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.
The story goes Samson was going down to Timnah to make the arrangements for the wedding, but as they approached the vineyards of Timnah, a young lion came roaring toward him. The spirit of the Lord came upon him in power so that he tore the lion apart with his bare hands as he might have torn a young goat. The first evidence that he had this amazing gift, this amazing physical strength, was when he was able to tear this lion apart. What he had in strength he lacked in judgment. The guy made a lot of bad decisions. In fact, the next time he returned to Timnah for the day of the wedding, he went down the same lion that was dead, the carcass laying on the side of the road and saw a swarm of bees inside the carcass of the lion and honey surrounding it. So what did he do? He stuck his hand in the dead carcass and scooped out the honey and ate it. It has to be pretty gross, but it is not only gross, he was directly violating a portion of his Nazirite vow that he was not supposed to be near dead things. So he is making a bad choice. So he ends up at this wedding feast. Back then a wedding feast lasted like seven days. It was filled with dancing, eating, and probably filled with drinking, and he probably participated in that. We don’t know for sure. The festivities lasted about a whole week.
Sometime during the festivities, Samson gest a little bored and he decides he is going to challenge the wedding party to a bet. He is going to challenge them to see if they are able to solve a riddle that he is about to give them. He goes on to say “‘Let me tell you a riddle, If you can give me the answer within the seven days of the feast, I will give you thirty linen garments and thirty sets of clothes. If you can’t tell me the answer, you must give me thirty linen garments and thirty sets of clothes.’” This is no small wager. This is equivalent of 30 three-piece suits at Macy’s or Men’s Warehouse. It is quite an expensive thing. These garments they are talking about are really the wedding garments. Very nice garments. He is taking a chance here betting these guys and they don’t want to be upstaged by this young man from Judah so they take the bet. They say okay tell us the riddle. He gives them the riddle. “Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet.” A very simple riddle. If you ever read the Bible, we know that he is talking about the lion and talking about the honey, but they don’t have a clue what he is talking about. They are getting a little bit stressed. By the third day, they are getting really stressed because they think they are going to lose this bet and lose face with the people and lose those 30 three-piece suits or whatever. They get nervous. So they approach Samson’s wife and try to convince her to coax the answer from Samson. To make sure she does it, they threaten to kill her and her father if she doesn’t get the answer. What we see in the next few lines, we see where she is pulling out all the stops to try to get Samson to reveal the secret of the riddle. She is crying. She is complaining. She is whining about it. She is just driving him crazy. Finally what he does is he gives in and gives her the answer to the riddle. What does she do? She turns around and gives the answer to the wedding party. By the seventh day when Samson shows up and says do you have the answer? What is it that is stronger than a lion or what is it that is sweeter than honey? So they gave the answer. It had to do with the lion and honey.
So Samson was obviously very upset so we begin to see a cycle of violence. We begin to see that temper come out of Samson. He has to pay this bet, so he goes into another Philistine city and finds 30 men. He slaughters them, steals their clothes, comes back, and gives it back to the wedding party to pay off his debt. It starts a cycle of violence for Samson. What makes matters worse is he goes back to claim his wife, and his wife is not there. He asked her father what is going on. Basically, I didn’t think you were coming back so I gave her over to your best man. This is starting to sound like the Jerry Springer show. This just flips Samson out. He doesn’t know what to do so he begins to think about it. He begins to think what am I going to do. He decides he is going to go and begin to practice more violence even to the point of violence against animals. He finds a group of foxes and some would suspect it is jackals and he would match the foxes in pairs. He would tie their tails together and then tie a torch to the tails, set the torch on fire, and then release the foxes into the crops, into the olive groves, and into the vineyards. Basically setting all their harvest on fire. Destroying a whole season of crops. This drives the Philistines over the edge so what do they do? They go back and they actually kill his wife and her father. This set Samson on edge and he goes back and just randomly begins slaughtering a bunch of Philistines and then ends up hiding in a cave somewhere.
About this time, things are getting pretty intense. The Philistines have this huge army out there looking for Samson. As they go out looking for Samson, they run into a group of soldiers from Judah, Samson’s own country. The soldiers from Judah find out that the Philistines are looking for Samson and they are mad. They find Samson before the Philistines find him and they convince Samson to turn himself in to the Philistines. Samson says I will do that. So Samson allows them to tie up his hands, his arms, and be turned into the Philistines. But just as he is approaching the Philistines and the Philistines see him and come running out screaming, something amazing happens. “The spirit of the Lord came upon him in power. The ropes on his arms become like charred flax, and the bindings dropped from his hands. Finding the fresh jawbone of a donkey, he grabbed it and struck down a thousand men.” Just like in the movie. He finds this jawbone and he starts slashing at all these guys and he kills a thousand men. It is amazing. He kills all these guys and then he is so proud of himself he goes on and writes a little poem about it. He is very prideful and very boastful about it. The people from Judah are so impressed that they make him their ruler. They make him a judge for 20 years. In fact, the last line in verse 15:20 says “Samson led Israel for 20 years in the days of the Philistines.”
The story could end there. We really don’t know what is going on in these 20 years. We really don’t know in this 20 years if he is a good leader or a bad leader, but we do know that the guy didn’t deal with his issues. Particularly, he didn’t deal with the issues of the heart. The lust-related issues. Chapter 16 opens up again with “One day Samson going down to Gaza where he saw a prostitute. He went in to spend the night with her.” You remember when we talked about Rahab a few weeks ago. When the men went to Rahab the prostitute, they were going there to hide out. We don’t believe that is what Samson was doing here. Samson was going to basically engage her services. Apparently, some of the Philistine men found out about this, so they decided this was another opportunity to capture Samson. They decided we are going to surround the city and when he comes out through the city gate in the morning, we are going to capture him. Somehow, Samson must have gotten wind of this and he fooled them. He got out in the middle of the night and instead of going through the big doors at the city gate, he decided he is going to take down the entire door, the post and the cross bar, throw it on his back and, to show what a strong guy he is, he is going to carry that door all the way up to the top of a hill while the Philistines are just standing there awestruck. An amazing site of his strength.
But the Samson show is about to come to an end. All these years of lying and lust and anger are finally closing in on him. We find in chapter 16, it kind of begins like chapter 14. It begins again with a woman. This time it is not the prostitute. It another woman who he actually falls in love with, the beautiful Delilah. It goes on to say “That sometime later he fell in love with a woman in the Valley of Sorek whose name was Delilah.” The Valley of Sorek was actually a valley that was originally occupied by Judah but the Philistines had come in and taken over. Again, he was looking for love in all the wrong places. He was going into the valley that he shouldn’t have been going looking for a woman when he should have stayed in Judah. He goes there and he really loved Delilah. You get the sense maybe Delilah loved him, but also if you were a Jewish reader and reading this, you start thinking something is up. Especially if you know that the meaning of Delilah is one who makes someone weak, one who weakens. She was about to weaken Samson in an incredible way. She was about to find out what it was that made him strong. That is exactly what the Philistines were trying to do. The Philistines wanted to know what is the secret behind Samson’s strength. They wanted it so bad that they were willing to pay top dollar. The passage says that they paid 28 lbs of silver each person. I don’t know how many people paid but apparently they say it could be anywhere from several thousand to several millions of dollars. Delilah says I am in on this. I am going to figure it out. What does she do? She begins coaxing Samson. She begins talking to Samson and trying to find out what is the source of your strength. He just kind of toys with her a little bit. He lies to her a little. Plays a little game. Tells her different things. She is starting to get frustrated because he is just messing with her. He refuses to give her what she wants; the secret to his incredible strength. Out of frustration, she finally says “‘How can you say ‘I love you?’, when you don’t confide in me. This is the third time you have made a fool of me and haven’t told me the secret of your great strength. With such nagging she prodded him day after day until he was tired to death.” I see some men out there shaking their heads. Been there Samson. All kidding aside, she wore the guy down. So much so that finally he told her everything. “‘No razor has ever been used on my head,’ he said, ‘because I have been a Nazirite set apart to God since birth. If my head were shaved, my strength would leave me, and I would become as weak as any other man.’” There is the answer right there. So what does she do? She waits one night when Samson has his head on her lap and she calls in one of the Philistine men and cuts off all his hair. All of a sudden he feels little bit weaker. But he doesn’t quite know that he is getting weaker. “The next day he awoke from his sleep and thought ‘I’ll go out as before and shake myself free.’ But he did not know that the Lord had left him.” This to me is the saddest line in the entire four chapters. He did not know that the Lord had left him. The Philistines and Delilah thought that his strength was in his hair, but his strength was from the Lord. His strength came from the fact that he had the spirit of God living in him. The hair was just symbolic of that relationship with God and that vow with God. When he began to, step by step, step away from that vow by violating one aspect of the vow after another, the Lord left him. It was all downhill from there. What the story says is that they captured him and gouged the guys eyes out, which was very common to do for prisoners. It would make it more difficult to escape. They gouge his eyes out and some would suggest that that is actually symbolic of something. It is symbolic of the fact that what is it that got him in trouble? His wandering eyes so he got his eyes gouged out. Some would suspect that maybe it has to do with the fact that he lost sight of his call that God had placed on his life. Whatever the case, he ended up in a prison cell grinding flour 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We don’t know how long he stayed in that prison cell but probably long enough to where he began to reflect on his life. Maybe he began to think about the calling he had on his life since a baby. Maybe he began to think about the fact that he had made that Nazirite vow and how many times he had violated that and how he had grown up in a good home and went against the best wishes of his parents. He might have been thinking all that stuff. Whatever the case, the story tells us that his hair began to grow back. Some suggest the growing back of the hair is actually symbolic of the fact that the spirit was coming back to him. Maybe he is getting back that connection with God that was lost. The closing scene is we have a situation where the pagan Philistines are in the temple of Dagon. It is their national god. They are in this huge temple with thousands of people on the roof and everywhere and they are praising the temple god Dagon. They are saying praise to our god Dagon who has delivered Samson into our hands. About that time, they decided to drag Samson into the temple. They began poking him and making fun of him and trying to get him to perform and doing silly things and poor Samson is just standing there really helpless and doesn’t know what to do. What he decides to do in one final moment of faith, he decides to lift up this amazing prayer up to God. He says “O Sovereign Lord, remember me, O God. Please, strengthen me just once more, and let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes.” It is still a little bit self-centered but you see that he was calling out to God. As the story goes, he found these two huge pillars that basically supported the entire structure and it is very true that there were several pillars that supported the whole roof and the entire structure. He found these two pillars and it went on to say “Then he pushed with all his might on these pillars and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Thus he killed many more when he had died than while he had lived.”
That is the story of Samson. I think it is a pretty extraordinary story. Sad to a certain degree, but it is a very extraordinary story. Like any of these stories, there are a number of lessons that we can glean from that. As I thought about it, there are probably about a half-dozen different lessons. I am going to give you a few of them. The first lesson is that God is still out there calling out leaders. In other words, we still live in a period of decay, of immorality, moral decay, spiritual decay, political decay where people are out there crying out for help. Nobody knows what is going on in the government. They are all mad at everybody. People are killing each other. Morality has gone down the tubes. God is still calling up men and women to lead the people into deliverance from the very things that they don’t even know they are oppressed of. They don’t even know the things they are enslaved to. God is calling leaders, but he is not just calling any leaders. He is calling spiritual leaders. Samson was a leader, but he was not a spiritual leader. He was not a spiritual leader really at all. He didn’t have any control of his interior life. He could lead people. He could kill thousands of people, but he couldn’t manage his life. He didn’t practice what I would call the art of self-leadership. God wants leaders, but he wants spiritual leaders. People who can lead their own self before they lead others. We sometimes put leaders on a pedestal for what they are out there doing but in the meantime their soul is dark as night because they haven’t led their soul. They are out there trying to lead other people like Samson and then you have a disaster. That is a lesson.
He wants spiritual leaders, but he also wants just people that are willing to disciple others. Everybody is not called to be some sort of a major leader like Samson either in the church or the workplace, but we are all called to be out there discipling people. In other words, we are all called back to the great commission as told by Jesus back in Matthew 28:19 where he says “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” If you are a born-again believer, this passage is for you. You can’t squirm your way out of this one. We are called to make disciples, which basically is not as complicated. It basically means if you are here and somebody is here, you are taking a person from there to here. You are giving them what you know and then somebody else gives them what they know. That is all it is. It is not that complicated. Everybody in this room knows something about the Lord. Knows something about the faith. My question to you is are you giving it to somebody? We are all called to make disciples.
The final thing really is that God equips us to do these things; to lead or to make disciples. He gives us all these gifts. Samson it was his physical strength but for some people it is just learning to practice the gift of hospitality. The gift of friendship. The gift of mercy. The gift of teaching. Whatever it is. He has given us all these phenomenal gifts that we should not squander. We are designed to use to begin to continue build up the kingdom of God. The problem with Samson is Samson is best known for what he tore down. He tore down the temple. Christians are best known for what they build up. They build up the kingdom of God. That is what we are called to do. Occasionally it involves tearing some old ways down, but it really involves beginning to build up the kingdom of God with the right kingdom values, the right attitudes, the right beliefs in our home, our church, our workplace, and in the world. We are all called to something. Some of us are called to be leaders and you are not doing what you are supposed to be doing. You are not leading. I would challenge you to begin figuring out where you are called to lead. As Christians, we have to learn that we are the ones that have to go out and seek our calling. We cannot wait for the church to give it to us. If you are leader, you know what I am talking about. If you are a leader, you know you are a leader. Again, are you answering that call? If you are a disciple, if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, you are all called to be discipling somebody. Start in your own home with your children, the classroom, the workplace, wherever you find yourself, you are called to carry out this great commission. Again in Jesus’ words “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Let us pray.
