Samson was born in an age when Israel had no king, and no Joshua or Moses to lead them either. And only one generation after Joshua’s death the Israelite clans had already exchanged “the God of their fathers” for the “various gods of the peoples around them,” Judges 2:12.
So “In his anger against Israel the Lord handed them over to raiders who plundered them” (14), and “Whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand of the Lord was against them to defeat them” (15). But in response to their cries of distress God “raised up judges, who saved them out of the hands of these raiders” (16). Unfortunately, this became the pattern all through the time of the judges. A good judge would die, Israel would return to “following other gods,” God would get angry (3:8), but when Israel cried out in their distress, God would raise up another “deliverer” (3:9) in the form of another judge, like Ehud (chapter 3), Deborah (chapters 4 and 5), Gideon (chapters 6 to 8) and several others, leading up to the birth of Samson in Judges 13 from the tribe of Dan.
Samson had a flamboyant start in life, similar in several ways to Jesus, in that Samson was also miraculously conceived, his birth was announced by an angel to his mother (Judges 13:2-3, 6-7), he was “set apart to God from birth (5) to begin the deliverance of Israel” (just like Jesus in Matthew 1:21), and “the Spirit of the Lord (13:25) began to stir Samson” (again like Jesus in Luke 4:18). In Samson’s case “The Spirit of the Lord came upon him in (physical) power, enabling him to tear a lion apart with his bare hands” (14:6). In strength alone he was impressive, and in his flamboyant looks too, with his long flowing uncut hair (13:5).
But Samson was also flawed. He chose a Philistine lass for his wife against his parents’ wishes (14:1-3), but God was “seeking an occasion to confront the Philistines who were ruling over Israel at the time,” and Samson’s reckless pig-headedness fit in perfectly with his rescue plan (4). And so did Samson riling up the Philistines at his marriage feast too. Samson made a deal with thirty of them (11), that if they could answer a riddle he put to them he’d give them thirty linen garments and thirty sets of clothes, but if they failed they owed him the same amount (12-13). In response the Philistines threatened Samson’s wife with death to get the answer out of him (15). She did it too, but only after crying for the full seven days of their marriage feast to get him to tell her (16-17).
God’s response was to give Samson sufficient Spirit power to kill thirty other Philistines in Ashkelon and use their clothes to pay his debt (19). And that marked the start of God delivering Israel from the Philistines. But “Why did Samson need to die?”….(next blog)
