When David told King Saul that he was willing to go and fight the Philistine, Goliath, Saul gave David a brass helmet, a coat of mail, and a sword. This was the minimum armor that he thought David would need in such a battle. However, David was not used to fighting with unfamiliar equipment and preferred to meet Goliath with the two weapons he had depended on to kill a lion and a bear, namely his trust in the God of Israel and his sling.
Goliath was enraged that Israel would send an unarmed man to fight with him. The conversation went like this: “ ‘Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?’ And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. And the Philistine said to David, ‘Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field!’ Then David said to the Philistine, ‘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. And this day I will give the carcasses of the camp of the Philistines to the birds of the air and the wild beasts of the earth, 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 will give you into our hands’ ” (1 Samuel 17:43–47).
Goliath was a little over six cubits tall (about nine feet). The image that Nebuchadnezzar built was 60 cubits tall. It was apparently impossible to avoid yielding to the King’s demand to bow down to his idol, but a fiery furnace heated seven times hotter than usual could not keep God’s people who are faithful to Him from victory.
In the near future God’s faithful people will all be commanded to worship a beast or an image to that beast whose number is 666. The victory to be gained will not be with any human machinery or strategy. Rather it will be gained through a miracle of God, as it was with David’s sling and the faith of the Hebrew worthies in the fiery furnace.
“They sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying: ‘Great and marvelous are Your works, Lord God Almighty! Just and true are Your ways, O King of the saints’ ” (Revelation 15:3)!