1 Samuel 17:36-37
“Your servant has killed both lions and bears; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, seeing he has defied the armies of the living God.” And David said, “The LORD who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.” And Saul said to David, “Go, and the LORD be with you!”
You can hardly turn on a National Geographic program about the origins of the human race without hearing that the reason we are at the top of the food chain is because we have bigger brains than the rest of the animal kingdom. Our big advantage, we are told, is that we are toolmakers while other creatures have only tooth and claw. To be sure, there is something in this. But a shepherd alone in the Judean countryside with only his sling to protect him will not necessarily agree with a modern anthropologist that the outcome of a fight between the shepherd and a lion or a bear will be slam-dunk obvious. Even less will he tell you that a fight between a teenage boy and a battle-hardened hulk in armor is outrageously unfair to the hulk. The boy, at any rate, seems to have felt himself totally outclassed but for one thing"he never believed he was fighting all by his lonesome. He attributed his successes, not to his highly evolved brain in the animal kingdom, but to the One who made his brain and everything else about him (and the roaring and devouring lions, bears and giants in the world). And that is why David was confident he could defeat Goliath: it depended, not on him, but on God. Let us face our roaring and devouring giants with that same confidence in God, not in our brains, armor, or weaponry.
