Samson Series

If you have your Bibles with you today and you want to try to follow along, we are actually going to be looking at a number of chapters starting with Judges 13:1. As many of you know, we have been going through a series called Extraordinary People of the Bible. The lesser known people of the Bible who God used in amazing and extraordinary ways because of their faithfulness and because of their obedience. Today, we are going to take a little bit of a sidetrack. We are going to talk about somebody who God used in spite of his lack of faith. In spite of his lack of obedience. The man’s name is Samson. If you grew up in the church or went to Sunday school as a kid, you probably heard about Samson or at least you have heard about him from the pulpit at some point. But just in case you haven’t, I thought I would play a trailer from the 1950 movie called “Samson and Delilah” just to give you a quick snapshot of Samson’s life.

That was the Hollywood version of Samson and Delilah. Today we are going to look at the biblical version of Samson and Delilah. The problem is that the story of Samson takes up four chapters in the book of Judges. I need to give you the quick high fly over version, swooping in on a few key passages just to give some structure to the text. I am going to be going through it pretty quickly. What we see here is we have the story of Samson. It takes place in the book of Judges. The book of Judges is simply about Judges but actually not the judges in terms we think about. It is actually about the military rulers that ruled over Judah in the time before kings were put into place. This period of Judges was not a good time for the people. In fact, it was a period of a lot of different decay. It was a period of moral decay. It was a period of spiritual decay. It was a period of political instability and political decay. What you see in the book of Judges is an ongoing, recurring pattern where the people were said to do evil in the eyes of God. So what God would do is send him some sort of foreign oppressor to knock some sense into them a little bit and then the people would cry out for some sort of help and then God in his mercy would send some sort of a person to give them freedom. That is what we see in the opening passage in the book of judges where we see again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, so the Lord delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for 40 years. So again the people were being oppressed. This is the context that Samson is born into. Samson had a mighty call on his life that was really evident from his birth by the miraculous circumstances that surrounded his birth. You may recall, if you are familiar with the story, it is similar to John the Baptist’s story where an angel of the Lord appears to Samson’s mother and tells the mother I know you have been barren and I know you can’t conceive, but I am going to give you a son. A miraculous surrounding of his birth. The angel goes on to say “And the boy is to be a Nazirite, set apart to God from birth, and he will begin the deliverance of Israel from the hands of the Philistines.” He will be their deliverer. A little side note on this idea of Nazirite. Basically the word Nazirite just means to be set apart. So someone who was taking the vow of the Nazirite means that God had set that person apart for a very specific work in the world. Associated with that Nazirite vow would be the idea that that person would have to abstain from things that would be considered impure or unclean. It would include not having a glass of wine. Not even eating grapes. It would include things like staying away from dead bodies and that sort of thing. It would also include the willingness to never cut your hair. We see that Samson was someone who had a very clear calling on his life; a calling to deliver his people from the hands of the Philistines and to live a life consistent with that calling, which would mean he would live the life of a Nazirite. That is the basic introduction of the story.

We see for Samson life started out pretty good. If you go on to read in verse 24 where is says “He grew and the Lord blessed him and the spirit of the Lord began to stir him while he was in Mahaneh Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol.” We see that he was born in a blessed situation. If we had time to read through the passage, we would see that his parents were very spiritual. They prayed a lot to the Lord. He had a good solid upbringing. The spirit of the Lord was on him from a very young age. We also see as we read on that Samson, like many youth, had a little bit of a chink in their character. A little bit of flaw in their character. One thing about Samson, we will see that Samson had a major problem with anger. We also see that he also had a problem with the ladies. In other words, he liked the ladies too much. Particularly, he seemed to like the foreign ladies. As a side note, I have no problem with foreign women. In fact, I am married to 100% Italian and she is a Browns fan to boot and that makes her pretty foreign around here in Steeler country. So I have no problem with that. But you see Samson was somebody who not only liked foreign but he went into enemy territory to find a foreign wife. The passage goes on to say that “Samson went down to Timnah and saw there a young Philistine woman. When he returned, he said to his father and mother, ‘I have seen a Philistine woman in Timnah; now get her for me as my wife.’” As many parents often do, when they don’t approve of the future daughter-in-law or son-in-law, they try to discourage the wedding. But Samson could not be discouraged. In fact, there is a passage where he says she is the one for me. How many times have we heard that? She is the one. He decided against the best wishes of his parents and he was going to marry her anyway, which became the first of a long list of bad choices for Samson.