The judges of Israel

Samson

The strong man who broke every vow but the last · During the Philistine oppression · Delivered Israel from The Philistines · Judged Israel twenty years

Samson was set apart from the womb as a Nazarite to God, given supernatural strength, and called to begin delivering Israel from the Philistines. Yet he lived driven by his appetites, broke his vows again and again, and told the secret of his strength to Delilah, who betrayed him. Blinded and enslaved, he prayed one last time, and in his death pulled down the temple of Dagon, killing more of Israel's enemies than in all his life.

For, lo, thou shalt conceive, and bear a son; and no razor shall come on his head: for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb: and he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.Judges 13:5 (KJV)

His story from Scripture

Israel did evil again, and the LORD delivered them to the Philistines forty years. To a barren woman, the wife of Manoah of the tribe of Dan, the angel of the LORD promised a son, saying, no razor shall come on his head: for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb: and he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines. Samson grew, and the Spirit of the LORD began to move him.

But his life was a storm of passion. He demanded a Philistine wife against his parents' wishes; he tore a lion apart with his bare hands and later ate honey from its carcass, touching the dead against his vow; he posed a riddle at his wedding and, when it was betrayed, slew thirty men to pay the wager. He caught three hundred foxes and burned the Philistines' fields, slew a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, and carried off the gates of Gaza, bar and all, and carried them to the top of a hill. Once his own countrymen of Judah, more afraid of their Philistine rulers than trusting in God, came and bound him with new ropes to hand him over, and the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him so that the cords melted from his hands like burnt flax. He judged Israel twenty years.

Then he loved Delilah, and the Philistine lords paid her to learn the secret of his strength. Three times he lied; the fourth time, worn down by her daily pressing, he told her all his heart, that no razor had ever touched his head. She lulled him to sleep, his hair was shaved, and he awoke saying he would go out as before, not knowing that the LORD was departed from him. The Philistines put out his eyes and set him to grind at the mill in the prison. But the hair of his head began to grow again. At a great feast to their god Dagon they brought him out to mock him, and Samson prayed, O Lord God, remember me, and strengthen me only this once. He took hold of the two pillars of the house and bowed with all his might, and the temple fell, and the dead he slew at his death were more than all he had slain in his life.

His character, honestly

Samson is the most gifted and the most self-destructive of all the judges, and Scripture hides none of it. He was consecrated to God from the womb and treated his consecration carelessly, breaking his Nazarite vows one by one: touching the dead, feasting with the uncircumcised, giving himself to foreign women. He was impulsive, vengeful, ruled by lust and pride, and he told the secret of his strength for the price of a woman's coaxing. The strongest man in the Bible was the weakest where it counted. The book does not present him as a model to imitate; it presents him as a warning wrapped around a wonder, a man who squandered extraordinary grace and only turned to God, humbled and blind, at the very end.

How God used him despite his weakness

The astonishing thing is that God used Samson at all, and used even his sins. The text says plainly that the LORD sought an occasion against the Philistines through Samson's ill-matched marriage. God worked through a man who worked against himself, so that the deliverance was clearly God's doing and not the fruit of Samson's holiness, for he had little. And at the end, blind and broken, Samson finally prayed and depended on God rather than on his own arm, and God answered. His greatest victory came not in his strength but in his weakness, when at last he called on the LORD.

The cycle at breaking point

Samson barely runs the cycle at all. The people do not even cry out this time; they seem content under the Philistines, and some of them try to hand Samson over to keep the peace. He only begins to deliver Israel, as the angel foretold; he does not finish it, and no lasting rest follows. The deliverer is now as much a problem as a solution, and the nation is so far gone it no longer wants to be saved. The book is nearly at its terrible end, where it will declare that there was no king in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes.

How he points to Christ

Samson, set apart from the womb and given to deliver his people, points to the true Nazarene, Jesus, consecrated to God and sent to save. But again the contrast is the sharpest pointer. Samson was strong outwardly and weak within; Christ was meek outwardly and mighty within, holy where Samson was wayward, faithful to every vow Samson broke. Most of all, Samson won his greatest victory by dying with his arms spread against the pillars, killing the enemy in his own death. So Christ, with arms spread on the cross, won his greatest victory in death, destroying the true enemy and the powers of darkness, not for revenge but to save. And where Samson died and stayed dead, Christ rose.

A note on honesty: the book of Judges is one of the darkest and most candid books in the Bible, and it does not flatter its own heroes. The failures named above are the ones Scripture itself records. We do not whitewash them, because the point of the book is not how good the judges were, but how faithful God was to a people who could not save themselves, and how deeply they, and we, need the true Deliverer.

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