Samson's new wife has a character like his old wife. Why does he always seem to fall for the worst
women? Delilah is willing to accept a
bribe to betray him to the Philistines and tries here three times to trick Samson
into revealing the secret of his great strength and three times he lies to her. His weakness is readily apparent, women,
particularly foreign women as it seems likely that Delilah was a Philistine
also. His Nazirite vow was long
forgotten by this juncture, he was seemingly uninterested in his own people and
religious observance.
The man at the pool has been there thirty-eight years,
surely the religious leaders who now confront him over the carrying of his bed
on the Sabbath know who he is and can stand in amazement that he is now
walking. They had to have seen him
during all this time but they are more concerned with the law (at least their
interpretation of it) than his healing.
The man is quick to shift blame for carrying the bed to the one who
healed him who told him to take it up.
He and Jesus both knew that the carrying of the bed was an infraction of
the Sabbath rule concerning work, but Jesus coupled the healing with the
command. When Jesus then confronts the
man He gives a further command to do no more sin lest something worse happen to
you. Was sin the cause of the original
handicap? How can the man who caused him
to sin by commanding walking with the bed now say to do no more sin? The man's reaction is interesting to say the
least, to go and tell the Jews that Jesus was responsible for all this. His allegiance, like that of Delilah, is to
those in power.
Stephen continues apace with his history lesson, getting to
Mount Sinai and the affair with the Golden Calf. He connects that episode with the prophetic
words that come later concerning the apostasy of the people. They have repeated that sin again and again
in their history. Nothing would have
been surprising in this history, nothing would have alerted the listeners to
the coming plot twist. We, like the
Israelites, tend to go astray. We don't
overtly worship other particular gods but we do tend to worship false gods like
materialism and our culture has enshrined sexual desire as the supreme ruler of
all things. Anything that we put in place of Him as our deliverer and savior is
a god. In the book Robinson Crusoe the
protagonist reads his Bible and comes across the passage, "Call upon me in
the day of distress and I will deliver you" and initially prays that he
will be rescued but then soon realizes that his very existence on this island
is a deliverance as the distress of his former life apart from God was what he
needed to be delivered from. It is only
then that he determines to make the best of his current situation and wait with
the Lord in this distress but if he be not delivered it no longer mattered.
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