The book of Judges is challenging to the soul, but if we allow the Holy Spirit to speak through its troubling narratives, there is so much we can learn and apply.
There is a repeating cycle in Judges that you will see could analogous to our current cultural and spiritual angst:
The tribes had disobeyed God’s command to drive out ALL of the idolatrous nations when they conquered the Promised Land. They let many idol worshippers remain and lived among them, even intermarrying with them. This led to a chronic problem of sin, idolatry, and rebellion.
When the Hebrew people continued unrepentant, for many years in some cases, God would allow them to be overtaken by foreigners who brutally oppressed them. Eventually, they would become desperate, remember their true God, and cry out to him.
God, in his infinite mercy, would hear from heaven and send a human rescuer who, filled with the Spirit, would powerfully subdue their conquerors. The people would humble themselves and pledge to worship and serve only the true God. This would last about five minutes.
Then their own sinful tendencies, combined with the continuing influence of the pagans around them, found them drowning in perversion and idol worship again. And around and around they went.
Stirred by the Spirit
Samson was one of these leaders whom God employed to rescue Israel from the Philistines, their chief enemy at the time.
Samson’s birth was marked with supernatural phenomena. The angel of the Lord announced to his parents that they would have a son whose head is never to be touched by a razor because the boy is to be a Nazirite, dedicated to God from the womb. He will take the lead in delivering Israel from the hands of the Philistines. (Judges 13:4-5). This angelic prophecy was confirmed by the angel ascending through the flames as they made their sacrifice to God.
The parents obeyed. Samson was born and “grew, and the Lord blessed him, and the Spirit of the Lord began to stir him…” (13:24-25).
The Spirit Crashes in
The Spirit started with a stirring, but the next move of the Spirit in Samson’s life was to be much more dramatic.
He encounters a roaring lion, and under the power of the Spirit, tears the lion to pieces with his bare hands. (14:5-6) The Spirit manifests to give Samson superhuman physical strength. He could have been one of the Avengers.
Later in his story, Samson is caught by the Philistines and tied up with strong ropes. The Spirit comes powerfully on him again, allowing him to break free. He singlehandedly kills a thousand of them with the jawbone of a donkey! (15:13-17).
The book of Judges reveals that even in the OT, the Spirit shows up in various ways, depending on God’s purposes and the particular character of a person.
Contrast Samson with Gideon, who was weak and fearful. But when the Spirit fell on him, he was victorious against thousands of Midianites with a 300-man army armed only with torches and trumpets. The Spirit worked in Gideon through faith and obedience rather than physical or military strength.
A flawed, foolish man
Samson was a mischievous trickster who followed after his lust. He was a player, an OT example of James’ description of the person who:
is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. (James 1:14-15).
On a return trip to visit his pagan girlfriend, Samson finds a honeycomb inside the carcass of the lion he had killed, and it inspires a clever riddle he challenges the Philistines to answer on a bet.
They can’t figure it out and tell Samson’s girlfriend to pry the answer out of him. She nags him endlessly until he gives in, and the men come to Samson with the answer. He is incensed by the lack of fair play. The Spirit comes upon him and he strikes down thirty men, strips them, and gives their clothes to the men who had answered the riddle, even though they had cheated. Samson apparently wasn’t one to welch on a bet.
The Spirit gets involved in the gratuitous foolishness that Samson had initiated. Why? Because God had a larger purpose of eventually empowering Samson to deliver his people from the Philistines completely. (See Judges 14:4).
Nagging, manipulative women
We’ve already seen the Philistine lover who pried the answer to the riddle out of him. The second example is Delilah. Samson falls in love with her, and we soon learn that she is shallow and deceptive, openly betraying Samson in a way similar to his last misguided lover’s betrayal.
Prodded by her Philistine brothers, Delilah nags and manipulates Samson with tears to get him to reveal the secret of his strength, which is his long, never-cut hair. While he sleeps on her lap, she lops off his dreadlocks. He wakes up and is seized by the Philistine men.
Sampson thinks the Spirit will show up again and he will escape, but discovers he has become weak and helpless. The Philistines gouge out his eyes and throw him into a prison where he is left to blindly, mindlessly grind grain all day.
Then we read, But the hair on his head began to grow again (16:22).
One day, Samson is brought out to entertain some Philistine nobles who gathered to offer sacrifices to their god, Dagon. What kind of entertainment this blind, shackled, pitiful man would provide them is hard to imagine.
As he stands between two weight-bearing pillars of their pagan temple, he prays that God would empower him one more time. His prayer is answered. He breaks the pillars and the temple collapses on everyone, killing himself along with more of his enemies than he had while he lived (16:30).
What are some possible lessons of this text for born-again believers?
· The Holy Spirit knows each of us individually, by name, and by calling. He will work in us in surprising ways sometimes, ways that are designed to fulfill his higher purposes in our lives.
· Before Pentecost, the Spirit came and went, but now, as born-again believers, we have this Spirit abiding within us. His wisdom, conviction, comfort, and power are always available.
· Because we have different strengths, weaknesses, and personalities, he will work in our lives in unique, individual ways. Like Samson, even when we veer off track, the Spirit continues to work on our behalf, interceding for us, guiding us, informing us, and helping us to get back on track.
· We are being sanctified day by day, but we still stumble and fall into temptation or behave foolishly at times, like Samson did repeatedly. Hopefully, this is not a chronic problem for us as we seek a renewed mind.
· Samson seemed resistant to recognizing or changing his sinful patterns and foolish behaviors even when they brought ruin or marred his relationships. We can seek the Lord’s face, repent and confess our sins, receive cleansing, and be at peace again.
· Women can be godly, wonderful people who bring joy, grace, beauty and comfort to this world. Women like those portrayed in Samson’s stories, who are given over to manipulation, nagging, gossip, and self-centered indulgence, should be avoided like the plague.
· Those looking for an example of fantastic, godly womanhood can find her in the story of Ruth, just one book over in your Bible.
Finally…
A few weeks after the killing of Charlie Kirk, I watched a sermon by my pastor friend Gordie Deer. He analogized Samson’s situation with the state of the church today in the aftermath of Charlie’s assassination.
Like Israel, the Church has so often taken the Lord for granted and gone her own way. We have silently given assent to cultural norms that are an affront to the holiness of God.
As happened to Samson when Delilah cut his hair, we have forfeited our strength to a nagging, corrupt culture, becoming weak and afraid to stand against evil.
But as Gordie said, and many of us are hoping…
Our hair starting to grow back.
Let it be so, Lord.
Painting: Samson and Delilah (1620) by Anthony van Dyck
