We come now to the famous crisis of his life when he was to learn once and for all that redeemed man is no good unless he has found the union basis, which is what we also call sanctification. We learn that it is not we but God and that God can take us through the crisis moments because it is He operating. We know God. We have our weaknesses, but God can take us through them.
Samson did not know that. He loved a woman named Delilah, the famous Delilah. I do not think he was married to her but he had a real passion for her. The five lords of the Philistines made her one of their agents by offering her eleven thousand pieces of silver to get the secret of his strength. Remember, those were external days and they did not know the secret we have within us today. Thank God, it is a universal secret today and we are all Samson's in our way.
Apparently she had a great hold on him because he visited her again and again. A woman has great power when a man is grabbed by a passion for her. Time and time again she said, “Now, tell me wherein your strength lies.” He pretended it was a game. He did not know there were men lying in wait to grab him when they found the secret. Three times he played his tricks with her. She got hotter and hotter and put pressure on him. Finally she said to him, “I won’t love you if you don’t tell me your secret. I don’t call it love when you act like this.” She cut him right to the bone. Thinking he might lose her, he told his secret.
He sold out his central allegiance to God for the love of that woman. However, that was not his basis. We will prove later that it was his soul, not his spirit. He was God’s man and he never ceased to be God’s man; but he almost sold out his very birthright. Not quite, for he was not like Esau who sold his spirit. The point is that flesh cannot exist by itself. That is why we must not judge people for going to the flesh. Unless God is in you, you cannot resist. It is only in Christ, in the power of His death and resurrection, that we can walk and be delivered. We can have confidence in that deliverance and be kept in that deliverance. Samson did not have the confidence that he could be kept by God so he played too far in his weakness for women. He did not have the controlling power of God to keep him. He did to a certain extent, for God used him. There was a purpose in his going too far, for he must be broken. If God’s ultimate power was going to come through, he would have to ultimately be a broken man, a God-filled man to the death. We all have to go through that and this was Samson’s time.
The world mocks and makes up plays about Delilah but a wonderful thing was happening here. This was God. He was using the sex drive in the man for His own purposes. We must not say that Samson sold himself totally for he only sold his flesh. He got to a point where he was beyond resisting, but if he had walked with God, God would have kept him from going beyond resistance. He would have stopped where he should have stopped long before. God would have held him. What he did did not come from his center but he sold his center out. For twenty years he had been accepted by Israel as a judge and now he had sold his commission, his nation, his reputation, himself. It is possible to go pretty far but much less possible if you have moved in, because there is something in God that will not let you. God has you and He will keep you. There is nothing that says you will not have whatever your special tendencies or weaknesses may be, as anybody else does, but you will not be held by them. You only know that if you have settled into knowing you are not you but He, that He is the only One living. You are not safe out of union.
Samson was not safe because, although he was God’s man and the Spirit of God came upon him, he did not know God in that inner relationship which men like David, Elijah, Moses, and Joshua came to know. So he had to go through this and, therefore, in that sense, he could not help it. This was God’s purpose because God was going to strike His final blow at the Philistines by the weakness of Samson.
That very weakness problem made strength, perfected in that very weakness. This thing we could call sin was the very thing God used. The sin was not the sex; the sin was selling out his faith. In those days sex did not matter as much. Those were different days. This thing was used by the flesh in him to cause him to practically deny his faith, which was the real sin.
Choosing to keep her love rather than keep his faith was his sin. It is equivalent to our setting out in a ministry and then destroying our ministry by being involved in something of the flesh. That is much less likely to happen if we have moved into this union life. We can never say it cannot happen for Paul says, “For it is a mighty force that I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection lest that by any means, when I have ministered to others I, myself should become a castaway” (I Cor. 9:27).
Castaway does not mean thrown out. It means disapproved. It does not mean the loss of salvation. It is the same idea as the branch burned with the vine. It is men who cast you out. Samson was no good to men, to Israel. We can be cast out of our ministry but we have not lost our salvation. We may lose our ways so that men have no use for us, but we have not lost our salvation. We have no word for them, no message. They will not come. We lose out on that level. That is the level that Samson lost out on but he did not lose his inner relationship, his inner knowing.
This is how God moved, and so he had to go to the bottom. He had to become a helpless, weak person, put in prison, blinded, and made to sweat away at grinding corn at a mill. He became a normal, physical body, a laboring slave.
Then came this remarkable way of God. God is with his people, even these early people. There Samson was, and he knew God. He knew that he had lost his way. All he had really lost was his way; he had not lost God. His hair began to grow again and it began to dawn on him that he was getting back to being a Nazarite again. He was still in grace, God’s man. He had made a mess but the Philistines did not know that his symbol would grow again. He was conscious of coming back to the place where the power of God could come through him.
Not long after Samson had this growing realization, a great occasion arose. The Philistines wanted to rejoice because Samson, Israel’s Goliath, had been destroyed. This Samson was a slave now and they wanted to have a great celebration. It symbolized to them that the whole nation was back under their control. They planned a great feast in a building so remarkable that they had three thousand on the roof. They certainly built in those days! In some strange way, the building was held up by two great pillars. The Lord was moving now, and they wanted to make sport of him. The pillars were centered in this building which had this great crown, including the lords of the Philistines in it. They had a little boy lead him in by the hand in between those pillars. I suppose this was a way to laugh at him best. They conveyed to him that these were the pillars that held the building up. Then Samson said to the lad, “Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them.”
Suddenly he saw it! My symbol is back with me; God is with me. Then he prayed. This was new. This was his real relationship now, because he had not thought of praying before. “Remember me, O Lord, I pray thee, strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once. I’ll give my life for this.” Now he becomes an intercessor. “My life doesn’t matter; I’ll give my life for my two eyes.” He had been
God’s man and this is the way he looked at it. Obviously this was the way of the Israelites’ deliverance from the Philistines if they would take it. Then he took hold of those pillars upon which the house was borne, one with his right hand and the other with his left. That is it! He would die that in the end God’s work would be glorified. He knew he had come back again to be anointed of God. He would die with the Philistines.
And it says, “He bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life” (Judges 16:30). Then they took his body and buried it.
So that is the story of Samson. There are some great revelations of the way God works by people who have to come to the same way in the end. You have to come out of the idea of “If I’m equipped in some separate way I can do it.” No! I have to come back into the center where the “I” has disappeared and God is the One and all is God. What happens to me is not the point. God will now operate by me. That is the history of Samson as presented to us.
- Norman Grubb
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