Clough Judges Lesson 14

Judges 15

By way of review, Samson ministered to his country when it was involved in one of its most severe national crisis. At that particular time in the nation Israel ecumenical religion had gotten such a hold in the population that it was impossible to lead that nation back to God. In the existing state there were thousands and thousands of people who had at one time believed in Jesus Christ, as far as they could in the Old Testament sense. And yet these thousands and thousands of people that had at one time believed in Jesus Christ had been snowed by the smooth talk of ecumenical religion to the point where national apostasy had set in. And this national apostasy was something new in this series of Judges. We’ve gone through many of the judges and we’ve seen there’s always what we call the three step cycle; there’s always first an account of the apostasy, how they apostacized religiously, they began to serve the Baalim and other gods, and then God brought chastening. That’s always the second step in the three step cycle and after the chastening there would always be a time of national confession, and the nation would confess and realize that they had been involved and then there would be deliverance.

Also I showed you that in this three step cycle that these two words, apostasy and chastening, actually represented only a very few verses. You can always spot the emphasis of the authors of the Old Testament by the number of verses, I hate to sound mechanical about this but really it’s true; the quantity of verses that are devoted to a particular topic usually shows you where they kind weight the text, on what issue, and if you’ve noticed, time after time we’ve studied all through this, apostasy and chastening take a small amount proportionally and then a large amount proportionally would be devoted to deliverance. In other words, the emphasis so far has been on the grace of God in response to a national confession. But with the Samson cycle that began in Judges and ends with Judges 16 we find something new; this entire three-step pattern has completely folded.

So what has been normative for the nation as it cycled in apostasy has now dropped out of the picture completely; it’s as it were you have a series of cycles in the book of Judges and each cycle gets lower and lower until finally chaff, and that’s where we are at the Samson cycle. Each judge has a worse time than the one before in trying to lead the nation back. And remember this part of the book of Judges deals with the national leadership. In the last part of the book of Judges you’re going to see some really gruesome things. Up to this point you might have said well, these leaders are pretty tough characters and they were pretty uncouth and they certainly don’t act much like believers. If you think the leaders are bad, wait until we get into chapters 17-19 and you see what the population is doing at the grass roots level. You haven’t seen “nothin’” yet. But the leaders, the whole emphasis here, in Judges 3 on up to chapter 16 is dealing with the upper class aristocracy, with the leadership class, with what God is doing to try to bring the nation back to Himself through individual leaders. No nation can survive without leadership.

This is why our nation is going down; we have done everything we can to destroy leadership in this country. Every time this country gets a good leader, what do we do? Fire them, throw him out, we’ve done this to MacArthur and a number of other individuals who were brilliant leaders in their day, men whose advice if it had been followed would have led to a minimum amount of suffering. But every time America gets a leader they either refuse to pay attention to him or if he is involved in a position of authority he is ridiculed by these two-bit news commentators on the TV stations or some other thing. So inevitably we always bury our good leaders and you can’t do this much before the good leaders just say to heck with the whole thing. This is happening in our military service so our military position is weakened. You, as a Christian, have a citizenship obligation to pray that God would raise up leaders; we need them badly. Every nation has a need for leaders, and in the days of Samson Israel was in a bind because she had no leaders. This whole section on Samson is going to be an argument to show you that even a nation that needs leadership badly, when God provides the leaders, will turn around and kick them in the face, just like America has done, just knock them, laugh at them, ridicule them, oppose them, do everything we can not to go along with them.

So here in Samson’s day we have the following situation; you have a group of enemies over here to the east of Jordan, the Ammonites. A man by the name of Jephthah opposes them. So the southwest you have the Philistine enclave, the pentapolis, Gaza and the other cities in the Philistine pentapolis. And out of this Philistine pentapolis you have insurgencies, not in the military way but in a religious way. Philistine religion was ecumenical; the Philistine religion shows ecumenical nations two places in the Word of God. At one place in the Word of God, in 1 Samuel 4, they bring the Ark of Jehovah, they lose it, the Israelites tried to use it as a good luck charm and of course, the Ark was never meant as a good luck charm and so God said if you think this is a good luck charm, let me take it away from you. And so they lost the Ark of Jehovah at the battle of Aphek in 1 Samuel 4, and when they lost that meant that the entire symbology of the Old Testament reign of Jehovah had been gone; it was just an outer symptom of an inner condition.

So we have Philistine religion being able to penetrate this part of the holy land. So out for a region of… say fifty miles or so, you have them able to suppress the population, but without military force. This is the strange thing about the Philistines early phase. Now later on they did use military force. But in the early phase the Philistines had complete domination over the Israelites and they did not use military force; they used religion. All they did was gather together all the gods in one pantheon and say they are basically all saying the same thing. See, this is the first phase of the National Council of Churches; this is how they work too. So you have this whole thing and the Philistines were able to, therefore, encompass this land area. By the way, one of their later policies which also fits with the modern ecumenical movement is disarmament. They advocated disarmament so when the people began to fight for their freedom they didn’t have anything to fight with and you’re going to see Samson has to use a stick and the reason why he does this, he doesn’t have any weapons, the Philistines had taken them all away. So the next time you see your friendly little politician that you elect, say in the paper that he’s for handgun removal, taking all hand guns away from the citizens and so on, just chalk it up, here’s another apostate. Because unless you have a handgun, unless you have the right to have a handgun there’s no way of defending yourself, that’s all. You can just imagine the guys that are hijacking aircraft or people that slaughter somebody, you can just imagine them running down and registering all their handguns; that really makes sense. All the goons are going to just flock down t register their handguns. That’s a real brilliant piece of legislation.

This is the way the Philistines operated and we can see this operate on a national scale today and we can see it if we study our Bibles carefully because it’s the same old principle, people are just as stupid now as they were then. So this worked and Samson’s job was to break this thing up if he could. And Samson had a great problem because Samson ministered down here; he came out of a refugee camp actually from the tribe of Dan. Dan had been assigned along with the other tribes a little place of land about here but they never could quite hack it and the tribe of Dan was always spiritually weak individuals and they were gradually pushed back and pushed back so that they basically only had a few refugee camps left by the time Samson was born. His parents lived in that refugee camp.

Now most of the tribe of Dan moved northward, we’re going to see some of the gruesome things that the tribe of Dan got involved with later. But the Danites resettled north of the Sea of Galilee. But right now we’re looking at this refugee camp down here to the southwest area near Philistia. And this is where Samson was born. So we have then Jephthah operating in the east, we have Samson operating in the southwest, and then in the center, in the heartland of the country we have a young man by the name of Samuel who is going to start ministering and we’ll see his ministry in 1 Samuel, but he is already apparently ministering in this area. So look at the way God’s Holy Spirit is working to deliver that nation. Notice how God delivers a nation and in your prayers for the United States it would be well for you to pay attention to how God does deliver a nation.

He’s using a two-fold attempt to deliver the nation Israel from apostasy. The first thing He does is He sends Samuel, who was a Bible teacher, to teach Bible doctrine. And he goes throughout the hills of Judea, up and down, up and down, up and down, from city to city setting up not only teaching but he trains other men and they do teaching of the Word. So you have many places of young men who under the tutelage of Samuel are beginning to study the Word of God intensively and over many, many hours, and they’re devoting their lives to the ministry of the Word of God and then they’re going forth and teaching so here at the center of the nation, the heartland of the nation, the nation is going to come back to God in a few hundred years and it is going to be because they had the Word of God taught to them. The nation Israel is going to have a golden era under King David and King Solomon, an era that is going to make all these [can’t understand word] of the past look insignificant. The nation is going to have a fantastic future, a wonderful future. They’re going to have a tremendous economic system, a tremendous military system, but notice all of this is going to come after that nation has been exposed to and received Bible teaching. After that and only after that do they receive their golden age.

We can observe this function, for example, with Jonah. Jonah goes to Nineveh; the Assyrians, when Jonah went to Nineveh were on their last leg. After Jonah goes to Nineveh and they experience a national revival the Assyrian Empire grows; it has one of the greatest phases in history. You see the same thing with the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was having some severe political problems at the time of Jesus Christ and before, and after the Christians got…don’t you buy this line that the Christians were the ones that destroyed the Roman Empire, the Christians are the ones that kept the Roman Empire going for 300 to 400 years. So the Christians again contributed by a knowledge of Bible doctrine to the stability of the society and it’s the same thing in the United States. We don’t have to go down as a nation; if we go down it’s simply because the population en masse has rejected Bible teaching; that’s basically it, they failed to apply it in their life, they failed to live for Christ in a dynamic way, they failed to make Christ known to their neighbors, they have failed to apply Bible doctrine in their business, in their areas of academics. That’s why we’re going to go down if we go down, but the United States can have its future golden age, just like Israel is going to have shortly after Samuel gets through his ministry. There’s no reason why the United States can’t do it. We have the means and we could yet have a tremendous reversal in our country and it will come by a maximum number of young people. We could have a whole generation get fed up to here with the kind of things that they and their parents have brought on themselves by their negative volition toward the Word of God. When we get down to David’s generation we’re going to have thousands of people in the nation Israel who said listen, I can remember my father and mother and they can tell me about the kind of stuff that used to go on in the days of the Judges and I don’t want anything to do with it, I’m not going to live in that kind of situation.

Within 20 years, during the judgeship of Samuel you have many things happen. Apparently near the time that Samson was born we have the battle of Aphek; at the battle of Aphek you have Israel losing the Ark to the Philistines. During that time Philistia militarily dominates the whole land. This was a severe setback for the nation. The lost a military battle. So we have this national reversal at Aphek and finally this is enough to call the nation around, gee, you know there must be something wrong with our relationship to the Lord. Brilliant deduction, but it takes this suffering to make them wake up to the fact that they’re out of it. And then finally, later on, in 1 Samuel 8 you find the major backbone of the Philistines broken. And here under the leading of Samuel where you had 20 years, notice the time it took, 20 years of Bible teaching, 20 years, this wasn’t some little overnight revival where Samuel trotted from one city to the next. You had 20 years of thousands and thousands and thousands of people taking in the Word of God, that’s what mattered. Do you see how you shift national entities; you don’t do it overnight, you take years and years and years with a maximum number of people taking the Word of God, that’s what stabilizes a nation and it took 20 years to do it.

The incident we are going to study in Judges 15 occurred during the early part of this 20 year period. During this early part of the 20 year period Bible teaching had not taken hold, particularly in the southwest section of the nation. The great southwest of Israel was completely out of it spiritually and they had no idea of releasing themselves in the grip of the Philistines. So therefore God has to send a man who was a professional troublemaker in to polarize the situation. Now you can see how polarization would occur; by polarization we simply mean that here in the population you have negative volition, positive volition, negative volition, positive volition, negative volition, negative volition, positive volition, positive volition, etc. You have a group of people intermingled. When Samson gets through he polarizes them. What does that mean? It means that they are set apart, so that you have all the positive volition people this way and you have all the negative volition people over on this side. And there’s a difference between them. In other words, these two segments of the population are in collision, there’s tension.

These people are in strong disagreement with one another. You may say this is a funny way of building a nation by tearing it apart. This kind of ministry of separation often is the prerequisite. Why? Because a nation cannot return to God without a concept of absolute truth and absolute falsehood, and where you have people who stand up firmly for absolute truth and absolute falsehood you will have division occur. Like the old story, oh, doctrine divides; we have the same thing in Christian group after Christian group, we don’t teach doctrine because doctrine divides. Of course it does, it divides truth from error. That’s what it’s supposed to do, to divide; that’s why it says a two-edged sword, of course it’s going to divide and any Bible believer who doesn’t want that kind of division is an apostate. So you just chalk it up, these believers…we don’t teach doctrine because doctrine divides. They’re not interested in learning the truth and they’re not interested in centering on the issues; there’s a very simple explanation for it.

In Judges 15 we have Samson come back and we’re going to have him set off a series of events that will lead to the polarization of the population. Please remember, this may seem bad to you, this may seem an undue amount of violence and suffering but keep the overall plan in mind. The reason this has to occur is for God to get the nation to confess. He will not deliver and cannot deliver until confession occurs. You can see this in your own personal life. When you receive Christ God has a plan for your life; that plan includes many different details. Some of those details you now know, some of those details you don’t know, but if you are a believer God has a plan for your life and if you are a smart believer you will recognize that you can’t be happy unless you know that plan and you’ll realize that all the substitutes for that plan that you put in the way are going to be wrong and you may enjoy them for a while but it’s never going to last and so you might as well just recall the fact that as far as your blessings, your happiness and your peace are concerned, you’ve got to know the plan and then submit to it.

So we have in each moment of time, we have that plan focused into time and we have the choice in each moment of time to submit to the plan by faith or to reject the plan, it’s our choice. So what happens? We have believers on negative volition. Why are they on negative volition? Because God’s plan for their life says I want you to do thus and such. Let’s put X here, that’s God’s plan for you at this moment. And so the believer says well, I don’t like to do X, now God I would like to know… see some people, it’s very interesting, they want to know God’s plan but do you know why they want to know God’s plan, they want to know it so they can see whether they like it or not. That’s really why, I’m convinced this is the reason why people what it all laid out for them and then they can pass judgment on God’s plan for their life. Huh-un, it doesn’t work that way, sorry.

If you’re willing to do His will He’ll make it known to you, gradually and in pieces but it’ll all fall together and you’ll have the certainty, you’ll have the peace, you’ll have the security that comes from operating in the plan of God for your life. No problem about it, you’ll have perfect confidence, you’ll have perfect rest, and no matter what happens, you can be hit with all sorts of disasters out here but no matter what, you can go through it because deep down in the deepest most recesses of your heart you know you’re in fellowship and there’s nothing that’ll blow you out; you have the peace of God that passes all understanding and no matter what the pressure, you can visualize an extreme kind of situation of national disaster and if we’re in the plan of God we’ll have peace in the middle of it.

We can have peace in the most fantastic pressure conditions if we walk in the plan of God. If we’re operating by faith and using the faith technique of resting in God’s plan this moment we can have peace that no psychologist, no psychiatrist, no one can give. But what happens? Believers always like to put something else, they like to replace X with Y, substitute one unknown for another one. And they love to replace what God wants for their lives with something else. It might be sex, it might be money, it might be security, it might be prestige, it might be something else or one of these things but you’re going to plug that in and you want that more. And God says I want you to do this, and you say yeah but I like this. And I think I know God’s will but I just don’t like it, I wish He’d change his mind, see. And a lot of this business of waiting on the will of God, you know what’s really in it? It’s waiting for God to change His mind. There’s only one problem, God doesn’t change His mind, because He’s predestinated you to be conformed to the image of Christ and you will be conformed to the image of Christ and you’ll either be conformed by your own misery or you’ll be conformed in blessing and you’ll enjoy the conforming process.

You have two choices; there’s one that’s eternally elect. If you are a believer you are in the eternal election of God and it means that you can enjoy it, you can go there and you can take your lumps as God gives them to you in your life and you can enjoy it and say thank you Lord, because I realize that right now, even though this disaster doesn’t seem too good and whereas all these things are against me and I feel kind of bad, nevertheless, thank you Lord because I see the big picture and I see that I have to go through this. Some of you who have gone through exercise and dieting know that the thing may not seem to be so nice at the moment but you’ve got to keep the picture in mind of where you’re going. And it’s the same kind of thing in the Christian life. Many of the things that God is going to send into your life aren’t going to be pleasant. But if you keep the big picture you can always return thanks; “in everything give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” And you can respond to live by giving thanks habitually for all these things. Or you can be out of fellowship, like Samson was most of the time, and God is still going to use your life. The only problem is that now instead of you enjoying it you’re going to suffer. Samson finally suffered; he gets killed with a block of cement or something that clobbers him on the head. So that’s how Samson ends his great ministry.

But notice something, that all during the time God is not coercing you, He doesn’t make the choice for you, inside His plan at this moment blessing and peace and you can enjoy it, even though you may have to slug it out you can enjoy it. You might have an artificial thing up here, security, and you may think oh, I couldn’t quit my job, this job is getting to me, this job is so big that I can’t study the Word of God, I haven’t got time to be with my family, I haven’t got time to exercise authority in the home, I haven’t got time to teach my children the Word of God, and all the other things but I can’t quit this job because after all, I might not find another job and all the rest of it. Don’t worry about starving; the welfare people will fix you up real good. But people think that security is a big thing. But in all of this you’re putting security over God’s plan for your life and so here you have a big fat S, Security, and down here God says quit, that’s the only way you can solve it, you’ve talked to the boss, you’ve tried to work your work around and no matter how you slice it, that job is coming between you and the Lord, and there’s nothing you seem to be able to do about it. So the only will of God for you is quit, period. When you’re too busy to study the Word of God you’re too busy period.

Now obviously every job has its problems, you may have a job and for a temporary period of time you are going to be too busy to study the Word, I don’t mean that; you know what I mean. I mean when the job gets to be inherently and habitually anti-Christian, and the point that you can’t stay in fellowship, you can’t do anything because it’s always the job, the job, the job. But when God’s will comes through to you, “QUIT!” with a big exclamation point at the end you can’t do it and you’re not going to; you will not submit to that by faith because up here you have replaced God’s plan for your life with security; you want security. Therefore what you have replaced human viewpoint in the plan of God, replaced the divine viewpoint with human viewpoint security perceived. When it comes to this very easy decision that you have to make, quit, you can’t make it and you’re being disobedient, carnal and out of fellowship. And then you’re miserable; what happens is that on negative volition you’re miserable and so you sit on the job, you’re miserable, everyone else on the job is miserable because they can’t stand you and your misery, you make them miserable, so you’re the source of misery all through the organization just because you’re miserable. Then all of a sudden somebody says here’s a quick way to witness and you try to witness to people on the job and it doesn’t work. Do you know why it doesn’t work; you haven’t shown any evidence you’re a Christian. You can talk to everyone in the plant and they’re not going to receive Christ because they look at you and good Lord, if that’s Christianity forget it. That’s the most miserable person I know around here and he claims to be a believer, I don’t want to be a Christian if that’s what it is. So what’s happened? A Christian out of fellowship, he always is an obstructionist to the gospel. It always works that way. So a person is out of fellowship, they get miserable and it gets deeper and deeper and deeper and this is the way it goes? Why? Simple decision, quit, that’s God’s will but oh no, it can’t be that, it must be something else; I don’t understand the will of God so I’ll go to my pastor and try to find out the will of God. So he chews on the pastor’s ear for three hours, I can’t find God’s will for my life. Somehow this doesn’t seem like God’s will but on the other hand, and of course they never clue in to what the other hand is, people are very good at burying the other hand and it’s all the way down, 20 feet under and until I find the other hand I can’t point out what the problem is; they don’t know the will of God because of this thing, they’ve got some sort of a human viewpoint plug that they’ve replaced and they’re not going to part with it.

The only analogy I can think of would be an alcoholic. Have you ever met an alcoholic that loved liquor? Most alcoholics despise liquor; they want t get off of it. They’d have you believe there’s nothing better than if they could get off of this horrible thing, but you know, it’s an interesting thing, they don’t want to part with it bad enough and so with an alcoholic you’ll find a person that’s miserable, miserable, miserable, a person who has caused divorce in the home, who beats their wife, throw their children around and creates horrible conditions but he will not part with his liquor, will not do it, no matter how low he gets and no matter how low everybody else gets under him, he won’t depart from it. Why? Very simple, because he wants it and he can cry great tears, oh I don’t like it, and all the rest of it but he really doesn’t, it’s all a façade, and it’s the same thing with a believer out of fellowship, instead of alcohol its security; instead of alcohol its prestige, instead of alcohol its sex, money, or something else, and they are just like alcoholics, they can’t stand it they claim, and they will cry, oh I can’t stand this misery, you don’t know the trials that I’m going through. That’s just like alcohol. God evidently at some place has told you to do something and you disobey, it’s very simple.

It’s not God’s will that every believer walk around perpetually in discord. Do you think that’s the way God really wants His children. Do you really think that God who died on the cross to provide our so great salvation has as His fundamental desire to leave believers hanging in midair, without any knowledge of His will, He loves to see His children disobedient, He loves to see them miserable, He loves to see children cry, etc. You know what it is; you don’t like to see your kid cry, etc. You don’t like to see your children miserable, walk in a room and see them oh boo-hoo, crying and carrying on. But that’s exactly what God looks at when He looks at some believers and they’re out of it, they’re miserable. Do you think that’s enjoyable to God to look down and see that kind of behavior pattern in His children? Of course not, He doesn’t enjoy that, and that’s not His will for the believer. So obviously if you have a maximum number of believers in this state it’s not God’s fault; somewhere along the line they got off the track and they are defiant; that’s what it is, absolute defiance. I am amazed at the kind of defiance believers can have to the will of God. It is amazing; I never cease to be amazed at people who outwardly are so fantastic and inwardly they are filled with defiance against the will of God, and refuse to submit to God’s plan for their life and come hell or high water they are not going to submit to God’s plan for their life, no matter how miserable he makes them. So God’s going to keep on making them miserable.

So here we have on an individual plain what the nation Israel is going through in Samson’s day. So in Judges 14:20, for that’s where the chapter begins in the Hebrew, we have Samson coming to his wife. Now Samson is typical of one of these believers, God’s will for his life is given in Judges 13:5b. Here’s God’s will for Samson, “For, lo,” He’s speaking to his mother, “thou shalt conceive, and bear a son; and no razor shall come on his head; for the child shall be a Nazirite unto God from the womb. And he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.” So you have God announcing that Samson, notice the word “begin” because why is it that Samson can’t deliver them? It’s simple, the nation never confesses. So Samson is not going to deliver the nation but he’s going to begin to deliver. So, “begin to deliver the nation,” there’s the plan of God for his life. That’s what he has been called to do as a believer. Now this moment by moment will of God, when he comes to a girl, he obviously wants to find a mate for life and if he operated on the Biblical principle, what would he do. He’d go back and he’d understand, God gave a plan to Adam, and Adam’s right woman was a woman that God had prepared for Adam to help Adam fulfill the plan of God for Adam. Eve is sexually engineered, that’s what the Hebrew word means, I’m always embarrassed to read it, for some reason it always strikes some as very humorous and I’m afraid they’ll start laughing when I read it, but in Genesis 2 it says God crated the man but He engineered the woman and it’s very interesting how this works out.

But Eve was prepared to help Adam accomplish the plan. See, God spoke to Adam, not Eve. Remember that. When God gave the plan it wasn’t to Eve, it was to Adam; after He gave the plan to Adam then He made Eve and then Eve was a girl who was specially fitted, and she was a girl who would have been very unhappy with any other man had there been any other man there because she had been especially engineered to accomplish the will of God for that man, Adam. And so obviously in this case there wasn’t much of a problem but nevertheless they were married by Jesus Christ in the Garden and so you have a marriage between the right man and the right woman. But that is a model for all marriages, or as marriages should be in the Word of God. So here’s Samson; Samson has this job, that’s God’s plan for Samson’s life. Now if Samson is going to follow the will of God for his life what should he be praying for? A girl who will be a believer, for that’s basically the issue in the Old Testament, Jewish boys could marry Gentile girls if the Gentile girls were believers, doctrine of the book of Ruth. So the issue was whether a girl would be a believer and particularly not just any believer but a believer that God has in this girls life trained her in how she thought, trained her in how she behaved in the home and so on, so that when she got to be a young lady that Samson could marry her and she would be his helpmate to accomplish God’s plan in his life.

So what happens? You read in the Bible and we read last time that Samson was very much concerned about the will of God and so he prayed for his right woman… of course we didn’t; he just walked down to Philistia and saw some real cute doll and thought she was attractive and he liked her and so he married her; so he married out of the will of God. So that’s the man’s first mistake, a very disastrous error. But nevertheless, this is the wife mentioned in verse 20, plus the fact that since the time he married her he has not done one thing to lead her to Christ because at the wedding he got hassled and took off. The wedding actually was a wedding feast, the marriage was never consummated; there were seven days of this wedding feast and Samson took of the seventh day and went down to Philistia and murdered thirty men and brought their sports jacket’s and suits and underwear on up to the people who were at the wedding feast, dropped them down and took off. So he left his bride to be sitting there with these men and their thirty suits and underwear. And that’s where he left her.

Now in Judges 14:20 he decides it’s time he went to see her again. This is a footnote given to show you what happened to here, “But Samson’s wife was given to his companion, whom he had used as his best man [friend.]” The word “friend” there is the best man, the friend of the bridegroom. This doesn’t work out today but then if the boy lost his bride he always lost is to his best man.

Judges 15:1, “But it came to pass within a while after, in the time of wheat harvest, that Samson visited his wife with a kid;” now it’s not talking about a kid, a little boy, it’s talking about an animal, “and he said, I will go in to my wife into the chamber. But her father would not suffer him to go in.” Now this is a peculiar kind of marriage, Gideon had this kind of a marriage. This is called a concubine marriage in which the man might live over at town A and have his girl over in town B, and the girl would live with her parents. And when he felt like he wanted to come home he’d come on over and take a short visit and then take off again. It wasn’t a very pleasant kind of marriage relationship but it was the concubinish marriage that Gideon had, and you remember the fruit of that marriage. That was Abimelech, that monster came out of that operation and here we see something else. Here we have the same kind of concubine marriage and Samson decided it’s time he dropped in and so he goes down and tries to butter her up and so forth, bringing down this kid. It’s at harvest time and that’s a notice that something’s going to happen.

Judges 15:2, “And her father said, I verily thought that thou had utterly hated her; therefore I gave her to thy companion: is not her younger sister fairer than she? Take her, I pray thee, instead of her.” Obviously he’s protecting his innocence, he interpreted the way Samson acted at the wedding that he wasn’t interested in his daughter. So he said if you’re going to treat my daughter that way, fine, I’ll just take my daughter and you can go bye-bye and I’ll give her to your best man. And so the best man [tape goes blank for a short time] and so they went and lived, I don’t know if it was happily ever after but they went ahead and were married. Well, this left kind of a problem because now in verse 2 we find the father in a fix because here comes this hulk in to see his daughter and the daughter has just been married, there’s a “Just Married” sign on her bedroom door, you can’t go in.

So now we’ve got a problem and the father recognizes it and he’s really scared, the Hebrew indicates that he’s really shook at this point; he’s trying desperately to get Samson to communicate to Samson that, look, I’m really innocent, I did this, I just interpreted what you did at the wedding and so I concluded that you weren’t interested in my daughter so if you’re interested in the way the girls look in this area take a look at her sister, she looks even better. So it was really a slap in the face to Samson. Samson wasn’t interested in God’s woman for his life; he wasn’t interested in the right woman, he was just interested in some sort of a doll that he could admire and so on, when he felt like it, and so he comes back there and he says well listen Samson, you’re really interested in just the exterior, and you’re just interested in how the girl looks and so therefore Samson, how about taking her younger sister. In other words, you don’t really care. But the way Samson begins to react sounds as though now he does care. Now whether this is a maturity on his part, whether somehow the Holy Spirit is working in his life, apparently he does love this girl and he’s very incensed that this has happened.

And so in Judges 15:3 Samson says something, and here we have a problem with translation. “And Samson said concerning them,” notice “them.” Not the girl’s father and not the girl, “them” refers to the Philistines, now this is very interesting. There’s a few things in this text that shows you Samson isn’t quite the clod you think he is. Samson is a person who does have some understanding and he loves the girl but he sees that this is an opportunity to get the Philistines. Now notice again, what is the plan of God for his life? Begin to deliver the nation from the Philistines, that’s God’s plan for his life. And so any given moment of his life will be some part of doing that.

Well, at this point Samson is looking around for an excuse and he thinks by now he’s got one, so he says in verse 3, “Now,” he says, “my hand,” I’m giving you a rendition, this is not a literal translation, this is the sense of it, “Now my hands are clean of the Philistines, now that I am just about to do them evil.” The Hebrew has a very interesting construction and it’s formed on this verb in the last part of verse 3, “do.” The Hebrew has a participle there, and it’s a particular kind of participle, it’s known as the future [not familiar with word; sounds like: instan] participle and the future instan participle is used in the text when the action is conceived as going on in the mind of a person already; in other words, it’s already set in motion. So verse 3 tells us something about Samson’s thought life. Right now, he already has a way he’s going to get the Philistines, and so he says, aha, he says now I can do this and I can be legally blameless without doing it. I’m not saying that the way he’s going to do it is definitely of God because this man is out of fellowship and in fellowship so much you can’t tell. But nevertheless he has a general idea that God wants him to clobber the Philistines so he just walks down, he’s going to literally clobber them but he needs some sort of a convenient excuse and that’s what he’s saying in verse 3, he says I always wanted to twist their necks around three times and now I’ve got a good excuse. Now you can obviously see it has nothing to do with the girl and her father so it’s a pretty lame-brained excuse but nevertheless he goes ahead and does it, and he has a real rip-roaring time here.

In Judges 15:4 he went and caught 300 jackals, now foxes would be kind of hard to catch because they go in packs but the jackals in Palestine, a kind of dog-like mangy looking thing and they do go in packs, and apparently Samson ran these packs up in the hills and surrounded them. There are a lot of hills in the foothills. You have a bunch of mountains up here that run down Palestine, Philistia is here, Samson’s refugee village is here, and the girl’s home is about here, five miles away. And so he’s come on down to visit, and up in this area, you don’t have to go too far to the east before you start engaging in these low foothills, and in these foothills there’ll be little valleys where you could trap a pack of these animals, so evidently he grabbed 300 of them and he took torches, and he twisted tail to tail, in other words he tied the tails together and then he put a torch on each tail, he tied the torch on between the tails and he set the brands on fire and then he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, he did it right at harvest time. So that was his way of playing trick or treat, they gave him a trick so he gave them one back. Now this is obviously not condoned; cruelty to animals is not condoned in the Word of God and obviously these jackals died a very horrible death, being burned to death as they dragged these flaming torches across these fields. [“And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails.”]

But to show you the complete job that the fire did, in Judges 15:5 we have a series of terms in the Hebrew that indicate a complete disaster. First of all, it was right during harvest time. It was like getting hail in August and September on the cotton crops. Here you have a complete wipe out, “And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines,” now that’s the King James, they call grain corn, that’s not corn in the American sense, that is grain. So “the standing grain of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn,” now the shocks are the sacks, they’re in the process of harvesting, they have these shocks out in the field and these are just sitting there, and so these foxes go by and they burn off the grass and the shocks, the harvested crop is burned, in other words, and the standing corn is the unharvested crop, that’s burned up too, so they don’t get anything out of it. You can imagine the agricultural disaster to this kind of thing, and not only did it burn the harvested crop and the unharvested crop but the last part of verse 5 says “also the standing corn with the vineyards and olives.” Except in the Hebrew it says “the groves of olive trees.”

Now this was a very great disaster because it took years for these olive groves to grow into production and with one night Samson and 300 jackals wiped the whole thing out, just completely tubed the whole agricultural operation of the Philistines, and you can imagine the disaster that went on there. It was apparently done at night by the way in which it was done, tradition says so, and if that was true, of course you can’t be sure of tradition, but if it was true you have a land breeze in Palestine with the wind blowing down from the uplands out and you start a fire here and that fire would just go west. There was no fire department to come put it out, so this was a major economic disaster this man wrought. He thought it was a friendly trick, that’s the way he thought of it, somebody could make a real good film out of this.

Judges 15:6, “Then the Philistines said, Who hath done this? And they answered, Samson,” they didn’t have much of a problem figuring out who it was, “Samson, the son in law of the Timnite, because he had taken his wife, and given her to his companion. And the Philistines came up, and burnt her and her father with fire.” Now in Judges 14:15 they threatened to do it; what this girl could have done, at that point, when she married Samson, was to claim his protection as her right man. Obviously there was a problem there in the marriage but she could have, she could have gone to Samson and said look, Hon, you’ve got the muscles just hang around because we’ve got some problems here and my dad and I are involved in this kind of thing and we’re going to get clobbered so why don’t you just stay here for a while, we need your protection. Samson could have stayed there, it would have resolved the whole thing, but evidently they didn’t.

By the way, notice the sweet crowd the Philistines are, this is always the way of ecumenical religion, we’re open to all ideas, just don’t cross our path.

Judges 15:7, “And Samson said unto them,” see this is kind of six for this and six for that, high score, so now Samson really gets hacked, and he utters an oath, “Though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged of you, and after that I will cease.” Again we have a translation problem. This is a very hard verse, I spent many hours on this one, trying to figure out what’s going on here and it’s because we have an incomplete oath, it’s an unexpressed oath, that’s the only way it makes sense. This is literally what is understood: “As Yahweh lives,” that’s understood, this is the first preface for an oath, “As Yahweh lives, you shall not,” or “cannot do anything like this except I be avenged of you.” That’s what it’s saying. “As Yahweh lives you can’t do anything like this unless I be avenged of you.” And here he utters an oath to God, and here he’s actually functioning as a judge. But the peculiar thing about this is that instead of judging the Philistines because of what they’d done to the nation, he judges the Philistines because of what they’d done to him, see it’s personal rights, it’s not national rights that he gets involved here.

But here’s something that’s far more important than it all and I think this is a very important lesson in apologetics. Samson faces a position much as in our own day, where you have relativism. I want you to notice the methodology God uses in a highly relativist environment, how he gets the nation straightened around. Do you notice His technique? He creates a physical situation where both sides have to assert their moral rights. Now you watch how this is going to come out; it’s going to come out real good in about two more verses; both the Philistines and Samson, both claim that they should be avenged. Now doesn’t that imply the existence of moral absolutes? Of course it does, because if morals are not absolute then one could argue that well, what’s good for the Philistines may not be good for Samson. After all, you know, the Philistines might have had a custom of burning men and their daughters, it might have been a very interesting Philistine custom, nothing wrong with it, and just Samson happened to mix with that particular society but in that society that was perfectly moral and ethical. Now obviously that doesn’t work because morals are absolutes and so what God is doing through Samson’s life is to create a real life situation where finally, pressed to the wall even the most ardent relativist is going to have to say that’s wrong.

And this basically is how God often works in people. You can meet the goofiest intellectuals, people who have got themselves up into an ivory tower of philosophy to the point where they don’t believe in anything absolute. Slap them on the face and see what happens, they say ooh, what did you to that to me for? Well, it looked like a good thing to do. But you can always get their reaction, the reaction is you wrong me, or something like that. In other words, you create a physical situation where their system doesn’t fit. All their relativism just goes down the drain because they have to say that was wrong. It’s always amusing to me that in the United States all these people that are gung-ho relativist always it’s their civil rights, now just a minute here, where to the civil rights come into the picture? You see, it’s the same thing here with Judges, you’ll see how this works out in these next verses.

Judges 15:7, “And Samson said unto them, Though you have done this, yet will I be avenged of you, and after that I will cease. And in verse 8, “And he smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter, [and he went down and dwelt in the top of the rock Etam.]” now we don’t know how he did this, I recently came across an article by a man who was an expert in karate, and he was writing on the so-called lost book of Jasher. Now the book of Jasher is a strange book that was mentioned in the Bible in two places. It’s mentioned in Joshua 10 and it’s mentioned 1 Samuel 1 and it was apparently a training manual that was used for the young men as they trained in the military training in the nation. But the funny part about the book of Jasher, tradition says it has dances in it, and you wonder, some nice things to have for soldiers but what does dancing have to do with being a soldier.

So the lost book of Jasher apparently was a book that combined some sort of song, it combined historical accounts, it gave instructions according to 1 Samuel 1 on how to engage in bow and arrow operations, archery and so on. So it was a military training manual of sorts. Now we have come down to us books that claim to be the book of Jasher, you may read in a magazine, send $8.00 to us and we’ll send you the lost book of Jasher, etc. Before you send your $8.00 in just be reminded that the lost book of Jasher, the text of it is not known and is not traced. These books do exist but nobody really knows the background, how accurate they are. However, this one expert in karate read one of these and he said the interesting thing that makes him think that many of these texts of the lost book of Jasher are accurate is because they show unmistakable signs of the existence of karate back to the time of Jacob, and he says this art, of course, was lost later on by the Jews and if it were really made up later in history how come we have these unmistakable signs of karate in this book when the rabbis didn’t know karate.

So it apparently does preserve early tradition. For example, one of the traditions it cites is how Levi and Simeon slaughtered that village before they went down to Egypt, they went into the village and they were faced with a bunch of armed men and they let go with some karate yells and temporarily it just froze these people and they went in and just hacked them up. So Jacob and his sons evidently brought karate to Egypt. And later on Pharaoh had what is called 400 men who fought with the hand. And he had his archers, he had his lance units with spears and so on, but who were these strange people, the 400 men who’d fight with their hands. So evidently the Egyptians too had learned karate, and it’s probable that this “hip to thigh” term that is used here in verse 8 is also some sort of a hand to hand combat that Samson is using at this point, that he has probably had some sort of karate or judo-like approach that he uses in hand to hand combat. This explains how he was able to wade into these people and slaughter them.

Judges 15:9, “Then the Philistines went up,” Here we have retaliation, counter retaliation, counter-counter retaliation, so by the time this things get going we’ll see he’s got a real good war started. “Then the Philistines went up, and pitched in Judah, and spread themselves in Lehi.” Going back to our map, this is the way it looks. Here’s the Mediterranean coast line, here’s the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea and here’s the area of action. The Philistine pentapolis, the Philistines start coming up because Samson has conducted his massacre there and he’s fled to a little place right about here, and the Philistines are coming up into the foothills, and when they do it they’re trespassing on the territory of the tribe of Judah. See, Dan had this territory here; Dan and Judah, and now they’re crossing into the boundary of the territory of Judah.

Judges 15:10, “And the men of Judah said, Why are ye come up against us? And they answered, To bind Samson are we come up, to do to him as he hath done to us.” See, here they are, relativists, everything is relative until you cross me, then all of a sudden for some strange reason absolute morals suddenly drop into the picture from nowhere. Obviously you have an awakening or quickening of the conscience in this thing. We’re going to get Samson for what he has done to us, and then notice this, because this is very interesting to watch.

In Judges 15:11 we have, “Then three thousand men of Judah went to the top of the rock Etam, and said to Samson,” three thousand, real brave boys; they sent three thousand up to get Samson, that would obviously testify to the fact that this man could well take care of himself. And notice the real brilliant statement they make to him. “Do you not know that the Philistines are rulers over us?” So what are you trying to do Samson, rock the boat, we’ve got security, it may be an apostate anti-God anti-Biblical ruler but “don’t you know the Philistines are rulers over us.” Of course Samson knew quite well, he married one, he knew the Philistines were rulers; in other words they’re just saying look Samson, you’ve got to compromise, you’ve got to go along with this apostate rulership, you can’t rock the boat, you’re ruining our security. See immediately it’s Samson’s fault. You watch that, this happens time and time and time again in history.

We saw this in that magnificent section of the Bible in Exodus 14 where you have along the edge of the Red Sea and you have the Jews fleeing here and they’re in a perimeter where they’re caught and Pharaoh’s chariots are moving in to completely pinch them off, they’re cut off by water in the back, and they face annihilation and disaster. Do you know what Moses says to them; before he says that magnificent phrase to them they say oh Moses, what are you doing getting us in trouble with the Egyptians. Same old story, believers who are compromising always hate to associate with a believer who is with it. This is why, and let me warn you about something, some of you have got new jobs and have made contact on your job with believers; you watch out which believers you make contact with because you can get into a job situation and you will meet a believer on the job who is an out-of-it believer and he will resent you if you are spiritual, and if you’re following God’s will in your life, using the faith technique moment by moment in your life you will have a joy, you will have a peace that he can’t have and he will envy you and he will resent you and the person on the job that will most oppose you will be the other believer. You can work with 20 unbelievers and have less difficult than one other believer on the job that’s out of it. It’s the same thing here, the static that Moses has to take. Here got them through 10 plagues, he’s got them all the way over here and then they say oh Moses, you’re getting us in trouble; we don’t like it, you’re threatening our security. We had jobs in Egypt, we’re not going to have any jobs except eating sand out here in the desert; we used to have homes and now we’re going to have to live in tents. We used to be able to go down and buy a new suit every three months; when we get out in the desert there’s no clothing stores in Sinai. Moses, we don’t like this, you’re undermining our security.

And it’s the same story here, they had security with the Philistines and they resented what Samson did because when Samson got through he was identified as a Jew and it made all the Jews suspect in the Philistine eyes, and he said now you’ve really got something going, now you’ve got us in a war and we don’t like that. So this is very typical of how believers act. Judges 15:11b, three thousand men and they said to them, “what is this that thou hast done unto us?” See, he hasn’t done anything to them. “And he said unto them,” notice this, paraphrase of verse 10, “As they did unto me, so have I done unto them.” See both Samson and the Philistines adhere to this moral absolute; they both hold the other party to blame. You can’t hold another party to blame unless there’s a common moral absolute shared by both parties; so therefore you have to have a moral absolute. So it’s interesting, in all of this relativism and ecumenicalism the thing that finally brought them to the light was a physical situation where they were forced back to a moral absolute.

Judges 15:12, “And they said unto him, We are come down to bind thee, that we may deliver thee into the hand of the Philistines.” Wasn’t that sweet, three thousand of his brethren are going to do him a real big favor, turn him back over to the Philistines. And here is one of those little verses in the Word of God where you can read over it thirty miles and hour and never see the point, yet this next verse coming up shows you that Samson was a man of faith. He was a man at this point he was in fellowship with the Lord and he had a peace and he had a purpose and he had a wonderful life at this point even though he had screwed up at other points, nevertheless let’s got back to the circles.

What was God’s plan for his life? To begin to deliver the nation. In this particular moment the will of God for his life was, obviously if he’s going to deliver the nation, not to harm the nation and to hurt the enemy. And so he makes a peculiar request at the end of verse 12, “And Samson said unto them, Swear unto me, that ye will not fall upon me yourselves.” He said you go ahead and you bind me, but I want you to swear to me that you will not fall upon me yourselves. Now why do you suppose he makes that peculiar request? Is Samson afraid of them? Oh no, Samson is not afraid of them because we’ve already seen how easily he could handle himself. Samson is not afraid of his brethren. The reason he makes this request is because he doesn’t want them to start a fight with him and he’s going to have to kill them. This is a love for his fellow believer. And even though they are dumping it all over him and even though they’re delivering him over to the hand of the enemy, Samson, in the will of God, using the technique of faith, he has peace with God, he can handle himself in the situation and even under that situation, as we have seen, Samson can very easily get out of fellowship and be very vengeful.

Yet at this point he’s makes one request; he says you bind me but don’t put yourself in a position where I’m going to have to clobber you. He gives them a warning. Now that may not sound like much to you but when you study this in the context of Samson’s life you will realize that this is an expression of love to other believers, even though these other believers don’t earn it, they certainly don’t merit by what they’re doing to Samson, right in the middle of persecution. Remember the principle of Romans 12, let wrath have its course. Samson is relaxed.

You know it’s awfully relaxing to be as a believer in a situation where somebody comes up and they just it all over you and you are able to use the technique Paul gives you in Romans 12:19, giving place unto the wrath, and so you just relax and you let it slide off and you don’t get in carnality and resentment, you just take it, that’s all, you handle it before the Lord, and so you can relax and it produces a wonderful peace and stability and you don’t have to get yourself ulcers worrying about something, just relax, that’s all, and it’s the same thing here, Samson is relaxed, he’s in fellowship. And what does he say? He says believers, I love you and I don’t want to hurt you so don’t do anything to get me in a situation where I’m going to have to hurt you. Now he probably felt like clobbering all three thousand of them at this point, but nevertheless, even though they are disobedient believers Samson recognizes they too are children of God and they too merit his love, positionally they are spiritually one with him.

Judges 15:13, “And they spoke unto him, saying, No; but we will bind thee fast, and deliver thee into their hand: but surely we will not kill thee. And they bound him with two new cords, and brought him up from the rock.” The reason the Hebrew puts that “new” in there is to draw your attention to the strength of the cord; it’s going to come up again.

Now in Judges 15:14, “And when he came unto Lehi,” this is the Philistine camp, remember they had gone up into the foothills, “And when he came to Lehi, the Philistines shouted against him,” the Philistines see him coming down and all of a sudden they yell out, and this particular yell was a victory yell, it was used in the armies of the ancient world when they had attained victory, they’d give this fantastic shout, and so it’s actually a shout of victory. And so when they make this shout of victory, immediately it says in verse 14, “and the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him,” this means he is immediately infused with supernatural strength, the word is a verb for quick motion, instanteously when he heard that victory shout the Holy Spirit moved. Why? Because whose victory shout was it? It was really Satan articulated through the mouths of the Philistines, at last I’ve got God’s man. So immediately the Holy Spirit rushes upon him, “and the cords that were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire, and his bands loosed from off his hands.”

Judges 15:15, “And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.” And notice, he doesn’t get one bit of help from his brethren. Like a bunch of goofballs, all three thousand sit around and look while he clobbers a thousand of them. They had them outnumbered three to one, and these goofs from the tribe of Judah stand around and they say well gee, look what he’s doing. And that’s their attitude, real help, one believer sticking up for another one. This is a one man show all the way because at this point there’s only one believer in that part of the country that has the guts to see what the issue is and stand up and part of the people he has to stand up to are his own, believers; he has to stand up to them as well. And so he slays them.

And in Judges 15:16 we have a song; actually it should be translated as poetry and it’s actually a play on words, “And Samson said, With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men.” In the Hebrew it looks like this, chamor, and chamor is the word for ass, and it’s also the word for heaps, so it’s actually a play on words and one of the great exegetes of this passage gave the following rendition of this song and tried to set it to a little poetry and by the way, this ass is a red ass, this has a reddish hew to him. So actually the way this should read is this: “With the red asses’ jawbone I have ridden them light red,” that’s what he’s saying, you it’s a play between chamor, meaning the red ass and the heaps of bloody bodies that is left. It’s a very gruesome song that he’s commemorating; look at these bloody hulks that I’ve left here, how about that. And this is the song of a warrior. And probably this was included in the book of Jasher.

Judges 15:17, “And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking, that he cast away the jawbone out of his hand, and called that place Ramathlehi.” And the last part, verses 18-20 show you a very interesting situation that often happens to believers. Verse 18, “And he was sore athirst, and called on the LORD, and said, Thou hast given this great deliverance into the hand of thy servant: and now shall I die for thirst, and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?” In other words, he had passed through an extensive, very strenuous ministry. As a result of this he ran his body down physically. He must have exerted a fantastic amount of physical strength and when in this kind of state of depleted physical resources believers often times get carnal. In other words if you weaken your body it will lead to spiritual problems. We see this again in 1 Kings 19 with Elijah, he does the same thing, he gets through his tremendous crisis ministry and after he gets through with it he’s drained of his physical strength and he turns and he says Lord, they’re all against me. And you wonder, how can a man be so fantastic one moment and collapse the next moment. It’s simple; one time they’re in fellowship, one time they’re out of fellowship, but the point to remember is that you can allow your physical health to deteriorate to the point where it begins to influence you spiritually. And here’s an illustration.

Judges 15:19, God gives water, “But God clave an hollow place that was in the jaw, and there came water out of it; and when he had drunk, his spirit came again, and he revived; wherefore he called the name thereof Enhakkore, which is in Lehi unto this day.” And a closing note in verse 20, Samson “judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.” But you never read he delivered them. For twenty years this man ruled and for twenty years he can never bring about deliverance because to summarize, we have believers who operate like this, believers who have a plan for their lives, plan X, X means your plan that God has for your life. And we have a maximum number of believers who are on negative volition toward plan X and instead of plan X they’ve plugged in some human viewpoint things, security, money, sex, prestige, job, something else that they’ve plugged in there and that’s more important to them right now than any other thing and no matter who tells them, no matter how many hours of counseling they have, they don’t want God’s plan.

Going back to our illustration of the job, it may come to a point where you have to quit your job because of various reasons. God’s will is quit, and you say no, I want my security, I want my money, I want all the rest of the things. After all, I’ve got payments on this and I’ve got payments on that, and I’ve got all these other things and all the rest of it. I’ve got obligations. Yes, and you also have an obligation to submit to the will of God for your life moment by moment by faith; that’s one of your key obligations. So we have a situation in the nation that directly parallels believers in our time, believers who are going around miserable, who say oh, Christianity doesn’t work, I’ve tried it and it just doesn’t work, and I don’t believe in taking in all this Bible doctrine because it doesn’t work, so what I’ll do is trot around all the churches and I’ll go to this church and at one church they teach me on tongues and I get hopped on tongues and go to all the little prayer meetings and that gives me a kick for six or seven months and I like it there, then I go down to the Second So and So Church and make friends there and enemies and when I make more enemies than friends I’ll move on to some other church, etc. Then I go from one job to another, etc. Believers are like this, unstable as water, they’re miserable and horrible. Why? It’s very simple, they have nobody to blame but themselves, that’s all. Don’t blame it on people, on the Lord, on something else, if you as a believer are miserable and suffering it’s because you somewhere in your life have rebelled against God’s will.

Now I’ve talked a lot in the recent months about the need for an absolute base of truth and I hope I have made it clear that all the techniques of the Word of God are not psychological gimmicks. We’re going to start balancing things up from now on with some of the subjective applications. This means that some believers who have heard what I have said and still sat there with a smug look on their face and have said well, that’s nice, it doesn’t apply to me, you are about to see how it does apply to you and it explains a lot of things that you can’t understand in your life. It explains a lot of the misery that you’re experiencing, it explains a lot of the confusion that you have because you are not using the technique of faith moment by moment, of trusting and submitting to the will of God in this moment, in the present, not yesterday or tomorrow, now. It means all these things, they all work together. And so as we move through and finish the book of Judges I hope we’ll see more and more of these details.