God’s grace
overcomes all of our failures; Judges 15
Samson is a great encouragement to every one of us. All of us fail at
times, all of us have sin natures that we allow to gain the upper hand at
times. Hopefully few of us run around our Christian life like Samson did, but
if God used Samson, and He did, the key to understanding it is that God used
Samson in spite of Samson’s carnality and so there was relatively little
blessing that accrued to Samson. Nevertheless God used him and it shows that
there is tremendous forgiveness, and God is a God of grace, despite all of our
sin and our failures. It is not what we are or what we do, it is based
completely on who He is and what Christ did for us on the cross.
14:8—it is at this point that Samson is going to violate the Nazirite
vow a second time by touching the carcass of the lion and defiling himself.
What we really see in this section is a threefold sin on Samson’s part. First
of all, he is forbidden by the Mosaic law from touching a carcass. Every
Israelite was. If you touched something dead then it rendered you ceremonially
unclean and you had to perform a
sacrifice for cleansing. The reason was that death was always a reminder of the
penalty of sin—the penalty of sin is spiritual death, its consequence is
physical death—and so whenever they came in contact with someone who was dead
they couldn’t go into the presence of God without a sacrifice. The picture
there is that we as believers can’t go into the presence of God when wee have
been defiled by sin. So there were hundreds and hundreds of ways a Jew could
defile himself and become ceremonially unclean. So the first sin of Samson is
that as a Jew he violates the Mosaic law. Secondly, he violates the Nazirite
vow by touching the carcass. The third thing is what he is going to do with the
honey. He is going to give it to his parents without telling them where it came
from and that causes them to become ceremonially unclean, but they are ignorant
of it. It is a sin of ignorance on their part because of what he has done.
Verse 12 – during this period in history we know that among the Greeks
and among other people in the Mediterranean area, telling riddles and proposing
riddles was a popular sport. They would sit around and try to outdo each other
with these riddles and they would bet and gamble on them: who would come up
with the best riddle that would stump everybody. So when Samson comes along and
develops this riddle we know that it fits the historical context of about
twelve to eleven hundred BC. This was a very popular thing to do at that time.
This is crucial to understanding these two chapters, everything revolves around
this riddle. The word “feast” referred to in verse 10 was the Hebrew word, mishta,
which refers to a seven-day feast of drinking and gorging. The inference is
that Samson is not sitting back in a corner watching everybody else gluttonize
and get drunk, he is right in there with everybody else having a field day
feeding his own physical appetite.
Verse 18 – “What is sweeter than honey?” The grace of God. “And what is
stronger than a lion?” The power of God. There are little hints here that
Samson is violating both, and that God is there to deliver
Verse 19 – immediately in contrast to that we are told that “the Spirit
of the Lord came upon him mightily.” We see that the Spirit of God is still
working through him but it is not in terms of spiritual value. The Spirit of
God has a plan and that is to disrupt this assimilation that is taking place
between the Philistines and the Jews. He then went down to
Chapter 15:1 – Samson visited his wife. Notice that it is in the time of
the wheat harvest. The writer makes a point of that because of what will take
place in this chapter. Apparently Samson had the idea that this was more of a
concubine marriage. The difference between a regular marriage and a concubine
marriage was that a regular marriage you moved in together and set up a home
and began a family. In a concubine marriage it had a legal status, it was not
like a prostitute or a mistress, but not on the same level of a wife. The man
didn’t live with the concubine, we saw that with Gideon, but she was legally
the man’s. But here the father won’t let it happen, but we see that this father
is treating his daughters like property here and we see once again a negative
view of women.
Verse 3 – now he is going to get involved in vengeance, he is going to
take it out on the Philistines. Verse 4 – “three hundred foxes” is not foxes,
it is jackals.” Foxes are solitary creatures; jackals run in packs. You could
set up traps to catch large numbers of jackals. Apparently there were a lot of jackals in this area but there was
also a lion. One of the things that God had promised to
Verses 4, 5 – “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. And when he had set the
brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and
burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and
olives.” He lights the torches and lets them into the fields. There is cut
wheat and there is still wheat on the stalks in the fields. Everything is
caught on fire. Remember what God had said to
Verse 6 – the Philistines respond in anger. They can’t tackle Samson,
he’s too tough, so they are going to take the path of least resistance and burn
up the girl and her father. And that is going to bring about another act of
retaliation from Samson in verse 7— “Since you act like this, I shall surely
take revenge on you, and after that I will cease.” What we see is the ongoing
destructive cycle of mental attitude sins--hatred, bitterness, revenge, on and
on and it just creates more and more trouble. The thing is that God is working
behind this to bring about the separation of Israel from the Philistines.
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.” We don’t know how many he
killed but it was a large number. Samson’s attitude now is that it is over
with, he’s done, and he just goes off by himself to sulk. Every time he does
something it is as if it is all over with. He has no foresight, he doesn’t
think beyond whatever is going on today and he seems to be totally oblivious to
the fact that God is using him. There is no indication that he is aware that
the Spirit of God is the source of his power at all. He is totally
self-absorbed.
Verse 9 – now what happens is that the Philistines come and camp in
Judah. And look at the reaction of the men of Judah. Here is the enemy coming,
and we know that they should understand this, it is not long after this, maybe
in another five years or so, there is going to be a major pitched battle. And
it is in that battle that the Philistines are going to capture the ark of the
covenant and bring it back to the temple of Dagon down in Gaza. So they know
that there is an antagonism and that the Philistines are the enemy but they are
so pacifistic. They were just going to cave in. They said they would go and
find Samson for them! The Philistines have given in to relativism, they have a
relativistic culture. They have absorbed all the surrounding and different
cultures, in many ways not dissimilar to late and early 20th and 21st century
times. Once every culture is viewed as having valid truths then all truths have
an equal amount of weight and an equal amount of value. There is not truth,
then, that is absolute, everything is relative. In relativism if everything is
equally true then everything is equally false. This leads to an ecumenical
mindset that it doesn’t really matter what we believe just as long as we all
believe something is God and we all use the same terminology, and we can all
get together, and doctrine is no longer an issue. So in this ecumenical mindset
truth doesn’t matter, the only thing that matters is whatever experience we have
in common. But if everything in life is relative then nothing is worth dying
for. If nothing is worth dying for, nothing is worth fighting for. If nothing
is worth fighting for then a major sin is going to be anybody who starts
stirring up trouble and causing war. So war becomes an ultimate sin and in
order to prevent that you disarm people so they can’t fight. That is what was
going on during the time of the judges. We know from 1 Samuel 7 that what
happened with the Philistines is they had entered into the iron age but they
would not allow the Jews to have a blacksmith, so that the Jews could not have
iron weapons, and that meant they couldn’t defend themselves and they didn’t
think they could go to war successfully against the Philistines. So we see all
these indications of extremely strange weapons at this time. For example,
Shamgar used an ox goad. David is going to use a sling. Now the men in Judah
don’t have anything to fight for anymore and so they are just going to cave in
to the Philistines. So pacifism always goes along with ecumenism. And that
always goes along with relativism because if there is nothing worth fighting
for and dying for then there is no reason to get involved with warfare. In
relativism the only things worth living for is whatever is going to make you
happy at the moment. That is where we are today in our culture, people are
doing whatever makes them happy right now, and they have no concept of living
for the future and the long range consequences of present action.
In our time the great sin is going to be the environment. It won’t be
long before war will be thought of as the greatest evil simply because it would
do such environmental damage. So anybody who would go to war is going to be
considered an environmental criminal, and under the guise of environmental
protection we are going to start disarming.
So the three thousand men go down to get Samson, and they say, “Don’t
you know that the Philistines are rulers over us? Why are you causing all this
trouble?” And they bound him up and took him to the Philistines. Then we are
told the Spirit of the Lord came upon him mightily so that he just broke his
bonds. And he found the fresh jawbone of a donkey which he uses as a weapon and
kills a thousand men. Then in verse 16 he has another riddle: “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 verse 18 Samson calls on the Lord, and it seems at this point that
there seems to be something positive about Samson spiritually. Yet even in his
prayer he is more concerned with himself and seem to be giving lip service to
God. But there is a small element in Samson’s thought that he realizes that
this comes a s a result of God’s provision. He does cry out to God and God does
answer his prayer despite all of his carnality because Samson’s carnality is
much smaller than the plan of God. The plan of God is based on grace and God’s
grace is going to eventually bring deliverance to Israel. But first He has
something to accomplish with Samson.
The principle here is that God’s grace overcomes all of our failures. No
matter how much we fail God still is a God of grace. If we are still alive God
still has a plan for our lives and God still uses us, and so the issue is that
whenever there is a problem, whenever we go through discipline, we need to
realize that God is using us for a purpose and that is to bring us back to
Himself. That is what God is doing with Samson and the Jews to get their
attention back on Him. Eventually that will happen but not under Samson’s
ministry, rather under Samuel’s ministry.