Scripture: Judges 13-16 (selected verses)
Today is our 8th Lesson from the Book of
Judges, and it features one of the most well-known of the judges, although he
isn’t always recognized as one of Israel’s leaders. As we have considered some of the many judges
who the LORD God Jehovah brought to the people, we have discovered
that some of the earlier leaders were very faithful, while some of the latter
ones experienced individual issues that hurt them personally, but that God still
used them in powerful ways. And Samson
would be no different.
But isn’t this the lesson that all of scripture
teaches us - that the LORD can, and does, use all kinds of people to
accomplish His will?
Remember Jonah, who disagreed with God’s desire for
the people of Nineveh, and decided to head out in the opposite direction? Through a series of God guided instances, the
man wound up following God’s will just the same, and 120,000 people would be
saved by his testimony. (Jonah 1-4)
There was also Elijah, the greatest of the prophets,
who knew, and had seen the power of God at work. However he still tried to run away from the
world’s terror, but would soon discover that God could follow him wherever he
went! (1 Kings 18:16-19:18)
How about Cyrus, king of Persia? (Ezra 1) He was a pagan, and yet, the Great I AM softened
his heart, and the king allowed the people of Israel, who had been captives in
Babylon for 70 years, to return to Jerusalem, to rebuild the temple as well as
the city, and to top it off, were given all of the looted treasures that had
been taken from the temple before it was destroyed.
And of course, there was Saul the Pharisee who
believed that the followers of Jesus deserved nothing more than punishment,
until the Living Christ met him on the Road to Damascus, and changed his
hardened heart into one for Godly evangelism. (Acts 9:1-31)
And I would be surprised if this lesson didn’t
extend throughout the many years since those days, even to include our day and
many of our lives, too. And so, we go to
the lesson that we can learn from Samson’s life.
Read Judges 13:1-5, 24-25
Samson was to be dedicated from birth to be a Nazirite
in the way of the LORD. Numbers 6 gives us some insight into what the life of
a Nazirite, either a man or a woman, should be about. One of the interesting aspects of this life
was that the dedication required, among many other things, abstinence from all
fermented drinks and even raisins and grapes and their juice, that the person’s
hair should never be shaved, or even trimmed, until their vow of dedication
ended, and then the hair was to be shaved off and offered as a burnt offering
in the Tent of Meeting (the predecessor of the temple), and, of course, a
strict adherence to the Law of Moses.
Now it is true that Samson himself never made that vow, but his parents
made the vow for him which bound them all.
This might be similar to our baptism of infants – both the parents and
the child are under the vows that are taken.
God even gives Samson’s mother a hint of the service
that awaits him. – that he will be the one who will initiate the defeat of the
Philistines. It had been a long time
since Israel had known peace, but Samson had been chosen to faithfully begin
their journey to freedom once again.
Read Judges 14:1-6
A Nazirite was dedicated as a person of Jehovah God,
which included obedience to the vows that were accepted. One of the laws was that an Israelite, either
man or woman, was never to marry into a family from a pagan nation. And
even though neither Sampson nor his parents knew that the man’s attraction to a
foreign woman was God’s will, they still knew that it was a violation of the
law! The LORD works in ways that we
might never understand, but while He has no obligation to the laws of humanity,
it should only be through His will that we separate ourselves from it.
The second issue that Samson goes against is that
of killing the lion. The law demands
that the lion be considered as an unclean animal (Leviticus 11:24-28),
and demanded that you never go near a person or animal that is either dead or
dying – remember Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, and the reluctance of
both the priest and the Levite to help the injured man? Of course in the instance of Samson and the
lion, again, it is only through the power of God that he is able to succeed.
And third, on his way home, he stops beside the lion’s
carcass, and scoops honey out of the body – again breaking the vow that his
parents took on his behalf. But this is
only the beginning of the preparation that God is making for his servant
Samson. The forbidden marriage goes
forward, the Philistine wife betrays him to other Philistines, her father even
gets involved with his own betrayal, Samson retaliates against the Philistines,
and they kill the woman and her father.
The plot thickens, and while we might wonder just how God is going to
use the details of this story to defeat the oppressors, the plan is actually proceeding
according to divine will, and obviously not in an understandable human way!
Read Judges 15:11-15, 20
As the
conflict continues to escalate, the Philistines turn their rath upon the nation
of Israel. The oppressors begin to show
Israel just how great their power really is, and Israel, for their own
protection, decides to take matters into their own hands. It doesn’t matter to them that God may be
using the situation to gain them their freedom; it doesn’t matter that God’s
plan will never be denied, regardless of what it takes; it doesn’t matter that the
power and purpose of God goes far beyond anything that either Israel or the
Philistines could imagine or conjure up.
But they move ahead with taking the initiative against Samson, and plan
to capture him and turn him over to the enemy.
Samson has disavowed nearly all that defines him as
a Nazirite, except for never cutting his hair, and that one faithful act
preserves his strength to use against all who oppose him. Israel knows of his strength, but they have
never understood what the source of that power is. And Samson isn’t about to let them know, so that
they won’t be able to reveal the truth to the Philistines. The Spirit of God comes upon him, the ropes
fall away, and the story of his slaying a thousand men with the jawbone of a
donkey unfolds. But the interesting thing
is that in taking up the jawbone he again violates the law’s admonition against
touching anything associated with a dead animal.
He has broken the Nazirite vows that define him as
God’s man and he has broken the laws that define him as a man of Israel – how long
will the LORD let his sins continue to pile up? Isn’t it about time to rein him in?
Apparently not – Samson still has the promise upon
him that he will be the beginning of the end of Philistine oppression against
Israel. God’s plan will not be denied! And for 20 years, the LORD
continues to use Samson to lead Israel toward the end of Philistia’s reign of
terror.
Read Judges 16:4-7
Sampson continues to sin with the Philistine women,
and eventually meets Delilah. The
Philistines also continue in their vendetta against Sampson, and approach his
new love with a bribe to discover the source of the man’s strength. That is the only thing that is still
frustrating their plans. This begins
Sampson’s lies to Delilah, but eventually she wears him down, and he lets the
secret out, that it is his hair. She
secretly and quietly arranges to have his head shaved, and the soldiers are
able to quickly overpower him and blind him.
Unfortunately, they fail to ensure that his head
continues to be shaved, and his hair slowly grows back, until, as we know, Samson’s
strength returns. He is imprisoned, and
humbled, and ridiculed by his captors, until the day that the rulers of Philistia
order that he be brought into their temple.
All of the hierarchy, the elite, the influential of that nation were
present, and he is chained between two of the pillars that support the roof,
and he begins to pray. He asks his
Jehovah God to fill him with the strength he needs, and asks that he might be
allowed to die at the same moment that his enemy perishes.
In one last gasp, Samson accepts his final Nazirite
vow, regains his strength, and pleads for death to pay for the life he has led. Did he know that he had been, and still was,
the instrument of God, even in this last act of retribution against the Philistine
leadership, which also leads to his own demise?
We aren’t told. But in this last
heroic act, he fulfills the reason for his Nazarite vow – that he would be the
one who initiated the downfall of Philistia.
We know that all of the judges, each in their own time,
obviously died at the end of their service to Jehovah God, but it was only
Samson who would die through his final, and greatest act of faithfulness. God had used Samson’s unfaithful life to
accomplish His divine promise to Israel, just as He did so many other times throughout
scripture. And Samson, as he prepared
for his own death, may have finally grasped a sense of what his LORD
was accomplishing through his response to the call to Godly service.
But this lesson should
never be construed as permission for each of us to be unfaithful to Godly ways,
so that we, too, could be a Samson for God.
Our LORD would much prefer that we are faithful servants,
and that we follow in Godly ways, and that we love those special ways, and
commit fully to all that God has laid out for us.
May each of us surrender our ways, in exchange for
the glory of HIS!
