I’ve been thinking a lot about appearance lately – the outward kind that the world so loves to base judgments and opinions on, and the inward kind that God says is so much more important.
When David was still a boy, he was anointed by Samuel to be the future king of Israel. But not before Jesse’s other seven sons had first passed before the priest. In fact, Samuel thought the first young man he saw, Eliab, was the one God had chosen.
But God told Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).
God saw something in David, and David proved him right, going on to become a mighty king and one of the great heroes of the Bible. (As well as one of the most fallible ones – see Affairs, Bathsheba.) I love that David was still young and probably not considered anything special by those around him – he was merely a shepherd boy – but he was used by God to kill Goliath, the Philistine giant.
This youngster, whose heart God had looked on and was pleased by, boldly stood up to the giant because he knew who was on his side. “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin,” David told Goliath, “but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty” (1 Samuel 17:45). Then he took out a stone, slung it and killed the guy, graveyard dead, with just one shot to the forehead.
Appearances, indeed, can be deceiving.
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