Why Goliath Didn't Have a Chance

1 Samuel 17:1-11;17-31

Sometimes what looks like a weakness turns out to be a strength. Sometimes, what we are so sure is a strength turns out to be an incredible weakness. Things aren’t always what they seem.

Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of Vivek Ranadive who decided to coach his daughter’s basketball team. From the start, he decided two things. First, he would never raise his voice. He knew from his own experience that twelve year olds do not respond well to shouting. He would speak calmly and softly and appeal to reason and common sense. This, alone, made him different than any coach I ever had. Second, Ranadive was from India. He thought basketball was crazy. One team would score and then everyone would run to the other end. There was rarely any defense across most of the court. The court is 94 feet long. Teams would only defend about 20 feet of that court. Ranadive was not going to surrender the other 74 feet.

Here’s the reason why Ranadive was not going to play the way everyone else played: his girls were terrible basketball players. They were not great ballhandlers. They were small and couldn’t rebound. They really couldn’t shoot well at all. Weak teams that played like skilled teams were never going to win. They were going to play by their own set of rules.

Understand, they weren’t going to break the formal rules of the game. They were going to break the informal rules. There was no rule against playing a full court press. Some teams played it every now and then. His teams was going to run a full court press all the time. There was no rule against trying to keep the other team from inbounding the ball. Some teams did that in the final seconds of a game. His team was going to contest every inbounds pass.

Here’s the truth. Ranadive’s girls—a bookish crew of future scientists and engineers—worked like crazy to be in the kind of shape that you had to be in to play that hard for a whole game. (Trust me—if you ever played the game and played a press, you know what I’m talking about!) However, the fruits of that work took those girls all the way to the national championship tournament. And, again, I wanted to remind you, these were not good basketball players!

You’d think that Ranadive and his girls would have won a lot of praise for their hard work. This was not always the case. Other coaches would complain that his tactics were unfair. Crowds would taunt him. Even the referees would go on streaks of calling “ticky-tacky” touch fouls against his players. It seems that a different approach is not always greeted with open arms. What Ranadive knew was that it was the only chance they had. What he was able to do was inspire those girls to work harder than anyone else.

What Ranadive did was really smart. He sat down and took an honest looks at the strengths and weaknesses of his girls and built a way of playing the game that accentuated the girls’ strengths. He refused to play into the strengths of his opponents. Of course there is a way that basketball has always been played. However, if they were willing to take the heat for playing differently—and there is always heat to be taken any time anyone does anything differently—there was a chance to succeed.

Gladwell tells the story of this basketball team early in his book, “David and Goliath.” Let’s set that scene. On one side of the Valley of Elah are Saul and the Israelites. On the other side of the valley are the Philistines. Each of these armies is assembled on high ground with the valley in between. From a military standpoint, they are in a stalemate. Anyone who would dare to cross the valley to attack the other side would be spotted way ahead of time and slaughtered as they attempted to come up the mountainside.

This is when Goliath appears. Goliath was a Philistine infantryman. He was at least 6 feet, 9 inches tall. He wore a bronze helmet and full body armor, all of which would have weighed well over a hundred pounds. He carried a sword, a javelin, and a spear. His spear was specially constructed with a weighted system for throwing that would have allowed that spear to penetrate any body armor. His shield was so huge and heavy that he had a special shield carrier assigned to him.

Goliath struts out one day and tries to initiate what was known as single combat. Single combat was a way to break stalemates and avoid mass bloodshed. One side—in this case, the Philistines—would send out their best warrior who would challenge the other side—in this case, the Israelites—to send out their best warrior. Battle would ensue. Whoever prevailed would take the entire other army prisoner, “Choose a man and have him come down to me. If he is able to fight and kill me, we will become your subjects; but if I overcome him and kill him, you will become our subjects.” These words struck terror into the hearts of Saul and all the Israelites.

For forty days, Goliath would march out to the front line and taunt the Israelites. For forty days, no one would answer the call. The silence on the part of the Israelites was deafening. This went on every morning and every evening. This had to take a toll…

In the meantime, young David is sent to deliver food to his brothers who are at the Valley of Elah. David drops off the food with the keeper of the supplies. Then, he scampers around, trying to find his brothers. As he is catching up with them, Goliath rolls out and starts his morning rant. The talk among the troops is that Saul is ready to pay big bucks to whoever kills Goliath: he will get one of the king’s daughters. He will never have to pay taxes again! David hears this offer, loud and clear.

At that moment, Eliab, David’s brother, goes after David. He accuses him of being conceited and wicked at heart. At this point, we ought to take Eliab seriously, not because brother’s don’t exaggerate each other’s weaknesses but because brothers know the weaknesses that they exaggerate are real. No one knows how to push each other’s buttons quite like family! David can be pretty full of himself. He also can cave to his own dark impulses. Those vulnerabilities will haunt him. However, for anyone to take on Goliath, they were going to have to be a little conceited. They were also going to have to do bend and break a few rules. In the Valley of Elah, David’s quirks will make him a great warrior. Eventually, these very same qualities will bring him to the lowest point of his life.

So, David finds Saul. You may remember from a few weeks ago that the people thought the great thing about having a king was that he would fight their battles for them. Saul was having none of that! Instead, David tells Saul that he’s ready to fight. At first, Saul tries to talk him out of this. David reassures Saul that as a shepherd he has fought with the lions and the bears for his sheep. He’s just as “battle hardened” as Goliath, just in a different way. We tend to overlook this when we tell this tale.

Then, Saul tries to dress David in his own tunic and armor and helmet. Think about this…as if it is not crazy enough that anyone would challenge Goliath, Saul’s big idea is to dress David up as if David is the king. "Ya…let’s get Goliath extra pumped up, right?” David sheds the king’s garments because he can’t move with all that gear on. He takes his staff, picks five smooth stones from the river and sets his sling in his hand.

This is where we totally miss the point. We think that poor David doesn’t have a chance against Goliath—which he wouldn’t if he was going to fight Goliath on Goliath’s terms. David, though, has no intention of doing that. Why? Because if David fights Goliath on David’s terms, it is Goliath who doesn’t have a chance.

In those days, there were three kinds of warriors. Undoubtedly, Goliath was by far the strongest infantryman around. No one would want to battle him hand-to-hand. Infantrymen, like Goliath, would have fared well against the cavalry, the horse riders and the charioteers. However, the infantrymen would have been most at risk in the face of the projectile warriors, the bowmen, those who worked primitive versions of catapults and… the slingers—the warriors who could shoot rocks with the force of a .45 caliber bullet from great distances and with incredible accuracy. (Imagine a major league 97 mile-per-hour fastball coming straight for your forehead!)

David may not have had extensive military training. However, in the hard knock world of shepherding, of staring down lions and bears, David had learned to be a slinger. Slingers were nimble and fast and deadly accurate. Goliath was slow afoot and slow to respond. He had to be with all that heavy armor on. Some medical experts even think that Goliath was sick. They speculate that Goliath had acromegaly which would account for his size. It would also explain why even though David had a single staff, Goliath talks about David coming at him with “sticks.” People with acromegaly often have blurred or double vision. So this huge, powerful warrior turns out to be an easy target. While Goliath pleads with David to “Come to me,” David drops to one knee, whips his sling into gear and kills Goliath within a second, well before Goliath had a chance to respond. Goliath brought a stick to a gunfight. Good luck with that!

We are not warriors on battle fields. However, we face all sorts of challenges. Sometimes, we are like Goliath, looking to all the world like a sure bet but completely unaware of how our strengths, themselves, might be our downfall. Sometimes, we are like David, seen by the rest of the world as a lamb being led to slaughter but actually possessing more than enough strength to get the job done—if we are willing to be approach things differently, if we are willing, like Ranadive’s basketball team, to work harder and play smarter.

The challenge, though, after an unlikely victory or two, is not to become just another bloated Goliath. Young David’s willingness to do whatever it takes in Elah becomes a problem for him as the king. Next week, we’ll watch as David becomes Goliath.

Mark Hindman