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1After some days, at the time of wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife with a young goat. And he said, "I will go in to my wife in the chamber." But her father would not allow him to go in. 2And her father said, "I really thought that you utterly hated her, so I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister more beautiful than she? Please take her instead." 3And Samson said to them, "This time I shall be innocent in regard to the Philistines, when I do them harm." 4So Samson went and caught 300 foxes and took torches. And he turned them tail to tail and put a torch between each pair of tails. 5And when he had set fire to the torches, he let the foxes go into the standing grain of the Philistines and set fire to the stacked grain and the standing grain, as well as the olive orchards. 6Then the Philistines said, "Who has done this?" And they said, "Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he has taken his wife and given her to his companion." And the Philistines came up and burned her and her father with fire. 7And Samson said to them, "If this is what you do, I swear I will be avenged on you, and after that I will quit." 8And he struck them hip and thigh with a great blow, and he went down and stayed in the cleft of the rock of Etam.
9Then the Philistines came up and encamped in Judah and made a raid on Lehi. 10And the men of Judah said, "Why have you come up against us?" They said, "We have come up to bind Samson, to do to him as he did to us." 11Then 3,000 men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam, and said to Samson, "Do you not know that the Philistines are rulers over us? What then is this that you have done to us?" And he said to them, "As they did to me, so have I done to them." 12And they said to him, "We have come down to bind you, that we may give you into the hands of the Philistines." And Samson said to them, "Swear to me that you will not attack me yourselves." 13They said to him, "No; we will only bind you and give you into their hands. We will surely not kill you." So they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.
14When he came to Lehi, the Philistines came shouting to meet him. Then the Spirit of the LORD rushed upon him, and the ropes that were on his arms became as flax that has caught fire, and his bonds melted off his hands. 15And he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, and put out his hand and took it, and with it he struck 1,000 men. 16And Samson said,
"With the jawbone of a donkey,
heaps upon heaps,
with the jawbone of a donkey
have I struck down a thousand men."
17As soon as he had finished speaking, he threw away the jawbone out of his hand. And that place was called Ramath-lehi.
18And he was very thirsty, and he called upon the LORD and said, "You have granted this great salvation by the hand of your servant, and shall I now die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?" 19And God split open the hollow place that is at Lehi, and water came out from it. And when he drank, his spirit returned, and he revived. Therefore the name of it was called En-hakkore; it is at Lehi to this day. 20And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.
Samson's wedding with the Philistine woman from Timnah ended in a blood bath. This is what the Lord wanted. Since Israel had no inclination to seek deliverance from foreign oppression, God worked through Samson's roving eyes and instigated a war. Theologically, we are to recognize in this marriage a picture of Israel. Samson, like Israel, fraternizes with the enemy, despite being uniquely set apart and divinely gifted.
Samson is a man torn between two extremes. Besides a taste for Canaanite women, his indomitable drive for vengeance is a force always to be reckoned with. "As they did to me, so I have done to them" (15:11) aptly summarizes his philosophy of retaliation. His concern is not for God's justice; he will simply do what he feels like doing. One thing leads to another, and the spiral of revenge keeps spinning downwards in a reckless descent. The Philistines retaliate for the devastation of Samson's army of 300 jackals (the only army he ever mustered) by roasting Samson's wife and her father in the fire. Once again, the narrator gives us a window into Samson's heart: "If this is what you do, I swear I will be avenged on you, and after that I will quit" (15:7).
Samson thinks the vicious cycle of violence can be broken by yet another escalation. His words reveal an important truth about human anger and vengeance. Anger is seen as capable of fixing the problem. We think our world will be set aright when we respond to challenges with some destructive force (physical or verbal, active or passive). Samson's idea, "…after this I will quit," implies the vision of a peaceful outcome on the far side of violent behavior. "Fix it, then all will be well!"
Not all forms of anger are sinful, but those that are will block any light of God entering our hearts. The absence of God in the words of Samson bespeaks selfishness, and this too is typical of sinful anger: the whole world revolves around the offended party. "Vengeance is mine—I will repay," is the motto, and the angry ego replaces God by seizing the divine privilege. No wonder that James reminds us that the "anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God" (James 1:20).
But the people of Judah have their own skewed notion about making or preserving "peace," and they are willing to pay any price for it. They surrender Samson to the enemy. The situation is comical, for the 3,000 men delivering the "package" should have been the army engaging the Philistines. Unlike Samson, the people of Judah do not have the stomach to do anything about their deplorable misery. In the interest of their comfort they sell out their leader. We have our comfort zones, and we can be protective of them, even to the point of denying the truth and our calling. In Jesus' parable of the goat and the sheep (Matt. 25:31-41) the distinguishing mark of the sheep is that they traded some of their own comfort for the kingdom.
Samson and the people of Judah describe two extremes. Creating our own brave new world by taking matters into our own hand defies the kingship of Christ. At the same time, the kingdom is not about our personal comfort in this world, and inactivity will surely lead to some form of enslavement. Trust in Christ is the antidote to both aberrations. He will eventually address any form of injustice, and he will be with us when we venture in his name.
The author of these devotionals, the Rev. Martin Emmrich, is an ordained OPC minister (Westminster OPC, Corvallis, Oregon) as well as the author of Pneumatological Concepts in the Epistle to the Hebrews, a book on the teaching of Hebrews on the Holy Spirit. We are happy to make these devotionals on Ecclesiastes and other passages of Scripture available to you.
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