Judges 14
RileyJudges 14:1-20
THE FALL OF SAMSONJudges 14-16.THE eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews is an epitome of history employed in illustration of faith. Many of the great names of the Old Testament are called; and each, in turn, is held before the reader as a hero of trust in God.A week since we found Jephthah to be in this company. The same Scriptures that include the name of Jephthah hold that of Samson also. “And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gideon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthah; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets This name, then, is in a goodly galaxy. If one wanted to preach a series of sermons on great Old Testament characters he could do no better than to take them in the order of their appearance in the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews.That Samson should be found in the list indicates that he was something more than a big bully, famed for his brute force. He was that! We have no doubt there are fans of the prize fight who seriously wish that Samson had been a twentieth century product, and that they might have seen him take an evening to bowl over John Sullivan, Corbett, Fitzsimmons, Johnson, Dempsey, Carpenter and Tunney in turn; and then perhaps line them all up and make a clean job of the septette; for, to the superficial reader and thinker Samson was nothing more than the world’s champion of the fighting ring for all centuries.But a more intelligent study of this Scripture will illustrate the fact that the history is not recorded to that circumstance at all, but rather to illustrate great and fundamental facts of life.
Permit me to lead your study under three statements: Feats of Strength, Folly of Sin, Facts of Salvation.FEATS OF Two or three things are made clear in the record of Samson’s feats of strength.He surpasses all his fellows. Until that time the world had not produced his physical equal; since that time it has just as signally failed to present his peer.
Immortality inheres in the incomparable. The moment a man is something his fellows have never been, or does something his fellows have never accomplished, he forces himself into the hall of fame. Witness Charles Lindbergh! The whole human race is tired of the humdrum of every-day life, and every-day experiences. The same race is delighted with novelties, and utterly infatuated with the altogether unusual! The trouble with the average man is that he has no more ingenuity than the beasts of the field or the birds of the air! He has seen the behavior of his father and mother and he proceeds after the same manner, or else falls short of even their accomplishments. He creates for himself no occasion of praise.
The world recognizes him as he passes, but forgets him the moment he is gone.The unusual man is the man whose name will live, and it does not require the mastery of the unthinkable to make it so; it only requires a splendid superiority in something, a point at which he will outclass all competitors. The Colgate family is famed in all America. Success in business and the accumulation of a fortune have made it so. When William Colgate, the founder of this house, was met on the towpath (traveling toward New York City) by an old boat captain who said to him, “William, if you know how to make soap, remember that a few years hence some man will be the best soap maker in America, and that man might be you”, the boy saw the meaning of the words, and shortly put them into practice and founded a great business and secured a great fortune. Emerson may have been a mystic in many ways, but he shows himself sensible and practical when he writes, “If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the wilderness, the world will make a beaten path to his door”.What is the lesson? Do not roll along in the rut of life!
Whatever you do, do it better than your neighbors and be the one individual of your community; do it better than anybody else has ever done it, and the world will never forget you.He even surprised himself. I have an idea that when the young lion roared against Samson, and Samson rent him as he would rend a kid, though he had nothing in his hands, it so astonished him as to account for his silence, for the text says, “He told not his father or his mother what he had done”.
There are some events in life that so far surpass what one ever expected to accomplish that he feels ashamed to tell them. There are some experiences that we do not think others would believe, because we know no one ever had them. When I was a lad in Kentucky I saw in the afternoon, just before the sun went down, a shining meteor traveling across the sky in a southerly direction! The roar of it was like a passing train; the blaze following it was yards in length even to my vision, and doubtless hundreds of miles in fact. The smoke that came from it formed a little cloud that held its position in the skies long after the meteor had gone. I had never seen anything like it; I had never heard of anything like it.
I went home and maintained an utter silence simply because I feared I would be laughed at and be accounted a Baron Munchausen if I told. But when the next morning’s newspaper came, and with great headlines reported that the meteor had been seen by thousands upon thousands, I went then into detail in telling that upon which I had looked.Samson’s strength was such a surprise to him that he kept silent about it, lest he should not be believed.
But he made note of it, and from that hour he knew what he could do, and woe to man or beast that challenged him to conflict. He moved to the battle absolutely confident of victory and knew no fear. The trouble with many a young man is that he never discovers himself. He never puts his strength to any sufficient test. He never undertakes a big enough problem, or lays his hand to a hard enough task to learn what his powers are. He kills kids, but does not know that he could throttle a lion. He takes a bath and dresses himself in decent clothes, but never dreams that he could cleanse himself of a bad habit if he tried, and throttle the devil himself if he set himself to the task.Is it not a profound pity for one to be possessed of splendid talents and never make discovery of them? Leslie M.
Shaw, at one time Secretary of the Treasury, once made use of Axtell—the famous race horse—to illustrate his point. He reminded his auditors of how Axtell came from a long line of blooded stock, and how his owner was very careful to see that he had the best attention possible. His limbs were rubbed daily that his muscles might be kept in good shape; he was not allowed to run with horses of ordinary breed, but only with blooded and swift ones. The time came for his training, and a man was secured who worked with him for a time and declared there was no speed in him. He was dismissed, and a second trainer secured, with a like result. A third did no better with him.
Then the owner himself determined to try what he could do. For weeks he coaxed, and tried every possible way in kindness to get the colt to trot; then he lost patience, and taking the whip in hand, he lashed him again and again.
As the keen crack cut into the sensitive flesh of the colt it aroused him. He picked up his feet as he had never picked them up before. He began to trot, and with additional strokes from the whip he went faster and faster— Axtell had discovered himself. And from that moment he was master of the ring.There are too many subjects of a soft and relaxing civilization. The land is filled with too many sleepy lads and lassies, awkwardly gadding their way about the most common tasks. Hardships and even cruelties have roused the world’s greatest men to conscious strength, as the appearance of the lion stirred Samson to the realization of the same.
If your lines have fallen to you in pleasant places, pray God to either send His Spirit upon you for inspiration, or to sweep from you every luxury and comfort, that adverse circumstances might accomplish for you what the lash accomplished for Axtell, and the lion accomplished for Samson. No man ever succeeded until he said, “I can do it”.He strangled his enemies.
We are told of the lion that “he rent him as a kid”. The men of Ash-kelon he slew and took their spoil; the Philistines he slaughtered with the jaw bone of an ass, and there fell a thousand of them.You say, “Does God approve this?” In the study of life do not stumble over difficult incidents. I do not know that God did approve it. That is really not the problem. The question is another one, a far greater one. How shall a man treat his enemies? What attitude shall a man take toward a lion that is in full leap, a lion that has sprung for the throat and will suck his blood? How shall a man behave toward enemies that have first secured his blinding, and then have set upon him to destroy him?I hold before you Samson as an ensample of proper conduct.
There is nothing to do with the furious lion but to rend him if you have the ability. There is nothing to do with furious enemies but to strike them down. To play with the first is to fall under his power and be destroyed; to parley with the second is to have your eyes put out and be flung into prison and made to grind for the sport of sinners.There is a better way and Samson revealed it— slay them! There is the lion of strong drink. What will you do with him? Play with him and he will break your bones.
There is a tiger of lust; play with him and he will suck your blood. There are the Philistines of gambling; play with them and they will wrap green withes about your wrists and new ropes about your feet, and shear your hair, and convert you into a pitiful creature of sport, a living mockery.
When John Wooley decided to have it out with the liquor business he started in to slay it. That was his only safety.A friend tells me of a strange bird known to the mountains of the West, commonly called “the roadster” on account of his custom of getting into the middle of the road and running more rapidly than a horse travels, for hundreds and hundreds of yards ahead of you as you go. Now this bird is said to be the most famous enemy of the rattle snake abounding in the same community. When in his travels he happens upon one, he approaches near enough to get the snake to strike. But with dexterous movement he always escapes the blow. While the snake is still stretched out, and before he can coil again, the bird puts in his sharp bill and picks out an eye.
Then he backs off and lets the snake coil and strike a second time. The moment this is done, and before he can recoil, he flies at him and picks out the second eye.
Then the hapless serpent is his easy victim, and he thrusts his long beak right through the spinal cord at the base of the skull. This bird is a teacher of men! What shall we do with the enemies of body, soul and spirit? Imitate Samson—strangle them, slay them! Let not a one that disputes your path live! That is a lesson well worth the learning, and no young man ever put it into practice but it profited him.And yet we must pass from the feat of strength toTHE FOLLY OF SINOur theme as announced for the sermon was “The Fall of Samson”. There is only one way to fall. Sin marks that way.
No man ever committed sin and escaped a fall. When Eve sinned she fell. When Adam sinned he fell. The record of Samson’s behavior is a revelation of common experience.At first his sin was in affection. His love of the woman in Timnath seems to have been a true love, and his intentions honorable, withal. He reports this affair to his father and mother. There was nothing clandestine about it. He asked the privilege of an honorable wedding, as a dutiful son should do.
And when the wedding occasion occurred, the young giant stalked in the midst of thirty of the bride’s friends as the chief entertainer of the evening.Once in a while you hear of a young man who is famed as a good story teller. In the ancient day they did not put forth stories as we do; they told riddles. The humor was not as good as is our modern method of story telling, but the wit was more in evidence. Arch Dean Farrar brings from Cassel a curious parallel of this instance from the annals of northern Germany. The judge promised a woman he would free her husband if she would tell him a riddle he could not guess. On her way to the courtroom she saw the carcass of a horse in which a little bird had built its nest and hatched its young, and her riddle ran after this manner: “As hither on my way I sped,I took the living from the dead,Six were thus of the seventh made quit,To read my riddle, my lords ’tis fit.”Unable to explain the riddle, the judge failed, and the husband was set free.But Samson combined in one a feat of the intellect and some gambling features, all of which added zest to the proposition and hinted the direction in which the lad was, perhaps unconsciously, yet certainly turning his life. Stupidity is not identical with spirituality, and saplessness is not another name for sanctity. A man does not have to be lugubrious because he belongs to the Lord. The love of innocent fun is not condemned in the kid or the lamb; we do not believe it is in the man. But it must be conceded that some features of what men call fun are inimical and dangerous, and it is only a step from them to the most grievous sin. Martin F.
Black was a prosperous commission merchant in New York City; his fortune was estimated at $150,000 to $200,000. At the age of sixty-six years, broken in spirit and in health, he appeared before the magistrate Isen-Brown of that city and begged him to send him to the House of Correction, where he could find food and shelter for the winter months.
In explanation of his condition, Black said, “Five years ago I was one of the respected commission merchants of New York, and with a most comfortable fortune. One day a big buyer paid me a visit and asked me to go out and take a little something with him. I excused myself, saying I never touched liquor. He ridiculed the idea and said, ‘You cannot imagine, man, that a single drink will do you any especial harm. Come along and be a good fellow’. I did not want to offend him, and thought to drink with him was a mere matter of fellowship, and so I consented. But the moment the drink was down, it seemed to run through my bones like fire and excited desires I had never known. That very afternoon I went to the saloon and drank myself drunk.
A young chap got hold of me, and we went forth to a gambling house. I lost the first day, $23,000. I saw the folly of it, but some smouldering lust for wine and gambling had been roused within me, and I was never able to put it down. Business soon left me and I was ruined!”Samson went from fun making to fleshly satiety. The reports of his behavior with harlots reminds one of the conduct of the prodigal son in Luke fifteen. The results of such a life are always and everywhere the same. It may land one man with the swine, and effect for him hunger and rags and disgrace. Another man it may fling into the hands of the Philistines who bind him, bore out his eyes, and send him to the mill to trample the corn as a blind horse is compelled to do!
But the one thing certain is that , this sin sooner or later super induces sorrow, visits suffering, turns success into terrible defeat.Louis Albert Banks gives us a fine illustration of that fact, drawing it from the life of Parnell, the great Irish leader. He says, “It is only a short time ago that he was the astute and thoroughly trusted leader of the Irish cause in the English Parliament. He had an eloquence peculiar to himself, seemed to have an unlimited measure of common sense, and above all a masterful will, which made him a governor of others, because he first governed himself. Beginning alone, he fought his way, step by step, until such men as Gladstone believed in him, and respected him, and victory seemed certain for him and for his cause. There was a time when almost any man with a clear eye for historic perspective would have said, ‘Here is a man who will live in history as one of its great figures’. In 1882 he was great enough to offer, of his own accord, to Mr.
Gladstone to retire from public life altogether, if in the great Englishman’s judgment such an act would be helpful to the Irish cause. Then came his secret overthrow.
The sin which destroyed Samson undermined him. It was long covered up and hidden; but like all sin, as it grew into mastery and control of the man’s nature, it became bold and defiant. In the autumn of 1890 his shame was uncovered before all the world. Then he was asked to retire; he was shown his cause would certainly fail unless he relieved it of his burden. But his sin seemed to have changed his whole nature, and he no longer had the power to be self-denying, or to do great and generous deeds. Justin McCarthy, who had been his dearest friend, says, ‘He seems suddenly to have changed his whole nature and his very ways of speech.
We knew him before as a man of superb self-restraint, cool, calculating, never carried from the moorings of his keen intellect by any waves of passion around him—a man with the eye and the foresight of a born commander-in-chief’. That was the man before he had sold himself to the devil, before secret sin had eaten out his manhood and drugged his conscience and palsied his will; but what kind of a man was he afterward?
Hear McCarthy again: ‘We had now in our midst a man seemingly incapable of self-control, a man ready at any moment, and on the smallest provocation, to break into a very tempest and whirlwind of passion, a man of the most reckless and self-contradictory statements, a man who could descend to the most trivial and vulgar personalities, who could encourage and even indulge in the most ignoble and humiliating brawls’. You all know the result. As Lucifer fell like a star from heaven to the deepest hell, so he fell from leadership, from the respect of mankind, and died as Samson did, brokenhearted and in shame”.The story of Samson is up-to-date! There are many men and women in Minneapolis tonight who have seen the consequences of their own sin, and to whom the meaning of this story is more plain than the words of any minister can make it to the inexperienced.But I beg you to reflect upon this picture! It is a splendid photograph of the devil’s dupe—blind, bound, grinding. Oh, God! can a giant be so degraded?
Yes, if he sin!Finally, the Spirit was insulted. The text of Scripture concerning this matter is plain. “He awoke out of his sleep, and said, I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself.
And he wist not that the Lord was departed from him”. God is a long time in giving us up! The Holy Spirit is difficult to grieve away. Patience is a prominent feature in the Divine love, but when the Spirit of God is gone, there is no strength. The Philistines took him and put out his eyes and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass, and he did grind in the prison house.I know what you are thinking. Did Samson’s strength then lay in his hair?
No. There wasn’t a bit of power in any one of those hairs; there wasn’t a particle of ability in all of them combined, and yet, the shearing of it stripped him of strength because that hair represented the fact of his vow to God, and the cutting of it was the breaking of the vow, and the man who has broken his vows to God is a weak man, hence a defeated man; he is a devil-mastered man.
The Word of the Lord is plain, “When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it; for He hath no pleasure in fools”.To be sure there is a difference between outward strength and inward strength. And yet, let it never be forgotten that there is also a kinship between them. This beautiful hair of Samson’s had been the visible symbol of a spiritual strength. The strength, however, had begun to fail before the hair was cut. Samson lost a part of it in gambling; Samson lost a part of it in brawls; Samson lost much of it in lust. Truly, sooner or later the outer man and the inner man will get together.
The shorn hair and the lost spirit will speak of the collapse of the entire man, external and internal. When I look on a man whose hair is uncombed, whose face is unwashed, I am compelled to believe that this outward appearance is an indication of the spirit within him.
External appearances have always been, and will forever remain, indicators. The Nazarite who has no interest whatever in the keeping of his hair has lost his holiness. And when the spirit is removed, no strength remains.“If God be for us, who can be against us”? “Ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little”. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”. Oh, I know that these are days when the new theologians tell us that God is never angry, and when Christian Scientists harp upon a single string, lulling to sleep with the statement, “God is love”. What superficial thinking, as if anger of a certain sort was inconsistent with the greatest love. “Indeed”, writes the great Dr. Dale, “the measure of our love for others is often the measure of our anger against them.
A comparative stranger may tell us a lie and we may feel nothing but contempt and indifference, but if our own child, whom we love, tells us a lie, there is often intense anger as well as grief”. That God is often angry with us is only proof that he intensely loves us.
Truly, as Dale continues, “To deny that God will be hostile to man on account of sin is to degrade our conception of Him. He is not a mere good-natured God; His righteousness as well as His love is infinite”.THE FACT OF The end of Samson’s history is not yet. The blind eyes, the brass manacles, the bolting stone—these are not the end of Samson. There is another day of victory for him, and although it is the day of his death, it is the day of his conquest also. He comes back into favor with the Lord; he comes back into fullness of power; he comes back to the overthrow of his enemies; he comes back in the estimation of his brethren and father.The fallen man, then, is not necessarily lost! The reason for that is not far to seek.
The fallen man is not necessarily a fully abandoned man. The man who grieves away the Spirit of God is not necessarily an utter degenerate.
There were great things about this giant of the early centuries. There were features of his life that must have been pleasing to God Himself. One phrase finally suggests it: “And he judged Israel twenty years”. Joseph Parker, the great preacher, speaking to this fact in “The People’s Bible”, urges us not to “forget the twenty years of service, the consideration of the necessities of the people, the frown which made the enemy afraid, the smile which encouraged struggling virtue, the recognition which came very near to being an inspiration”, and asks, “Who knows what heartaches the man had in prosecuting and completing the judgeship? Who can be twenty full years at any one service without amassing in that time, features, folly, all of which ought to be taken into account before pronouncing final judgment”? And blessed be God—He takes them all into account.
That is why the prodigal was received when he came home. The father reflected not on his failure only.
The father had never forgotten the jubilant spirit he used to see in that child; the father had never forgotten the generosity of heart; the father had never forgotten the depths of soul into which he had seen as nobody else; and so, when with lifted eyes he saw him facing homeward, the very sorrow of his countenance, the very shame of his rags, the very dejection of his spirit, stirred the very soul of his father.Oh, I wish I could get men to believe in the God of the Bible. I wish I could open their blind eyes to behold the compassion of His face and understand the depths of His affection, His forgiving love; then penitence would follow.The penitent man is storing up power. The record tells us nothing of the emotions of Samson as he sat at that mill stone, blind, bound, brutalized. But God does not need to write down the last word! We should be able to read between the lines. How would he feel?
How would you feel? How would I feel?
Had you dallied with sin, had you fallen under the betrayal of some Delilah, had you come into the power of the hosts of the Philistines, had you been blind, bound and set to bolting corn to feed others on bread that you could not touch—how would it affect you? A man would be degraded indeed who did not repent. And the man who does repent is storing up power. He may not be conscious of it. When David was writing the Fifty-first Psalm he little intended it, but as the water streamed from his eyes, strength was coming; and as he poured out his heart in grief, God was coming to him in power. And of Samson it is plainly written as he prayed, “O Lord God, remember me, I pray Thee, and strengthen me, I pray Thee, only this once, O God”, his strength came and those limp hands laying hold upon the two middle pillars, compelled them to totter at the touch, 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”.Can the conquered man come back to power?
Yes! Can the man conquered today be himself self conquered tomorrow?
Yes! Can the man who was wrecked be more than a match for them all? Yes! How? By penitence and prayer. It is a thousand fold better to be conqueror before you come to death, but is it not gracious that the man who has been defeated may even conquer in death? The poor thief hanging at the side of Christ conquered in death, but he came to his conquest by the same way that Samson did; he was compelled to cry unto Him for help. If this will make a man victorious in death, why should any man be defeated in life, for God is the God, not of the dead, but of the living!