GAZA, GOLIATH, GOSPEL: LIVING IN A WORLD TOO GOOD AT WAR

I took the simpler road home today and found myself driving through the smoke of wildfires started by Hezbollah rockets. It’s a stretch of highway with no possibility of turning around, unless you want to drive into oncoming traffic. I passed one (empty) car that had clearly been hit. I drove a little faster. Last week, we had to put out fires on the edge of our village[1] that started the same way: Hezbollah rockets. Yesterday, I visited the site of the Nova Festival and adjacent car yard memorial for the third time in two months. I’ve been to Auschwitz. I’ve been to Dachau. The Nova field is (to me, personally) the heaviest place I’ve ever stood. The car yard is excruciating.

If I’m honest, I find my capacity waning. It would be too much to try and survey every war and battle or bloodthirsty campaign since Cain first stained his hands with his brother’s life, but just within my own experience, I’m getting tired. Assad’s quiet permission to continue assaulting his own Syrian civilians with chemical weapons and barrel bombs frustrates me, to put it gently. The catastrophic collapse of Afghanistan in August 2021 nearly did me in. Erdogan’s recent libelous propaganda against Israel, accusing the Jewish state of aiming to take over Turkey after she polishes the Gaza Strip—after he’s spent years publishing maps of all the ground he plans to conquer for the Caliphate, including Israel[2]—almost made me laugh with his brazen, delusional hypocrisy. Can the Columbia mob advocate a bit for the Kurds he’s been killing since Saddam’s been missing from the job? Will Macklemore write a more accurate song for the world’s largest stateless people group?

Gone are the days of the battlefields; we live in the era of urban warfare, terrorist attacks, and intifadas. In the 19 years Hamas has held Gaza, they’ve built out a subterranean level, an underground Gaza, with tunnels feeding in and out of every apartment, house, and office above ground. That’s a new kind of strategy, certainly shared by the variety of Iranian proxies entrenched along Israel’s borders. What we saw on Oct. 7th wasn’t exactly new—pagan mobs have raped and pillaged for time immemorial. Muhammed relied on it as a war tactic and every jihadi cult has emulated him since. The pride and confidence to include GoPros was certainly new; even Putin is careful to not do that. But it was bait to engage in a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse in the Hamas hellhole that is now the Gaza Strip. Hezbollah is postured for their turn, lobbing barrages of rockets at civilians to either take lives or start fires in the meantime.

I want a world without war. I want us to stop “learning”[3] how to do it so well.

Allow me to pivot to 1 Samuel 17. It would be trite and simplistic to quote David & Goliath in light of the Gaza war because Goliath was a Philistine from Gaza; that’s not what I’m doing here. Philistines were not Arab and therefore are not the ethnic ancestors of the Arabs now living in the Gaza Strip. But some would suggest (and have) that, since the fruition of the Zionist dreams and miraculous re-establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, this particular story has flipped in the script. Voices like those gathering for Christ at the Checkpoint in Bethlehem this weekend[4] have claimed that Israel has become such a juggernaut apartheid aggressor against Palestinian Arabs that the nation once governed by the shepherd-king named David has, in fact, become the violent giant. Deductively, a social justice-centric hermeneutic leads us to conclude God will always fight for and side with the underdog. He is, to be sure, the “Father to the fatherless” and tireless advocate for the poor and needy, and the One who will defend the defenseless and vindicate all victims. This is just who He is. This is what He does and will do in fullness in the Day of the LORD and reign of King Jesus. The story of David & Goliath confirms this—but not in validation of a social justice liberation theology.

This episode is sandwiched in between formational events and issues in David’s young adulthood. In the chapter prior, he is anointed by the prophet Samuel before his entire family to be king over the nation, and summoned to play his instrument as a means of deliverance for the demon-afflicted King Saul. In the chapter following, the technical heir to what is now David’s inheritance, Jonathan, is knit to David in intercessory solidarity. By contrast, Saul’s jealousy of David begins to form and take root; this will ultimately lay the groundwork for his own death and demise. And in the midst of all these stories, David is sent on a lunch run for his big brothers serving at the war front in Israel’s defense against the Philistines. You’re likely familiar with the story; the nation of Abraham’s promised descendants are shivering under the intimidating threats of one particular Philistine who was particularly large and particularly strong. He makes an offer: Fight him and win, and the nation is free to go. Fight him and lose, and the nation forged in the Exodus will once again return to slavery.

David is incredulous: “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?”[5]

This is not a patriotic boast. David is not leveraging God’s eternal purposes through his own nationalistic interpretation of current events. His confidence isn’t in Israel at all—his confidence is in the covenant, the one evidenced by circumcision. And here was an uncircumcised man, one Paul would describe as “alien from the covenant,”[6] threatening to undo the Exodus as though he had a right or the strength required to re-enslave the nation of Israel and subvert the success of Joshua’s military campaign under the leadership of the LORD of Hosts. Remember that Joshua himself was confronted with the fact that God does not take sides.[7] The LORD alone is the line of demarcation. All our collisions are guilt-ridden on all parts and parties, but His sovereign and strategic eternal purposes are our salvation, that “all nations would be blessed”[8] through the covenant that promised and purchased the blessing.

David’s confidence in the covenant was met with the hand of Him who will make the first last and the last first,[9] and one simple stone neutralized and eliminated the principal threat against the covenantal nation. He then took the head of the Gentile who so confidently “boasted against the branches”[10] just a few minutes prior to…Jerusalem, which at that point was nothing to write home about. Prior to this story, we’re told only of Abram’s encounter with Melchizedek, King of (Jeru)Salem right before the LORD cut the Everlasting Covenant with him, [11] and the military campaign to capture it into Israelite territory under Joshua’s leadership. Yet it was enough for David, who spent his adolescence mining the things of God while guarding his father’s sheep, to know that Jerusalem is inextricably knit to the Everlasting Covenant. So when he won the fight with the covenant-slandering Gentile, he marked it by planting the head of Goliath in the City of the Great King.[12] Years later, when David himself was crowned over the nation, he relocated the capital city of Israel to Jerusalem and devoted his life to building the house of the LORD. His son Solomon oversaw the architectural engineering, completion, and dedication of the Second Temple. He literally saw the presence of the LORD manifest there.

Our hope is in the return of the manifest presence of the LORD to Jerusalem, when the Great King rules from His city and all nations of the earth are living in the fullness of the blessing entrusted to and stewarded by the nation of Israel. Imagine what could have happened if Goliath had instead bowed before the people of the covenant, and blessed them. His head likely would not have been buried in the soil as a symbol, now known only to God. But what if he had entrusted himself to the name of the Lord of Hosts, who has promised us a Day wherein the “nations will learn war no more,”[13] when all our swords and slings and AK-47s will be melted down to make enough farm equipment needed to clean up the mess we have made of things. This is our only hope.

My prayer is that we would not only not spend our days reiterating Goliath’s boast, but that the “people of the cross”[14] would walk the narrow road of the cruciform and bring the Good News of the Kingdom soon-to-be restored to Israel[15] to the Goliaths of our day, and even literally to Gaza—just as we were commanded to do.[16]

May we not love our lives, even unto death.[17]

Stephanie Quick is a writer/producer serving with FAI. She cohosts The Better Beautiful podcast with Jeff Henderson. Browse her free music, films, and books in the FAI App and at stephaniequick.org.

 
 

Stephanie Quick