Samson
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.
Today we’re talking about Samson, the extremely conflicted individual who God used to deliver Israel, which was an extremely conflicted nation at the time, right Greg?
Yeah. Let me read something I wrote along these lines and see how this stands.
Imagine two Hebrews, two men of Judah, meeting at a well or something and looking out over the hills and saying something like this. “So, we have 3,000 men.”
“So we take our resistance leader with our 3,000 and hand him over to the enemy’s 1,000. Is that right?”
“Hmm. And you don’t suppose anyone has thought about taking on the enemy directly, since we do outnumber them 3:1?”
“Right. So we grab Samson, turn him over to the Philistines and graciously bow out.”
“It’s not ideal for Samson, of course, but we wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t stirred up so much trouble.”
“You’d think the Lord’s Messiah would get the whole ‘go along to get along’ thing.”
Something tells me that ‘go along to get along’ is not the chosen path of the Lord’s Messiah.
You know, sometimes we have trouble understanding the Messiah. We have our preconceived notions of how this whole thing is going to work, and sometimes upsetting the status quo – well, think of Egypt and Israel and Moses.
“Why have you brought us out into the wilderness to kill us with hunger? It were better if we had abided still in Egypt.”
And when Jesus comes along in our lives – “But yeah, I know I asked for God’s help, but I didn’t know it would be so inconvenient and demand so much of me and I’d lose friends and my job might be on the line. I mean I just wanted a little bit of help.”
God is not at our beck and call. God is not our psychologist, our mechanic, our handyman, our woman who comes in once a week to help with the chores. He comes as God and king, and that was something that Israel in these days was having a hard time with.
We’re back about the same time as Jephthah, so we’re nearing the end of the 300-year cycle of judges. Jephthah is doing his thing up north, and while we read about Jephthah we don’t hear much about Judah and the southern part because they had their own issues, and their issues were this tribe called the Philistines, a tribe descended from the Egyptians.
The Philistines gave their name to the land, Palestine. They weren’t exactly Canaanites so they didn’t fall under the ban that the Canaanites did, but they were definitely enemies and they spent a good deal of time harassing and eventually oppressing Israel.
Yeah, they were descended from Egyptians, and that’s something to keep in mind as we continue on in Judges and then on into Samuel. When we see Philistines we should think Egyptian outpost, so we’re sort of fighting that whole battle over again.
The thing is, at this point the Philistines seem to have been a kindler gentler form of Egyptian. They weren’t as oppressive as the Moabites and the Ammonites and the Canaanites. I mean, ya know, so they disarmed you completely, so they no doubt demanded heavy taxes, but they didn’t come in and take all your food. They didn’t beat you up on the roadway, apparently, as normal. They let you have a militia; it just couldn’t exactly be armed. And after a while, it just seems like this is the way things have always gone, when they’d been going this way for 40 years. So for 40 years, Judah gets used to this.
Let’s see, 40 years ago was 1981. I think about some of the government bureaucracies that were put in place in the ‘70s or ‘80s, and no one can imagine life without them anymore, like the Department of Education. That was only 1973 or something.
I was talking to my kids at school about when I was their age in high school. The whole homosexual agenda was like a fantasy page out of some obscure newspaper that no one read. No one talked about that. I mean, people knew homosexuality was a thing, and there were one or two late-night shows.
I remember the first one that actually had a homosexual character for the first time on TV late at night, but that was the presence of the thing. It just wasn’t. It was still something people made jokes about and didn’t take too seriously. It was like because, yeah, they’re weird and Christians would say that’s really a bad sin, but it’s so marginal, so fringe. Why are you even worrying about this?
You said 1981? That was my first year of teaching, the year I graduated and the year I started teaching, so 40 years is a long time. It was a long time for Israel to be in the wilderness, and it was a long time between Christ’s ascension and the destruction of Jerusalem. It’s a long time for David to reign. We see 40 show up a lot, and 40-year periods show up a lot, and they’re usually times of testing, when God is preparing his people to take dominion back. As we look at this 40-year period, it doesn’t look like it’s working, so God intervenes miraculously.
It wasn’t particularly my purpose to talk about Samson’s miraculous birth, but his mother was a barren woman and an angel appears and announces all of this and puts Samson from the womb under the Nazarite vow, which means he’s going to be a holy warrior before God. The angel says he’s going to begin to deliver Israel from the Philistines. If anyone wants to, we can talk about that incident. We can talk about what a Nazarite is and does.
Probably the one thing for our story though is, as most of us know, Nazarites were not to cut their hair until they were done. Then they would cut their hair and they would offer that hair to God. All the hair that grew during their work and service they turned back to God to glorify him.
Someone once asked my brother, who had long hair in high school, if he had taken a Walter-ite vow (his name is Walter).
I don’t know how you respond to that. I don’t think he knew how to respond to that.
“Heh heh, I see what you did there.” In my generation was when growing your hair long was just becoming a thing – “Well, Samson had long hair.”
Or grapes or wine. These were things that went with the vow because you’re setting aside the blessings of the covenant to dedicate yourself to some form of warfare. It may be spiritual and doctrinal. It might be preaching. John the Baptist comes to mind. Or it may be on the battlefield, as it was with Samson. Anyway, he’s from the tribe of Dan, and from a very early age he begins to get involved in all this. We’re told –
And the Spirit of the Lord began to move him at times in the camp of Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol.
So he’s the Lord’s Messiah. He’s a judge. He’s appointed by the angel of the Lord. The Holy Spirit is on him, so all of this is really good, but it shifts immediately – because remember there’s no chapter breaks in the original – and goes from the Spirit of God moving him to…
And Samson went down to Timnath and saw a woman in Timnath of the daughters of the Philistines.
It’s easy to look at this and say, “But wait. She’s a pagan. We’re never supposed to be married to pagans. He’s obviously out of line, and he has problems with his eyes and with girls all the way through,” and that’s true to a point.
If they became not a pagan, and we can think of Boaz and Ruth, or Rahab’s husband, whose name escapes me at the moment, so it was not an impossibility and that seems here to be the question. The Lord’s Messiah is turning to a Gentile potential bride and saying, “Will you marry me and stand by me and be my partner and trust me to protect you from your own people?” God and Samson both are looking for opportunities, and here’s our phrase for tonight, to push the antithesis.
So antithesis, for those of you who do not recognize the word, it’s anti-thesis. It was a word that Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian/philosopher/educator/prime minister/journalist made popular, and it’s traditionally been popular since the late 1800s in Reformed theology. It means that from the time that God said, “I’m putting enmity between you and the woman,” there has in fact been enmity, warfare between Satan and all that the promised seed stands for.
It’s not just a theological battle. It is a cultural battle. It’s a religious battle. It’s a battle of civilization, thought forms, and everything else. In every place, the world is at odds and at war with Jesus.
The temptation is for always to soften that antithesis, to say, “Well, I’m a real Christian but I don’t see why I can’t do this, because everyone’s doing it and the Bible doesn’t actually speak about this at all.” Yeah, it actually does. Now, whether or not it says anything relevant to your concerns is another question, of course. But as Kuyper would say, there’s not a square inch in all of time and space of which Jesus does not say, “It’s mine.” We are called as Christians to discern his claims on everything.
Some things are easy, like sexuality. He invented this thing called marriage and he set its parameters and it’s between one man and one woman. It’s supposed to be for life, and there are job descriptions that go with it. We don’t get to reinvent it or manufacture Marriage 1.2 or whatever. We take it as is, and so on throughout life.
There are many things where God has set specific boundaries in his Word, and there are other things where the thing itself is sort of up for grabs, but the question is how will you do it. Will you do it in faith to God’s glory, obeying all of his laws?
You can make a movie. Movies are a potential in the creation. What are you going to do with them? Are you going to recognize that we are not to either practice, condone, or promote things like blasphemy, murder, adultery, or false witness? Or are we going to say, “But it’s a movie, it doesn’t matter. There’s a common ground where Jesus can kind of step aside and back off because this is just a cultural thing and the gospel doesn’t speak to it.”
But it seems to elevate art like, “Oh, but we can all agree about this. This is an important thing.” But then it’s like, “But wait, it’s so unimportant that Jesus doesn’t care what you put in it? Hmm.”
You speak of common ground and neutral things that we exalt, like mathematics. Think of the Enlightenment or physics. The world keeps trying to find things and telling us, “This is neutral ground. This is neither black nor white. Christian and non-Christians can both work here,” and there’s a sense in which that’s true, in that it is objectively God’s world because God objectively made it and it objectively honors and glorifies him and is upheld by his providence moment-by-moment, and therefore is objectively and subjectively subject to his Word. So given that, yeah, welcome to our Father’s world and territory.
Now, you want to help but understand that in your unbelief that is going to be a little problematic? Oh, you want me to come over and serve your idol? Yeah, that’s going to be more than problematic. So now let’s decide who the producer of this film really is.
These are the kinds of things. It can be in very personal and private matters of the heart. It can be in very public cultural matters. As we wander through this, we’re going to see that this seems to be something that Judah was facing at the time.
“Yeah, well, the Philistines really shouldn’t be in control, but it’s not that bad. It’s not like they’re really hurting us, and we can still worship and serve God. I’m sure God will deal with it someday, somehow, some way, but let’s not stir up trouble. Let’s not point out that the Philistines are wicked, idolatrous, and enemies of God, because that’s not polite. A lot of them are really nice people.”
Samson gets thrown into the mix to stir up trouble. We are told that with regard to this whole asking for a Gentile wife thing –
But his father and his mother knew not that it was of the Lord, that he sought an occasion against the Philistines.
The question is who is ‘he’? The immediate antecedent would be the Lord, and that’s probably what it means, but it could conceivably mean that this was self-conscious on Samson’s part. Whether God pushed Samson into this, and whether or not Samson understood it or not, the fact is that God was stirring up the antithesis.
God was saying, “You’re way too comfortable here, compromised under an oppressive Gentile power where you’re not living out your faith consistently the way I want you to. So let’s bring everybody together, put them in the same room, the same bedroom, and see how kind and nice and sweet and gentle these people really are.”
Well, it never gets as far as the bedroom. Samson goes down, and you know the story. A lion comes up and roars at him, and the Spirit of the Lord comes upon him and he tears the lion in half. No, he does not have big bulging muscles, despite all the Sunday School pictures, because later on the Philistines will look at the guy and say, “Where is his power coming from?”
This is confusing to me because as soon as he tears apart the lion, the lion is a dead body, which he’s not supposed to be touching.
Right, and this comes up again later on with the jawbone of an ass. Nazarites could fight in battles, and at first blush that’s like, “Wait. Does that mean they can only bruise people?”
Apparently they were allowed to fight in battle, but when the battle was over they had to disassociate themselves from death rather quickly. Thus, Samson later on in the middle of a battle picks up a bone, which is unclean – the jawbone of an ass, really unclean – and uses it as a weapon, but as soon as the battle is over he tosses it far away from himself, so the issue is not that as such.
But he leaves the lion’s carcass, and when he comes back he finds that some bees have created a honeycomb in it and there’s honey, and he uses a stick to poke into it and bring out some honey and shares it with his parents. So now the next question. Is this compromise?
It’s touching a dead body, but he didn’t touch the dead body. How close is too close? How critical are we supposed to be? Do we want other people to be as critical of us as we are of Samson? Let’s be careful.
Yeah, it’s easy to be critical of Samson. He’s been dead for thousands of years. Well, some day you’re going to look him in the eye in heaven and say, “Yeah, I thought you were such a jerk.”
And it’s interesting that God does not really comment on it. He just tells us that it happens. So he and the parents arrange the marriage. They said, “Is there not a good Jewish girl around you could marry?”
“No, I like her,” and he’s the Lord’s Messiah, so cutting him some slack we can say, “Well, maybe he does understand what God’s doing. God is going to stir up some trouble,” so they have a big party.
That’s a real question. We would like all of this to be black and white. The only thing we know going into it is we’re told the Spirit of God is upon him and moves him regularly. During this whole thing, the Spirit of God comes upon him very powerfully in a couple occasions.
So does this mean that he is cutting corners but God does not abandon him? That’s good news for us. Does it mean that sometimes in serving God, what may look like cutting corners to other people is in fact the very thing we should be doing. We’ve seen a good sample of that in Judges and we’ll see it in the life of Samuel and David as well, and even in the life of our Lord.
“You could have healed them on Friday or Sunday. Why’d you have to do it on Saturday, the Sabbath, and stir up all that trouble?”
Anyhow, so the girl’s father throws a big party and drafts 30 young men to act as his ushers, groomsmen, whatever, because he has no friends in Philistine-land, and he comes up with a riddle, which was a thing in those days. Something about Samson – he’s always kind of funny/peculiar, and kind of funny/ha-ha too – so he challenged them.
The feast lasted for a week. Wedding feasts often did. “If you can answer the riddle before the feast runs out, then I will give you 30 changes of clothes. But if you can’t get it, you give them to me.” The odds favor them, because each one of them will lose at most the price of a single change of clothes. He’s going to have to come up with 30 if he loses.
Right away they go after the girl and begin asking the girl, “What’s this riddle about?” because the riddle is this.
Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.
No. The thing is, because it is the Messiah who speaks, its answer must be sought after the Spirit. If you just try to list down all the things that there are, you’re going to miss it. We assume parallelism, because that’s the one clue, so presumably the eater is strong and the meat or food is sweet. Now, had they noticed or heard or looked around their borders, they would have found this dead lion torn in two. As you said before, random lions were a thing, so they might get that.
The question, if you’re thinking spiritually rather than “What’s the clever twist?” it’s not as difficult as it might seem. We still have the proverb “strong as a lion.” What actually is stronger than a lion? The Lord’s Messiah, and he just proved it. What is sweeter than honey? The psalmist will tell us the law of God is sweeter than the honeycomb.
Spiritual discernment would have gotten them there, but without that it just sounds like “blah blah blah blah,” so they go after the girl and try to get her to reveal it, but she doesn’t know the answer and she begins leaning upon Samson, trying to get him to tell her, and he puts her off. “I haven’t even told my parents. Am I going to tell you?” which does not sound very husbandly, somehow.
It goes on, and the last day the groomsmen come back and really lean on the woman and basically say, “We’re going to burn down your father’s house if you don’t find this, because we can’t afford this,” so she leans heavily on Samson.
Thou dost but hate me and lovest me not. Thou hast put forth a riddle unto the children of my people, and hast not told it me.
And it came to pass on the seventh day that he told her, because she lay sore upon him.
Yeah, cows. But just when you think, “Okay, we’re bottoming out here,” the Spirit of the Lord comes upon him and he goes down to the nearby city of Ashkelon, a Philistine city, kills 30 men, takes their stuff and hands it over to his groomsmen in payment of the debt.
The logic here is pretty good for a judge – an eye for an eye. “They won the riddle by information that wasn’t theirs, so I will pay my debt with clothes that aren’t mine,” but he killed people. It’s war. He’s the Messiah, but he’s so upset about this that he just walks off and leaves the girl, which is a mistake, because the Philistines come back. Actually, he comes back after a while and finds out that girl’s father has given her to somebody else.
I verily thought that thou hadst utterly hated her; therefore I gave her to thy companion.
But he came back assuming that they were married and that what needed to happen was consummation, so Samson’s looking upon it as an unconsummated betrothal, and the father is looking on it as abandonment. Samson does not blame the father, but he does blame the Philistines for creating this mess, and in his mind they have deprived him of children, of seed. So again with an ‘eye for an eye’ mentality, “If they’re going to take away my seed, I’m going to burn down their seed.” So in the traditional Samson-esque way he goes out and captures 300 foxes or jackals.
Somehow he went and got foxes. I’m reminded of Solomon’s warning of “the little foxes that spoil the vines” with regard to the things that can mess up a marriage. Well, they’ve messed up his marriage.
It is shady. He takes them and he turns them tail to tail, so he ties their tails up apparently, and sticks a firebrand in-between said tails, and then lights the firebrand. He must have them in a bag or pen or something, and two by two he pulls them out, ties up the tails, sticks in the firebrand, lights the firebrand, and then throws them out into the standing corn.
They of course are terrified to have fire at their rear, so they’re trying to pull in opposite directions at the same time, so they’re just going crazy. The SPCA should be after Samson for this.
So obviously it’s the father’s fault and the girl’s fault, so they go burn them down. They burn down the house and kill them.
Though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged of you, and after that I will cease.
The metaphor seems to mean with great confusion. We use the phrase ‘head over heels,’ which is weird because actually your heels are over your head, but it’s that kind of thing.
So there’s this great slaughter, and he goes up and escapes to some kind of out-jutting rock. Then the Philistines go – and this is in the territory of Judah, so they’ve invaded with armed force now, which apparently is not what they normally have been doing. They’ve kind of left Judah alone, but now Samson stirred up trouble. They’re bringing their armies in, and apparently they’re bringing in about 1,000 men, and they send word to Judah, “Bring Samson to us.”
So Judah calls together its militia, probably unarmed because later we find out that the Philistines have made a big deal about disarming Israel, but you know, you have rocks and clubs and sticks. So we have 3,000 men of Judah coming up to Samson, and this is what they say –
Knowest thou not that the Philistines are rulers over us? What is this that thou hast done unto us?
“Um, I’m the resistance leader. I’m the war leader. I’m the judge. I’m the Messiah. It’s kind of my job description to stir up trouble and get these guys out of here.”
“So you’re telling me that you’re loyal to God’s enemies. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yeah, they’re the rulers and we shouldn’t mess with rulers. We should just submit and God will take care of it someday by sending us…well, you know, somebody somehow. He’ll wipe them out when it’s his time, but meanwhile you can’t be stirring up trouble, pal. We appreciate your good intentions, but this is just so out of line.”
In Samson’s mind he’s still acting the judge – eye for an eye. “They took away my seed. I took away theirs. My wife they valued at 30 changes of clothes, so 5-fold restitution, so 150. I came up with 150 pairs of foxes to take away their seed. See, it works neat that way, kind of. Get it?”
We are come down to bind thee, that we may deliver thee into the hand of the Philistines.
It’s nice of them to announce their intentions. “Come put your hands right here. We’re going to tie you up.” Samson said –
And Samson said unto them, Swear unto me that ye will not fall upon me yourselves. And they spake unto him, saying, No.
But we’ll just bind thee fast and deliver then into their hands, but surely we will not kill thee.
“We’re just going to tie you up so you can’t possibly escape, and hand you over to your mortal enemies, but we won’t kill you ourselves. We’ll let them do it.”
And he says “Alright,” and they bind him. And as he’s brought to them, the Philistines shout against him, sort of the way the lion had roared against him earlier. By the way, think of a lion on the border of Egypt. There’s one made of stone.
The cords that were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire, and his bands loosed from off his hands. And he found a new jawbone of an ass…
Maybe it has goop hanging from it or something – bugs crawling in it? Anyway, it’s gross. He puts forth his hand and takes it and uses it as a weapon. He took it and slew 1,000 men therewith, and as he does, he makes a little poem. In the King James it reads –
With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men.
One commentator, trying to get at the poetry of the thing, said, “With the jaw of an ass I’ve piled them in mass.” Another says, “With the jawbone of an ass – 1 ass, 2 ass, 3 ass – I’ve slain 1,000 – 4 ass, 5 ass – 1,000 men.”
Okay, but probably a lot of our listeners don’t. He was a heavyweight boxing champion of the United States, and I assume the world. He had a reputation for making little Dr. Seuss-worthy poems to put his enemies off-balance as he went into the ring. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of them memorized. I’m sure someone out there can correct me.
And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking, that he cast away the jawbone out of his hand.
So he gets rid of it. Then God miraculously provides water in that place, and he judges Israel 20 years. So he started this process. He’s begun to stir things up. He offered this Gentile girl the privilege of being Messiah’s bride, but rather than run to him and trusting him for his protection, she ran to her people and the result has been bloody and violent.
It’s made Judah very uncomfortable because now, although Samson didn’t die, they are the ones who put him in the hands of the enemy. And Samson continues doing something for a long time, 20 years – not the full 40, but 20 years.
At the end of that time, Samson does have a lust problem. He goes down to a Philistine city, Gaza, so he’s going to go down there and stir up some trouble, but he gets sidetracked. He sees a prostitute and goes and procures her services. There’s no way to excuse that one.
After 20 years, and there’s a warning there, I think, that is it possible to walk with God faithfully for a very long time, yet if you let your guard down and trust your track record, you could fall pretty badly and you can take a lot of people with you when you fall.
My eldest daughter just discovered Jimmy Swaggart’s record when she was looking up a particular song apparently he was associated with. Then I pointed out how Jimmy Swaggart got into this. There was this guy named Jim Baker, who himself had a TV ministry called PTL, who got into trouble because of his affair with the church secretary.
These were men the world thought were very holy. They were TV evangelists and they spoke out against sin. They spoke out against Reformed theology too, but you know. And they fell badly. We can never get to the point where we can assume, “I’ve walked with God for 20 years.” Well, Samson did, too. There’s no guarantee there.
But while he’s doing this, the men of Gaza say, “Ah, he’s there! When he comes out, let’s get him!” assuming he’s going to be there until the morning, because nobody travels at night and the gates are shut, so he’s going to wait till morning and when he comes out we’ll get him. Well, he gets up in the middle of the night and goes and takes the gate of the city, its doors, its posts, and carries them away and puts them on a nearby hill before Hebron.
Now, this is not to excuse his sin at all, but it is to point out something. The Lord’s Messiah had the power to tear down the gates of the enemy’s cities, at which point, one might hope, the Jewish militia would run in and take the city because its defenses just went away and are sitting over there on another hill someplace. They don’t.
And then, of course, we come to the story that everyone knows, his affair with Delilah, who may or may not have been a Philistine. We don’t know her background, but she had contacts with the Philistines, and the Philistines are, like the rest of the pagan world, very lost in a magical worldview. They assume that this is magic. “He’s got some magic secret. Find out what it is, tell us, and we’ll do the counter-magic and get rid of him and go back to life as normal.”
Delilah flirts with him, seduces him, tries to get him to give up his secret, and asks a number of times, “What’s going on here?” and he plays along, rather than realizing, “Why are you asking this? First, you are obviously not a believer. Whether you’re a stranger or a proselyte or whatever you are,” he’s lived with her long enough, or had an affair with her long enough to know, “You’re not a godly lady, and suddenly you’re all interested in why I have this great strength.”
He’s probably talked to her at least a little bit about his God. It would come up in normal conversation when you’re living in Israel. But rather than say, “There’s something suspicious here, and this is not something we can talk about. If we’re going to be friends you need to drop this. Or how about even better, I just leave because I’m obviously living a compromised life.”
But every time he makes a suggestion, she follows it. She binds him, binds his hair, whatever, and every time as he falls asleep beside her or on her knees, once she’s done the binding she yells out, “The Philistines are upon thee!” The truth is, there happened to actually be real Philistines nearby, but he never sees them because he wakes up and immediately breaks out of whatever trap she’s set, and this keeps happening.
How many times does this have to happen before you realize your girlfriend is up to no good? Every time you tell her, “Here is a trap that will destroy me,” she sets it and then pretends that she’s springing it and then just kind of laughs it off.
What is this pattern of giving away his secret to women who totally betray him with it? You’d think he’d have learned about this 20 years ago.
Good point. I actually had not made that connection. Shame on me. That’s an excellent question. Yeah, he didn’t learn 20 years ago and he hasn’t learned now.
So finally she cries and weeps and does the same thing. She says, “You don’t love me because you won’t tell me the truth.”
And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death…
Right? There’s a moment where it’s like, “Okay, so this could be a little teasing ha-ha running joke between the two of them,” but then no, he actually hates it. Why is he putting up with this?
Yeah, even in a compromised situation most men will say, “This is annoying. Stop it,” but he’s so besotted with her that he can’t even gather the strength to do that. This man who in the Spirit is so strong and powerful doesn’t have the moral strength to say, “Shut up, dear,” let alone the strength to walk away from her, so in the end he gives in. He tells her sort of the secret, because even his own interpretation is twisted.
That he told her all his heart, and said unto her, There hath not come a razor upon mine head; for I have been a Nazarite unto God from my mother's womb. If I be shaven, then my strength will go from me and I shall become weak and be like any other man.
Her questions have always presupposed some sort of magical approach to the universe, and he’s humored her. But now when the question is “Where does your strength come from?” he does not say, “My birth was ordained by God himself. I was made a Nazarite from the womb and given this job, and it is the Spirit of God who’s my strength.” He goes right for the hair.
I don’t know how many children and unlearned Christians and non-Christians, if you asked them, would not in fact say, “Oh yeah, he got his strength from his hair.” No, he didn’t. He got it from the Spirit of God. If someone had snuck up behind him in his sleep and shaved him, it would not have changed the Spirit’s presence. He’s walking by faith, or he has been, but even here his own thinking is confused. He’s treating this gift like it’s magic. He’s beginning to think like the Philistines.
Well, we all know the story. She calls in a barber and, while Samson is sleeping on her lap, the barber shaves his head and God, because Samson has broken his vow deliberately by betraying it, withdraws his presence. The Spirit of God had departed from him.
The Philistines take him, put out his eyes, bring him down to Gaza, bind him with fetters of brass, and they make him turn a grinding stone in a prison house. There’s a bit of irony here – kind of the ‘eye for an eye’ thing, because grinding is a figure of adultery in the book of Job.
There’s also the seed involved. Also, that’s normally what you would have an ass doing.
Again it’s easy to take that and say, “Oh look, the magic power is coming back. We took the kryptonite away, so Superman’s powers are returning!” That’s not what it’s saying. It’s saying that God’s mercies are new every morning. God makes hair grow. Samson didn’t make it grow.
There’s no telling what would have happened if they had gone out on a regular basis and shaved him. Given their magical worldview, they should have. If they really believed this was the source they were incredibly stupid, or maybe she never told them, just “He’s waking up. Go for it.”
They have a big celebration in the temple of Dagon, who was a fish god, a merman. They said –
Our god hath delivered Samson our enemy into our hand. And when the people saw him, they praised their god, for they said, Our god hath delivered into our hands our enemy and the destroyer of our country, which slew many of us.
And while this is going on, and they’re bringing him out and making sport of him, he gets a breather, apparently, and they set him between some of the pillars. Samson says to the little boy whose job it is to lead him around –
Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them.
So he’s allowed to do this while people are drunk and laughing and not paying attention.
Now the house was full of men and women and all the lords of the Philistines were there. And there were upon the roof about three thousand men and women that beheld while Samson made sport. And Samson called unto the Lord…
O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.
Two eyes, two pillars. Pillars hold up everything. Eyes are organs of dominion. There’s probably more to it than that, but that’s what comes to me quickly. So he pushes on the pillars, and the whole upper roof where everybody is comes tumbling down. As Samson does it he says –
Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might, and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.
Often my students and older folks too will ask, “Was this suicide? Was he out of God’s will here?” No, he’s a soldier on a battlefield, but it didn’t have to end like this. Had he been faithful, had he guarded his heart in what might seem a comparatively little thing, but it was a big thing to Samson, he could have eventually led Israel on the battlefield and he could have killed tens of thousands of the enemy, or routed them out of Judah altogether.
It was a great victory. He crushed their heads under the stones, very much a Messianic image, but he could have done more. God used him for this, and God accomplished what God wanted. He had said, “You will begin to deliver Israel,” and now with Samson dead, Samuel, Saul, and David will pick up the task.
After David’s time, the Philistines pretty much aren’t a threat anymore, but it takes a little while. So there we have it, and the writer of Hebrews lists him among the heroes of faith. His faith was real. When he died he went to glory.
Some people have said that Saul comes closest to being a tragedy among the characters of scripture. I wonder if maybe Samson isn’t, because there’s a victory here but at what cost? And the cost was so unnecessary, because what started this was, first, his fall to the prostitute, to his own lust, and then to Delilah, his own lust. He never got that under control.
I’m thinking now of David. David had much the same problem, and David’s solution was to multiply wives, which is a semi-legal way of satiating your lust perhaps. In some ways the difference is not that great, and yet Samson does not recover.
Samson is very much alone. He doesn’t really have friends. He doesn’t have a support network, as David did. He doesn’t have prophets pointing a bony finger in his face saying, “Thou art the man,” and there are dangers with playing the Lone Ranger. But there was no one else because Judah itself was horribly compromised and was very content with what it had, where it was, and content to be under the heel of the Philistines, so nobody here is exactly pushing the antithesis.
Samson did what he could for a while, and yet he failed in his personal life and that caused a huge cultural defeat, although with some cultural military victory attached. So it’s a sad story, a triumphant story, a mixed blessing.
It kind of drives home the point of all the judges and all the kings as well. You have these people stepping in to fill the role, but all of them fall short. We need a better judge. We need a better king.
One of our elders years and years ago – I had been teaching through Judges – asked me, “People have been coming up to me and saying, “After every one of these judges, everything just falls apart. How do you square this with your post-millennialism?” and my answer was really simple. It’s the answer you just gave. “They weren’t Jesus.” They were mere human sinners and their life is riddled with compromise and failure, and yet God uses them.
In Bible study last night we were going through Hebrews 11 and we saw God’s verdict upon these people, with all their flaws. God is well-pleased in them, a phrase he otherwise reserves for his son. They’re clothed in the righteousness of Christ. Yes, they have their failings, and sometimes those failings have huge historical consequences, and yet God is pleased in them and pleased to call them his own. There is great comfort for us in all that. At the same time, there’s warning.
History is a battlefield. There’s no neutral ground. We either follow the Lord’s Messiah into battle or we war against him. There are no other options. Abraham Kuyper used the word antithesis to drive home the nature and extent of the spiritual and cultural war that is history. Christ claims all of human life and culture as his own, but at every point Satan would deny him his dominion.
Jesus will win, and in fact he’s already won, but the implications of his victory still need to be worked out on earth and in history, so the battle continues and we must each choose our role.
As Calvinists sometimes – and I’ve seen this a lot, especially in young people who have not been trained well, but sometimes in older folk as well – we don’t want to talk about choosing Jesus, choosing a side. I’m sorry, you have to choose. This is a choice. True, until God regenerates you you’ll make the wrong choice, but you most certainly must choose. You must make a decision.
Yes, he sets our hearts free so we can choose the right thing, and we must choose. There’s nothing Arminian in that.
We may play Philistines, nice enough in our own way, but enemies of Yahweh and his kingdom. We may play the role of Israel and Judah, claiming God’s grace for eternity but cowing before the enemy in the broader battlefield of society and culture, betraying Christ for peace in our time. We may imitate Samson and win a few stunning victories in the cultural war, while we lose the war in our own hearts and our own families. As we’ve seen, this role is the most tragic.
Or we can be men and women after God’s own heart – a segue toward David. But first we have the two stories at the end of Judges that we need to look at, that continue the rather depressing tone of the book and tell us why we keep going through similar cycles until God intervenes.
Judges is odd because it keeps escalating to the very end. In so many biblical patterns the high point is in the middle, but this one never drops. It just keeps building and building and building.
Yeah, and that leads us right into Samuel, where a lot of the things that happened before we now see come out even more plainly, but we’ll talk about that when the time comes. But we have Ruth in the middle, which we’ll be getting to soon.
Yes. Courtesy of my wife and daughter, I have one. I kind of have to explain it, although you two will understand well enough.
In our literature classes at school we have something we call spots. It is not a contagious disease, and I don’t know where the word originally comes from, because it’s one that my own teacher, Dr. Powell, used when I was in school.
A spot is simply this. It’s a phrase, a maxim, a well-known quote from some piece of literature that we ask our students to memorize, along with the title and author, because they’re things that educated people once knew well.
Now, ideally what should happen is that we should read all of the books multiple times, become very familiar with them, and talk about them with everybody until these things just stick in our minds, you know, the way we watch movies. If I say, for instance, “I understood that reference…”
Yeah, Captain America, Avengers 2012 or whatever it is. We do that. “In all the gin joints in all the world…”
Right. We get those. Because we do that, we see movies over and over. We talk about them. People used to do that with books, so this thing of memorizing little fragments of literature is, after a fashion, cheating.
One young lady in college, when I explained to her, “You know, I haven’t actually read these books. I’ve just been taught about them,” she said, “Oh, you’re a charlatan.” That hurt.
And there’s some truth in it. I’ve tried to make up for that by reading a lot of the books since then, but I have not succeeded in all of them. Another writer, E.D. Hirsch, came up with a term he called cultural literacy. He even trademarked it. There’s a dictionary of cultural literacy and a book that introduces the topic.
The idea is that once upon a time, and even today, there are things that all educated people do because they were educated. There wasn’t a particular format for getting there. You read, you talked to smart educated people, and these were just things you learned over and over again, and they form the backdrop of our language. They put flesh on the bones of our grammar.
So if I say, “Big Brother is watching,” or “What, you want to live in Utopia?” or “Yeah, that looks like the grassy knoll,” people know what these things mean, at least an older generation would. In those little references we can build implications and connections and say, “Oh, you’re saying this is like this, but I know about this from the story and all of this goes with it.” That’s something the Bible itself does with itself. If we see a lady with a barren womb, as we do often, or we see a young girl at a well waiting, we begin to realize, “Oh, this is what’s about to happen.”
We call them spots, and I’m recommending the learning of spots. If you want you can email us and we’ll send you a list of some of our favorites, but there are ways of finding these things. I’m sure there’s some brilliant way on the internet, some key phrase you could stick in. “Popular sayings in English language.” Or you could go to Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy and go through the dictionary. He actually does have a section of quotations that would be useful.
This came to mind because today my daughter and Mr. French were listening to people who wanted to be in the music program. They got three.
So Mr. French was saying, “Do you think it would be okay to re-open auditions just for high school and junior high, in hopes of getting a few more? Or would that look like favoritism or something?” and my daughter Emily said, “My graced one is wrong to none.” Mr. French said, “I just quoted that to somebody the other day.”
They are valuable ways of looking at life, summing up life, communicating, and in this context I will, as a sub-recommendation, recommend the Star Trek episode Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, so that’s mine.
I did make at least one friend in college by referring to that Star Trek episode. C.S. Lewis says, “A friendship is born the moment someone says, ‘You too? I thought I was the only one.’”
We talk about C.S. Lewis all the time, and we talk about the Space Trilogy all the time, so I’m probably tripling down or quadrupling down on the recommendation of That Hideous Strength. Whenever we talk about antithesis I think about Cecil Dimble and his comments on how over time the world seems to become sharper. All the shades of gray become not more defined as gray, but more defined as closer to black and white. And over time, things becoming clearer mean more clearly opposed to their opposites.
I think we’ve seen that in this account of Samson. We’ve seen it in the news lately. I’ve been following the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, and it rings truer every year. So That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis.
I have several I could recommend, but the two books that I’m currently reading I’m not far enough into to completely recommend, except for one of them, which I already know is going to be delightful, so I’ll just start with that one anyway. This is a half-recommendation because I’m only three chapters in. It’s James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small.
It’s the most wholesomely written narration I’ve ever encountered. It is so quaint and British, I just want to read it forever.
Yes, and you get to the end of it and you’re like, “Oh, thank goodness there are five more,” or however many there are.
That is good news. I’ve been reading it out loud to my wife while she works on one of her puzzles or something, because it helps her focus, so I’ve been doing voices. The opening chapter has a nosy uncle and in the narration he’s just called Uncle, so I’ve given him a slightly chubby-sounding country English accent. He talks all about Mr. Broomfield, who’s an excellent veterinarian, don’t you know, and all that. So that’s my first one. I’m sure it’s going to be delightful. It’s just I can’t say that it is, based on what I’ve read of it.
That’s what I’ve been told as well. My wife watched it a whole bunch growing up, I think.
That was the one with the actor who knows about medieval weaponry – Hardy.
I remember I called him by the wrong name last time I mentioned him on the podcast. There’s another actor whose last name is Hardy, so I’m not going to pretend I know his first name.
The second thing, which is my more full-throated recommendation, is there’s a Japanese word called tsundoku, and I think it literally means ‘reading pile’ in practical usage, but it commonly is used as ‘the act of buying books and never reading them.’ I’m going to recommend you do the opposite of that, which is to actually read the books that you own, which is a project I undertook starting in the summer of last year.
I was like, “I have almost 300 books on my shelf, and I have read 25% of them.” I counted and did the math to figure out what percentage I had read, and it was 1 out of 4, so I started reading more of them. It was like, “Oh, this has been sitting on my shelf,” some of them for as long as seven years, and I finally read it in 2020 or 2021 and it was great and I’m sad I didn’t read it before this recent timestamp. So that’s my recommendation, is to actually read books that you own.
Thank you, guys, both so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.
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