SPEAKER_01: This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Scott.
SPEAKER_00: Please take your Bibles with me to the book of Judges, chapter 13.
SPEAKER_00: I have the unenviable privilege of trying to preach on three chapters of Judges this morning.
SPEAKER_00: So pray for me if you will.
SPEAKER_00: Judges chapter 13.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Scott, for setting us up to consider the life of Samson.
SPEAKER_00: The life of Samson.
SPEAKER_00: Judges chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, 4 chapters actually.
SPEAKER_00: You're familiar with this account.
SPEAKER_00: And before we jump into it, I want to remind you that this is our communion Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: So we are headed to participate together in the celebration of the Lord's death, burial, and resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, by remembering Samson.
SPEAKER_00: Samson's immense physical strength occupies a large portion of our memory, obviously accompanied by his downfall with Delilah.
SPEAKER_00: But there is far more to the life and memory and history of Samson than just those two elements.
SPEAKER_00: So in chapter 13, we have the account of his birth.
SPEAKER_00: In chapter 14, we have an account about his first marriage, which we often forget.
SPEAKER_00: Chapter 15 is an account of his victories over the Philistines.
SPEAKER_00: And chapter 16 details the end of his life with Delilah and his death.
SPEAKER_00: But the larger truth over all of that text is that God sovereignly set Samson apart before his birth to be a savior judge over Israel.
SPEAKER_00: Very unique position.
SPEAKER_00: But Samson resolutely lived in the middle.
SPEAKER_00: He was set apart to be holy.
SPEAKER_00: But he was drawn by his love for the world.
SPEAKER_00: Samson spent most of his life trying to be like everyone else, even while accomplishing the very things that God intended for him.
SPEAKER_00: And so we see God's sovereign work all throughout this account, side by side, literally side by side with Samson's love for the things of the world.
SPEAKER_00: It sounds much like modern-day Christians trying to do what God commands them to do while also doing what pleases them.
SPEAKER_00: Now we can only consider this account very broadly.
SPEAKER_00: So as we notice our historians' broad descriptions of this strong man, we must also examine how much we are like Samson.
SPEAKER_00: And how much we need a holy God to be our great Savior and Judge.
SPEAKER_00: Consider with me five broad descriptions of Samson.
SPEAKER_00: And as we consider these descriptions, ask yourself and maybe confess if these apply to you.
SPEAKER_00: First one, this Savior Judge is different.
SPEAKER_00: This Savior Judge is different.
SPEAKER_00: He is uniquely set apart by God before his conception.
SPEAKER_00: Think of where we've been.
SPEAKER_00: God just steps in and uses him.
SPEAKER_00: But in Judges chapter 13, a man by the name of Manoah and his wife were visited by God himself and told that they would have a son who would be a Nazarite.
SPEAKER_00: Manoah and his wife appear strangely, somewhat ignorant of their God.
SPEAKER_00: This angel of the Lord, the angel of the Lord, which we find out later is God himself, appears to them and they don't even know how to communicate to him.
SPEAKER_00: They don't even recognize who he is.
SPEAKER_00: Manoah's wife calls him a man of God.
SPEAKER_00: First, our historian identifies him as the angel of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Then Manoah's wife says he's a man of God.
SPEAKER_00: Manoah prays to God and says, Would he please come back in verse 8?
SPEAKER_00: Would the man of God come again?
SPEAKER_00: And only after they offer a sacrifice to God do they recognize, uh-oh, we've seen God face to face and we might die.
SPEAKER_00: Let me ask you a question.
SPEAKER_00: If God Himself appeared to you, would you know it?
SPEAKER_00: Would you be in a position in your spiritual life where you would recognize who God is?
SPEAKER_00: That's the setup for the whole account of Samson.
SPEAKER_00: Here's a group of people who are so far from their God, they can't even recognize him when he's with them, and they don't even know the terms to use to refer to him.
SPEAKER_00: He is very ordinary to them.
SPEAKER_00: The people of Israel have shifted out of the middle to be like the dominant culture of the time.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, they had given up.
SPEAKER_00: We don't see anyone here in Israel crying out to the Lord to yank them out of their place of complacency, out of their domination by the Philistines, and back into a right relationship with God.
SPEAKER_00: We don't see any of that.
SPEAKER_00: The nation was content with the status quo.
SPEAKER_00: It's just what was.
SPEAKER_00: They don't seem to care about their relationship with their God.
SPEAKER_00: They don't seem to care about the fact that the foreign nation rules over them.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, they are satisfied with it.
SPEAKER_00: If you look over at chapter 15 and verse 11, there's this strange comment.
SPEAKER_00: Just as though this is everyday knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: Don't you know this?
SPEAKER_00: Manoah and his wife are pictures of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: They are aware that as a nation they belong to God, but they are not at all in step with him.
SPEAKER_00: In our present-day America, we might say this is the story of cultural Christians.
SPEAKER_00: They don't even recognize when God is speaking to them in person.
SPEAKER_00: They don't know what words to use to refer to God.
SPEAKER_00: There is no awareness of God's presence, but they know somehow, in some way, they kind of sort of belong to God.
SPEAKER_00: But in the midst of that, we see God's sovereignty.
SPEAKER_00: Because God was not satisfied with Israel's contentedness.
SPEAKER_00: Strange statement to make.
SPEAKER_00: We are supposed to be content, right?
SPEAKER_00: Yes and no.
SPEAKER_00: We are not to be content with living in the middle.
SPEAKER_00: Nor are we to be content with loving the world or the things in the world.
SPEAKER_00: God was not satisfied with his people's contentedness, with their love for the world.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, Israel was very responsible.
SPEAKER_00: They were responsible for what led them into sin and their abandonment by God.
SPEAKER_00: The world had such a hold on them that they no longer desired God's mighty work to rescue them.
SPEAKER_00: There's no crying out for God's help like Israel in Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: This is what happens when someone spends so much time in the middle.
SPEAKER_00: You gradually drift outside of fellowship with God, outside of God's connections in the spiritual way, and all of those things are soon forgotten, and they just become memories in a scrapbook.
SPEAKER_00: But in God's mercy and grace, he was not content to leave his people in that place.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes God leaves his people right where they are as a part of his discipline and his judgment.
SPEAKER_00: But here, God steps into his created world to rescue his people.
SPEAKER_00: He forced Israel out of her complacency.
SPEAKER_00: God interrupted Israel's state by promising a unique child who he called a Nazirite from birth.
SPEAKER_00: A Nazirite comes from a Hebrew word Nazir, which means basically to be separate from something, to be distinct, to be other than.
SPEAKER_00: You can look on your own at Numbers chapter 6 in the first half of that chapter or so to see all of the details about a Nazirite.
SPEAKER_00: I'll summarize it for you, though.
SPEAKER_00: A Nazirite was someone who was separated from the world in a distinct way that marked them as belonging to God.
SPEAKER_00: And anyone could take a Nazirite vow.
SPEAKER_00: Typically, a Nazirite vow was temporary, it was for a period of time.
SPEAKER_00: But it came with three primary obligations.
SPEAKER_00: A Nazarite vow required total separation from all alcohol, any alcoholic beverages, and it even extended to vinegars and unfermented grape products.
SPEAKER_00: Secondly, they were to remain separate from corpses, from dead bodies.
SPEAKER_00: And third, a Nazirite was not to cut his or her hair during the length of their vow.
SPEAKER_00: Now remember, a Nazirite vow was typically temporary.
SPEAKER_00: So it could be days, weeks, months, years, and you didn't cut your hair during that time.
SPEAKER_00: And that haircutting, lack of haircutting, was an outward sign of that person's separateness to holiness.
SPEAKER_00: Now sometimes there might be an accidental violation where you came in contact with a dead body and you didn't mean to.
SPEAKER_00: And so hair was cut and the vow was restarted, and the hair was offered as a sacrifice to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if there wasn't an interruption and somebody performed their Nazarite vow from beginning to end, at the end of the vow, the hair was cut, and the hair was brought and offered as a sacrifice to the Lord, because that hair was a symbol that the person belonged to God.
SPEAKER_00: The hair was permanently devoted because it was the outward sign of someone's separation to God.
SPEAKER_00: That's what holiness is.
SPEAKER_00: It's a separation to God.
SPEAKER_00: So a Nazarite displays in their life God's holiness by being separate themselves.
SPEAKER_00: Now the difference here is that Samson didn't take a voluntary, temporary vow.
SPEAKER_00: God stepped in before he was even conceived and said, this is what he's going to be.
SPEAKER_00: Period, end of story.
SPEAKER_00: He was chosen by God to be set apart for his entire life.
SPEAKER_00: Samson didn't choose that life.
SPEAKER_00: God appointed him to it.
SPEAKER_00: And his parents gave him the name Samson.
SPEAKER_00: I hope to give you some insight this morning into that name so that you hear that name differently from now on.
SPEAKER_00: Samson is a word that is based on a Hebrew word for sun.
SPEAKER_00: S-U-N, the sun in the sky, that big glowing orb that we see sometimes in summer.
SPEAKER_00: So Samson, every time his name was mentioned, would remind people of the sun.
SPEAKER_00: There may be some local importance to that because just a few miles south of where Samson was born and his parents lived was a place called Beit Shemesh, the house or the temple of the sun.
SPEAKER_00: So God may be saying, no, that's not the place where God rises.
SPEAKER_00: It's here in Samson.
SPEAKER_00: So the unspoken question of Judges 13, 14, 15, 16 is this?
SPEAKER_00: Is the sun rising for Israel in the midst of their mil living in the middle?
SPEAKER_00: Sadly, the answer to that question is no.
SPEAKER_00: Because our historian does a fascinating literary move by repeating the word down over and over and over again.
SPEAKER_00: Samson goes down, Samson goes down, Samson goes down.
SPEAKER_00: The man born as son is not rising, but going down.
SPEAKER_00: Samson is different.
SPEAKER_00: God promised his birth, God appointed him to be a savior judge by a distinct appearance to his parents, and God set him apart.
SPEAKER_00: Samson is a different kind of judge from the other judges.
SPEAKER_00: But this savior judge is indifferent.
SPEAKER_00: Do I not have that slide up there, guys?
SPEAKER_00: Indifferent?
SPEAKER_00: It's not there?
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: Can you go back to my first one?
SPEAKER_00: There we go.
SPEAKER_00: It was right there.
SPEAKER_00: There we go.
SPEAKER_00: This savior judge is indifferent.
SPEAKER_00: He starts out as different, but he lives his life indifferently.
SPEAKER_00: His difference, his God-appointed difference, had very little, if any, true impact on who he was, on how he lived his life, on how he obeyed God.
SPEAKER_00: For one thing, he fraternizes with the enemy.
SPEAKER_00: If you look at chapter 14, we begin to see that he went down to Timnah.
SPEAKER_00: He went down to Timnah Timnah is a city of the Philistines.
SPEAKER_00: The Philistines who are ruling over Israel at this point.
SPEAKER_00: So he doesn't go down to fight the enemy or to free Israel from the enemy.
SPEAKER_00: No, he goes down to the enemy to get married to one of the Philistines.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't lead an army there.
SPEAKER_00: We don't see him seeking the Lord's will like Gideon as to what he should do.
SPEAKER_00: No, Samson went down to be at the level of the world around him.
SPEAKER_00: The sun does not rise to proclaim the glory of God to the pagan peoples.
SPEAKER_00: The sun goes down to live with the pagan peoples and be like them.
SPEAKER_00: Samson from the very beginning failed to be separate.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, he desired to marry a woman from among Israel's oppressors.
SPEAKER_00: In spite of that, God's working, sovereignly using Samson's indifference as part of the divine plan to rescue Israel.
SPEAKER_00: Samson and Israel wouldn't actively seek the ousting of the Philistines, so God works within the context of Samson's sinful desires to accomplish his will.
SPEAKER_00: God acted sovereignly, and Samson bears responsibility for his actions.
SPEAKER_00: He goes down and we see this strange situation.
SPEAKER_00: His father and mother go with him.
SPEAKER_00: He says, Listen, I want you to get this girl for me for my wife.
SPEAKER_00: And his parents say, Listen, wouldn't you just marry one of our own people instead of one of the Philistines?
SPEAKER_00: And he says, No, get her for me, for she is right in my eyes.
SPEAKER_00: She looks good.
SPEAKER_00: Get her for me.
SPEAKER_00: And they went down in verse 5 of chapter 14.
SPEAKER_00: A young lion comes at Samson and he destroys it with his bare hands.
SPEAKER_00: And he says nothing.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't tell his mom and dad.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't tell his fiancee.
SPEAKER_00: He just says nothing.
SPEAKER_00: That's a bit strange, don't you think?
SPEAKER_00: You get attacked by a lion and you tear it apart with your bare hands and you don't say anything?
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's to set us up because Samson doesn't want to say anything.
SPEAKER_00: Samson is a man who is driven by his senses and his desires.
SPEAKER_00: It's all about what he sees, all about what he feels, all about what he wants.
SPEAKER_00: There's no thought here given to God's desire for Israel to remain pure and undefiled and separate from the nations around them.
SPEAKER_00: Samson just does what he wants.
SPEAKER_00: And so he goes down.
SPEAKER_00: They talked with the woman in verse 7, and she was right in Samson's eyes.
SPEAKER_00: She looks good, it all feels right to him.
SPEAKER_00: And so after some days in verse 8, he returns to take her.
SPEAKER_00: And oh, he just thought, I'm going to stop by and see the carcass of the lion.
SPEAKER_00: Behold, there was a swarm of bees in the body of the lion and honey.
SPEAKER_00: And he scrapes it out into his hands and went on eating as he went.
SPEAKER_00: He came to his father and mother and gave some to them, and they ate, but he did not tell them that he had scraped the honey from the carcass of the lion.
SPEAKER_00: Why would he not tell them?
SPEAKER_00: Because he's a Nazirite.
SPEAKER_00: And a Nazirite is not to touch a carcass.
SPEAKER_00: Samson has no desire to remain dutiful to his calling.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, he follows his senses, he follows his desires, and he not only violates his Nazarite calling, but he defiles his parents by indirectly bringing them into contact with a corpse.
SPEAKER_00: His parents have set him apart by God's command from birth, and now he desecrates them without even telling them.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks, son.
SPEAKER_00: We see in verses 10 through 19 that not only is Samson driven by his senses and his desires, but he's driven by anger.
SPEAKER_00: They went down and they had a wedding feast, a wedding celebration in verse 10, for so the young men used to do.
SPEAKER_00: But for some reason the Philistine people know that something's up, and so they hire 30 bodyguards for one guy.
SPEAKER_00: Now these are not bodyguards to protect anybody, these are bodyguards to do something to Samson.
SPEAKER_00: He says to them, Let me now put a riddle to you, and if you can tell me what it is, Within the seven days of the feast and find it out, then I will give you 30 linen garments and 30 changes of clothes.
SPEAKER_00: That's a small fortune.
SPEAKER_00: But if you cannot tell me what it is, then you shall give me 30 linen garments and 30 changes of clothes.
SPEAKER_00: Again, that's a small fortune.
SPEAKER_00: Here's the riddle: out of the eater came something to eat, and out of the strong came something sweet.
SPEAKER_00: We already know the answer to the riddle because we're following along in the story.
SPEAKER_00: He's referring to the lion and the honey in the lion, and in three days they could not solve the riddle.
SPEAKER_00: On the fourth day, what do they do?
SPEAKER_00: On the fourth day, they said to Samson's wife, entice your husband to tell us what the riddle is.
SPEAKER_00: And if you don't, we're gonna burn you and your family.
SPEAKER_00: What has Samson gotten himself into?
SPEAKER_00: He's not separated anymore.
SPEAKER_00: He's not even living in the middle anymore.
SPEAKER_00: He's gone down to the ways of the world, and now the ways of the world are beginning to impact him and everyone around him.
SPEAKER_00: And this will serve as a prelude to Delilah.
SPEAKER_00: We remember Delilah, don't we?
SPEAKER_00: We don't remember the unnamed woman.
SPEAKER_00: Samson loses the bet because his new wife pestered him to the point where he gave in.
SPEAKER_00: But remember, he may not have even been in this predicament had he not violated his calling and come into contact with the corpse of the lion.
SPEAKER_00: If he would have just known, I can't go touch that, I'm not going to worry about it, and just go on, he wouldn't be in this predicament.
SPEAKER_00: He wouldn't have the riddle to tell them.
SPEAKER_00: But at every turn, Samson, though he was called to be set apart from birth, at every turn it's as though he does not want to be set apart.
SPEAKER_00: He has one foot in his Nazarite status and the other in whatever pleases him.
SPEAKER_00: He's trying desperately to live two lives at the same time.
SPEAKER_00: And to some extent, beloved, this is every believer in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Ephesians chapter 1 says that every believer in Christ was chosen before the foundation of the world.
SPEAKER_00: And you've been called to be holy before him as your father is holy.
SPEAKER_00: We might say in our own sense that we are Nazarites.
SPEAKER_00: And so often we want to be normal, like the rest of the world.
SPEAKER_00: But God did not choose us before the foundation of the world to be like the world.
SPEAKER_00: That kind of life only brings the temporary joys of sin and with it the pains and sorrows of sin.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, Jesus said that whoever follows him must take up his cross daily.
SPEAKER_00: We crucify our attachment to the world.
SPEAKER_00: But Samson was indifferent to God's will.
SPEAKER_00: Are you?
SPEAKER_00: Brothers and sisters, we must guard against indifference.
SPEAKER_00: Notice what Samson's indifference cost him.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 1 of chapter 15.
SPEAKER_00: After some days at the time of the wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife with a young goat.
SPEAKER_00: He says, I will go into my wife in the chamber.
SPEAKER_00: But her father would not allow him to go in.
SPEAKER_00: And her father said, Listen, I really thought that you utterly hated her.
SPEAKER_00: You left in a rage.
SPEAKER_00: So I gave her to your companion, your best man at the wedding.
SPEAKER_00: Is her younger sister not more beautiful than she?
SPEAKER_00: Please take her instead.
SPEAKER_00: Samson said, This time I will be innocent in regard to the Philistines when I do them harm.
SPEAKER_00: So Samson went, caught three hundred foxes, and took torches.
SPEAKER_00: He turned them tail to tail and put a torch between each of their tails, and when he set fire to the torches, he let the foxes go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and it all burned up as well as the olive orchards.
SPEAKER_00: Verse six, when they asked who did it, they said, Samson, the son-in-law of that Timnite, because he has taken his wife and given her to his companions, and the Philistines came up and burned her and her father with fire.
SPEAKER_00: Samson left in a rage.
SPEAKER_00: He comes back in a rage.
SPEAKER_00: He burns them, and so they burn his wife and her father.
SPEAKER_00: Samson was driven by his anger, and someone misinterpreted his rage and gave his wife to his best man.
SPEAKER_00: How many of you would vote for this man to be your judge?
SPEAKER_00: Now God used him to frustrate the enemies and to kill many of them.
SPEAKER_00: But Samson routinely violated his call to holiness.
SPEAKER_00: Which tells us that our third description here is that the Savior Judge here of Samson reacted in a worldly way.
SPEAKER_00: Guys, at the computer up there, I can't switch over the slides, so could you do that for me?
SPEAKER_00: This Savior Judge reacted in a worldly way.
SPEAKER_00: What do we mean by that?
SPEAKER_00: I'll give you a few instances.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, he reacted in a worldly way by retaliating when wronged.
SPEAKER_00: He retaliated when wronged.
SPEAKER_00: Samson would not have lost his bride had he not reacted angrily in the first place.
SPEAKER_00: Then he retaliated because he believed he had been wronged.
SPEAKER_00: Samson never looked at himself and asked, what was my part in this?
SPEAKER_00: No, he just reacted based on his senses, based on his emotions, based on what he wanted.
SPEAKER_00: Thankfully, God is working in the background.
SPEAKER_00: He's beginning to save Israel from the Philistines.
SPEAKER_00: But Samson acts sinfully, irresponsibly, but God used that to fulfill his purposes.
SPEAKER_00: God brought good out of Samson's living in the middle.
SPEAKER_00: But that good for Israel brought sorrow and pain to Samson and his family.
SPEAKER_00: Sort of like the New Testament version of should we sin that grace may abound?
SPEAKER_00: Grace may abound, but sin bears consequences, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_00: Samson's former bride here paid a high price for Samson's living in the middle.
SPEAKER_00: Would all of that have been avoided had Samson just remembered I'm a Nazirite and I can't go touch that lion?
SPEAKER_00: That dead lion?
SPEAKER_00: Maybe.
SPEAKER_00: But Samson's violence escalated into an angry rage and a desire for revenge.
SPEAKER_00: He's called to be a Nazirite, to be separate, but his lack of separateness exacerbated his sinful tendencies.
SPEAKER_00: That's one way that Samson acted in a worldly way.
SPEAKER_00: Another way that he reacted in a worldly way is by considering an eye for an eye appropriate.
SPEAKER_00: Look at chapter 15 again.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 9.
SPEAKER_00: Then the Philistines came up and encamped in Judah and made a raid on Lehi.
SPEAKER_00: And the men of Judah said, Why have you come up against us?
SPEAKER_00: And they said, We've come up to bind Samson, to do to him as he did to us.
SPEAKER_00: Then three thousand of the men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Atom and said to Samson, Listen, don't you know that the Philistines are rulers over us?
SPEAKER_00: You need to obey them, submit to them.
SPEAKER_00: What is this that you've done to us?
SPEAKER_00: And he said, As they did to me, so I have done to them.
SPEAKER_00: Samson lives as though an eye for an eye is the right way for a Nazarite to live.
SPEAKER_00: Had Samson known the law of God, or had he been cognizant, aware in the moment of the law of God, he would have remembered Deuteronomy 32, 35, where God says vengeance belongs to him.
SPEAKER_00: Samson does not act like a qualified leader and a judge of a nation.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, he employs the thoughts and actions of the world instead of obediently submitting to God's word.
SPEAKER_00: Friends, we are different.
SPEAKER_00: We are called out, separate, holy.
SPEAKER_00: What has Jesus called us to do?
SPEAKER_00: Has he called us to exact vengeance when we are wronged?
SPEAKER_00: Has he called us to hold on to grudges and become embittered when we are wronged?
SPEAKER_00: Does he command us to demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?
SPEAKER_00: You know the answers, right?
SPEAKER_00: No.
SPEAKER_00: How do we react when we are wronged, especially, especially when it's our sinful tendencies at the root of the problem?
SPEAKER_00: Do we act like called-out ones or do we act like the world because we're living in the middle?
SPEAKER_00: But Samson is a strange man because he's living in a sort of paradox.
SPEAKER_00: On the one hand, he occasionally remembers his calling.
SPEAKER_00: If you look at chapter 15 and verse 14, the Philistines come out to meet him, and the Spirit of the Lord rushes upon him.
SPEAKER_00: He breaks the ropes that are around his arms and he finds the fresh jawbone of a donkey, and he put out his hand and took it, and he killed a thousand men.
SPEAKER_00: As soon as he finished speaking, verse 17, he threw away the jawbone, and because of that, the place is called Ramat Lahi, which is the hill or the place of the jawbone.
SPEAKER_00: And then he realizes, you know what, I'm really thirsty.
SPEAKER_00: Again, that's that senses part of Samson.
SPEAKER_00: He lives off of his feelings.
SPEAKER_00: And he realizes he's so thirsty that he might die of thirst, literally.
SPEAKER_00: So he calls upon Yahweh and says, You've granted this great salvation.
SPEAKER_00: You, you have granted this salvation.
SPEAKER_00: By I've been the means of you granting this salvation.
SPEAKER_00: Shall I now die of thirst?
SPEAKER_00: And God split open the hollow place that is at Lehi, and the water came out, and his spirit returned, and he revived.
SPEAKER_00: Samson gave God credit for the defeat of the Philistines.
SPEAKER_00: He calls upon the Lord for preservation of his life, for physical salvation.
SPEAKER_00: He's acknowledging in that moment his utter dependence on the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: But firmly standing in the middle, he has no problem marrying a pagan wife.
SPEAKER_00: Yet he's not okay with falling into the hands of the Philistines.
SPEAKER_00: Do you see the paradox?
SPEAKER_00: I belong to God, and God is the one who sustains me, and God who works through me, but you know what?
SPEAKER_00: I want this lady for my wife, and I don't care who she is.
SPEAKER_00: This is one mixed-up judge who sometimes sounds an awful lot like you and me.
SPEAKER_00: Because we know, as followers of Jesus, that we live in a fallen world.
SPEAKER_00: And we know that Christ calls us to not love the world.
SPEAKER_00: We know that God is the source of all good in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: We know that he is the one who empowers us to follow him, and yet we so often forget him and pursue worldly desires.
SPEAKER_00: Like Samson, we too are ruled by our passions.
SPEAKER_00: Which we see again in chapter 16, Samson went to Gaza, and there he saw a prostitute and he went into, and there's a recognition that he's in town, and they want to set an ambush and capture him.
SPEAKER_00: That turns into loving a woman in the valley of Sorak, whose name was Delilah in verse 4 of chapter 16.
SPEAKER_00: Hold your finger if you're in chapter 16 and look back at chapter 14.
SPEAKER_00: Chapter 14, at the beginning of Samson's life after his birth, he goes down to Timnah and at Timnah he saw one of the daughters of the Philistines.
SPEAKER_00: Now in chapter 16, he goes to Gaza, and there he saw a prostitute.
SPEAKER_00: Do you see over and over again how our historian is telling us Samson is ruled by his desires and his passions?
SPEAKER_00: He's an out-of-control savior who's a slave to the desires of the flesh.
SPEAKER_00: In this situation with the Philistines, he's surrounded at midnight, and first he acts in lust by going to a prostitute, then he tears apart the wall of a city and he carries a massive central gate structure away from the town and up on a hill.
SPEAKER_00: Nobody can do that, but Samson does it under the power of God.
SPEAKER_00: And it just demonstrates the irony of Samson's life.
SPEAKER_00: He's set apart by God to begin to rescue Israel by punishing the Philistines, and yet he can't get away from himself.
SPEAKER_00: Then we turn to the story of Delilah.
SPEAKER_00: And when he falls in love with Delilah, then it seems genuine.
SPEAKER_00: In verse 5 of chapter 16, the lords of the Philistines came up and said to her, We've got a bribe for you.
SPEAKER_00: We want to be done with this guy once and for all.
SPEAKER_00: Find out the secret of his strength, and we will each pay you the five lords of the Philistines of the five major cities, we will each pay you 1,100 pieces of silver.
SPEAKER_00: 1100 times five, 5,500 pieces of silver.
SPEAKER_00: In case you're wondering, this is a million-dollar payoff, at least in today's terms.
SPEAKER_00: Samson loves Delilah, but will she return the favor?
SPEAKER_00: What happens when you live in the middle and you are in love with the world?
SPEAKER_00: Does it pay off?
SPEAKER_00: The answer is no.
SPEAKER_00: The answer's no.
SPEAKER_00: Now in this story, Samson's smart enough to not give away the source of his strength.
SPEAKER_00: He's foolish, but he's smart enough to not tell Delilah.
SPEAKER_00: She pesters him, she keeps asking him over and over again and trying to take advantage of what he tells her.
SPEAKER_00: And each time he lies, he tells her, This is the source of my strength, when it really isn't.
SPEAKER_00: And finally everybody's fed up.
SPEAKER_00: And she says in verse 15, How can you say I love you when your heart's not with me?
SPEAKER_00: You've mocked me these three times.
SPEAKER_00: And when she pressed him in verse 16, day after day, and urged him, his soul was vexed to death.
SPEAKER_00: And we are left with the question, would he be in that place if he was faithful to his Nazarite status?
SPEAKER_00: You know the story.
SPEAKER_00: He finally tells her it's about his hair.
SPEAKER_00: While he's asleep in her lap, she cuts his hair and shaves his head.
SPEAKER_00: She pressed him hard day after day.
SPEAKER_00: Rather than living a life dedicated to God, Samson would instead love the enemy and give in to his worldly passions rather than stand firm till the end.
SPEAKER_00: Samson chose Delilah over God.
SPEAKER_00: Samson knew his calling.
SPEAKER_00: He wasn't ignorant.
SPEAKER_00: He knew that he was a Nazirite.
SPEAKER_00: He knew what that meant.
SPEAKER_00: He knew his strength was symbolized in his hair by a connection to God.
SPEAKER_00: The hair symbolized that.
SPEAKER_00: But Samson never came to terms with his calling.
SPEAKER_00: He loved the things of the world too much.
SPEAKER_00: He enjoyed the pleasures of the world too much to accept the position to which God had called him.
SPEAKER_00: He continually fought against his calling, much like we do when we seek the joys and pleasures the world offers us.
SPEAKER_00: We too are called to be holy and to be separate.
SPEAKER_00: And our sign of our calling is the indwelling spirit of the living God.
SPEAKER_00: Yet we too, like Samson, struggle to come to live worthy of our calling.
SPEAKER_00: And when we fight against the spirit of the living God within us, we can't fully experience the joys of life in Christ because the call, the pull of the world is too strong in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: It's sad.
SPEAKER_00: It's almost as if Samson just wanted to Delilah to release him from his calling by cutting his hair.
SPEAKER_00: It's like he finally gave in to his desire to be normal rather than to be God's.
SPEAKER_00: And she said, The Philistines are upon you, Samson.
SPEAKER_00: And he awoke from his sleep and said, I will go out as at other times and shake myself free.
SPEAKER_00: But he did not know that Yahweh had left him.
SPEAKER_00: At the beginning of this account, Samson's parents did not recognize that Yahweh had visited them.
SPEAKER_00: And now we get to the point where Samson does not know that Yahweh has abandoned him.
SPEAKER_00: This is a statement about Samson and Israel.
SPEAKER_00: They had abandoned God.
SPEAKER_00: And so he abandons them.
SPEAKER_00: They are that far from him.
SPEAKER_00: Would would we would we realize it if God left us?
SPEAKER_00: Are we living paradoxes?
SPEAKER_00: Are God's people or even the unsaved world confused by how we live?
SPEAKER_00: Do we say that we are separate, called out, followers of Christ, and yet live no differently than the world?
SPEAKER_00: Finally, we see that this Savior Judge lived in the middle.
SPEAKER_00: Samson is weak now.
SPEAKER_00: He's hairless, he's bald.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 21 the Philistines seized him, they gouged out his eyes and brought him down to Gaza.
SPEAKER_00: They bound him with bronze shackles, and he ground at the mill in the prison.
SPEAKER_00: Suffering as a blind prisoner humbled Samson and drew him back to where God wanted him at the end of the story.
SPEAKER_00: God's purpose for Samson would stand.
SPEAKER_00: Despite Samson's love for the world, God would not allow Samson to fail to accomplish God's purpose for him.
SPEAKER_00: And beloved, you can find some encouragement there that whatever God's purpose for you is, it will be fulfilled, regardless of where you live, in the middle or somewhere else.
SPEAKER_00: But Samson is fully responsible for the consequences of his sins.
SPEAKER_00: And in one night, Samson was brought down to the lowest imaginable position.
SPEAKER_00: A grinder of flour in prison.
SPEAKER_00: This man who has the highest calling to be God's special deliverer of Israel, set apart, a Nazarite.
SPEAKER_00: This son has fallen so far that his eyes are set.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord left Samson.
SPEAKER_00: But notice verse twenty two.
SPEAKER_00: But the hair of his head began to grow again.
SPEAKER_00: From the rest of the account, I think we can surmise safely that's not referring simply to the fact that the follicles in his head replicated and began to grow.
SPEAKER_00: It is that.
SPEAKER_00: So after this man named Sun went down and down and down and down as if the sun were setting, he eventually died.
SPEAKER_00: In a magnificent kind of way, pulling down the pillars that supported the roof of the community center and killing thousands of Philistines all in one fell swoop.
SPEAKER_00: This sun went down.
SPEAKER_00: But then this setting sun went up.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 31, chapter 16.
SPEAKER_00: Then his brothers and all his family came down, and they took him and brought him up, and buried him between Zora and Eshtaol in the tomb of Manoah, his father.
SPEAKER_00: This setting son was taken up to his home for burial.
SPEAKER_00: And this son, this setting son who was taken up will one day rise again.
SPEAKER_00: And he will testify to God's mercy toward those who trust in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: We know this because Hebrews chapter 11 tells us that Samson, the setting son, lived by faith despite living in the middle.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, Samson is the sad story of God-given potential seemingly wasted.
SPEAKER_00: He wanted little of his divine calling as Israel's deliverer.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, he lived in two worlds.
SPEAKER_00: One foot in the world of his faith as a sacred Nazarite, and the other firmly in place in the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life.
SPEAKER_00: More than 3,000 years later, we possess a similar calling.
SPEAKER_00: And we do the same things.
SPEAKER_00: We know that we have been set apart by God's call to live a holy life, but we don't want to live like that so often.
SPEAKER_00: But my friends, your God has called you to holiness.
SPEAKER_00: And we have sung about our holy God.
SPEAKER_00: There is no one like him.
SPEAKER_00: And he has said to you, his daughters and his sons, be holy, as I am holy.
SPEAKER_00: It must be our prayer that the Lord will give us grace to be what he's called us to be.
SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, Samson and the other Savior judges prove one simple truth.
SPEAKER_00: God's people cannot save themselves.
SPEAKER_00: God's people cannot save themselves even with his divine calling and empowerment.
SPEAKER_00: We need a perfect Savior and a holy judge.
SPEAKER_00: We need a true Son who fulfills God's purpose without succumbing to sin.
SPEAKER_00: We need an ideal Nazirite who would not give in to the desires of the flesh or the love of the world.
SPEAKER_00: We need an ideal Nazirite who would not take vengeance into his own hands but would entrust himself to the will of his Father.
SPEAKER_00: We need an alien righteousness and a divinely empowered holiness that comes from being a new creation indwelt by a holy God.
SPEAKER_00: And that is what your God gives.
SPEAKER_00: He came to give himself so that we might be his children who walk in the way of holiness.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_00: Lord Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
SPEAKER_00: That Samson was not the ultimate Savior.
SPEAKER_00: We give you thanks that you are.
SPEAKER_00: And that we can look by moving our eyes from Samson and look from Samson to the cross.
SPEAKER_00: And see there hanging on the cross what ideal holiness is.
SPEAKER_00: We can see there on the cross that you did what we could not do, what Samson could not do, what Gideon could not do, what Jephthah and the other judges could not do.
SPEAKER_00: We look to the cross and we see Jesus, our brother, our savior, our judge, and our king.
SPEAKER_00: The righteous one, the sinless one who took upon himself our sins and nailed them to the cross.
SPEAKER_00: And in faith, like Samson, in the midst of our sin, we look to you and we confess our sins and trust in you alone.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.
SPEAKER_01: Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.