If I were a betting man, I would give two-to-one odds on my annual salary that you’ve heard at least one sermon on David and Goliath where the preacher preached that you too can slay your giants.

David and Goliath might be the most frequently allegorized passage in the Bible. It has been used (and abused) until we almost can’t think of it any other way. I was with a group of fellow pastors a few years ago, and I commented that we tend to make Bible stories about ourselves instead of Christ or instead of seeing why God gave us that story. I gave the story of David and Goliath as a case in point. One of my fellow pastors immediately objected to the notion that the story of David and Goliath might be about Jesus. “That’s allegorizing,” he said. I asked him how it is allegorizing to make it about Jesus but not allegorizing to make it about me?

To allegorize is to interpret symbolically. When we allegorize a passage, we look for hidden spiritual meanings that transcend the text’s literal meaning. “Commentators who use allegory deserve high marks for creativity but low marks for approaching the biblical account as literature.” (Haddon Robinson, Biblical Preaching, 59)

We do this more than we realize, especially when preaching from the Old Testament. I will confess that in the past, I have preached that Gideon’s 300, who drank from their hand instead of sticking their head in the water, were a spiritual example to us as Christians. It was, no doubt, a fine message – one that would travel. Except, that sermon is entirely extra-biblical. I won’t share my points with you because the points don’t matter. We cannot identify any spiritual virtues in drinking from your hand. We cannot do this – no matter our power of perception – because God doesn’t tell us that the men who drank from their hands were spiritually superior to the others. God didn’t choose the 300 over the others because they were the more spiritual. Go ahead and look at the passage. You won’t find that claim in there.

We can’t condemn the men who stuck their heads in the water to drink. We cannot say that sticking your head in the water would be wrong or spiritually inferior (though I find it physically challenging to drink this way). If you ever find yourself in the wilderness needing a drink, we can’t say that you are more spiritual if you put your hand to your mouth and lap like a dog. This is not a command of God, nor is it the point of the passage. Why did God choose the men who lapped like a dog? The Bible doesn’t say. God whittled Gideon’s army to 300 and told him that he would save Israel by the 300 that lapped. The point is what God did, not what the 300 did.

Allegorizing is an affliction. And we are much afflicted by it. I don’t have time to recount all the “revival” sermons I have heard where men thought they had discovered the secret sauce of revival in the cloud the size of a man’s hand or the sound of abundance of rain. When I was a teen, my pastor preached “God’s gonna burn your barley field”  from the second half of 2 Samuel 14, when Absalom burned Joab’s barley field. So now Absalom is a type of God.

My friend, that is criminal.

Haddon Robinson warns that “misapplication of the Old Testament has had an embarrassing history.” He relates the example of Origen, who preached that in the battle of Jericho, Joshua stood for Jesus, Jericho for the world, the seven priests for seven of the twelve disciples (Origen hand-picked the seven), Rahab for the church, the scarlet cord for the blood of Christ. This is atrocious. It has no place in Bible-believing churches. Period.

What, then, is the crime of allegorizing?

Allegorizing strips the passage of its meaning

The passage becomes a vehicle for your own thoughts and opinions, the great whiteboard where you can write whatever spiritual truth your fancy can imagine. The passage has no literal value. The value of the passage is almost entirely in its power to illustrate some “spiritual truth.” The actual meaning of the passage is ignored, and the symbolism you see in it becomes its meaning.

God gave every passage of Scripture for a reason. The preacher’s job is to examine the passage until God’s purpose becomes clear. He has no right to make the passage an allegory of something else.

Why does the book of Judges give so much detail about Ehud’s defeat of Eglon and so little about Othniel’s defeat of Chushan-Rishathaim? Not so you can preach that “the dagger of God’s Word will bring the dirt out of your life.” The Othniel story sends a message to us, and the Ehud message does as well. But the message is different. God isn’t saying that Ehud is more important. The value of the Ehud story is not so that we have the opportunity for a juicier application (pardon the pun). God isn’t saying that Othniel’s battle is unimportant because it left out exciting details. God has a point to make with every story in the Bible.

Allegorizing teaches the church to make stuff up about the Bible

Christians hear the preachers doing it, and so they do the same thing, often with equally atrocious (though less admired) outcomes. The layman’s allegorizing never gains traction, though, because he is a layman. He doesn’t have an MDiv in creative interpretation. Let the “experts” handle Scripture.

How you handle Scripture in your pulpit is how your church will handle Scripture in private. You teach them how to interpret Scripture by the way you interpret Scripture. I shudder at some of the hair-brained interpretations that must be taking place in our churches, given the examples our people often hear from the pulpit.

No surprise, our people are woefully unprepared for tragedy when it strikes. They have been taught to see Christ’s miracles as an encouragement to expect miracles in everyday life. In other words, they have been trained to allegorize the miracles of Christ. We put more stock in the symbolic value of Christ’s miracles than in the point Jesus made through those miracles. Jesus never taught that “if you have a health crisis, I can fix that.” He can, of course. But He doesn’t teach us to expect that. Jesus made a point to the people of His day, and His miracles were signs (seimeia) to confirm that point. Christ’s miracles preach to us that we are fools to reject Him.

But believers have been taught to think they should look for a miracle whenever they have a crisis. It upsets people for me to say this, but the Bible doesn’t teach that. Yes, God can cure your cancer or restore sight to blind eyes. But we set ourselves up for terrible pain – a crisis of faith, really – when we tell ourselves that we can anticipate the healing miracles of Christ in our case.

When God doesn’t heal our loved one, we think God has forsaken us. In his book Where Is God When It Hurts, Philip Yancy tells the story of Brian Sternberg, a record-shattering pole vaulter who was paralyzed from the neck down in a trampoline workout. For twenty-five years, Brian and his family insisted that he was about to be healed. Thousands of prayer meetings were held, and famous faith-healing pastors visited, anointed him with oil, and prayed over him. “Everyone felt stirred, everyone believed, but nothing changed.” (115-127)

Because of the way many have allegorized the miracles of Christ, believers have been conditioned to think that God will heal us of our diseases if we pray fervently enough. Many believe that there is something wrong with the sick person if they don’t experience a miracle. I know this first hand. My wife contracted Lyme Disease more than a decade ago. Many, many believers have told us that we should not “accept” this as her new norm, insisting that we must keep praying for a miracle.

I can’t criticize too harshly. I have preached in the past, “You CAN walk on the water!” I once preached a series through all the miracles of Jesus, in which I spiritualized every one of them, either making them picture the saving work of Christ or else making them about our expectations in a crisis.

My friend, you can’t walk on water. When Jesus called Peter out of the boat, He didn’t do that to show you what you can do, or even what Jesus can do in your life. There is a definite point to that story, something that Jesus was doing in the lives of His disciples at that moment, and something God wants us to know because of what Jesus did with the disciples. But the point is not that “I can do all things through Christ, so I can walk on water.”

Allegorizing diminishes the message of God’s Word

It doesn’t elevate Scripture. Think again about what you are doing when you allegorize. You are saying that the passage has value inasmuch as it carries the message you want it to carry. Your message is more important than the text. Your ideas, the hidden spiritual meanings you write onto the passage, become ultimate.

This has been the downfall of the mainline denominations. The embrace of homosexuality in the mainline denominations traces directly to their long history of allegorizing. Once you start down that trail, objective meaning is lost and eventually abandoned altogether. Every passage becomes subjective and experiential. The very gospel ceases to be a vicarious sacrifice to satisfy divine justice and instead becomes an example. Jesus didn’t “make” the way for you to be reconciled. He “showed you” the way to return to God. If you follow His steps, you can find your way home.

The more a preacher allegorizes Scripture rather than preaching the intended message according to the text, the more the Bible itself becomes symbolic of human struggle and divine intervention. The Bible no longer shapes our view of culture, of morality, of humanity. Our views of culture, morality, and humanity shape our view of the Bible. Rather than interpret the world through the lens of Scripture, we interpret Scripture through the lens of the world. The message of Scripture begins to be what I see in Scripture – an empty canvas where I can paint whatever I imagine. I stop listening to God’s words in the Bible and start finding my thoughts in whatever I read there.

Allegorizing makes you the master of the passage

When you allegorize, you make the meaning of Scripture subjective. You deny the words of Peter, who said,

Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation. (2 Peter 1:20)

You become the boss. If you are creative enough, you can find just about any novel symbolism in a passage of Scripture. But when you do this, you aren’t searching to find what God wants you to know because of what He reveals in a passage. You are looking for what you see in that passage. The Bible becomes the vehicle for your message.

Obviously, where the Bible presents an allegory, we have a responsibility to preach the allegory. Paul tells us, for instance, that Hagar and Sarah are an allegory. We must not ignore this when preaching their story. And yes, we should explain the allegory when preaching Galatians 4:21-31. But we do not have the authority to invent allegories. And since Paul tells us the meaning of that allegory, we have no right to add our own interpretation.

If a Bible story brings some spiritual truth to mind or anticipates a New Testament doctrine, you can point that out. But the preacher ought to hold the Bible in such high regard that he would not dare suggest that the connections he sees are authoritative. Be sure the suggestion is in the passage, that you aren’t snatching it out of thin air. Out of respect for the authority of God’s Word, you should mention that nothing in the passage requires us to see this connection.

Have we forgotten what it means that God’s Word is the authority? The authority of God’s Word makes a claim on the preacher first. God’s authority, as expressed in His Word, should impact us in the study as we prepare our notes and in the pulpit as we preach our sermons. If my preaching does not submit to God’s Word, how can I expect the church to respond in faith and obedience?

Tomorrow’s apostates grow out of today’s allegorizing sermons. Preach the Word. Reject novel interpretations. Ask yourself, “Why did God include this story in the sacred record? What does God want me to know about Him from this passage.” Then, preach that.