One of the most common characters for children to learn about in Sunday School when they are young is Samson. Kids love to hear about the guy who was so powerful that nobody could beat him up. His physical strength was so great that he was able to bring a huge building down by pushing on the columns. Those kids in Sunday School learn how Delilah tricked Samson into letting his hair be cut, and how Samson lost his strength because of that. I remember as a kid thinking that it sounded like magic, that there was something about Samson’s hair that mysteriously gave him strength.
Well it’s possible to hear that story like that when you’re a kid, but as an adult the magical hair idea sounds a little like the talking mirror in Snow White. But if you go back and read the story of Samson in Judges 13-16 (as a matter of fact, I’d encourage you to do that this week), you see that the story isn’t about magical hair at all. Samson’s story is about a man who was supposed to be totally set apart for God’s service, but who never completely gave himself to God. Oh, he toyed with following God, but he had a wandering eye, and every time a choice arose where he had to decide whether to follow God’s will or do his own thing, Samson almost always, in his pride and arrogance, did his own thing.
We first learn about who Samson is supposed to be before he is even born. Listen to Judges 13:2-5,
2 A certain man of Zorah, named Manoah, from the clan of the Danites, had a wife who was sterile and remained childless. 3 The angel of the Lord appeared to her and said, “You are sterile and childless, but you are going to conceive and have a son. 4 Now see to it that you drink no wine or other fermented drink and that you do not eat anything unclean, 5 because you will conceive and give birth to a son. No razor may be used on his head, because 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.”
Now you learn a lot about Samson in those verses. One of the main things you learn is about the lifestyle he is supposed to live. He is going to be a special man, a Nazirite. The Old Testament prescribed that a person who took a nazirite vow wasn’t supposed to drink alcohol, and they weren’t supposed to do anything that would make them ceremonially unclean like touch the dead body of a person or an animal. If they did there was a prescribed ritual that they had to go through to become ceremonially clean again. A nazirite also wasn’t supposed to have his hair cut. Those rules might sound strange to us, but they were a way to distinguish a person who was totally set apart to God’s service. Usually a nazirite vow was a temporary thing, something that a person did for a portion of their life. However, there were special cases when God determined that Israel needed a leader who would be dedicated in His service. When that time came, God would command that a man be set apart as a nazirite for life even before birth. John the Baptist and Samuel were two of those special people. Samson was another.
Because of Samson’s special responsibility to lead Israel as a warrior to overcome an occupation by the Philistines, God gave him enormous physical strength. Evidently, he didn’t look like a pro wrestler all bulked up on steroids, but he was so powerful that he could defeat enemies with his bare hands. One time he picked up the jawbone of a donkey and killed 1000 men with it. I’d like to see Steve Austin try to do that! But when you read about Samson’s life, in spite of His incredible potential as a leader set apart by God before birth, in spite of his special gift of miraculous strength, he never became what he could have been. Samson’s life is a textbook case study of unreached potential.
The reason was, Samson loved to flirt with the enemy. He was called by God to defeat the Philistines, these pagan people who lived in Israel’s Promised Land. It was his job to run them out of the Holy Land. But the Philistine lifestyle and culture captivated Samson. Now we have to understand a little background. The Philistines were a sea going people originally from Greece, who migrated to Palestine several hundred years before God gave the Promised Land to Israel. Sometimes when we think of the Philistines we only think of Goliath, a knuckle dragging, nine-foot tall thug. But that not a true picture of what the Philistines were like. They had a highly developed culture. The Philistines had built great cities, where there was a tremendous night-life to enjoy. Their women were sophisticated and beautiful. Not only that, they worshipped a pagan fertility god named Dagon, and part of their worship ritual was to have sexual relations with prostitutes.
In contrast to that, Samson’s people from the tribe of Dan were nomads. When God gave Israel the Promised Land, they never completely took their part of the land, so they were suffering the consequences. They were very poor, basically living as slaves under Philistine rule. They lived in the mountains. Their settlements were more like refugee camps than cities. Their homes were mostly tents. Not only that, but the worship that the God of Israel prescribed was much different from Dagon’s worship. God’s people were to be sexually pure.
Samson’s problem was that he preferred Philistine life to life among God’s people. So he married a Philistine, actually over his life he married a couple of Philistines, as well as engaging in sexual relations with the Philistine prostitutes. He hung out in the Philistine cities, enjoying the night-life and the sophistication of their culture. He was a mighty warrior and on a few occasions he used the strength that God gave him to defeat many Philistines, but He never became everything God had set him apart to be. Remember, as a child Samson was set apart as a Nazirite: no strong drink, no dead bodies, no razor to the head. Well, over the course of his life he had drunk plenty and he had killed so many people with his bare hands that they couldn’t even keep count any more. But the one thing he had maintained was that his hair had never been cut. It was a last vestige of his obedience to the vow he was supposed to maintain before God.
The Philistines were well aware of Samson’s power and position as a leader of Israel, so they offered a bribe to his wife Delilah to find out how he was so powerful. She snuggled up next to him and did her best to get him to tell her. He told her that a freshly made rope could bind him, then he told her that if his hair were braided he would become weak. Every time she learned that he had lied to her. Let me read to you from Judges 16:15-22 (NIV)
15 Then [Delilah] said to him, “How can you say, ‘I love you,’ when you won’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.” 16 With such nagging she prodded him day after day until he was tired to death.
17 So 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.”
18 When Delilah saw that he had told her everything, she sent word to the rulers of the Philistines, “Come back once more; he has told me everything.” So the rulers of the Philistines returned with the silver in their hands. 19 Having put him to sleep on her lap, she called a man to shave off the seven braids of his hair, and so began to subdue him. And his strength left him.
20 Then she called, “Samson, the Philistines are upon you!”
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.
21 Then the Philistines seized him, gouged out his eyes and took him down to Gaza. Binding him with bronze shackles, they set him to grinding in the prison.
What a tragic downfall for a person who had so much potential! A man set apart for God’s service, empowered by God with the gifts to lead His people and defeat the Philistines, winds up treading grain like an animal in the prison of the Philistines. (pause)
I tell you that story because it so perfectly describes what James wants us to understand in our passage from his letter. According to James the biggest problems that we face don’t come from outside sources. It’s not the world, or the devil or other people that hold us back from living the kind of life God wants for us. Petty conflict, unfulfilled hopes and desires, James says they are the direct result of our unwillingness to submit ourselves to God. According to James when we become like Samson, when we in our pride seek self-fulfillment over humble service, we wind up far from where God wants us to be. When we are self-consumed rather than God consumed, then we will never be everything God longs for us to be, and we will never achieve the potential that awaits us as children of God.
Text: James 4:1-10
It is perhaps one of the ugliest words in our language. It’s a sinister word with a dark cloud looming all around it. The word has such an evil connotation that our society has sugar coated it by using other words in its place. An affair, a sexual liaison, a tryst, there are all kinds of ways to get around using the word, but it doesn’t make the reality any less ugly. Adultery is nasty.
What makes the word adultery so ugly is not the sound it makes but the pain it represents. When you talk about adultery, you talk about a betrayal of trust at the highest level. Stealing, lying, coveting and all the other sins that the Ten Commandments prohibit cause much pain and certainly are evil, but the pain of adultery is more intense. It is the pain of someone who has placed themselves in a most vulnerable position, placed the most intimate portions of their life in the hands of another, only to have those precious things crushed by betrayal.
I wonder if you were offended when James pointed his bony finger at us and cried out “You adulterous people....” Certainly he could have been more tactful. Doesn’t he know that we’ve all made the grand sacrifice by coming out on this balmy August morning to go to church? Surely he’s forgotten that many of us have given our lives to Jesus! Perhaps he has failed to realize that we read our Bible’s when there is time and that we give an offering whenever we can afford to! If I didn’t know better, I’d think James must be talking to someone else. (Pause)
But I do know better. You and I both know who he is talking to, and we know all too well why he is coming down so hard. It is because we are adulterers, guilty of the most heinous of sins. We have taken the gestures of intimacy, the absolute faithfulness of one who loves us more than we can ever imagine and we have treated them as if they were insignificant. We’ve allowed our eyes to wander from the passion we once felt for God, and we have all too often been seduced into a relationship with the world that will only cause us grief and pain.
How many times do we get into a conflict with somebody, and rather than forgive and reconcile we nurture a grudge and avoid them all together?
How often, when we let our minds wander, do we fixate about the things we don’t have rather than giving thanks for the abundant blessings that God has poured into our lives?
How frequently do we borrow, buy and binge because our wants are more important to us than our obedience to the one who has called us to serve, love and be generous.
James has a word for those of us who act like that. He calls us adulterers. We have let our eyes wander, we have been seduced into believing like Samson that we can do our own thing, live our lives as we please and somehow God will lag along and bail us out when we get in a mess. Samson learned the hard way the truth that James quotes in verse 6, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
You know, those words cut both ways. On the one hand they are a warning for those who are proud, “You don’t want to be opposed by God.” On the other hand, they are a tremen-dous promise to the humble. God always gives grace to the humble who come to Him recognizing their failure and repenting of their pride. As the group sang earlier, “Great Is His Faithfulness.” Even for us adulterers, God is always faithful.
I have to admit, I didn’t tell you the whole story of Samson. Judges 16:22-30 22 But the hair on his head began to grow again after it had been shaved.
23 Now the rulers of the Philistines assembled to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon their god and to celebrate, saying, “Our god has delivered Samson, our enemy, into our hands.”
24 When the people saw him, they praised their god, saying, “Our god has delivered our enemy into our hands, the one who laid waste our land and multiplied our slain.”
25 While they were in high spirits, they shouted, “Bring out Samson to entertain us.” So they called Samson out of the prison, and he performed for them. When they stood him among the pillars, 26 Samson said to the servant who held his hand, “Put me where I can feel the pillars that support the temple, so that I may lean against them.” 27 Now the temple was crowded with men and women; all the rulers of the Philistines were there, and on the roof were about three thousand men and women watching Samson perform. 28 Then Samson prayed to the Lord, “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.” 29 Then Samson reached toward the two central pillars on which the temple stood. Bracing himself against them, his right hand on the one and his left hand on the other, 30 Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines!” Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Thus he killed many more when he died than while he lived.
You remember that passage I read earlier about Samson’s purpose in life. He was set apart to God’s service with his Nazirite vow for the purpose of leading the nation of Israel to victory over the Philistines. That last sentence is very important. It was only when Samson was willing to die to His own needs that He accomplished what God had set for Him to do. Unfortunately, it took God leaving him to suffer the consequences of His actions before He was willing to give himself fully to God.
What will it take for you to be humbled enough to give yourself fully to God? James is warning you to avoid the adultery in your lives by giving ourselves obediently over to the one who loves you enough to die on a cross. His words in verses 7-10 are both a challenge and a promise to anyone who will hear and obey them. Let me conclude the message with them. (Read James 4:7-10)
