So we are going to be considering
Samson once again and we did spend a little bit of time last
week thinking about the beginning of his ministry. We will come
again to him next week, God willing, but today we're going to be thinking
about more of the incidents from this man's life. So we're going
to read together Judges chapter 15 and reading from verse one. But it came to pass within a
while after, in the time of wheat harvest, that Samson visited
his wife with a kid. And he said, I will go into my
wife into the chamber. But her father would not suffer
him to go in. And her father said, I verily
thought that thou hast utterly hated her. Therefore I gave her
to thy companion. Is not her younger sister fairer
than she? Take her, I pray thee, instead
of her. And Samson said concerning them,
Now shall I be more blameless than the Philistines, though
I do them a displeasure. And Samson went and caught three
hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and
put a firebrand in the midst between two tails. And when he
had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing
corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks and
also the standing corn with the vineyards and olives. When the
Philistines said, who hath done this? And they answered, Samson,
the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he had taken his wife
and given her to his companion. And the Philistines came up and
burnt her and her father with fire. And Samson said unto them,
Though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged of you, and
after that I will cease. And he smote them hip and thigh
with a great slaughter, and he went down and dwelt in the top
of the rock Etam. Then the Philistines went up
and pitched in Judah, and spread themselves in Lahi, And the men
of Judah said, Why are ye come up against us? And they answered,
To bind Samson are we come up, to do to him as he hath done
to us. Then three thousand men of Judah
went to the top of the rock Etam and said to Samson, Knowest thou
not that the Philistines are rulers over us? What is this
that thou hast done unto us? And he said unto them, As they
did unto me, so have I done unto them. And they said unto him,
We are come down to bind thee, that we may deliver thee into
the hand of the Philistines. And Samson said unto them, Swear
unto me that ye will not fall upon me yourselves, or ye will
not kill me yourselves. And they spake unto him, saying,
No, but we will bind thee fast, and deliver thee into their hand. But surely we will not kill thee,
and they bound him with two new cords, and brought him up from
the rock. And when he came unto Leahy,
the Philistines shouted against him, and the Spirit of the Lord
came mightily upon him, and the cords that were upon his arms
became as flax that was burnt with fire, and his bands loosed
from off his hands. And he found a new jawbone of
an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand
men therewith. And Samson said, With the jawbone
of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I
slain a thousand men. And it came to pass, when he
had made an end of speaking, that he cast away the jawbone
out of his hand, and called that place Ramathleh. And he was sore athirst, and
called on the Lord, and said, Thou hast given this great deliverance
into the hand of thy servant. And now shall I die for thirst,
and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised? but God clave
an hollow place that was in the jaw. And there came water thereout,
and when he had drunk, his spirit came again, and he revived. Wherefore he called the name
thereof Enhach Koreh, which is in Lehi unto this day. And he judged Israel in the days
of the Philistines twenty years. Amen. May the Lord bless to us
this reading from his word. Samson has come down to us as
a man of great strength and power and determination. But we should
not forget also, and indeed perhaps more importantly, that he was
also a man of great faith. He is listed in Hebrews 11 among
the faithful men and women of whom it is said, the world was
not worthy. Samuel trusted the Lord. and
he was used by the Lord to avenge the wrongs done to the Lord's
elect in Israel. The Lord loves his chosen people. And the Lord has promised that
he will avenge his people on all their enemies that hurt them. And here, in Samson, is a practical
example of that very process taking place. As such, Samson
is a type of the Lord Jesus Christ, as a judge and as a leader. of the people. If the world was not worthy of
Samson, it certainly was not worthy of the Lord Jesus Christ. And yet the Saviour graced this
world with his person. God himself, in the form of a
man, walked the streets and breathed the air of this world. that he might deliver his people
from their enemies, from sin and death and hell. Samson was
not a perfect man by any means. Only the Lord Jesus Christ was
ever without sin. But Samson looked to Christ and
when the Holy Spirit came upon him to accomplish great feats
and do great works, he served the cause of God and the church. He served as a picture of the
greater judge who was yet to be revealed. This chapter tells
how Samson was further deceived and mocked by the father and
family of his Philistine wife. We read a little bit about that
last week, and I won't go back over that, but here we see that
this mockery continued to take place, and Samson felt this. He felt that deceit. What the father had done was
he had given Samson's wife to another man. And this insult
provoked Samson and caused him to declare these words, What
he was saying there was this, The Philistines were to blame
for offending him and giving him cause to be angry. It was the Philistines and their
actions that stirred up his anger and his wrath. In the original
insult, there was a personal affront against Samson, but the
Lord used that to avenge the hurt of his people against the
Philistine nation. And I think it's interesting
to notice in this story as well of Samson, how a local tit-for-tat
incident can escalate from a personal feud into a national catastrophe. As the chapter unfolds, we learn
that Samson, in order to avenge the shame that he felt and the
anger that he felt against the Philistines, caught 300 foxes. Now, some think that these were
actually jackals, which are a kind of dog-like creature as well. And he caught these foxes and
he tied them together two by two by their tails. And he put a firebrand between
every pair. So he probably had a piece of
cord and he tied the tails of the animals together with this
cord and then wrapped a firebrand in the cord as well. And he set
that alight and he let those animals run wildly, run freely
in amongst the crops of the Philistines. He let them loose into the cornfields
and into the vineyards and into the olive groves of the Philistines. And this was the time of year
when all these things were ready for harvest so they would be
very flammable and dry. And we learn that the Philistines
afterwards took revenge by burning Samson's wife and her father. Now I'm not sure whether we read
that as it being out of anger for the crops that they had lost,
or in some way trying to dispel Samson's anger and appease him
that he wouldn't do any more. Whatever it was, it didn't work,
and Samson said, though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged
of you, and after that, I will cease. And we learn that Samson
smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter. I wonder what hip and thigh means.
I'm not sure. I don't know. I wonder if it
means that he kicked them. Or I wonder if it means that
he broke their legs. Whatever it is. a lot of them
died as a result of this engagement with Samson. Now the Philistines
wanted more revenge and we're told that Samson went to a place
called Etam which is in Judah and so the Philistines brought
out an army and they gathered their army and marched into Judah
in order to arrest and to take Samson. And the men of Judah
were very anxious about this, very fearful. And they tried
to make peace with the Philistines by giving up Samson. They went to Samson and they
said, we're here to hand you over to the Philistines. And
Samson agreed to this, as long as they promised not to kill
Samson themselves, which they agreed, and they bound him with
cords. those cords were easily broken
when the Philistines took possession of Samson and we learned that
Samson found a jawbone of an ass, a donkey's jawbone and he
used it to slay a thousand Philistines. And these were Philistine soldiers. This was an incredible feat.
This was a miracle that the Spirit of the Lord came upon Samson,
endured him with such strength and ability and power and force
that he slew a thousand armed soldiers with only the jawbone
of an ass. The chapter ends with the bursting
out of a spring of water by which Samson is revived of the great
thirst that he had after this exertion when he felt that he
was ready to die of thirst. So this is the chapter, these
are the incidents that we have before us today. And I just want
to draw your attention to a couple of applications, a couple of
lessons that I think we can draw from this account. And here's
the first one. Samson's wife, the Philistine
girl from Timnah, She deceived him right at the very beginning
to stop his enemies from burning her and her father's house. She
tricked Samson so that she wouldn't get into any danger. And yet
she died the very death that she hoped to avoid. If this woman
had just trusted and honoured her husband at the start, at
the beginning. The outcome might have been so
much different. The Lord Jesus Christ is like
a strong husband to his bride. That's one of the pictures that
we have of Christ. Christ is the bridegroom and
the church, his people, are his bride. And so the Lord God says
that he will be a husband to his people. So that the Lord
is like a strong husband to his bride. but we cause ourselves
so much hardship by not trusting our husband as we should. So
here's our first lesson from this little passage. Let us stand
up for what is right, and let us stand for what is true, and
let us stand for what is honourable, despite the threats that we might
face in this world. and let us trust in the Lord
for his protection. There is a little saying which
is not from the Bible but it's got some wisdom in it which I
thought was probably repeatable here. It says this, it is better
to fail in a cause that will ultimately succeed than to succeed
in a cause that will ultimately fail. And as the Lord's people,
let us dedicate ourselves to Christ's service, knowing that
his is a cause that must succeed. There's another little lesson
that we can take, perhaps, from this passage. And it's to do
with the fact that the children of Judah, that the men of Judah,
also betrayed Samson. Not only did Samson's wife betray
him, but the men of Judah betrayed Samson as well. Despite their
years of oppression, or perhaps because of their years of oppression
by these Philistines, they chose to deliver Samson into the hands
of their enemies, despite the fact that there were 3,000 of
them there. they chose to deliver their judge,
their champion, their defender into their enemy's hands in order
to be killed. Many years later, a high priest
in Israel did exactly the same with the Lord Jesus Christ. And
he said on that occasion, it is expedient, or he was saying
it was better, it's better for us, it's expedient for us, that
one man should die for the people and that the whole nation perish
not. Actually, he was speaking there
about things that in truth he really didn't understand. He
was speaking about the Lord Jesus Christ being the substitute for
his people. He thought he was referring to
Israel and to the Jewish nation at the time with respect to the
Romans. But here we find a parallel in
the life of Samson. This is an example of where Samson
is a type of the Lord Jesus Christ. This high priest handed the Lord
Jesus Christ over to the Romans to be crucified so that both
Samson and Christ were delivered by their own people into the
hands of their enemy. But here there is a difference.
Samson broke his bonds and slew a thousand men. And the Lord
Jesus Christ went all the way to the cross and to death. Despite having power to go free,
it wasn't that the Lord Jesus Christ lacked the ability to
go free. In fact, we're told in Matthew
chapter 26 that the Lord says, Thinkest thou that I cannot now
pray to my father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve
legions of angels. Twelve legions of angels. That's
thousands and thousands of angels. What battles might have been
won with twelve legions of angels? but the Lord suffered himself
to be taken. He suffered himself to be bound
and given into the hands of his enemies that his people might
go free. That his people might have life. And here's a third lesson that
I want to just leave with you. Samson slew of the enemy a thousand
with the jawbone of an ass. It was a surprising weapon. Do
you remember another judge we spoke about, a man called Shamgar? He used an ox goad, or something
that they used to use to prod oxen, to make them grind out
the corn, for example. But here, Samson uses the jawbone
of an ass. and strengthened by the Spirit
of God, Samson avenged the elect of Israel. And as a public judge,
he slew the enemies of the Lord's people. This was retribution.
The retribution of God against the enemies of his people. Now
we might say the jawbone of an ass of all the things that Samson
could use in order to gain this amazing victory, the last thing
that we, well maybe not the very last thing, but one of the last
things that we could have thought about was the jawbone of an ass.
It was an unexpectedly successful weapon. And in that respect, let me draw
a wee parallel for you. Think about the scriptures and
think about the gospel. You see, as believers in this
world, we do not fight in the normal way that the world fights. We don't fight with swords and
we don't fight with guns. What we are called to do is to
preach the gospel and testify the word of God. The Apostle
Paul says, for though we walk in the flesh, that is, we live
in this life, we do not war after the flesh, for the weapons of
our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling
down of strongholds. The church doesn't send out warriors,
it sends out preachers, and it sends them out with an unexpectedly
successful weapon, the Scriptures, the Holy Scriptures and the Gospel
of the Lord Jesus Christ. It sends out preachers and by
the preaching of the Gospel, Christ gathers his people and
builds the Kingdom of God. Here's just a final thought and
then we're done. Samson was given water when he thirsted at the
end of his battle. God miraculously brought water
from the jaw. Now whether that was from the
actual jaw of the ass, or whether it was from the ground where
the jaw fell, because the ground also had the name of the jawbone
of the ass, because that was where the battle took place.
Whatever it means there, it was a miracle, because this fountain
appeared, as it were, that had never been there before. And
when the Lord Jesus had finished his battle on the cross with
our enemies, he also cried out to God, I thirst. The Roman soldier at the side
of the cross heard him and to torment him, he gave him vinegar
to drink. But what a picture that is of
the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ's desire was for his bride
and his thirst was for our souls. He died to save his people from
their sins. The Romans wouldn't give him
water to drink. but his father gave him a great
reward, just as he had given Samson the reward of refreshment
after the battle. So, the Lord Jesus Christ was
rewarded by his father. Samson was given pure water to
drink, to quench his thirst, and Christ obtained a bride,
a bride, pure, clean, and fit for his presence, saying, It
is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning
and the end. I will give unto him that is
athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely. It is the
Lord's people who drink at the fountain of life. Spiritual life. May the Lord give us that living
water from the fountain of the water of life that we might come
to trust the Lord Jesus Christ as our Saviour. Amen.