This coming Lord’s Day morning we will be considering (for the third time) the life and exploits of that most famous Biblical character named “Samson.” Our text will be Judges 14:1-19 with a special focus upon verses 1-4.

I suspect that we would all confess that we’ve learned some things about this man that we didn’t know to be true, and that his life’s story has been set before us in a different light than we have previously observed. I can tell you that for such a long period of my own life, what I knew about this man was fragmentary. He was really strong! He killed a whole bunch of Philistines with the jaw bone of a donkey (15:15). He got involved with a woman named “Delilah” who tricked him into giving up his secret. And then, he met his end at the temple of Dagon as he, literally, ‘brought the house down,’ and killed more of Yahweh’s enemies in this act of self-sacrifice than he did in all of the pervious twenty years he judged Israel (16:30).

But, as we are now seeing, there is much more to this man than this! And his story and his place in the history of God’s Old Covenant people is very important and somewhat complicated! As we have said before, there is much to learn from him and from God’s dealings with His persistently rebellious people at this stage of their history.

So far, we have discovered that things were really bad by the time Samson came on the stage. And we have also learned that Samson’s appearance itself was most unusual. He was called to be the savior of his people while in his mother’s womb. And his unnamed mother had been unable to have any children until the angel of the Lord appeared to her and announced that she would give birth to a son. And she would give birth not just to any little boy, but to one who would “begin to save” the Israelites “from the hand of the Philistines” (13:5). And then we remember how the Spirit of God came over Samson, and began to “stir him,” moving and empowering him to do the Lord’s bidding (13:25).

And here is precisely where the problem is for us. Over and again in the inspired record of his adventures, we are told that Samson was empowered and directed by the Holy Spirit. And yet, in these 4 chapters of Judges (13-16) he looks like anything but a man full of and led by the Spirit of the Lord! There is tension abounding in the life of Samson!

That tension reaches its full magnitude in 14:4 where we are given a piece of inside information about Samson that serves as the key truth regarding his whole life. According to this verse, all that Samson did, even in his willful defiance of the commands of the divine Word, was “from the Lord”! What a perplexing claim! Even in his sinning, Samson was accomplishing the will and purposes of Yahweh! Here we encounter the incomprehensible mystery of divine providence, and a truth that will not only confound us initially, but will comfort us ultimately, and point us to the cross of our blessed Savior and Lord!