Dan:
Samson and Idolatry. Genesis 49:15-16
Samson
is the last judge mentioned in the book of Judges but he is the only judge that
doesn’t bring peace to the land, he is the only judge that doesn’t deliver
them, he just stirs up a tremendous amount of trouble. He is the most pagan of
the judges and what the writer of judges is trying to do is show the process of
how a culture becomes paganised. At the beginning of the book of Judges the
nation is spiritually together, they are at the top of their game. They have
just defeated the people of Jericho, the city of Ai, the major strongholds in
the south, they had conquered Hebron and the tribal alliance in the north, but
they come off their game because they start to compromise with the people who
lived in the land. They begin to compromise instead of giving one hundred per
cent obedience to God and slaughtering every man, woman, child, and animal in
the land they decide they are going to have a policy of appeasement and
co-existence with these spiritual enemies. So they become corrupted by the
human viewpoint pagan culture around them.
Israel
has gone through several cycles where they have degenerated into idolatry by
the time they get to Samson; it is the 6th cycle of degeneration.
For the 6th time they have done evil in the sight of the Lord and
for the 6th time God has punished them. But unlike the other five
times they don’t cry out to God this time. There is no call from the people to
send a deliverer. They aren’t ready for it, they don’t have the capacity; they
have completely compromised. Part of this is because for the first time in this
cycle of foreign conquest they are not being maltreated and abused by the
Philistines. There is an assimilationist policy at this time among the
Philistines—live and let live—and so they are not trying to destroy
the Jews they are trying to assimilate them and the Jews are just walking into
the compromise trap and are willing to give up their distinctiveness and their
freedom and just for the sake of universal brotherhood and world peace they are
willing to intermarry with the Philistines. That is one of the things you see
with Samson. He has always got his eyes after some Philistine young woman that
he is chasing because there is no sense left anymore that the Jews shouldn’t
intermarry with the Canaanites, which was specifically prohibited by the Mosaic
Law. So what has happened is that in a set-up where there is this trend toward
assimilation, toward moral relativism where every truth is good, all truth is
God’s truth, everything is fine, let’s just all get together, and everything is
about to destroy the distinctiveness of Israel, God is sending Samson not to
deliver them but to create a thorn in the flesh to the Philistines to stop the
assimilationist process. He is sending Samson into the situation to be a bull
in a china closet and to stir up the antagonism between the Philistines and the
Jews so that the intermarriage and the assimilation process is going to break
down.
Samson
is no great spiritual giant. He does trust God at a key point at the end but
his life is dominated by apostasy, by degeneracy, he is a womaniser. And there
is a whole theme in Judges about how the more pagan a culture becomes the more
objectified women become. That is why the women in Samson’s life are never
named. The only woman that is named in the whole episode is Delilah. So the
women are just pictured as secondary window dressing to the whole story. This
is part of the point, that in a pagan culture women are no longer the helpmate
and in the important position God originally sets them up to be in.
At
one point Samson is hiding out from the Philistines in the hill country of
Judah and 3000 men of Judah, a small army, comes searching for him. They don’t
want to organize themselves with him, they want to convince him to give up and
go over to the enemy. See how modern the Jews sound! They are into appeasement.
Don’t’ rock the boat, don’t take a stand for anything, just lets us all get
along and let’s not fight and let’s not go to war. When you succumb to moral
relativism there is nothing absolute anymore. Everything and every culture and
every belief is relative and everybody has their own views that are equally
valid. It is matter of let’s just all be happy with whatever we say. Moral
relativism erodes any sense of ultimate standards and any kind of objective
truth. Relativism means that everything is equally true. But if everything is equally
true, everything is equally false; and when everything can be equally true and
equally false then nothing is worth fighting for anymore, nothing is worth
living for anymore. If you don’t have any high virtues, high standards to
achieve, then it is just about feeding your own pleasure. The only thing we can
hold in common then is just experience. If you don’t have anything worth dying
for you don’t have anything worth living for. The only thing that is worth
living for in a relativistic society is whatever you want to do at that
particular moment. It is all driven by what I want right now, whatever is going
to stimulate my flesh right now. Another aspect of this is, if nothing is worth
dying for then the great sin is someone who says that there is something worth
dying for and he fights for it. That is where we are in our culture today.
We
have a war against radical Islamic fascists and we live in a culture where
nobody thinks it is worth fighting for anymore, and they have forgotten what
happened on 9/11, it doesn’t matter to anybody anymore; that is ancient
history! So in our time, as it was in their time, if there is nothing worth
fighting for then let’s just be pacifists, let’s just give up. That is the path
to enslavement. This is what happened under the Philistines. There was real
arms control under the Philistines. The Philistines had iron weapons and we
learn from 1 Samuel that they prevented the Jews from having blacksmiths. They
took all the blacksmiths out of the land so that nobody could have a weapon
that was superior to what the Philistine had. The lesson is that if the people
in the land, the citizens of the country, do not have equal fire power to that
which the state has then they will be under the thumb of the government. This
is how the Philistines controlled the Israelites, so God sends in Samson and
gives him supernatural weapons.
So
Samson has this negotiation with the pacifists from Judah and they convince
him. They tell him they are going to bind him and deliver him to the Philistines.
The idea is that if we git rid of the people who have any connection to
absolutes, to fighting for something, and then we can all have peace.
But
God has a different plan, and as they take him back the Spirit pf God comes
upon him and the ropes are broken. The Spirit of God does that, Samson doesn’t
flex his muscles and pop them. The Samson finds a new weapon, a fresh jawbone.
The Spirit of God here isn’t related to spirituality, because what is the first
thing that he does? He grabs the wrong kind of weapon. A dry jawbone is going
to be better than a fresh jawbone. A fresh jawbone means that it is recent, it
is still moist, still part of a carcase, and once again he is violating his
Nazirite vow. He grabs this jawbone of an ass and kills a thousand men with it.
Then he is so impressed with himself that he writes a little pop chorus about
it to make sure that everybody learns about his glorious deeds.
But
in the midst of that, even when he has all of this pagan relativism and
everything else going on, he is still not oblivious to the fact that his source
of strength comes from God. So he gets very thirsty, cries out to the Lord. He
is blaming God but at least there is a recognition that God is there. He is
like Jepthah, he is bargaining with God. Then we have a note that he judged
Israel 20 years in the days of the Philistines, but we don’t have the note that
he delivers or that he brings rest.
Then
he goes 45 miles down to Gaza. There he sees a prostitute. The Gazites are told
that Samson is there and they surround the place and lie in wait for him all
night at the gate of the city. When Samson takes the gate he has to defeat the
troops that are guarding the gate, then he has to pull the gate off of the gate
post. It weighed probably close to a thousand pounds. He hoists it up on his
back and carries it to the top of the hill that faces Hebron. Hebron is 45
miles away! He is almost to the Dead Sea. What is going on there? The text
really doesn’t say but it seems like he is trying to sucker the Philistines
deep into the territory of Judah, maybe to arouse their anger against Judah and
force the men of Judah, who were pacifists in the previous chapter, to finally
take a stand.
After
that he falls in love with Delilah. She shaves off his hair and the Philistines
capture him. This is the culmination of a process but God is also in control of
what Samson is doing, and he knows what is going to happen. It was that the
purpose of Samson wasn’t to deliver the people but to create this turmoil to
keep assimilation from taking place. The Philistines capture him, they put out
his eyes, shave his head, put him in a prison and he becomes a grinder in the
prison. He is blind but his hair begins to grow back. This isn’t mystical, this
isn’t superstitious. The hair is a sign of the vow, and when the hair grows
back God is making a point that those who are set apart to him are those he can
use, and despite their spiritual failure. God uses us in a lot of ways
regardless of our flaws and failures. That is what grace is all about. God
doesn’t say, Well you have to grow up and be mature before I can use you. That
is not grace, it is legalism.
The
Philistines decide to have a great victory supper and sacrifice to Dagon, their
god. God is going to make it a point that Dagon doesn’t have any power. He is
not just giving Samson one last shot at it. God’s honor is at stake here. So as
they come together to offer the sacrifice to Dagon, to give him credit for
their victory, God has to wipe them out. Samson, just like the bargaining of
Jephthah, he says, One more time, God. Let me take vengeance on the
Philistines. He is not concerned about the glory of God, He is still
self-absorbed, still driven by his own arrogance, but God has a broader
picture. He is going to use Samson’s carnality which is mixed up with just a
little bit of faith to give him the strength, and is going to strengthen him,
because this will show that God’s power is greater than the power of the false
gods. The dead that Samson killed at his death were more than he killed in all
of his life. This brings honor and glory to God because he could only do this
through the power of God, and he demonstrates God’s power over the power of the
Philistines.