From start to finish, the story of Samson is a wild one. A classic hero to a T, Samson lives large and loud and goes out in much the same way. He’s exactly what the Israelites wanted to get them out of trouble with the Philistines. But Samson was here for a good time not a long time, and when the dust settled, he was one more in a long list of judges trying to save Israel from itself. But the calling of Samson’s story were destined to be repeated with an entirely different heart and an entirely different outcome. In many ways, the stories of Samson and Jesus run parallel and in opposition of each other and point us to what we actually need for true deliverance.
Let’s start with Samson’s story. His mom is visited by an angel and told she’ll give birth to a deliverer of great strength. When Samson arrives on the scene he makes good on the strength promise and starts kicking some Philistine butt. In many ways, he becomes the Biblical Heracles, taking on foe after foe in ever wilder ways (I mean, who does that with foxes and donkey jaw bones?). Pretty cool hero so far. But like Heracles, Samson scores about a zero on the impulse control scale. His intensity to fight rules him and his desires run absolutely unchecked, particularly with women. Women prove the ultimate derailing of Samson’s calling.
Despite Mosaic law forbidding it, he asks his parents to get him a certain Philistine woman for a wife. When they object, he demands it claiming she is right in his eyes, an echo of the greater problem in Israel of everyone doing whatever suits them best. Now God is able to use this event to deal a powerful blow to the Philistines, but next thing you know, Samson spies another woman. Delilah. And we all know how that went.
Samson’s life is a constant battle between his incredible ability to do great things for Israel and his inability to walk in a God-honoring way. But ultimately? Samson is so painfully, sinfully human he complete crashes and burns in the fire of his own poor choices.
Betrayed by Delilah, caught and blinded by the Philistines, Samson finds himself in a Philistine temple with one last chance to honor God. Praying for his strength to return one last time, Samson brings down the entire temple, killing more Philistines in that moment than he had in any of his other endeavors.
When the dust settles, Samson is dead. There will be no more epic battles, no more routing the Philistines, no more inhuman feats of strength. Samson is not strong enough to fight his own sin and he can’t overcome the death it brings. In the end, Samson joins the list of Israel’s judges and takes his place as a footnote in history.
That’s the end of Samson’s story, but it’s not the end of the story.
Because hundreds of years later, another young woman gets visited by an angel and told that the son she’ll have will go on to do miraculous things and bring freedom and hope to his people.
And that son arrives (spoiler alert: it’s Jesus), and he does begin to do everything the angel promised. The only problem for the people watching him is that it looks nothing like they hoped it would. Those who’d grown up on stories of Samson and his incredible strength hoped that Jesus would finally be the answer to the Roman oppression that was wearing them down to nothing. They wanted him to drive Rome out and rebuild them as a nation, restoring them to their former glory.
But Jesus did none of that. Instead, he came to people with love and redemption and it drove people crazy. Where was the power and strength they had waited for? Where was the deliverance? Instead of a hero, they were dealing with a carpenter who kept telling them to love their neighbor. And then came the cross, and everything changed. Like Samson, Jesus was captured by his enemies, and like Samson, he was beaten and humiliated for sport. But Jesus did something Samson would not. He sacrificed himself for others, not for his own glory, but for the redemption of the world. The world has never been the same since and the story still goes on.
So what does this all mean for us? Despite the obvious answer that Jesus is a thousand times better than donkey-wielding Samson, this parallel reminds us that God’s way of accomplishing his means is often so different than how we expect him to work. When we want to be like Samson, Jesus calls us to be like him. When we want him to wreck our enemies, he asks us to build them into brothers.
Now I’m not saying Samson’s strength was an inherently bad thing and that we use all of his story as a bad example. There are those blessed with the gift of aggression and more importantly the wisdom for how to use that gift. God calls people with strength to be defenders of others. What I am saying is that we need to be aware of how we want God to work and what he actually does to accomplish his mission. What we want doesn’t always line up with how God is actually going to work
Are we humble enough to change course to what God’s planning? Or are we going to put our faith in our idea of a Samson? One will come and go, the other will last forever. And it will come with work for us. To give up your idea of how you want God to work is no simple thing, but it’s everything. Whether it’s giving up how you thought your job or family or even your life would look, it’s worth it to be part of what God’s doing. His plan will always be far better than any we could make.
Let’s be more than Samsons.
Let’s find some joy,
A
Avalon Robinson Author 