Samson, Who Judged Israel Twenty Years

21The Philistines laid hold on him, and put out his eyes; and they brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he ground at the mill in the prison. 22However the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaved. 23The lords of the Philistines gathered them together to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon their god, and to rejoice; for they said, “Our god has delivered Samson our enemy into our hand.” 24When the people saw him, they praised their god; for they said, “Our god has delivered our enemy and the destroyer of our country, who has slain many of us, into our hand.” 25When their hearts were merry, they said, “Call for Samson, that he may entertain us.” They called for Samson out of the prison; and he performed before them. They set him between the pillars; 26and Samson said to the boy who held him by the hand, “Allow me to feel the pillars whereupon the house rests, that I may lean on them.” 27Now the house was full of men and women; and all the lords of the Philistines were there; and there were on the roof about three thousand men and women, who saw while Samson performed. 28Samson called to Yahweh, and said, “Lord Yahweh, remember me, please, and strengthen me, please, only this once, God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.”

Suppose that one day God asked whether you could live for him alone for the next twenty years. How would you answer? And suppose he did not simply leave you to find your own way, but told you everything: the work to be done, its purpose, the plan, and even where each of your choices would lead. Could you live by faith for those twenty years?

God has called us and told us all of it: the work his people are to do, the purpose behind it, his plan, and what will come of it. Like a parent who holds nothing back from a child, he protects us, and he has told us why we must take up our calling and where we will arrive on the last day. If we still live as we please, the judgment we receive on that day will be ours alone to bear.

How much time do you have left as one of God’s own? God will ask whether you have been faithful in the office he entrusted to you as his child, and he will certainly ask what you did with the twenty years he gave you. When we meet God, we may plead that the world was in turmoil, that we were busy eating sweet honey, or that someone led us astray, and that this is why we did not do the work. None of it will stand as an excuse, because he has already told us everything. Whether you are commended as a good servant, or told that he does not know you and that you are to be cast into the darkness, will be settled right there, according to how you have lived.

Even so, we do not change our thinking, and we fail to live as his people should. Sadder still, none of us knows when the last day will come. We must therefore live as though today were that day; only then can we receive a salvation we need not be ashamed of when we see God face to face. Rather than assuming that our own thinking is right and our decisions the soundest, we must have the breadth of heart and the wisdom to examine ourselves.

People are poor at criticizing themselves, so they seldom change their minds even when shown sound evidence, and changing the way they think about spiritual things is harder still. When they hear a judgment or opinion that differs from their own, they act as though they agree; once they have turned away, they feel criticized and grow resentful. Even with the word, they want to hear only what suits their convictions and discard whatever rebukes them, and this keeps them from maturing. The wise are different. When they hear what others think and how others judge, they look at their own view and the other person’s coolly, as a third party would, and that is what allows them to reach sounder decisions.

Yet people take any counsel offered to them as an attack, and on matters they have settled for themselves, the frame of their thinking hardly moves. This is folly. If they treated other people’s thoughts and decisions as a chance to make up for what they themselves lack, they could take a better course. They know full well that their thinking is stubborn and wrong, yet they will not change it, and as a result they make even those around them unhappy and cannot live in harmony with them.

Samson is now trapped in a frame of his own making. Locked in the belief that the Philistines could not be attacked without him, he had lost even the capacity to judge his own wrong conduct. It is true that God meant to defeat the Philistines through Samson. But God would work with him only if he lived as a Nazirite and as a judge.

Samson’s spiritual condition, however, has sunk so low that God cannot use him as his instrument; worse, he is obstructing God’s work. Samson is deplorable here: he shifts the blame for his evil deeds onto the Philistines and insists that he himself is not at fault at all. He would not let go of the idea that his attacks on the Philistines were no fault of his, that everything he did, he did for Judah. He justifies himself and evades responsibility.

God’s good purpose can be revealed only when the judge is someone who takes responsibility for whatever trouble arises, and Samson takes none. People like this cannot live in community. We are meant to trust one another, work together, and serve one another; but because such people refuse to answer for anything, nothing can be entrusted to them. The same holds in the affairs of the world, but in God’s work, refusing to take responsibility never means escaping it. Since the sin born of that trouble remains, it gives birth to yet another sin.

Had Samson repented before God of the wrong he did in marrying a Philistine woman, God would certainly have forgiven him and given him wisdom for living. Then his wife and his father-in-law would not have died, and there would have been no quarrel with the Philistines. Instead, Samson kept using the strength God had given him for revenge. Vengeance called forth vengeance: when Samson slaughtered the Philistines in great numbers, they were enraged and attacked Judah to capture him.

Judges 15:11

11Then three thousand men of Judah went down to the cave in Etam’s rock, and said to Samson, “Don’t you know that the Philistines are rulers over us? What then is this that you have done to us?” He said to them, “As they did to me, so I have done to them.”

If Samson had truly attacked the Philistines according to God’s will, he would have had no reason to hide. He should have boldly told the men of Judah what God willed and, as their judge, joined forces with them. Because he lived a merely human life instead, his own people abandoned him.

When his father-in-law told him that his wife had been given to another man, Samson could not master his temper. He caught three hundred foxes, tied torches to their tails, drove them into the fields, and burned up the grain, the vineyards, and the olive groves. It is hard enough to forgive the judge of a nation for breaking God’s word; but he went on to blame others for it and handed the Philistines a pretext to attack. When the Philistines learned why Samson had done this, and heard that the loss of all their grain and fruit could be laid at the door of his father-in-law and his wife, they killed the two of them. On hearing that his wife and father-in-law were dead, Samson vowed a still greater revenge and repeated his folly, killing far more people.

Having heard the whole story from the Philistines, the men of Judah had to decide whether to hand over Samson, their judge, or to declare war to protect him. Had Samson lived for Judah, they would have protected him even at the cost of their lives. Sadly, without a second thought, the men of Judah bound Samson and handed him over to the Philistines.

Judah was clearly wrong to give up its judge so easily. Afraid of what might happen to them, they did not even ask Samson why he had done these things, nor did they pray and ask God whether they might hand over the judge. Out of fear of the Philistines who ruled them, Judah delivered Samson into the hands of his enemies.

Because no one in this situation takes responsibility, the trouble keeps spreading. With no one willing to answer for it, vengeance followed vengeance until the moment Samson died, as we know from the way the story ends.

When Judah bound Samson and handed him over, he must have been in despair, because it seemed so unjust that they would give him up instead of protecting him when, in his mind, every attack on the Philistines had been to save Judah. Samson had not matured as a judge, and his thinking stopped there; God could not undertake great things with such a man.

The Philistines, on the other hand, had always been on the losing end with Samson, and when they saw him brought to them in bonds, they shouted for joy. But their cheering was short-lived: Samson snapped the ropes that held him as if they were nothing. How dumbfounded the Philistines must have been when those ropes gave way! Furious, his hands now free, Samson again carried out a massacre and killed a thousand men. Here was a man who could summon his strength whenever he wished. Why could he not live any better than this? Had he lived a little more wisely, he could have brought glory to God’s name.

If Samson had grown humbly and patiently, building up strength until he and the people could stand against the Philistines together as their judge, his strength would have shone all the more. Facing an enemy with the Philistines’ military might called for building strength over time, even while suffering at their hands. A man with the strength to kill a thousand with his bare hands ought to have used it to set the nation right; but he lived as he pleased, and disgrace was the result. Had Samson worked for his nation, his own people would never have cast him off. He had received such great grace. If only he had been a prudent man, he would have defeated the Philistines as God planned and set Judah free.

Unless Samson turns from his wrongs, he will only go on committing the same sin.

Judges 16:19

19She made him sleep on her knees; and she called for a man, and shaved off the seven locks of his head; and she began to afflict him, and his strength went from him.

Betrayed by his wife, abandoned by the men of Judah, lashing out at the Philistines in anger, Samson still did not come to his senses. God kept him safe to the very end, but Samson threw away even the grace of God.

Once God takes his children into his arms, his love for them does not change. But Samson could not break his bad habits, and once again he fell in love, this time with Delilah, a prostitute who lived in the valley of Sorek, not far from Judah. Her name is said to mean lustful or weak, and she is thought to have been a woman of Judah who had already been married to a Philistine. When the Philistines saw that Samson loved this lewd woman, they set out to take their revenge: they promised Delilah eleven hundred pieces of silver if she would tell them where his strength came from. In those days a shekel of silver was four days’ wages for an ordinary laborer; with that in mind, eleven hundred pieces of silver was more than she could have saved in ten years, even if she spent none of it. As a prostitute, Delilah had no reason to turn down such a sum.

Delilah asked Samson where his great strength came from and how he might be subdued. The question sounds strange the moment one hears it, but Samson paid it no mind. When she pleaded with him, he told her that if he were bound with seven green cords that had never been dried, he could be overpowered. Hearing this, the lords of the Philistines gave the woman seven green cords that had never been dried and lay in wait with her in the room to seize Samson, but the cords snapped all too easily.

A question arises here. The woman he met in Timnah, and now Delilah, were both in league with the Philistines, digging for his secret. Why does Samson, a man of God, keep falling for the same trick? It is because even those who belong to God lose their wisdom once greed and lust take hold of them. Without the wisdom God gives, Samson fails to see through Delilah’s cunning scheme at all, just as he ate that honey without the slightest sense of guilt.

Turning the tables, Delilah demanded to know why he had mocked her and why he had told her lies. Philistines sat waiting in the inner room, and the woman kept pressing him for the secret of his strength, yet Samson, blinded by his love for Delilah, had lost all judgment. Every one of us needs the habit, at least now and then, of weighing and questioning our own thinking. Yet people believe their judgment is always right and exact, and they trust in their own strength and ability; so in the end they do as they please.

When Delilah kept nagging him, Samson teased her, saying that new ropes no one had ever used would hold him, or that she could weave seven locks of his hair into the web on the loom. This came from the pride of a man sure that no one could ever capture him. A judge doing God’s work was making a game of God’s grace with a wicked woman bent on prying out his secret. He should have recognized the true intent of the woman who tormented him so relentlessly and left her. But Samson was bound by lust, and her urging troubled his soul to the point of death. Having already left God, he lacked even the most basic conscience by which a heart is kept upright.

Delilah, for her part, had kept Samson so captive to the pleasures of the flesh that he could think of nothing else; she knew he would not leave her however much she pestered him for his secret. Satan knows when the hearts of God’s people waver, and he knows exactly where to strike to make them fall. That is why we must not trust ourselves, but must always set the word of God as our standard and test our thoughts and judgments by it.

Torn by bitter conflict and anguish, and gripped by the foolish fear that he might lose Delilah, Samson at last poured out his secret. He confessed that he had been a Nazirite to God from his mother’s womb, and for that reason no razor had ever come on his head; if his head were shaved, his strength would leave him.

Had Samson been beside me as I read this passage, I would have shouted at him to come to his senses, for now he had truly forsaken God: the God who had protected him through every foolish thing he did, the God who had helped him even when he made choices no judge should ever make. We too may stumble, even fall, as we live in this world. God waits for us when we make wrong choices, gives us peace, and bears with us; but if any of us chooses to leave him, he does not hold us back.

Samson gave away his secret for fear of losing Delilah, and in the end that meant a miserable death was waiting for him. Those who have been called to be God’s children are likewise abandoning the truth and walking into darkness, afraid of losing a world that has no life in it. That road is a road of death without end; unless they turn back, they cannot escape falling into hell. The temptations of the world are like Delilah’s, and the Philistines who sat with her in the inner room are like the work of Satan, who stands in the way of the salvation of God’s people.

Once Samson’s own lips had given up his secret, there was no escape for him. The man whose strength could kill a thousand Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone lost the battle between spirit and flesh. He cast aside God’s word so easily, yet never once doubted the words of Delilah the prostitute, and he had to die a most wretched death.

Judges 16:20

20She said, “The Philistines are upon you, Samson!” He awoke out of his sleep, and said, “I will go out as at other times, and shake myself free.” But he didn’t know that Yahweh had departed from him.

By throwing away the secret that only God and he shared, Samson forfeited his standing as God’s servant; the power of God no longer rested on him but departed. If we throw away Christ, the secret that God shares with his people, God departs from us. It was for sharing the secret that is Christ that he acknowledged us as his children; discard that secret, and he has no reason left to protect us.

As a dog returns to its vomit, Samson went back to his sin again and again, yet he thought that whenever he needed it, he could rise, shake himself free, and use his strength. But his strength had left him, and so had Delilah, whom he loved. Captured by the Philistines, he lost both his eyes and would never see the light again; bound with fetters of brass, he was reduced to grinding at the mill in prison. A son of God, the judge of Judah, was doing the work of slaves. To destroy a single life, Satan is as kind as if he would give you the whole world; but once you accept his temptation, he throws you, as he threw Samson, into the lowest and foulest place in the world. God brings ever greater honor to those who serve him, but Satan, once his victims are of no further use to him, simply casts them into a pit.

Mercifully, as time passed, Samson’s hair began to grow again and his strength returned; but it was strength that had nothing to do with God. The time in which God had wanted to use him was already past. Knowing this was his last chance, Samson told no one the secret of his returning strength.

One day the Philistines called him out to their feast to watch him perform, and he realized that this would be the place of his death. So, as verse 28 records, he cried out to Yahweh, praying that God would remember him and strengthen him only this once, so that he might at once be avenged on the Philistines who had put out his two eyes. Then, with all the strength he had, he wrapped his arms around the two pillars to which he had been bound and brought the house down.

This story grieves me deeply: a man of God became a laughingstock to his Philistine enemies, and after receiving so much grace he died so wretchedly. The scene in which Samson prays to be strengthened just this once is heartbreaking to me, for God had always strengthened him and worked for him whenever he wished, and yet he asks for help only this once. The scene makes plain how empty a life becomes when our faith does not put God first, does not give thanks in all things, and does not obey the word.

God had wanted to make Samson’s life as a judge a splendid one, but that grace was cast aside. The judge who should have struck the Philistines and set Judah free became an entertainer at a Philistine feast and met a pitiful end. As he died, did he think it some consolation that, as a judge, he had at least killed more Philistines in his death than in his life? Samson lived a thoroughly human life, yet he spent twenty years as Judah’s judge. The glorious years God had prepared for him lost their light because of his immature faith and character.

How many years have you been given as one of God’s own? What kind of faith are you showing him in those years? We must think deeply about whether we are wasting the grace that God gave us freely when he laid down his own life.

Friends, once greed has hold of you, you will not realize it even when the world deceives and mocks you. Where are you weak? I hope you will examine yourselves: whether, as Romans describes, your heart hates God and is insolent, filled with unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, and malice; whether it is full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and evil habits; whether, instead of speaking and acting positively, you only criticize and judge others.

Lazarus, the beggar who died at the rich man’s gate, was saved; what kind of faith did he have? By the world’s standards his life was miserable, and he had nothing to offer God. What faith, then, did he live by, that he was carried to Abraham’s bosom? Since Satan’s way is to find our weakest point and strike there, Lazarus would have faced many temptations, promises that he would prosper if he abandoned God, yet he would have held fast to his faith to the end.

May you, too, never forget God’s love, never be deceived by the world as Samson was, and work out your salvation by believing in Christ. God is merciful: those who seek him find him, and he gives to those who ask. I hope you will live out to the full the life of those who serve such a God as their Father, and so enter the eternal Kingdom of Heaven.