Revival Mills
Revival Mills
Judges 16:21-22
And the Philistines seized him and gouged out his eyes and brought him down to Gaza and bound him with bronze shackles. And he ground at the mill in the prison. But the hair of his head began to grow again after it had been shaved.
Despite the shadowy, bleak veil of blindness that Samson now finds himself immersed in, I’d venture to guess he’s seeing things more clearly than ever before.
Don’t be blind to this image, friend—sit with it till it sinks deep into your conscience. Picture the stately, Samurai-like, long-haired Nazirite herculean leader, the man who tore a lion to shreds and caught 300 foxes and surged through 1,000 Philistines with an ox-goad and carried a city gate on his shoulders like a backpack and protected Israel for twenty years, now with head scalped and scarred, with ghoulish, empty sockets that once nestled fierce eyes, and with anemic arms grinding what little life they’ve got left at a clanking, wooden wheel. Oh, but hopefully now that Samson has lost the tools of his greatest compromises, now that he’s void of those sensory magnets that continually lusted after indecency, he’s listening. To the silence, to the devil’s laughter, to the voice of his conscience, to the wisdom of his parents from years before, to the Spirit of God. Because the truth of the matter is that he’s been grinding at the mill in the prison long before those Philistines gouged out his eyes and tossed him into this hellhole. This is just one instantiation of that mill. This is just a final consequence of the grind. And I’d like to think that here, at last, he discerns what all those lustful thoughts and secret affairs and rebellious choices added up to in God’s ears the whole time: just the infernal grinding of a prison mill.
Oh, but even scalped hair can grow again. Even blinded eyes can see with fresh light. Even a saint in the depths of retribution, at the bitter end of wasted potential, can rise again to new heights. Yes, and God’s mercy can transubstantiate this clanking sound into a hymn of praise, too! Even if Samson ekes out his last days here in the darkness of this cavern, these have the potential to be his purest days yet. Because the same wooden instrument that marks his spiritual demise can also mark his spiritual revival.