The story in Judges 13–16 is intended to both warn and encourage.
If we wish honestly to understand what God did and taught through Samson, we must ask ourselves not what any fanciful mind can now, in the light of the New Testament, bring out of the narrative, but what good did the contemporaries of Samson receive from him, and what impressions were produced in their minds by his career? These old heroes were not first sent so we can now look back at them and see a reflection of Christ. They were sent in the first place that they might be deliverers to their own generation. As such we must study them.
First then, we must find an answer to this question: What principles regarding the way in which God works deliverances for man were taught by Samson?
DELIVERED BY INDIVIDUALS
Obviously the first principle impressed on the minds of his contemporaries must have been that “in a state of universal depression all must ultimately depend on the indomitable strength which is aroused in individuals (Ewald, Hist ii. p. 399). God loves to deliver His people from the multitudes of their enemies by single champions. This was never brought so prominently out as in the life of Samson. The other judges were backed by the people. The movement for freedom began with them individually, but the mass of the people rose at their call. But Samson throughout fought the Philistines single-handed. He despised their whole collected armies, went down alone into their strongest cities, and, when they would shut him in, carried away gates and bars in grim satiric mood that was his fighting humor. And that was the nearest approach to seriousness the presence of armed enemies could induce. Samson was qualified by his natural gifts thus to stand alone and to hearten the people, giving them more courageous and hopeful thoughts.
It was not so much his great physical strength but the blithe and daring manner in which he used it that impressed the people and solaced the weaker men who could not imitate him. His name, Samson, refers not to his strength, but to his temper. It means “Sunny.” This was what the people saw in him—an inexhaustible joyousness of disposition that buoyed him up in danger and difficulty, and made him seem to the downtrodden people, whose future was clouded and gloomy, as the sun rising up and cheering them.
This joyousness comes out in the lightheartedness with which he fights against countless odds; in his taste for witty sayings and riddles; and in the gigantic practical jokes he perpetuated in carrying off the gates of Gaza, and in tying the foxes tail to tail, sending them through the standing corn with burning brands. Nothing could have been better calculated to reanimate Israel when oppressed by the Philistines than a spirit like this which could treat them with such contempt.
In sending this judge to Israel God meant the people to admire and catch his spirit; He meant them to see that He expects His people to be “sunny,” to overflow with health and vivacity even under protracted misfortune. This, God produced in them not by giving this spirit of joy and vigor to all, but to one man only.
This therefore must be our first practical lesson—how much can be done by individuals. We can all be indolent in things spiritual; we shrink from everything heroic, from everything that goes beyond the actions of our neighbors. We need, therefore, to be reminded that grievances will not reform themselves, nor will be reformed by the whole community awaking to them, but that some individual must take each grievance in hand until it is mastered. How often it happens, if we are living with our eyes open, that we see some hurtful influence spreading and are filled with shame that we cannot put a stop to it. We have not the unselfishness of the great men who fix upon some definite evil and give their life to its eradication; have not the gallantry of Samson, who picked quarrels with the Philistines as often as he could that he might rid his country of oppression.
In this way Samson was a type of Christ, who, single- handed, encountered those essential evils which keep us back from God, who did battle for us and by His own strength delivers us from every bondage, who “trodden the winepress alone.”
DELIVERED IN SPITE OF OURSELVES
A second principle illustrated by the life of Samson is that God often has to deliver His people in spite of themselves. The Israelites, instead of flocking to Samson’s standard and seconding his effort to throw off the Philistine yoke, bound him and gave him into the hands of the Philistines, complaining bitterly that he had brought them into trouble with their masters. They were willing to buy peace at the price of Samson’s life, just as the Pharisees said of our Lord, “If we let Him thus alone…the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation.”
They would not strike a blow in defense of their own liberty, still less in defense of their champion. These 3,000 armed men of Judah stood by as idle spectators while Samson burst the bonds they had bound on him, and snatching up the only weapon he could see, the jawbone of an ass, fell on the enemy and slaughtered as many as did not flee. Put yourself in the position of these abject and cowardly men of Judah, and you will see that they must have been deeply ashamed of their treachery to themselves in delivering up Samson. They must have seen that God meant to deliver them, and had delivered them in spite of themselves.
Everyone who has endeavored anything for the good of others knows how common this spirit is. People for the most part don’t wish to be elevated, enlightened, purified. If advancement gives them the least trouble, they prefer to remain as they are, and turn angrily on those who stir them up to higher things. They need to be helped in spite of themselves. That man will not prove a very efficient social reformer who refuses to help any but those who help themselves; who is dismayed when he finds his intentions are misunderstood; who cannot, like Samson, patiently submit to abuse from those whose best friend he is, and have them undoing his work for them almost as fast as he does it.
We must, I fear, all plead guilty to a similar treachery in our own best interests, and acknowledge that if saved, it must be in great part in spite of ourselves. Like these men of Judah we prefer respectable and comfortable subjection to sin to hard-won freedom. We become reconciled to the dominion of foolish and hurtful lusts. Some sins don’t seem to do us as much harm. They do not brand us as slaves, nor bind us with fetters that audibly clank. Their bondage is like that of the Philistines, mixed with some advantages and comforts. To rid ourselves of them is a painful, difficult and humiliating work—a work that throws us out of comfortable, easygoing relations with the world, and makes life a more dangerous and toilsome thing. Therefore we do not second our Redeemer when He would deliver us from such sins. For is it not true that indolence, love of ease, fear of putting ourselves into difficult circumstances are thwarting the Saviour’s work in many of us? If we are to be saved from such bondage, it will be with bitter shame and regret that while we laid heavy burdens on our Redeemer, we ourselves would not touch them with one of our fingers.
THE GREATEST VICTORIES ARE WON THROUGH SELF-SACRIFICE
But a third principle about God’s deliverances was lodged in the minds of the people by Samson’s career— that the greatest deliverances are wrought by self-sacrifice. As they themselves expressed it, “the dead which [Samson] slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.” Through mere love of fighting and in the joy of battle, he had slain many. In the mere overflow of physical vigor and exuberance of his own spirits, he had borne down the enemies of God. But his greatest victory was when he himself was humbled to the dust, when life had lost its charm, when no joy for himself was thought of, and when his only motive was to assert the might of Jehovah against the boastful worshippers of Dagon. It cost him his own life, but his life could not have been better spent. In those former victories he sustained no hurt, displayed no devotion, no character, scarcely any daring—for he trusted in his talisman of hair, and knew he could overpower all opposition. But in his death his heroism first appears; and we understand how he should be enrolled among the glorious names of history. We forget all his faults in his noble disregard of his own life, in his magnanimous scorn of those Philistines and their god.
In this one moment, as he bows his mighty frame between the two pillars, a new light shines upon him, and we see that he is indeed a saviour worthy of Israel and worthy of God. Would not everyone go with his brethren and gather out the mangled remains of the hero, tenderly separate them from the carcasses of his enemies, and carry them up to the burial place of his fathers, in pledge that he loved not his life unto the death, but laid it down for the brethren?
We need not pause to show how this principle was displayed in the great salvation; how the death of Christ accomplished more than His life. Rather let us reflect that whatever we do for our fellows and for God, it is not always our greatest activity that is most truly successful. You cannot measure the good a man does by the length of time he is about it, or the diligence he shows in it. One moment of true devotion effects more than a lifetime of labor. This is what is needed if we are to do good. In the family, in society, anywhere or anyhow, it is all the same; this is the one requisite for the highest kind of efficiency, a heart going out more to others than resting in itself; a spirit of genuine devotion to a great cause, or to the people around you—that is what all men acknowledge to be a real blessing and gift of God in their midst. But seldom do we see it, except in men whose experience has been something like Samson’s, who have sat in darkness and the shadow of death, the light of whose life has been extinguished, and their hearts brought down with affliction and labor.
These, then, are the three principles which the life of Samson sets vividly before us: that the good done on earth is mostly done by individuals; that it has often to be done in spite of indifference or opposition of those for whom it is undertaken; and that to accomplish the highest and greatest good, men must devote themselves.
There is no picture in the Bible, or perhaps in all history, more pathetic than that of Samson after his fall: the mighty sunny Samson, the flash of whose eye had unnerved his enemies, fettered now in the Philistine dungeon, deprived of the light of day, set to grind like a woman, and dragged out to be the jest and scorn of his insolent conquerors. Were circumstances ever calculated to inflict a keener, more overwhelming shame than when this mighty champion, who had never encountered resistance and had never conceived the possibility of defeat, who had borne everything before him in one uninterrupted tide of victory, suddenly found himself hopelessly in the hands of his enemies, his eyes put out, his strength all gone from him, and with it all token of the favor of God? Was ever a dungeon inhabited by gloomier thoughts, was ever a more pitiable humiliation than that of this forlorn captive, far from his friends, shut out from the light, pursued by the thought of his own mad folly and low lust and reckless forsaking of God that had brought all this upon him?
Are there none of us who should take Samson’s humiliation to heart, none of us who are reckless as he in the use we make of the gifts God has given us? We also were, like him, vowed to God before we had consciousness of our own, and we have received some grace or gift with which to serve Him; but how many barter these gifts for the most contemptible indulgence of the flesh, or for the gratification of a small ambition, or for a little portion of the world’s goods!
But, in conclusion, observe how God returned to Samson and gave him back his strength. There is no better instance of the use God can make of the wreck of an ill-spent life. He had ruined himself beyond repair for this life; he could never be the man he was; but in those lonely days in the Philistine prison-house, when his blindness cut him off from converse with outward things, his own humbling, remorseful thoughts were his company, his own past life his only view. He saw the ruinous folly he had been guilty of, saw his betrayal of the trust God had reposed in him, saw that out of the best material for a life of glory that any man of that period had received he had wrought for himself a life of shame and a degrading end. His heart was broken; the strong man was crushed, and had, like the weakest sinner, to cry to God, to seek that last comfort that abides when all others are gone, and that more than makes up for the loss of all others—to seek that light, the light of God’s own presence, that restores brightness to the most darkened life, and that does not refuse to shine on that most benighted soul.
Slowly his hair grew, and with it slowly returned his strength, as health comes back slowly to a man that has been shattered by disease or accident. If you have fallen into sin, you must not expect your soul to recover quickly. It is like the growth of hair; you cannot hurry it. Let repentance work its perfect work, thankful that even thus you may get back to God.