Mattress Shopping with Og.

Did you know Og’s bed was 14 feet long?

You’ve heard of Goliath, the giant defeated by the shepherd boy that effectively ended the war with the Philistines and saved the nation. But have you heard of Og of Bashan?

I was reading Deuteronomy 3 yesterday, and there the Hebrews conquered Og of Bashan who along with Sihon, king of the Amorites stood as the last barriers to God’s people entering the promised land. When they raided Og’s personal bedroom, the Scriptures tell us they found that his bed was nearly 14 feet long. That’s 4 feet larger than Goliath. What a strange detail for the Bible to record!

There’s some discussion about Og’s lineage, but apparently he came from a line of people that were abnormally large and tall, and of whom the Israelites were afraid.

Og is mentioned about 18 times in the Bible, and every time he’s mentioned as a symbol of the Lord’s victory and strength in battle against seemingly insurmountable odds.

By the time David faced another giant hundreds of years later named Goliath, he remembered the Lord’s help in his own life crediting the one who “rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear” as the one who would certainly take care of this Philistine before him, and he was able to defeat that giant by trusting in the past faithfulness of God.

Usually when preachers talk about Goliath, they make it completely human centered, saying something like “God can help you conquer the giants in your life.” But Goliath was a couple hundred years after Og. Og was a story the Israelites knew well. Israel’s God, it turns out, had a history of helping underdogs overcome enormous odds, and the only reason David or anyone else had any trust in God was because of past victories.

Here’s the point (and yes I’m allegorizing this to make a point), no matter what problem you face in life, God has a track record of victory over even greater problems in the past. We tend to quickly forget God’s small rescues throughout our lives, just like the Israelites who left Egypt and had to continually retell the story to their kids about their deliverance from slavery.

The other point of this all is that the only reason we can have any hope when we face the giants of life is that Jesus faced the Ultimate Giant and won. Our most catastrophic predicament has been solved at the cross. Our universal and ultimate enemy has been slain. When we look to the cross, we see a God who doesn’t avoid suffering and pain, but who enters into it and receives it, a God who is not distant from our pain but present in it.

There’s a weird comfort that comes from knowing that Og’s bed was four feet bigger than Goliaths: the comfort of knowing that any suffering we face in life God has also faced 1000x over, and any obstacle we encounter God has overcome infinitely greater, and he knows what its like. The confidence and courage to face our struggles and challenges and our own darkness within comes from trusting that the One that has already delivered us, at great personal cost, from an infinitely greater giant.

I wonder what mattress shopping for Og was like. Do they come in custom sizes?