help. How do we get past that? How do we get to the point where we’re willing to let the Lord onto the battlefield?
The first piece of the answer to this question is that, in practice, we usually don’t start looking to the Lord for help until we’ve started to feel that where we are isn’t working. We see this in today’s story: Goliath is a menace. The army of Israel is dismayed and terrified by him (vv. 11, 24). This is a picture of us watching our pride in action and not liking what we see. Even Goliath’s own behavior hints at the ways in which our pride makes us unhappy. He stood in front of the armies of Israel and defied them—dared them to fight against him. And in a piece of the story that wasn’t read to the children, we’re told that he did this for forty days, morning and evening (v. 16). For forty days he went out, twice a day, and shouted at everybody, “I’m better than you are!” And that’s what pride does. It strives, relentlessly, to prove that it really is what it claims to be. That part of us that believes that we don’t need help from God is constantly reviewing the facts and reasserting its conclusion. Multiple times a day it says, “I’ve got this, I’ve got this. I can overcome anything.” And the reason our pride does this so relentlessly is that it’s haunted by the fear that one day we might not be able to prove that we’ve “got it.”
So this story is about us coming to ourselves and realizing that we’re fighting this exhausting fight inside our own heads—a fight to be great, a fight to be giants in our own eyes. And we realize, “maybe the spirit that’s fighting this fight isn’t me—maybe this is a spirit from hell that’s bullying me.” So we come to see that our pride isn’t “us:” it is our enemy.
But what it really takes to let the Lord onto the battlefield is faith in Him, or trust in Him. And to have that, we have to have some understanding of who He is, and what He does. Saul wouldn’t let David go out to fight until David told him about the lion and the bear that he had overcome, in order to save his sheep (vv. 34-36). He told Saul, “The Lord, who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, He will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine” (v. 37). This story that David tells is a picture of the Lord’s power and His willingness to save His people. We turn now to our final reading for today, which is also from True Christian Religion [read §122].
The Lord is a Redeemer. He rescues His people from their enemies. He’s like a king who saves his children from their kidnappers, or like a shepherd who throws himself between his sheep and their predators—as David did—and drives those predators away. We are His children; we are His sheep. In the Word He promises, over and over, that He can fight for us, He will fight for us: He will deliver us, and lead us to living waters. That’s what He does. That’s who He is. And we need to understand that. We need to know that He says that He can get us out of the mess that we’re in right now. We need to know this, even if we’re not sure we believe it.
Today’s recitation, from the book of Isaiah, begins with the words, “Shall the prey be taken from the mighty?” (49:24). In other words, if something mighty has made you its prey, who’s going to save you? If you’re trapped by towering pride, how are you going to get away from that?
But thus says the Lord: “Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible be delivered; for I will contend with him who contends with you, and I will save your children.” (v. 25)
The Lord will contend with the sprits that contend with us. He will go out against the giants in our heads, like David went out against Goliath.
And we just need to give Him a chance. We don’t need to be filled with emotional faith: we need to be willing to see what happens if we try to do it His way. Saul probably wasn’t confident that David could defeat Goliath, but he let him try. We may not be sure that the Lord can do what He says He’ll do; we may not be sure that what He says is truer than what we see. What we need to do is bow our spirits—bend our pride—just enough to give Him a chance. Let Him onto the battlefield, and see what happens.
Amen.