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Tara Leigh Cobble
Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Leigh Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap. Did you know we have another daily podcast? It's called the Bible Kneecap. Like kneeling in prayer because your girl loves a pun. Anyway, it's a short prayer of response to what we've read and recapped each day, and each episode is about 60 to 90 seconds long. To give you a taste of it, we've uploaded a free preview of the Bible Kneecap for you today, so be sure to look for that in your feed. Today we meet our 12th and final judge, Samson. He may be the only one you've heard of before. He's definitely the most famous, in part because his story is the most detailed in the book, but also it might have something to do with the fact that he feels like the closest thing Christian culture has to a traditional superhero. I hope today's reading helped paint things a little more clearly, because he's probably the worst and most wicked of all the judges in the book. Not only that, but he probably doesn't actually have big muscles like we usually imagine. I'll tell you why tomorrow when we wrap up this story. As for today, the people of Israel have fallen into sin again and are oppressed by the Philistines for 40 years. And according to 1017, this is all probably happening simultaneous to the stuff we read about yesterday. Yesterday's battle with the Ammonites was happening in the Transjordan east of the Jordan river, and this stuff with the Philistines is happening along the Mediterranean coastline of Israel west of the Jordan River. First we meet a man named Manoah and the angel of the Lord, who is likely God the Son shows up to tell Manoah's barren wife that she's going to have a son. He says her son will play a role in helping rescue Israel and that she should raise him to live under the Nazarite vow. You may remember the Nazarite vow from Number six. The rules of the vow included not drinking any alcohol or even eating any part of a grape, not cutting your hair and not touching anything dead. If you recall, the Nazarite rules were an even more ramped up version of some of the rules for the Levites. Most people took this vow temporarily and voluntarily, but Samson was assigned this role and his assignment was lifelong. And God even said it doesn't start when he's born, it starts when he's in the womb. So Manoah's wife has to follow the Nazarite vow during her pregnancy as if giving up coffee isn't hard enough on its own, it seems like Manoah and his wife really believed this prophecy. They're earnest about it. They beg God for instructions and advice from the angel of the Lord. And when they're referencing the prophecy, they say when this happens, not if this happens. They offer a burnt offering to God and worship him, the one who works wonders, as the text calls him. After Samson is born God, the spirit, begins to send him promptings about his calling. At some undetermined age, God blesses him. And chapter 13 ends beautifully in chapter 14. The first decision Samson makes seems to be wicked and foolish. He's demanding to have a certain Philistine woman as his wife. But the text is clear that underneath this demand is a plan Samson is working out and that it was set in motion by God. Samson is a secretive man who operates fairly independently of everyone else. So what his parents don't know is that he's secretly making an inroad to overthrow Israel's oppressors, the Philistines. Another secret he keeps is that he killed a lion with his bare hands with the help of God, the Spirit. I used to think he didn't tell anyone because he was just being humble. But there's no evidence of humility elsewhere. My guess is that he kept it a secret because as a Nazirite, this would have almost certainly been a sin. He wasn't allowed to touch dead bodies, though to be fair, some people think that rule only applied to dead human bodies. But if it did apply to all dead things, and I'm inclined to think it did, then not only did he touch the dead line when he killed it, but he also touched it a few days later when he scooped honey out of its carcass. This is where we're starting to see outright that Samson makes a lot of foolish decisions. He's prideful and entitled, driven by lust and impulsive desires. And he also seems to break every single rule of his Nazarite vow. His pride begins to rear its head at his wedding feast, which, by the way, almost certainly involved lots of alcohol that he wasn't supposed to drink, but most likely did. He taunts 30 Philistines with a riddle, which he made up based on his likely sinful encounter with the lion. And when they can't solve it, they coerce his wife into getting the answer from him. This is where we see his first sign of weakness. Women. When the guys tell him the answer to his riddle, he's furious and embarrassed. Not only did he lose the bet, but he was betrayed by his new wife during his own wedding feast. So he decides to kill them and take all their clothes, which certainly involves touching their dead bodies. One of the strangest parts of today's text is that it says God the spirit equips him for this task. But while he's away slaughtering the Philistines, his father in law gives his brand new bride to his best man. Later, when Samson returns and tries to consummate the marriage, her dad tells him the bad news, but offers him the consolation prize of marrying her sister instead. So Samson does what any of us would do in that situation. He catches 300 foxes, ties their tails together and lights them on fire, then sends them into a field to burn all the crops. We've all been there, right? No, this is bonkers. But he probably chose this option because it was the one way to get back at them while remaining innocent. In regard to his Nazareth vow against touching dead things, he was clever, I'll give him that. The Philistines get their revenge on him by burning his wife and father in law to death. So Samson either kills more Philistines or beats them up in retaliation. The text isn't really clear here. The back and forth between Samson and the Philistines continue. When they attack the tribe of Judah, Judah decides to capture Samson, their own judge, and turn him over to the Philistines as a bribe. Judah, you're better than that. When they bring Samson to make the exchange with the Philistines, Samson breaks free and kills a thousand men, presumably all Philistines, but who knows? And he did it with the jawbone of a donkey, which also constitutes touching the dead. And so does killing people, probably. We're not even really to the story he's known for, and you can already see what a rebel he is. One of the things you may have picked up on is that the other judges fought with armies. Samson didn't. Samson was the army does his own stunts. Every Philistine who died on his watch died by his hand. He's not a leader at all. He's a solitary vigilante. It's hard not to be impressed by him, though. And we definitely see God at work, initiating and sustaining Samson's calling. But it can be a really challenging text to work through theologically. So what was your God shot? The thing that stood out to me like a flashing neon sign was the way God empowers sinful people with wicked motives to accomplish his righteous plan. He was using Samson's pride and rage to defeat Israel's enemy in a time when they were oppressed. For lack of a better term, Samson was the lesser of two evils. When God's spirit empowers Samson to do something, he's not endorsing Samson's sin. But sometimes he's using Samson's sinfulness to defeat a greater enemy. I know we talk about this all the time, but sinners are all God's got to work with. None of us deserve to be used by him. And when we are, you can bet something is still going to be off track in us somewhere. Only a sovereign God could bend our sin to serve his purposes. And that is a huge comfort to me because it's easy for me to feel like my sin or someone else's sin has ruined everything. I'm not big enough to ruin everything. He's bigger. That sets me free. I'm so glad I can't ruin his plan because he's where the joy is. If you've got four kids and two dogs, your quiet time probably looks really different from mine with me and my four plants. And that's okay. No matter your phase of life, there are some tools that can help you make the most of your quiet time or your unquiet time. I like to call mine priority time to help me prioritize it. And I'd love to tell you more about what my priority time looks like. So I've built out a priority time toolkit that we'd love to give you for free. Just go to thebiblerecap.com time or click the link in the show notes.