Brent Pollard
The Temptation to Feed on Fear
In this high-stakes election year, with our nation more tribalized than perhaps any time in recent memory, the core issue we face is a widespread habit: “doomscrolling.” This compulsive, endless consumption of negative news and distressing online content feeds anxiety, nurtures fear, and starves the soul of hope. First popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic, doomscrolling amounts to voluntary imprisonment in a cell of manufactured despair. To resist fear and reclaim perspective, we must rely on faith, deliberate thought, and God’s Word—tools that equip us for the challenges and Goliaths of our time.
The Christian response to such darkness must be light. We must make Philippians 4.6-8 not merely familiar, but our constant companion. Through prayer, we banish anxiety; through deliberate focus on what is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, and excellent, we reclaim our thoughts from the enemy’s propaganda machine. Where the world offers an endless stream of catastrophe, God offers peace that surpasses understanding (Philippians 4.7).
Light-Scrolling and Ancient Warfare
It was through such positive scrolling—what we might call “light-scrolling”—that I encountered a video by someone calling himself “The Nerdy Christian.” His observation about David and Goliath arrested my attention and challenged assumptions I had carried for years. Like many, I had viewed this famous contest as ending in David’s victory solely through God’s direct intervention. Yet history reveals a more nuanced truth, making the story even richer.
The sling was no child’s toy. It was among the most fearsome weapons of the ancient world—a fact the Romans learned to their horror. When Hannibal crossed the Alps with his war elephants and stood at Rome’s gates, he brought 2,000 slingers whose skill was legendary. At the Battle of Cannae, one of Rome’s most devastating defeats, a slinger’s stone struck the consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus, inflicting wounds that led to his death. The mighty Republic that would eventually rule the Mediterranean nearly fell before the whirring death delivered by stones and leather straps.
The Insult Was Not in the Weapon
When Goliath taunted David, his words dripped with contempt—but not contempt for the sling itself. “Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?” (1 Samuel 17.43 NASB). The sting lay not in dismissing the weapon, but in the absurdity of a shepherd boy, dressed in farm clothes and carrying pastoral tools, presuming to face a champion warrior. A proper opponent would bear the armor and weapons Saul had attempted to strap onto David’s young frame (1 Samuel 17.38-39). To Goliath, it was as if someone had sent a farmhand with a crook to chase off a trained predator.
But what the giant in his arrogance failed to perceive, David understood with crystalline clarity: God had been preparing him for this moment through every ordinary day he had spent in the fields.
The Physics of Faith
Slingers were crucial to the armies of the ancient Near East, Greece, and Rome. Their effectiveness was rooted in simple physics—the high kinetic energy produced by rotational motion and release velocity. When 1 Samuel 17.49 describes the stone sinking into Goliath’s forehead, it aligns perfectly with natural laws. The stone would have fractured the giant’s skull, perhaps punching clear through to lodge itself in the wound. This created the impression of “sinking” into the flesh.
What the armored Goliath seems to have overlooked was the relative thinness of skin and bone protecting the brain. The practiced David, who had spent years perfecting his aim against predators, knew precisely where to deliver the lethal blow. He didn’t need God to bend the laws of nature. God had already woven into creation the very physics that would bring down the blasphemer.
Does this rob the story of its wonder? Far from it. This understanding actually deepens our appreciation for how God works.
Providence in the Pasture
Though God did not need to perform a supernatural miracle at the moment of combat, His providence had followed David throughout his youth like a shepherd follows his flock. That providence established a pattern, a precedent upon which faith could firmly stand. As David himself declared before the king, God had given him strength to defeat lions and bears that threatened his sheep (1 Samuel 17.34-37). The same covenant-keeping God who delivered him from those fierce beasts would deliver him from this uncircumcised Philistine who dared mock the living God and His people.
Here we glimpse a profound truth about divine preparation: God uses the mundane to equip us for the momentous. David’s years in obscurity, mastering a weapon most would consider beneath a warrior’s dignity, became the very foundation for his greatest victory. His faithfulness in small things—protecting defenseless sheep from predators—prepared him for great things. He protected defenseless Israel from the champion of Gath.
More Than the Mundane
The Nerdy Christian rightly observed that God will use the ordinary experiences of our lives to equip us for extraordinary callings. Yet we must not stop there. Otherwise, we truncate the full counsel of Scripture. God has not limited Himself to using only the mundane to prepare His people for battle.
Consider Paul’s instruction to Timothy: “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3.16-17 NASB). God has given us His very words—not merely as historical record or moral guideline, but as comprehensive equipment for “every good work.” Peter echoes this truth when he reminds us that God’s divine power “has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him” (2 Peter 1.3 NASB). The context reveals that this knowledge comes through the Gospel itself.
And what is this Gospel? Paul declares it to be “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1.16 NASB). The Greek word translated “power” isdunamis (δύναμις)—the very word from which Alfred Nobel derived the name for his explosive invention: dynamite.
Yes, the Gospel is God’s dynamite.
Weapons Divinely Powerful
Listen to how Paul describes this explosive power that God places in our hands: “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10.3-5 NASB).
Scripture itself is the sword of the Spirit (Ephesians 6.17), sharper than any two-edged blade. It pierces to the division of soul and spirit, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Hebrews 4.12). Where David carried five smooth stones from the brook, we carry the eternal Word that spoke worlds into existence. Where David’s sling could fell one giant, God’s Word can topple every fortress of falsehood that exalts itself against truth.
Equipped for Every Giant
The giants we face today seldom wear bronze armor or carry spears like weaver’s beams. They come disguised as anxiety scrolling through our feeds. They come in the form of speculations that undermine faith, as lofty arguments against the knowledge of God. They appear in the culture’s contempt for biblical truth, in our own wavering doubts, in the thousand small compromises that would diminish our devotion.
But God has equipped us to face them all. Through the mundane experiences of life, He builds practical skills in us. He builds tested faith. Through the profound truth of His Word, He arms us with weapons divinely powerful. Through the Gospel’s explosive force, He gives us everything pertaining to life and godliness.
The question is never whether God has equipped us. The question is whether we will, like David, step forward in faith with the tools He has provided. Refuse the ill-fitting armor of human wisdom. Trust instead in the name of the Lord of hosts whom we serve (1 Samuel 17.45).
The Witness of Preparation
When we immerse ourselves in Scripture daily, its truth shapes our thoughts and guides our steps. Something remarkable happens. We discover we can indeed slay every evil giant we face. As we grow deeper in a relationship with our Savior, others will take note—just as the religious leaders noticed about the apostles—that we have been with Jesus (Acts 4.13).
This is God’s way: to prepare us through providence, equip us through His Word, and empower us through His Spirit. He takes shepherd boys and makes them giant-slayers. He takes fishermen and makes them fishers of men. He takes ordinary believers and uses them to turn the world upside down (Acts 17.6).
The giants still taunt. The enemy still rages. But we need not doomscroll through catalogs of catastrophe, rehearsing reasons for despair. Instead, let us take up the weapons God has forged for us—both the practical skills refined through faithful living and the spiritual sword that is His eternal Word. Let us step forward, not in our own strength, but in the name of the God who has covenanted with His people. And let us remember: the battle belongs to the Lord (1 Samuel 17.47). He uses the weak things of this world to shame the strong, that no flesh should glory in His presence (1 Corinthians 1.27-29).
In Christ, we are more than conquerors (Romans 8.37). Every giant will fall. When we resist the culture of fear and trust in the practical skills God builds in us and the explosive power of His Word, we are equipped for every challenge. In this way, the world will know that there is a God in spiritual Israel (1 Samuel 17.46; Romans 9.6-8).
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