Samson was under a Nazirite vow not to cut his hair, eat
unclean food or drink alcohol. He was
ritually pure and then some. That, under
such a vow he can now marry a non-Israelite wife is incredible. His parents can't countenance the idea but we
are told that it was actually God's plan.
Eating honey from the carcass of the lion was also a violation of his
vow, he would not have been allowed to come near a dead body (see the parable
of the Good Samaritan - the priest and Levite didn't know if the man was alive
or dying so they kept their distance). Samson
may have had many good qualities but wisdom and discernment, particularly with
women, weren't in his gift mix. His wife
is able to pry from him the secret of his riddle so that her kinsmen can avoid
paying up on their wager. Samson, acting
in the Spirit of the Lord, kills thirty men of the Philistines in order to make
good on his obligation. Samson is one of
the most interesting characters in the Bible.
The woman can only do what Jesus Himself had done and what
the disciples had done, make the offer to come and see. We have to wonder what the people of the town
thought they were coming to see. Did they
know this was a Jewish man to whom she referred? She asked if this could be Messiah, so what
were they expecting when they came? They
were expecting a prophet like Moses, not the Messiah the Jews were looking for,
they had only the books of Moses as their Bible. What was it about Jesus in the two days He
spent among them that convinced them that He was indeed Messiah? We are told nothing at all of those two days,
but surely something happened that caused them to believe. As we will see in Acts, when persecution
broke out in Jerusalem, one man, Philip, went to Samaria and reaped a bountiful
harvest there, just as Jesus said they would.
They only needed to hear, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story.
Stephen's defense doesn't sound like a defense at all. It sounds like Jewish history. The leaders had to be wondering where this
was all going, they knew all this. One of
the things we tend to overlook when we speak about the Gospel, when we
evangelize, is that it begins long before Jesus came into the world as a
man. It begins at the beginning and it
tells the story of why He came, what has happened to get us into the mess we
are in. The story matters because it
answers the questions right up front. Is
God good is answered by Genesis 1. How the
world is what it is with a good God is answered in Genesis 3. The story is of God's goodness from beginning
to end, and that the problems in the world are related to our failure as His
designated rulers, as image bearers, not some defect in Him. We, Christians, born of the Spirit, are to be
true image bearers, restorers of God's rule through humankind on earth. He is sovereign over all, times, places and
people. We are to show what it looks
like to yield to that sovereignty and cooperate with Him.
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