The path of redemption (Judg 16:23-31)

During an evening course in my twenties, I met another young woman, and we soon discovered that we were both Christians. As we walked to the underground after class each week, we often had long conversations in front of the station. Soon, however, I began to wonder about my acquaintance’s relationship with God. For her, being committed to God meant going along to church and trying to be a good person. She arranged her life as it best pleased her with no struggle or soul-searching about decisions, yet confident that God approved of her choices. In fact, she shared with me how God had told her that she was going to have a family and a happy life and die at a ripe old age with grandchildren around her. The sheer complacency of it took my breath away.

The way to deeper insight

Samson’s story reminds me of this a little, since he was likewise a self-sufficient man, unconcerned regarding his life choices, and his enormous strength gave him the illusion of invincibility. He knew that this strength was God’s gift (Judg 16:17), yet he lived as if it were automatically his. Sadly, he crossed the final line between allegiances thinking that he could carry on as before and did not know that the Lord had departed from him (Judg 16:20)! It took a hard knock from life, betrayal, the gouging out of his eyes and utter humiliation to realise it. As so often when God’s servants compromise their commitment, his downfall gave the enemy an opportunity to gloat. Boasting of their god, Dagon’s power (Judg 16:23-24), the Philistines implicitly denigrated Israel’s God whom Samson supposedly served. Samson in his blindness was pitiful as he was guided by a young boy (v.26) while the cream of Philistine society and its leadership amused themselves at his expense (Judg 16:25-27). We can only imagine what this involved, tasks performed to a mocking audience who would have laughed derisively at his clumsy moves and enjoyed his pain when he hurt himself. What a bitter pill for a man who could do anything he wanted before, to be sightless and weak, taunted and scorned!

Yet it was in this state of utter helplessness that Samson truly understood the source of his strength as from God and not automatically his. He recognised that he had no right to expect God’s intervention (note his repeated ‘please’ and the request for help ‘just this once’). In line with his deeper insight, Samson addressed God by His personal name, Yahweh, for the first time (capitalised ‘GOD’ in NASB; Judg 16:28). Yes, he was embittered and focused on himself, but he came in faith and that is what mattered. By comparison, Israel, too, took God’s love and grace for granted throughout their history while they disregarded His call to live a holy life (e.g. Jer 7:8-11). They, too, had to be enslaved and carried away in chains into exile to come to their senses and seek God. The path of redemption for us, too, leads into a recognition of our utter helplessness, so that we come to God with faith knowing that we have no claim on Him and depend entirely on His grace.

Dying to live

At the same time, Samson’s life had been so infiltrated by ungodly influences, so intertwined with the Philistines and enslaved to them in the end that his only path to be free of his chains was to die with them (Judg 16:30).[1] Once again, this is a pattern repeated in Israel’s exile (a symbolic form of death) and in us, fallen human beings, whose lives are so deeply penetrated by sin that we, too, can only be free by dying to it (Rom 6:3-7). For Samson, death was final, but it became the means by which he achieved his God-given purpose (v.30 cf. Judg 13:5) and in death he was finally reconciled to his family who took him home for burial (Judg 16:31). For us, dying to sin in a symbolic sense, that is, a radical break with a wilful life, is a gateway to a new beginning with the Lord.

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[1] Barry G. Webb, The Book of Judges, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 414.

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