Book End
Book End
Judges 16:28 & 30b
Then Samson called to the LORD and said, “O Lord GOD, please remember me and please strengthen me only this once, O God, that I may be avenged on the Philistines for my two eyes.” … Then he bowed with all his strength, and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people who were in it. So the dead whom he killed at his death were more than those whom he had killed during his life.
It seems fitting that Samson ends his ministry in exactly the same manner he started it—by avenging his honor against Philistine backstabbers—yet, underneath the wreckage of this crumbled Philistine estate, I hear a deep and profound sigh for all that Samson could’ve been. There’s no doubt in my mind that had he determined—like Moses and Joshua and Caleb of old—to live and serve and fight for the glory of God rather than for personal grievance, his spiritual exploits would’ve outmatched his physical ones. But Samson’s life is like a song that has a minor chord strumming under all the major lifts. Even though the final note is a high one, it lingers with the dissonance of all the compromises that led to it.
Friend, I mentioned at the outset of Samson’s life how the Angel of the LORD visited his parents with the most superlative of all messages, the very message that always precedes a seismic generational shift in history, the same message that coronated Abraham’s birth and John the Baptizer’s birth and our Lord’s birth, and Samson marks the end of an era. He’s Israel’s last judge, and his brief biography is a bookend to a unique period of divine revelation not marked by patriarchs or monarchs, but by an unusual cast of stewards commissioned to stand as donkeys amidst God’s precious flock.
The honest truth is that I’m at a loss for how to properly eulogize Samson, except to say this: that he strikes me as a monument to the entire era. We hear in his brief tale not merely a biography of battles and liaisons but a dirge of these peculiar days where men did what was right in their own eyes. Days as dichotomous as Samson himself: with great strength and great weakness, great revival and great idolatry, great progression and great regression; ah, but all lined in the palm of God’s good hand.