Samson’s War (Part A)

Maybe you're wondering in the process of this devastating effect on their economy is what happened to the foxes? Did they get their jackals? Did they burn up? Well, the cord that would attach to the flaming part would likely burn up before it reached to their tails and then they'd eventually be free. Why not just send one at a time?

Well, because they would have just ran off to their den somewhere and then that would have been the end of it. But to have them together, yoked together like this, was actually pretty smart. It's like he tried this before. And now here's Pastor Rick with his message called Samson's War, as he teaches in Judges Chapter 15. The Word becomes secondary. Prayer becomes primary.

The Word becomes secondary. That flips everything upside down. But that's how his life was, upside down. It's so perplexing.

Well, not really. On the one hand, you understand it very easily because he's so selfish. He's so self-centered.

It's all about him. On the other hand, of course, he's got all of the evidences of God in his life and shows no appreciation for it. The Bible is a book of men and women with all their faults. And it doesn't give them to us always as model sinners saved by grace.

Nice little boys and nice little girls. It is filled with those who make great blunders, with imperfections, just like ourselves. That's why we can identify with them. That's why we're eager to receive lessons from the Scriptures, because we can. And as I look at the life of Samson, I wouldn't protest his presence at the Lord's table in heaven.

I don't think he'd protest any of ours either. I do not want to be the elder brother of the prodigal. You see, with the elder brother, the prodigal brother didn't meet his standard. Why does he get? Simply because he turns to you, turns back to you, Dad, simply because he repents, he's restored, and he is celebrated?

Yeah, that's exactly why. I don't want to be like that, looking at the lives of these characters in Scripture who ultimately are listed amongst the heroes of faith. In verse 1, after a while in the time of wheat harvest, it happened that Samson visited his wife with a young goat. And he said, let me go and to my wife into her room, but her father would not permit him to go in.

Just reading this, it sounds a little comical. It says it happened that Samson visited his wife with a young goat, like the two of them were going to visit. The goat was going to be a meal. After a while, in the time of wheat harvest, now if you remember in the last chapter, Samson had the marriage ceremony with the Philistine guest, but the Philistines had gotten to his wife and under duress, or I'll put it this way, they threatened her. If she didn't tell the secret of his riddle, they'd burn her house down with her father and her in it, and all the rest of the family. And so she, of course, tried to get the answer to the riddle that Samson gave at the festival, and she did get the answer, and she told them, and Samson figured it out, and he was so angry. He went on a killing spree, and then he stomped off home without consummating the marriage. Well, some time has passed, probably once to a year even.

We don't know for sure. And now he wants to go and consummate the marriage with his wife, to consummate the betrothal. It is the time of wheat harvest. It means it's May or early June.

The different elevations in Israel bring in the crops at a different rate of speed. It's Pentecost season, a feast of weeks where the Jews would celebrate the wheat harvest. It happened that Samson, it says here, visited his wife with a young goat.

This was a peace token. He couldn't find a bouquet and box of chocolate, so he'd bring a goat. And perhaps he learned since that she had to get the answer to the riddle to save her father's house. Throughout the life of Samson, we can tell he has no care. He holds the Philistine men in contempt, but he is attracted to the Philistine women, and that brought all these problems in his life. Why didn't he stay in his territory and do war with the Philistines instead of trying to mix the two together?

And it shows up in his ministry as a judge of Israel. But likely he did learn, and now he's coming back to resolve the matter and the matter of loyalty. You would hope that he gets to the bottom of that with her.

I know I heard. Or is he just lonely? It does appear that none of the Jewish women had any interest in him. They never show up in the story, except his mom.

Pretty bad when your mom's the only female that likes you. Anyway, and he said, let me go into my wife, into her room. Of course, in his head, she belonged to him, and he wasn't alone.

It was law. Even the Philistines believed that. But her father would not permit him to go in. That's an awkward moment, and being that it's Samson, it's a very dangerous, volatile moment.

You never know with this guy in the Philistines. Verse 2, her father said, I really thought you thoroughly hated her, therefore I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Please take her instead. Well, her father really thought this. A note would have been nice.

You know, postcard, hey Samson, are you coming back? Hated? He says, I thought you hated her. Yeah, because she betrayed me. Well, you know, and we probably figured that out by now. But legally, he's married.

The patrol was in force. It's typical of Samson that she should just wait indefinitely for him to get over his temper tantrum and come back, though, so he's not blameless in all of this, how he handles it, but still, this is his wife. Is not her younger sister better than she? Please take her instead. What kind of parent is this? I'm of course like Laban, you know, but is that any way for a parent to speak of a child?

Well, you know, she's kind of ugly anyway, and the other one's better. This was crazy to do this to a child, to pit one against the other or show one as being above the other. What a recipe for ruin and pain and suffering, so unnecessary, but these were immoral people. No one would like to be treated this way.

Why would you treat another that way? These are the questions that the New Testament starts holding us accountable to, getting to the bottom of, and not letting us wiggle away from, and they were commanded to be evicted from the land, which the Jews did not do. Joshua and Caleb's generation, you know, they subdued the land, and they left it to the future generations. They said, now we've laid this foundation, go finish the job. Well, they did not finish the job, and they are reaping the consequences.

We'll return to that, but beginning the work in earnest was not enough. Verse 3, as a nation, getting rid of the Philistines and the other Canaanites. And Samson said to them, verse 3, this time I should be blameless regarding the Philistines if I harm them. Well, this is a threat, and he justifies his possible destructive actions because, well, you cheated me. Now, I declare war on your nation.

Personal reasons, it's not, well, you know, God is, I'm just remembered. You know, I've been a little negligent. We've been commanded to get you people out of the land.

I think we need to ramp that up again. No, he does not do that. This is personal. You hurt my feelings, you've stolen my wife. You had no right to do that, so I'm going to hurt you, and you won't be able to blame me.

What kind of, it's like a five-year-old. You can't blame me. What does blame have to do with it, and you're killing people. I mean, blame has something to do with it. Of course, he's guilty of it, but the way he is saying it is that I'm justified in doing you harm. Never mind that the people that he's intending to harm, as people go, did nothing wrong to him.

If anybody should have been punished, it would have been the father-in-law. He had no right to give his daughter away, and he took Samson's, you know, betrothal money, and then he gets another hit from the substitute husband. And when we get to verse 6, we'll see that everybody will say, you know, Samson did this because his wife was given away. So, Samson decides to take out his anger on the Philistines, and he does it in a very radical, very serious way, and it just brought nothing but bloodshed. He's going to literally burn up their fields and their groves, their vineyards. He's going to damage their economy severely, blaming them again for taking away his wife. But his motives, nothing to do with God. So unlike David, so unlike Caleb and Joshua, he's content to live with the Philistines so long as they don't cheat him. Once they cheat him, he's provoked, and he feels now that he can strike back. A petty person is what he is, and there are petty people like this. They just won't let it go if you've hurt their feelings in any way. New Testament, we find Paul dealing with this all, and suffer the loss, Paul says.

What is this? Taking Christian to court in front of the unbelievers, and airing all the laundry in front of everybody without shame? Come on, stop doing this. And so we have the precepts, the letters of the apostles and those under their authority. Samson was a spoiled rich kid. Now that does not mean all rich kids are spoiled. I've met a good amount of them, and they're not all spoiled.

Some of them are very noble, and you can find spoiled poor kids, which is kind of worse because you can't borrow anything from them. So this David, King David, to hold the motives next to each other when he faced Goliath, then David said to the Philistine, you come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin. That's a lot of gear to take out a shepherd boy. Isn't that a little overkill there, Goliath? Says David to Goliath, but I come to you in the name of Yahweh of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.

You've got to love it. God was center for everything David did. Even when he was sinning, he knew it was wrong, and it was just way wrong, but God was always in David's thoughts. Samson, you just can't make that case for him. How would you like to be his lawyer getting him into heaven? Well, he is a believer, and the evidence is Hebrews 11. That would be probably all you've got. Well, now we're not reading the whole life of Samson.

We're just getting the highlights, and they're brutal, not in his favor. Verse 4, Then Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and he took torches, turned the foxes tail to tail, and put a torch between each pair of their tails. Well, so of course, how much time does it, now these are jackals, not likely foxes at all. We'll get back to that in a moment, but he's thought this out. He's been stewing and brewing.

How much time does it take to set bait and traps and empty them and keep them alive till you get up to your 300 quota? I mean, in his head he is like, boy, wait till they get a dose of this. He is steaming. The scorn that's burning in his heart. The torches have no heat next to his heart, the scorn that's in there. Samson's war, and it will cause the Philistines to understand that Samson is the bringer of death. When he shows up, Philistines will die. It's a nice point in the story, though, that there are no recorded Jewish deaths under the judgeship of Samson.

Doesn't mean they did not occur, but they're not mentioned, and that is significant to his judgeship. But the passion to get even, it seemed to come so easily to Samson. It's just no problem, with no second thought. No, now you're going to pay. It's like the guy you just do not want to wrong.

You give him 90 cent to change for a dollar and you give him, accidentally you leave out a dime? He's going to come kill everybody? Well, these animals, in the Hebrew, the fox and the jackal have the same name, and how you distinguish them, I guess, is from the context, and here's a good lesson on scriptural context, because foxes, they're not abundant in that region, not as jackals were, and so that is, of course, one of the answers, foxes being solitary animals. I mean, it'd be a lot more work to get foxes than to get jackals that travel in packs, and again, large numbers of them were in the land, so it just makes perfect sense, and he has to get 300 of them to get his 150 pair of jackals to turn loose on the fields and groves. Now, where did he get the number 300?

It'd be nice if I knew the answer. You would be very impressed with that Bible teaching. Boy, he knew that one. I don't know how, he probably, I don't know, drew straws or something, but anyway, he felt 300 was what the job called for.

You could imagine him outbidding the job. Now, let's see, I've got how many acres here? That would be 300 jackals.

This is kind of funny if you look at it that way, but there was nothing funny about it at the time. This is going to be agricultural arson. Verse 5, When he set the torches on fire, he let the foxes go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up both shocks and standing grain, as well as the vineyards and olive groves. So, maybe you're wondering, in the process of this devastating effect on their economy, is what happened to the foxes? Did they get their jackals?

Did they burn up? Well, the cord that would attach to the flaming part would likely burn up before it reached to their tails, and then they'd eventually be free. Why not just send one at a time? Well, because they would have just ran off to their den somewhere, and then that would have been the end of it, but to have them together, yoked together like this, was actually pretty smart. It's like he tried this before. It's like, you see him first, if I do any harm to you, it's your fault, and he tries with one jackal, and the jackal goes the wrong way. Back to the drawing board. And when he's doing two, he's probably saying to himself, Samson, you're a genius. Super genius.

A little wild E. Coyote in this Coyote Man. Anyway, the killing fields are going to begin now. This is, again, this would be, you know, stealing all, breaking all, it breaks their economy, or does major damage to it, targeting their food supply, the wheat, the grapes, the olives, and the olives had multiple, you know, they were a multipurpose product.

I mean, not only did you eat the olives and make all sorts of nice dishes with them, but you used the oil for lamps and for lotion and heating, well, lamps, and you just had a lot of purposes. The shocks here are the piles of sheaves that were cut and stood on edge and ready for them to just come pick up and start working, preparing, and yet he burns them up, so this really got them. What was he expecting them to do? I think he's provoking them.

He knows, I'm going to pick a fight. I'm going to declare war on them. Verse 6, then the Philistines said, Who has done this? And they answered, Samson, son-in-law of Timmonite, because he has taken his wife and given her to his companion. So the Philistines came up and burned her and her father with fire. Well, again, they weren't going to stand around doing nothing while their food and fortunes went up in flames, and we can hear them say, Who brought this on us? Oh, that, you know, Timmonite, he brought this Hebrew into the mix.

He's the problem, and that's why they go to him. This reminds us of Genesis 39 with Potiphar, the master of Joseph, his wife, who Joseph refused when she squeals on him, which is a frame-up. She said to the others, See, he has brought into us a Hebrew to mock us. And so she brings out, he's, you know, a Jew. She gets racist with the whole thing.

Well, you can bet some of that was going on there. Who brought this Hebrew into town to do this? And they go to the house of Samson's wife's father. And, of course, what they do is not only unjust, it is inhumane. It is cruel. Their deaths were painful and senseless.

It was just horrible. In the long run, she tried to save her house from being burned by these people, and it gets burned down anyway. Her betrayal of Samson did not bring her safety.

It cost her and her family their lives. And so as we look at that, we say, Well, you know, these are the people that Samson is dealing with. We know that, and he is beginning to deliver his people. This would have gotten worse in time had God not raised up deliverers. In verse 7, it says, Samson said to them, Since you would do a thing like this, I will surely take revenge on you, and after that I will cease. Well, the cycle of evil has started, and he thinks that he's going to end it. But it's not going to end this horrible cycle that he has put into motion. Incidentally, again in verse 6, it says, Because he has taken his wife, and that's the point I wanted to make earlier.

Everybody understood that this was indeed his wife, and the man, the father, had no right to give her away. But that does not justify Samson's other behaviors, and how quickly the flesh wants to justify its wrongs. Verse 7, where it says, Who would do such an inhumane thing like this? He's religiously adolescent, Samson is. He doesn't grow up, at least not in this chapter.

Maybe by the end of the chapter there's a hint that he improves some. But it's naive of him to think that he can just dictate the terms. I'm going to punish you for what you did, and then we'll be even.

And they're going to say, Okay, that's just very foolish. Verse 8, And he attacked them hip and thigh with a great slaughter. Then he went down and dwelt in the cleft of the rock of Etam. So he goes and slaughters a bunch of them.

We're not told how many. And then he goes home. This is what he does.

He's somewhat of a bully. The causes of the Lord are not his causes. It's Samson's image, or whatever is hard, or whatever. And so where it says he attacks them hip and thigh, in other words, he wasn't fooling around. And by telling us it was a great slaughter, we know that this was severe. We don't even know if he used a weapon. Or if he just, you know, one punch kind of death blow on anybody that was hit by him or even grazed. So the Hebrew for the phrase hip and thigh is he struck them thigh upon loin.

So just with much strength. Verse 9, And now the Philistines went up and camped in Judah and deployed themselves against Lehi. That's not a high school, incidentally. Reckless Samson, a personal feud again. It's escalating and now it's going to be an inter-nation or international, we would say. It's an inter-nation emergency. It's an emergency on the Philistine side.

They have to respond to this. It's an emergency on the Israel side because the Philistines, they have the weapons and the armies and they can come and do a lot of damage. And so the tribal leaders are very much on the Jewish side concerned about this. Verse 10, And the men of Judah said, Why have you come up against us? So they answered, We have come to arrest Samson, to do to him as he has done to us. Now what's left out are the details, of course, and we're kind of glad about that because the Bible, the historians are notorious for repeating the whole story again. But, you know, he burned up our produce and he's killed people and we've come to get them.

Who can blame them? God warned the Jews that if you do not drive these people out, they're going to be a problem. Numbers 33, verse 55. And how many times does he have to say it?

Just once. If you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then it shall be that those whom you let remain shall be irritants in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land where you dwell. And this is being fulfilled, not only here, but it is being fulfilled here. Verse 11, Then three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Edom and said to Samson, Do you not know that the Philistines rule over us? What is this you have done to us? And he said to them, As they did to me, so I have done to them.

What a little baby. It's tit for tat there. They started it!

And he's, you know, he's a grown man. Well, this is only one time, the only time under Samson's judgeship that we read of the Jews mustering an army, putting an army on the field. That's kind of sad. And it's not against the Philistines. It's against Samson. They get, you know what, he's a problem. And we better send one, two, three thousand. Three thousand men should do. By the time he's finished killing two thousand five hundred, he'll be exhausted.

And the other five thousand, five hundred can just throw a net over him. I don't know if that would think, they had to be thinking that way. When they saw the Philistines show up with a thousand men, they said, mmm, that's not going to work.

All right. So, you know, you have to ask the question, if they mustered an army like this, this quickly, three thousand men, was it that Samson was just too difficult to work with to bother mustering an army, to get in back of him? Were his leadership skills so awful that no one would follow him? Well, you get that impression.

You get the impression, I work alone kind of a thing, but also that good, because we can't work with you. And that would be a tragedy. Or was it that the people were so incompetent and spineless and so given into being, you know, ruled over by the Philistines that Samson said, I can't work with these people. I'd rather not have them on my side, than have them, I could do better without them. Either way, for both, for all of Israel, it's a lost opportunity to have this advantage. The Philistines knew how to use Goliath. Well, it didn't work in the end.

But they had Samson. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio for this study in the book of Judges. Cross Reference Radio is the teaching ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel in Mechanicsville, Virginia. If you'd like more information about this ministry, we invite you to visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. You'll find additional teachings from Pastor Rick available there, and we encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. By doing so, you'll be notified of each new edition of Cross Reference Radio. You can search for Cross Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app, or just follow the links at crossreferenceradio.com. That's all the time we have for today. Join us next time to continue learning more from the book of Judges, right here on Cross Reference Radio.