When you think of the heroes of the faith in Scripture – the giants who came before us – it doesn’t take long before you think of David. Many would place him up there with Abraham and Moses as perhaps the most important people in Scripture, apart from Jesus, of course. And while it is right and fitting for us to recognize David in this way – after all God did give us the “hall of faith” in Hebrews 11 – we cannot stop there. We need to look at David so we can look through him.

David did some incredible things, but he was by no means without sin. His affair with Bathsheba and consequent murder of Uriah prove this. But God still used David in a mighty way as we see in this passage. David was a great king, a man after the Lord’s heart (1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22), but God did something far greater through him than his contemporaries ever saw. Through David, God sent the Messiah. So we don’t fix our gaze on David as we recognize his life of faithfulness; instead, we turn our eyes and fix them on Jesus, the source and perfecter of our faith, the one true hero (Hebrews 12:2).

What is the danger of fixing your gaze on the people of the Bible? What might you miss if you fail to consider them at all? What encouragement might others be seeing in your life?