We continue with the second installment in our series of the Bible’s Biggest Losers with one of my favorite losers of the Bible – Samson. The story of Samson may be somewhat unfamiliar to many of you for a couple of reasons. First, his story is found in the middle chapters of the book of Judges, which is an often overlooked book of the Bible. It’s right after Joshua and before Ruth. Joshua, Judges, Ruth. It’s too bad that this is an overlooked book, because it has some of the greatest stories in the Bible. If you ever need a good book to read, don’t go to the bookstore, sit down and read the book of Judges. You won’t be disappointed. The second reason you might not know about Samson is that it has been hard for Sunday School teachers to put a positive spin on Samson. Supposedly, he was a man of God, but as we’ll see today, nothing we read about him is very Godly.
Now, he starts off well enough. Chapter 13 of Judges talks about his impending birth. The wife of a man named Manoah is barren, but an angel appears to her and says you are going to have a son, and he will be a nazarite, which means he will be separated or consecrated to God for the work of God. He’s going to be special. He will deliver the people from the Philistines who are tormenting the Israelites. Then the angel gives some odd rules for Samson’s life as a nazarite: he can never eat anything made of grapes, especially wine, or eat anything that is ritually unclean – like from something that was already dead and you just found it, and he can never cut his hair. These are his special rules for being set apart to God.
That’s a pretty promising start. It’s always a good sign when God comes and tells a woman who has never had kids that she’s going to have a son. Well, Samson kind of becomes the exception to the rule. In Chapter 14, Samson begins his shenanigans. Samson is traveling around the countryside and he sees a beautiful woman, who also happens to be a Philistine. He tells his father that he wants her as his wife. His dad says, “C’mon Samson, she’s a Philistine! Can’t you find a nice Israelite girl?” Samson says, no, she’s the one. So he’s traveling with his mom and dad down to see her and a lion jumps out at him. Verse 6 of chapter 14 says that Samson grabbed the lion and tore him apart with his bare hands.
Now this is the first story of Samson’s great strength. That’s what Samson is known for, how strong he was. Of course, killing the lion meant that he touched a corpse and blood, so he was unclean now, but someone his parents didn’t notice what he did, and he didn’t tell them. They went and negotiated the marriage with the young woman’s family and went home. A while later, Samson came back to marry her, and on the way saw the corpse of the lion he had killed, and some bees had made a nest in the corpse of the lion. Samson went in and took some of the honey and ate it and gave it to his parents to eat, too. Again, unclean.
Well, eventually they get there and prepare to have a wedding feast, and Samson is not only strong, but he thinks he’s pretty smart, too. So he decides to make a bet with some people there that they can’t guess a riddle. The loser has to give the winner a whole bunch of really fancy clothes. So he gives the riddle “out of the eater came something to eat, out of the strong came something sweet.” Well, the guys he made a bet with get mad because they can’t figure out the riddle so they tell his wife to coax it out of him. So his wife goes to see him and starts crying and says, “You don’t really love me! You told such a clever riddle, but you won’t even tell me, your wife, the answer! You must hate me!” And she nagged him for four days until he finally told her the answer, and she told the men the answer, which of course was the honey that he had found in the lion – “out of the eater came something to eat.” Samson is mad at his wife for giving his answer away and making him lose the bet, so he goes down to another Philistine town and kills thirty men, takes their clothes, and gives them to the guys he made a bet with. Then he goes home and leaves his wife at her father’s house. Samson has a temper problem.
But Samson has more than a temper problem. Samson has a pride problem. You
know, often times in scriptures we come across people that God has greatly
blessed, and they remain so humble and good through it all. Think about Joseph
and how God brought him to power in
Samson wasn’t one of those people. Samson was chosen by God, and he knew it. Samson was given great strength by God, and he flaunted it. Samson was God’s number one man, and he made sure everyone knew it. He could have any woman he wanted, and so he did. Unfortunately, one of the gifts that God did not grant Samson was great wisdom. Now Samson thought he was pretty smart, but it turns out that he wasn’t. Yet because of his pride, he could not recognize his own weakness.
The story of Samson continues with Samson coming back some time later to get
his wife, and it turns out that her dad thought that Samson was no longer
interested in her, so he had given her to the guy who had been Samson’s best
man. This reads like a mix between Conan the
Of course the Philistines are mad, so they go to Samson’s wife and father and kill them for the trouble that Samson has brought on them. This makes Samson even more mad, so he vows revenge on the Philistines and starts to kill them.
This pattern goes on for some time. The Philistines try to get revenge, Samson kills the Philistines. Samson finds a pretty Philistine girl, gets in trouble, and ends up killing Philistines. The Philistines try to get revenge, Samson kills more Philistines. Finally, we get to the story of Samson and Delilah, where Samson really lets his pride get the best of him. Samson of course falls in love with her, a Philistine. This is the story that was read for us earlier. The Philistines tell her they will pay her to find out what makes him so strong. So she starts to nag him, and he lies to her and tells her she needs to tie him up with fresh ropes. So she does, and he snaps them like nothing.
And Delilah cries and says, “Oh you don’t love me! If you loved me, you’d tell me.” This goes on and on until finally Samson tells her that his great strength comes from God, because he has been set apart by God. And he tells her his rules for being a nazarite, and that he has never had his hair cut as a part of those rules. So, of course, she cuts his hair. The Philistines come in, he thinks, “Well, I’ll just kill them like I always do.” But his strength has left him because his vows to God have been broken. And they gouge out his eyes and take him as a prisoner.
Samson, Samson, Samson. What an interesting life this guy led. Like Adam and Eve that we talked about last week, Samson had it all. God had blessed him. God had consecrated him and set him apart from his birth. And yet, Samson turned out to be a loser. Samson let his pride get in the way.
Samson let his pride get in the way of doing God’s work. He was arrogant. And he forgot where his strength truly came from. His strength came from God, and not from himself. And he found that out the hard way once he broke the vow, the strength of God left him, and he tried to take the Philistines on by himself anyways. They gouged his eyes out and took him prisoner. At this point it became clear that the true strongman in this story was not Samson, but was God.
Has anyone else ever fallen into that trap? The trap of thinking you are someone great when really the greatness that people see in you is the work of God? This is such an easy trap to fall into for one simple reason – we all want to be a somebody. We all want to be a somebody. I don’t care who you are, we all like to be recognized as somebody important.
I’ve talked about this before; this is an easy trap for me to fall into as a pastor. Everybody comes out at the end of the service and tells me how wonderful things are and how nice the sermon was and stuff. And people I run into around town say, “I hear good things are happening at Van Buren. You are doing such a good job!” And compliments like that are fine, IF I reflect them off myself and onto God. Because God is the one who is doing a good job, not me. I’m just a tool. I’m just your Average Joe who has let God use him.
But if when people give me all those compliments, I just absorb them, do you know where they go? Straight into my head, and my head begins to swell. I start to think more of myself than is actually the case. But we all like to absorb these compliments sometimes, don’t we? It makes us feel like a somebody. We say, “Doggonit, I am doing a good job. I’m working hard.” Just like Samson says to himself, “You bet I’m strong, look at all the Philistines I’ve killed. I’m a big deal.”
But guess what: the moment you take God out of the equation, the moment that you remove God’s strength, the moment that you start to rely on yourself instead of on his power and his grace, THAT’S when you are a nobody. You are only truly a somebody when you have God working in your life. Without God, we are nobodies.
And like we saw, Samson found that out the hard way. Samson was so full of pride and arrogance that he couldn’t see that God was truly the one supplying the power behind it all.
Now this isn’t the end of Samson’s story. Just like we saw with Adam and Eve,
God uses our shortcomings, even our disobedience and our pride, to show his
glory. And that’s just what he did with Samson, too. In Chapter 14, verse 4,
when Samson has asked his parents to get him a Philistine wife and they can’t
figure out why, the scriptures explain it for us. It says, “His father and
mother did not know that this was from the Lord; for he was seeking a pretext
to act against the Philistines, because at that time, the Philistines had
dominion over
And I think God does that with us all the time. We like to think that God only uses our strengths, and I think he does use our strengths. But sometimes its our weaknesses that are most useful to God. A couple of years ago I had a lot of conversations with God revolving around this stuff. I’d say to God, “God, I know you want me to pastor a church, but I’m young and I’m from the middle of nowhere. Those are two big weaknesses. How can you possibly use me?” God would just say, don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of that. And as it turns out he found me a place that needed a kid from the middle of nowhere. Things that I saw as weaknesses, he turned into strengths, just as he did with Samson. God used Samson’s weaknesses even more than his strengths.
And the second way God showed his power and his grace through this story is that all the while, God never stopped caring about a relationship with Samson himself. But before that could happen, Samson needed to be humbled, and as we saw, he became very humbled. Eyes gouged out, taken as a prisoner to the Philistines. He had nothing left. And we see in Chapter 16 that some of the Philistines have decided to throw a party and praise their god, the Philistine god, for helping them defeat Samson. And they brought him out to entertain them, so they could laugh at him and ridicule him. They put him between two big stone pillars that supported the second story of the house, where there were even more people partying.
And for the first time, Samson asks God for help. He basically says, “God, I need your strength. Help me to take revenge on the Philistines one last time, and then let me die with them.” And God gave him the strength, and he knocked the pillars over, bringing down the house and killing everyone inside. And the scriptures say that in this one act, when he trusted God for the strength, he killed more Philistines than he had in his entire lifetime.
So in the end, Samson wasn’t such a loser after all, even though he had been for most of his life. He finally got it. God’s strength is the strength that matters, not our own. Our strength and our skill and our ability all comes from God, and yet we get prideful over it. How can this be?
You know, I have a nice place to live over there. A couple of times this last week as I was coming home and I drove by the front of it, I thought, “Wow, that is a pretty little house. It looks really nice.” And I could feel myself beginning to swell with pride for having such a nice place to live. Then all at once I stopped myself and realized: I’ve done nothing to make this place what it is. This house was built by God…and Doug. I’ve done nothing to deserve it, I did nothing to build it. It has been handed to me out of no work on my own part. How ridiculous is it that I am prideful over this house?
But we do it all the time. We take credit for God’s victories. We boast in God’s strength as our own. And sometimes God has to bring us down a notch and humble us and let us realize where true strength comes from. It’s not from us. It’s from him. And we need to recognize God as the powerful one, the one who sustains us and takes care of us. I think the words of this last song fit with that perfectly.
Sing hymn 152 I Sing the Almighty Power of God
Van Buren United
Pastor Dan Metzger