Seventeenth Page: Delilah, you devil of a damsel!

She blew it!

The message excited her so much, that her gumption deserted her. They were married for some years now, but sadly there was no child in the family. In moments of stillness, husband and wife would look at each other and sigh wistfully with aching hearts. Apart from the difficulty of coping with their own sense of unfulfilled desire, quite possibly they also had to contend with unkind chatter in the neighbour-hood over their condition. It is in these bleak and forlorn circumstances that the message came, like water to a dry and parched land.

She was going to give birth to a son!! Was she flabbergasted! Her humdrum life was going to radically change! This was news that was too good to be true! In her state of euphoria, she failed to check where the message came from, who delivered it. Her only thought was that she should share it with her husband soonest. Without a second look at the messenger, she ran (Judges 13:6, NLT).

Perfect handle for her husband to denounce half the human race! “Oh, these women; such emotional creatures! The moment they hear something they want to hear, they lose their equilibrium, they take leave of their senses ….…..and so on and so forth”. He could then have gone on to recollect and recount in lacerating detail every foolish act of omission and commission on the part of his missus in the past.

Manoah did nothing of the kind.

He prayed.

What? Yes, he prayed. Prayer came naturally to him. Like talking to someone right beside him. Someone he knew rather well. No great preparation needed. No arduous journeys, no bodily contortions, no self flagellation, no pious prostrations, no pompous pronouncements, no magnificent preambles, no humongous offerings. Simple words, rising from the heart, in context, to the point, earnest: “Lord, please let the man of God come back to us again and give us more instructions about this son who is to be born” (Judges 13:8,NLT).

It is useful at this point to pause a moment and consider Manoah’s experience with prayer in the past. Sad to say, it was not very encouraging. You can bet he was praying for years for a child to be born in the family but there was no acknowledgment, no response, no promise, no nothing. Enough to fill the mind with unbearable ennui; frustration should have been just around the corner!

Under the circumstances it is remarkable that he prayed at all; that he continued to repose his faith in the God of Israel. In fact it is amazing that he was able to rise above the negatives in his life and maintain such a close relationship with God, that without a moment of hesitation or reservation, he starts talking to the Lord like he was talking to a friend. As though God had always been sympathetic, kind and responsive!

What is our experience with prayer? Largely useless? Hopelessly one sided? Barring the venting of our feelings, a complete waste of time?

Don’t give up.

If you are looking for an example of unshakeable faith and abiding trust, Manoah is your man.

Ah, but we are digressing. Let’s get back to the story. The problem was real and specific. Midway into her sprint, Mrs.Manoah realized that she didn’t get the name of the person who brought the momentous news! But as we observed, Mr.Manoah didn’t waste time finding fault with her. He turns to the Lord instead and intreats. His prayer was conversational and yet reverential.

It is interesting to note the content of his prayer. He wasn’t looking for verification or confirmation of the message. There was no element of “really?” or “is it true?” in his talk with the Lord (for talk it was, more or less). He wasn’t accusing his wife of hallucination! He wasn’t questioning her credibility. He didn’t doubt her sanity.

He trusted his wife.

Wow! What admirable understanding between husband and wife! She comes and confesses that she omitted to gather a vital piece of information concerning a very important message and he doesn’t bat an eyelid! He doesn’t pounce on this tactless admission by the weaker sex to assert the superiority of the male of the species. What a beautiful picture of a loving, united, communicating, lapse overlooking, God fearing, sharing, caring, praying family undergirded by mutual respect!

Would this be a description of your family as well?

The baton in his hands, Manoah was not going to rerun the race; he was all set to move forward to the next step, seeking guidelines as to how to bring up the boy who is to be born. He did the rational, measured,logical,manly,management thing!

He sought directions from the Lord

And the Lord didn’t disappoint him. He sends his angel a second time but curiously only to his wife again. Let’s not miss the nuance here. Manoah clearly prays for the man of God to come back to “us” again (indeed he eschews the I word throughout this narrative, in favour of the “we”s and “us”s – another great lesson there in family unity!). The Bible says “God answered Manoah’s prayer, and the angel of God appeared once again to his wife as she was sitting in the field. But her husband, Manoah, was not with her” (Judges 13:9,NLT).

What she was doing, sitting alone in the field, I don’t know. Though her husband Manoah was not with her, subsequent events show that she was not far removed from her. Let’s just say that she was minding her business and he, his! Each was confident in his or her individual pursuit, but the two were available to each other – on call!

Obviously the Lord regards the husband and wife as one unit! Physically they were separated at that point of time but in their mind and expectations they were united, and that is the way God regards them.

So Mrs.Manoah runs (Judges 13:10, NLT) again to her husband across fields.

Several further conclusions can be drawn from this:

– Though it was Manoah who made the prayer, it appears Mrs.Manoah was fully in the know. It won’t do to refer to her as just being in the ‘loop’; she was in the main line and knew the intent and content of that prayer. And like her husband, she was fully ‘expecting’ an answer! Therefore she had an implicit understanding what the answer was about.

– And she was alive to the fact that child rearing is not an independent activity to be left wholesale to the mother while the father busies himself with work ! Her husband had a definite role to play.

– She was apprehensive that she might goof up again and wanted her husband’s wise head in attendance when the angel came calling again.

– She must have been pretty athletic to do this repeatedly! (This is the second time she is running in a space of 5 verses: NLT)

It is interesting to see what happens next.

Now Manoah is running as well, together with his wife (Judges 13:11, NLT)! He was no slouch either and could match his wife step for step.

What a family! Emotionally knit, spiritually alert and physically fit! Well, the next time you plan to arrange a ‘Family Seminar on Holistic Health’ you know whom to invite as resource persons!

So Manoah arrives at the scene and gathers all the pertinent information on how to bring up the boy who is to be born; and finally he gently pops the one question that was uppermost in his mind all along:” “What is your name?” only to get stumped by the answer that it is “It is beyond understanding”(Judges 13:18,NIV).

Then

He offered a sacrifice to the Lord.

When the man of God ascended miraculously in the fire of the sacrificial offering, Mr.Manoah was not only shaken but was stirred. Why, he was not only stirred but he pretty nearly swooned! Together with his wife, he fell flat on the ground and all he could do was to whisper “We will certainly die, for we have seen God!” (Judges 13:22,NLT)

And what about Mrs.Manoah – the excitable, highly strung, temperamental creature – who generally tends to get carried away at such sightings? She was as cool as a cucumber! It was her turn to have her wits about her. She declares most rationally that “If the LORD were going to kill us, he wouldn’t have accepted our burnt offering and grain offering. He wouldn’t have appeared to us and told us this wonderful thing and done these miracles” (Judges 13:23,NLT) So the roles kind of reverse. Even stevens!

Into this calm, peaceful, balanced, pastoral setting enters Samson – the promised son – and he kind of turns the Manoah household upside down. That is what children can do to a family – disturb the order!

The Spirit of the Lord would descend on Samson every now and then and he would do exploits. He was anything but stable, serene, phlegmatic; on the contrary, he was capricious by nature and he was largely guided by his senses. He went by what he saw.

For example, a girl in Timnah caught his eye. And straightway he makes up his mind to marry her. Pretty fast –eh? Never mind the fact that Timnah is a Philistine town and the Philistines were at that point in history were lording it over the Israelites and were tormenting them. Yeah, never mind that she belonged to the enemy camp; his course was ‘see’-‘like’-‘marry’. Things like ‘think’-‘pray’-‘decide’ were not in the equation. She looked ‘good’ and that was that; he was adamant about marrying her!

He only seemed concerned about his likes and wants and was grossly insensitive to the political situation. This was a guy who was strong in body but somewhat soft when it came to powers of thinking. He had a definite weakness for the fairer sex. He could fall in love at the drop of a hat!

The Manoahs’ reaction to this ticklish issue is instructive to all parents in like situation. Sure, they weren’t greatly thrilled about the fact their son was hell bent on marrying a girl from the wrong side of the fence. They protested, they remonstrated, they reasoned, they pleaded! But when they saw that their son’s heart was made up

They just yielded.Not only did they yield they went so far as to make arrangements for the wedding (Judges 14:10,NLT)

No doubt they prayed, but rather that make it an issue of prestige, pride and racial prejudice, they went along for the sake of their son’s happiness and surrendered their views at the altar of God’s sovereignty.

They submitted!

(Of course it can be argued that God ordained the whole matter this way, in order to full fill His larger purposes; and indeed there are verses to support that. “His father and mother didn’t realize the Lord was at work in this”(Judges 14:4,NLT). But isn’t the Lord always at work? Predestination is an extremely complex subject and is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say here that if we begin to ‘blame’ everything on that, man pretty much becomes a puppet with no responsibility at all and nothing to learn!)

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Basically there are two kinds of people in the world: naggers or nags and naggees or the nagged. Women have a great reputation as being particularly gifted in the art of nagging and so it is no surprise that they form the majority in the nagger category. And our girl from Timnah was right up there, in the top echelons!

At the wedding celebration “she cried whenever she was with him” seeking the answer to the esoteric riddle Samson threw at the bridal party. Now nagging may offer tremendous satisfaction to the nagger but only as long as it can be kept up. It is not a great way to get what you want, and whatever benefits that accrue (to the nag) mostly lie in the ‘process’ than in the result, which invariably spells misery for both sides. This instance is no exception and it tragically ends in Samson losing his bride (to his best man!) and the bride later losing her life. There must be some alternatives to nagging that are not so drastic in their outcome, but alas some women never learn!

One may ask why Samson – in the first place – should throw such esoteric riddles at a bunch of party makers. I guess he was merely looking for an opportunity to dramatically declare his killing of the lion he encountered on the way to Timnah. Samson was like that. Not only was he capricious, he was proud, arrogant and somewhat vain.

We have already made the point that Samson had a strong body but a week heart. As a judge, he proved to be most injudicious in some of his actions, letting brawn rule over his brain. His lack of tact showed itself in many ways and he invited trouble from the Philistines time and again by his insane activities (Judges 15:3-4).

And he boasted (Judges 15:17, NLT), saying I’ve done this and I’ve done that. God had to bring him down to earth with a thud and strike him with a severe thirst before he cried out in acknowledgment of God’s power.

This temptation to seek glory for ourselves when God is working mighty things though us is quite real. We forget that we are but His agents, His representatives. To claim that I can perform miracles or work wonders is to abrogate His authority and mislead the public (we may recall that that great leader Moses himself failed on this score Numbers 20:10). Here Samson was merrily blowing his own trumpet and needed to be reminded that he was but a man.

Let us summarize what we’ve gathered about Samson:

– He had a weakness for women.

– He was selfish and put his interest above that of all others

– He insisted on having his own way.

– He was a loud mouth, a bully, a beast.

– As a judge, he was most injudicious. He was always hatching diabolical schemes to irritate the Philistines

– He wasn’t above boasting

Yet, he was a Nazarite!

It appears that Samson, the improbable Nazarite was gleefully indulging in every other sin. Now that should speak to the legalistic among us. We are particular about not doing certain things, not eating a particular kind of food or drinking certain beverages. We could be sticklers for this and sticklers for that. We take pride in our principled adherence to certain norms but in most everything else we are pretty loose about our beliefs and actions. We make a fetish of something and get all edgy if we detect a danger to what we hold as dear, but we are not so concerned about other equally important aspects. We behave as though our snow-white status in some pet issues somehow grants us license to indulge in other questionable activities and insulates us from culpability! That somehow this one position outbalances everything else that it not so right, and averages out.

Or it could be a denomination. We belong to such and such a movement and that is the be all and end all. Once you’ve joined it, you carry a special identity and have made it for this life and the next! It is as though your real time behavior in a fallen world is somehow beyond close scrutiny or critical examination.

Samson was guilty of something like that but in all likelihood he never even thought about these ‘weightier’ matters as he hustled and bustled through life, given his limited cogitative endowments.

No razor on the head, no wine – but no bar on whom he would marry. No qualms about where he would spend the night (Judges 16:1)!

Could it be that we too are guilty of similar dichotomy and imbalance in our Christian life? Isn’t this the problem Jesus addressed when he declared

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices–mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law–justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former”? (Matthew 23:23, NIV)

But let’s not be in a hurry to condemn Samson. Even though he was not quite what you might call a well rounded man of God, man of God he certainly was and despite his multifarious failings God was definitely using him; he was an instrument in God’s hands.

I guess that means we need not wait until we attain perfection in order to be used by God, for that will never happen in this world! If there is one thing we can learn from Samson’s life, it is that we should be available to him and allow ourselves to be used by God.

Yes, Samson may not make the cut as the model you want to emulate, but there is no disregarding the fact that he was zealous about his calling as a Nazarite, that he was conscious of the special gifts God had blessed him with and that he was mindful about his responsibility in protecting God’s people!

(Again you might argue that all His shortcomings were planted by God, in order to wreak vengeance on the Philistines, but then we’d be swinging to the other side and acquit him altogether)

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About time we turned our attention to Delilah!

We have already noted Samson’s weakness for women. He is now restless since it’s been a while since he had one. Lo and behold all of a sudden Delilah appears on the scene. How it happened is not clearly explained but it is easy to deduce from the narrative that the enemy planted her.

The devil is never short of devices to entice us in our moments of weakness, as he demonstrated most spectacularly in the life our Lord himself in the narrative following His fast in the wilderness!

You don’t have to go to great lengths in search of temptation. The devil saves you a whole lot of trouble and presents it to you on a platter. (The problem is that some times in our pseudo spiritualism we don’t like to acknowledge the devil’s role and would rather give God the credit for ‘meeting our need’!)

The image of the devil as an unsightly creature with a conical face, stand-out ears, a wicked smile and horrible horns is par for children in Sunday school – in order to get them to develop a healthy distaste for the evil one. But by the time we move through adolescence, the picture changes radically with Satan somehow acquiring an acceptable profile, if not altogether a desirable one!

One of the amazing qualities of the devil is his ability to change his appearance to suit the occasion and adopt whatever demeanor that best fits his plan. He can take many forms across the entire gamut – right from a slithering serpent to a shining angel (2 Corinthians 11:14).It can be safely assumed that Delilah, as a composite embodiment of the very essence of the evil one – both in his devilry and bewitching beauty – was a very attractive woman. The enemy was fully aware of the criteria that determined Samson’s choice of women in the past and he was happy to cater to his exquisite taste in physical appearance. Beware; the devil is well acquainted with your search history!

So like the idiot described in Proverbs 27:12 Samson finds himself in the valley of Sorek, completely overlooking the fact that “Her house is a highway to the grave, leading down to the chambers of death.(Prov.7:27, NIV). The first step in resisting the devil must be that you recognize the devil. Satan made that impossible by blinding Samson’s eyes (2 Cor.4:4) to the truth so that he willingly embraced falsehood. Far from resisting the devil (James 4:7), Samson was lying on its very lap. Ephesians 6:11 says “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil”(ESV).Forget the armour, Samson had no clothes at all; he was practically naked!

While the Bible tells us that Samson fell for Delilah lock (pun intended!), stock and barrel, it says nothing about his love being reciprocated. So the question arises:

Did Delilah love Samson? You might as well ask “does Satan love you”? “The thief”, the Bible says,” comes only to steal and kill and destroy”(John10:10). And what was Delilah set out to steal here? Samson’s relationship with God, his sense of identity with Him. Delilah, the devil’s own daughter, emerges as a cool, calculating femme fatale who loses no time in putting a price on his affections. Notice how relentlessly she goes after Samson’s secret source of strength that arises from a covenant relationship. Delilah’s intentions were clear right from the beginning, but Samson was blissfully ignorant. Samson became spiritually blind, before the enemy gouged out his physical eyes.

It is pertinent to ask the question where we spend our time. Do we find ourselves often getting swayed by the attractions the devil has to offer or do we find succor and solace at the feet of God? It is a choice. The former gives pleasure but it enervates you and leaves you a spent force. The latter gives joy; it energizes you and revitalizes you.

Thank God Samson’s story doesn’t end in unmitigated hopelessness. Though he suffered terrible consequences for his folly, God didn’t abandon him (Psalms.16:10). “The Lord knows those who are his” (2 Timothy 2:19).Down in the dungeons of Gaza, while he was grinding grain, the grace of God reached out to him with a second chance; his hair grew, his relationship with God was restored; the covenant between them was renewed.

The enemy may think he’s finished you off. But God wasn’t finished with Samson yet. When the denouement came and Samson looked up to his God one last time, God did not forsake him. The house fell down and 3000 Philistine men and women (no doubt Delilah among them) who only moments ago were praising their god Dagon, lay dead. The name of God was glorified!

Victorious in his death, Samson finds a place in the Faith Hall of Fame erected in the book of Hebrews.His body perished,true, but his soul is eternally secure.

How about yours?