Take your Bibles with me and turn to Judges 15. Judges 15.
I'm still not sure what happened to me last week, but I want to thank Adam for preaching in a pinch for me when I got sick. He did a good job.
The truth is, I was really excited about preaching that story. I love the story of Samson. The good news is I get to do it tonight.
Let's go ahead and read the whole chapter tonight. It's not a long chapter. Then we'll go back and discuss what happened here.
[!bible] Judges 15:1-20 - KJV
- But it came to pass within a while after, in the time of wheat harvest, that Samson visited his wife with a kid; and he said, I will go in to my wife into the chamber. But her father would not suffer him to go in.
- And her father said, I verily thought that thou hadst 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.
- And Samson said concerning them, Now shall I be more blameless than the Philistines, though I do them a displeasure.
- 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.
- Then the Philistines said, Who hath done this? And they answered, 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.
- And Samson said unto them, Though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged of you, and after that I will cease.
- And he smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter: and he went down and dwelt in the top of the rock Etam.
- Then the Philistines went up, and pitched in Judah, and spread themselves in Lehi.
- 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.
- Then three thousand men of Judah went to the top of the rock Etam, and said to Samson, Knowest thou not that the Philistines are rulers over us? what is this that thou hast done unto us? And he said unto them, As they did unto me, so have I done unto them.
- And they said unto him, We are come down to bind thee, that we may deliver thee into the hand of the Philistines. And Samson said unto them, Swear unto me, that ye will not fall upon me yourselves.
- And they spake 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.
- And when he came unto Lehi, the Philistines shouted against him: and the Spirit of the LORD came mightily 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.
- And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.
- And Samson said, With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men.
- 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 Ramath-lehi.
- 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?
- But God clave an hollow place that was in the jaw, and there came water thereout; and when he had drunk, his spirit came again, and he revived: wherefore he called the name thereof En-hakkore, which is in Lehi unto this day.
- And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.
Let me quickly give you an overview of what happened here and then we will spend most of our time discussing it.
In chapter 14 Samson got married. Remember, he went to his parents and demanded that they get him this philistine woman to be his wife. Why? Because she was a looker. That's the only reason.
So Samson has this wedding ceremony with this Philistine woman, he's literally marrying into the family God created him to fight against and on the way, he get's attacked by a lion and rips it in shreds. Then, inside the lion, he finds a honey comb. (This is all stuff Adam talked about last Wednesday.)
So Samson is at the wedding feast with thirty companions and he proposes a bet. If they can answer this riddle (and no one was going to get the riddle) then he'll give them 30 sheets and thirty changes of garments. Basically, he'll buy them all a nice change of clothes. But if they can't, then they have to give him 30 nice outfits. They have seven days to figure out this riddle.
The people agree to it and Samson thinks he's done something. But the Philistine guests get angrier and angrier and they go to his wife and they say "if you don't figure this out for us, we are going to burn you and your father's house with fire."
So Samson's wife get's him to give up the riddle. Now Samson owes them 30 changes of garments. So Samson goes down to another Philistine town and kills thirty men and steals their clothes and while he's doing this, his father-in-law goes ahead and gives his wife to the best man.
So now, in chapter 15, Samson wants to go back and get his wife. Apparently he was mad at her for giving up the riddle, but he's calmed down now. He wants to go get his wife. So he goes back to his father in law and says "let me visit my wife in her room."
And the father-in-law says "Um, yeah, that is going to be a problem. You see, we thought you didn't want her, and we didn't want to ruin her wedding week, so we gave her to the best man, but you can have her little sister, she's prettier anyways."
And now Samson is really mad. He says "this time I'm really going to get the Philistines and I'm going to be right to do it."
What happens next is hilarious, Samson catches 300 foxes. How? I don't know. That seems hard. Then Samson ties the foxes tails together in pairs and lights their tails on fire and sets the foxes loose in a bunch of Philistine fields and barns, burning up their wheat crop.
Why? I don't know. The whole thing seems completely random. It seems like a juvenile prank. An extremely random and destructive juvenile prank.
A lot of skeptics like to pick on this one particular story because if you think about it. There are problems with it. Where did Samson get 300 foxes?
So Samson took these foxes or these Jackals and used them to burn down the fields of the Philistines. And the Philistines, as you can imagine, got pretty upset about that. That's millions of dollars of damage AND their food for the winter.
So in retaliation, the Philistines found Samson's wife and father and law and burned them alive.
So you have this cycle of retaliation. Samson does something, the Philistines retaliate, Samson does something again, and the Philistines retaliate again. Before long you they have to think "what are we fighting for again?"
A lot of bad happens when we try to take matters into our own hands and retaliate. It can start this vicious cycle. The Christian thing is to leave that stuff to God.
Romans 12:19 says:
[!bible] Romans 12:19 - KJV 19. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
But this isn't how Samson was thinking. He says in verse 7 "Let me take vengeance for this and after that, I'll stop."
And so Samson goes and "smote them hip and thigh" - that's just an expression that means he whipped up on some Philistines. We don't know how many he killed but it had to be a lot because the verse tells us it was "a great slaughter."
Then Samson, who at this point is all alone. He's cut off his family. He has cut off his Philistine friends. He just goes up to the top of a mountain and lives in a rock. In a cave.
But the Philistines aren't done yet. They want Samson to pay for this. So they bring in an army to get him.
The jews are like "What are you here for?" (We'll come back to that) and the Philistines say "we want Samson."
So the men of Judah go and find Samson and Samson makes them promise they won't kill him, just deliver him to the Philistines.
They bind him with two new ropes and they bring him to the Philistines. When Samson gets in the middle of the Philistines (remember, he's all tied up) the Spirit of the Lord comes on him and he breaks the ropes like they are nothing, grabs the first thing handy (which happens to be the jawbone of donkey) and kills 1000 men with it.
Now, here is another thing people have a problem with? How could Samson kill 1,000 men with a donkey's jawbone?
Well, if you look at one of these things, it makes a natural club. There is a natural handhold between the top teeth and the bottom teeth. And Samson had supernatural strength. He was a bad man.
They were also likely on a hill with a restricted path. Samson probably had the upper ground and there were all these men of Judah around that the Philistines had to worry about.
So Samson kills these men with the jawbone and then calls the place "Jawbone hill" and makes up a braggy little jingle about how he killed "heaps and heaps" of them.
The chapter ends with Samson suddenly crying out to God. Not in gratitude for giving him strength, but because he's thirsty. Samson seems to only care about his physical appetites.
And God opens up a spring from the hill and Samson drinks from the spring.
The chapter ends by telling us that Samson judged Israel for 20 years.
So lets think about this story for a minute. Because even if you believe that it really happened (and I do) it's kind of a problem.
Samson's behavior here is not godly. It's vengeful. It's petty. It's juvenile. It's brought on by sinful behavior. It breaks his Nazarite vow. It's ugly stuff.
And when you read this story, the question here is "what good could come of this? What is God trying to do here?"
Obviously we aren't meant to read this story and admire Samson. We aren't meant to read this story and want to be like Samson. (None of us could anyway.). So...
I think there are two things we need to see in this story that help us to understand what God was doing here.
The first thing is...
I want you to go back to chapter 14, to one of the verses that Adam looked at last week, because it really explains for us what is going on.
Look back at Judges 14 verse number 4. This is, I think, the key to understanding what God is up to.
[!bible] Judges 14:4 - KJV 4. But his father and his mother knew not that it was of the LORD, that he sought an occasion against the Philistines: for at that time the Philistines had dominion over Israel.
Here is the problem: Israel is captured and controlled by the Philistines but get this - they are ok with it. They like it.
In our story when the Philistine army comes to get Samson, the people of Judah are mad at Samson. Don't you know Samson that the Philistines rule over us?
Samson marrying a Philistine was probably normal. You see, Israel was on the verge of extinction, not from the armies of the Philistines, but just from assimilation with the Philistines.
They liked the Philistines. They liked the Philistine culture. They liked the Philistine gods. They liked the Philistine women. And they seem ok with just melding into them.
At no point in the story of Samson are the jews like "Save us from the Philistines." No. They are ok with it. They only time they get riled up is when Samson makes the Philistines mad.
Samson's behavior here is sinful. Start to finish its sinful. He isn't motivated by godliness. He is motivated by lust. He is motivated by the flesh. He is motivated by pride and greed.
Samson is just as bad as Israel. Maybe worse. He's acting just like the Philistines.
But here is what I want you to see: God was using Samson to drive a wedge between the Philistines and Israel. God was using Samson to create friction.
The devil is smart, and he knows that he isn't going to defeat God's people by force. Whenever Christianity is persecuted, we tend to get more godly and turn to God and God works.
The devil has had much more success in trying to defeat God's people with worldliness.
[!bible] James 4:4 - KJV 4. Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.
The devil is more successful when we are friends of the world.
[!bible] [1 John 2:15 - KJV](https://bible-api.com/1 John+2:15?translation=kjv) 15. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
You can't be the Christian God wants you to be AND be cozy with the world. You can't live for what the world lives for, think like the world thinks, get all your friends from the world, and be the Christian God wants you to be.
And so what was God doing with Samson? Israel and the Philistines had gotten so cozy that God had to do something supernatural and use the sinful inclinations of a very flawed man to drive Israel and the Philistines apart.
It took the violence of Samson to wake the Philistines up to say "these people aren't are friends." It took the violence of Samson to jostle Israel out of their comfort zone.
So let me apply this to you:
And if you are, what will it take for you? What will God have to do to His church to make us separate from the world?
So that's the first thing God was doing through Samson and it was the immediate thing, let me quickly remind you of the second:
As terrible as Samson is in his character, he is a very clear picture of Christ in his circumstances and there are many parts of this story that remind us of Jesus.
God brought deliverance through one man. Again. Samson isn't like other judges. He isn't a captain. He is a one man army. He works alone.
And Jesus did His work alone for us.
The deliverance was rejected by God's people.
Israel wasn't interested in what Samson was doing. They were almost annoyed by it. And when Jesus came to this earth, His people weren't looking for the kind of Savior that He was.
The deliverer was betrayed and handed over by Judah.
In our story tonight, Samson is handed over to the Philistines by Judah.
And our Lord was betrayed by Judas, which is the New Testament spelling of the name Judah.
Deliverance happened on a hill named after a skull.
In our story tonight Samson kills a thousand on a hill named after a donkey's skull and our Lord did His great work on Golgatha - a hill also named after a skull.
So there are similarities to Jesus and Samson in the circumstances here. But the differences are also important: