I have to confess, I am not an art aficionado. I appreciate great art, but I’ve never really obsessed on it. Recently, though, for the first time, my knees buckled on seeing a work of art.
We were in Florence, and visiting the Accademia is among the many Things To Do. We found an English-language tour with a tremendous tour guide and went on an adventure among original paintings by artists I’d only heard or read about.
The tour eventually took us into a hall filled with Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures – the finished works, apparently, had been looted by Napoleon’s soldiers. At the far end of the corridor, in an atrium reserved solely for that work, lit by natural light, stood David.
That’s when my knees gave, just a little. David had existed solely on TV, in coffee-table books, in slides when I played on the old Reach For The Top quiz show, or on a set of fridge magnets called “Dress Me David” (you don’t want to know). There he was – all seventeen feet (5.2m) of him – in that famous pose as he faces Goliath, slingshot in hand, naked, having shed not just the armor that didn’t fit, but also, symbolically, any pretense.
Look at that face: the steadfast confidence of one who knows that there will be – can be – but one outcome to this showdown. Goliath will lose. Or, more importantly, God will win.
And here’s where things got even more interesting. For centuries, this image of David has been the pride of Florence. He has represented the determination of the city and its people to fight and defeat all invaders and to survive even the worst challenges. We are small but mighty, the statue and David’s expression say. According to our guide, though, David’s creation coincided with the Renaissance and the beginning of the “Age of Reason”, when the Protagorean ideal that “man is the measure of all things” took hold. Reason maintained that human strength was sufficient to overcome anything and for the Florentines, David symbolized that ideal.
Except, as so often happens, they neglected the rest of the story.
“You come to me with a sword, with a spear, and with a javelin. But I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you and take your head from you … that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel. Then all this assembly shall know that the Lord does not save with sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord’s, and He shall give you into our hands.”— (1 Samuel 17:45-47)
Not exactly the words of someone bent on showing how powerful his own strength is, are they? David knew he wasn’t fighting in his own strength, or hoping for a lucky shot; he was fighting for his God. “You insult my God,” he is saying, “and He will make you pay.” Remember that David worshipped the Lord to such an extent and with such abandon that his first wife, Michal, “despised him in her heart” (2 Samuel 6:16); practically every Psalm that David wrote declares his faith in, love for and (most importantly) trust in God: they’re a chronicle of a relationship we all need to strive for.
How did David become a rallying point for a worldview that not only diminishes the importance of that relationship but, by extension, denies God’s existence altogether?
I believe there’s a simple response to that. The general public in Renaissance Florence didn’t read the Bible. Claims that David represented the new ideal of Reason and that man’s intellect is as good as it needs to be, would have gone unchallenged. After all, wouldn’t it follow that if David could hold off an oversized enemy single-handed, then Florentines could fend off the whole world? And doesn’t it follow that we are in control of our own destinies and can do whatever seems right in our eyes and not have to answer to The Big Sir? Doesn’t that make the Renaissance mindset all the more attractive?
Except, as I say, it was based in a fallacy; and it’s not the only instance of Biblical fallacy being used to establish popular thinking. Think of the Crusades, oppression of certain ethnic groups, suicide cults and seemingly “benign” world-views: all, supposedly, justified by something in Scripture. Think of all the misery that could be avoided if people actually read the Bible for themselves, rather than relied on what someone else says that it says.
I speak from experience. When I finally blew the dust off the cover, nearly twenty years ago, I found that the more I read it, the more it rang true and the more I believed; and the more I believed, the more I was able to discern truth from often dangerous lies. As the Apostle Paul (or whoever wrote Hebrews) says,
“The Word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12).
Sure, there are mucky bits, like stuff about confronting one’s sin and repenting and the blood of Jesus; but through it, we come into a relationship with God that we never thought possible. With that comes peace, freedom and strength, so that, when we face our own Goliaths that we can’t take down all by ourselves, we still know we will win.
Drew Snider is a writer, pastor and former broadcaster. He spent a decade ministering at Gospel Mission on Vancouver's Downtown East Side and has been a guest preacher at churches including Westshore Alliance in Langford, Westpointe in Vancouver, The Oasis in Duncan and Port McNeill Full Gospel.
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