banished

Read I Samuel 17 and I John 3

“For who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?” I Samuel 17:26

David, as I’m sure you know, means beloved.  Goliath means banish, or to send into exile.

To be exiled has always been my greatest terror. As the youngest in my family I was often sent away by my brother, and even by my sister, because I was too little. In grade school, I spent an awful lot of time out in the hall. (I have an adult friend who was recently diagnosed with ADD. He insists  that I have a much worse case of ADD than he has, so I think that may be the reason my teachers felt the only time they could get their classroom under control was when I was not in it.)

But worst of all was hearing about the Rapture—that time when everybody who cared for me would be gone in the twinkling of any eye. I knew, of course, that only those who weren’t saved would be left behind, so I desperately tried to get saved. And I did get “saved,” like many times. My mom finally gave up trying to record all these special occasions. Her Bible only came with six blank pages.

So the giant of banishment has loomed large in my life, even to this day. When I got terminated from my job in January, the thought of being banished is what has made it so hard. Over the past couple of months, I’ve talked with different ones who I had worked with every day for years and years. Each time one of them tells me they miss me, I can’t talk any more. I can hear them saying, “Yea, I talked to Larry. He got so emotional, I think he started crying. I had no idea he liked me so much.” I did like them, well enough. But the reason I get so choked up was because I was exiled from them.

Goliath means banished. But David means beloved.  My real name is David Lawrence Rodgers. David is my dad’s name. We named our first born son David. I hope to hear that one of my grandsons is named David.

The beloved is never banned. Who would exile the beloved? More than anything, more than life itself, one wants to be with the beloved.

David sounded a bit cocky when he said to this huge creature standing in front of him, “You come to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of Hosts. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head.”

Maybe not, thought Goliath. But David did. And he did it because he was beloved of God.

We all see a lot of giants around. We know we are in big trouble when we look out and see things like cancer, or terrorists, or America’s decay, or our job about to end, or…

We need to take this to heart—you and me, every one of us who takes God at His Word—no giant stands a chance against those of us who, like David, are beloved of the Lord.