Samson: A Marriage Doomed To Fail – Part 2 of 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Many wonder why God seems to bless those who live in disobedience to His will. Such a man was Samson.

He married a woman he never should have chosen. Yet God empowered him to do mighty deeds. Today, distinguishing between God's use of a man and His approval of what that man does. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, your series is We've Been Down This Road Before. Today we witness the contrast between a failed life and God's use of a man anyway.

Well, Dave, if that sounds ambiguous, it is because it is ambiguous. On the one hand, you have Samson with all of his moral failures. On the other hand, God uses him mightily at the end of his life.

And as I've emphasized before, he ends up being listed in Hebrews chapter 11 as a hero of faith, all because of God's undeserved grace. Well, today is the last day of our matching challenge. And any gift that you give will be doubled. Now I want to explain that this is actually the end of our fiscal year. Would you help us end strong? Here's what you can do. I'm going to be giving you this contact info.

Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. We believe that God is leading many of you to help us. And as I've emphasized before, Running to Win is heard now in 50 different countries in seven different languages. At the end of this message, I'm going to be giving you a testimony given by an Arabic listener.

One of the things that blesses me is that Running to Win is also heard in Arabic throughout the Middle East. But would you consider helping us? Here's what you do.

Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Any gift that you give will be doubled to the glory of God. Now let's listen carefully. He chose the wrong woman.

Let's hurry on. He also focused on the wrong things. He focused on the wrong things. Now the story is here in Judges 14 and I'm not going to read it all to you, but I'm just going to tell you about it. Samson loved riddles and you'll notice in verse 14 he said, let's make an agreement. That's the context in which he said, if you guess this riddle, I will give each of you. He had a 30 attendance. 30 young men were given to him among the Philistines as his attendance. And he said, I will give each of you a linen undergarment to wear and a set of outer garments to each of you 30. If you guessed this riddle, if you don't guess it, you have to give me 30 changes of Raymond. I don't know what Samson was going to do with all that. I guess he was going to talk his mom and dad into making a walk-in closet so they could hang all of them there and say, these are all of my clothes.

So that's the agreement. Now the riddle is this verse 14 out of the eater, something to eat out of the strong, something sweet. Well, these guys, of course they couldn't guess that. If you didn't know what happened previously, there'd be no way that you could really figure out what that is all about. And then suddenly they turn nasty. Have you ever had really nice people become really, really belligerent and begin to play hard ball. They go to the bride and they say to her on the fourth day, verse 15, they sit to Samson's wife, coax your husband into explaining the riddle to us, or we will burn you and your father's household to death. Did you invite us here to Rob us?

Wow. We don't see a whole lot of happiness right here at this point. So they go to her and they tell her you'd better find out the secret of the riddle. And so in verse 16, and this is so true to human nature, isn't it?

The wife has the ability to be able to manipulate and to get from the husband all that she wants. Here it is verse 16, Samson's wife threw herself on him sobbing. You hate me. You don't really love me. You've given me my people a riddle, but you haven't told me the answer.

Oh, that's a bad way to start a marriage. So Samson tells her and she tells the guys. And so Samson loses the battle. And what does he have to do?

He loses the riddle game. And so now he has to find 30 garments to keep his promise. And it says in verse 19, then the spirit of the Lord came upon him in power and he went down to Ashkelon and struck down 30 of their men, stripped them of their belongings and gave their clothes to those who had explained the riddle. I suppose if they were thinking they were going to get new clothes, they were mighty surprised.

These were in the used department. And so Samson gives them to them. Did he touch dead bodies to get these clothes off the Philistines?

Very probably again, violating the Nazarite bow. But by now Samson was living according to different rules. He thought that he'd be able to get by. He focused on the wrong things. He was focusing on riddles instead of his relationship. He was thinking about a good time instead of godliness.

I mean, this man was no more prepared for marriage than some people are today who walked down to the altar. Notice he went to the wrong place. He went for the wrong reason. He married the wrong woman. He focused on the wrong things and he has a wrong response when his marriage did not work out.

And it didn't work out. It says that he went home burning with anger. This is verse 19. And he went up to his father's house, verse 20, and Samson's wife was given to the friend who had attended him at his wedding.

She was married to his best man. Well, folks, what do you think of that? What does Samson say in this context? Does he say, you know, it is time for me to thoroughly deal with some issues in my life.

I've got some issues that I need to work through here because I was disobedient to God and this whole thing has just been an unmitigated disaster. No, that's not what he says. Chapter 15, he wants to get even with the Philistines because he goes back and discovers that the father of the bride had given his daughter to somebody else, namely his best man. And so he becomes angry. And the Bible says he catches 300 foxes and he ties their tails together and then he lights them and he sends them through the barley fields of the Philistines.

What kind of a game is that that he's playing? But this is Samson. You say, well, could that really be true?

Yeah, he might have caught them over a period of time. And you have to remember that Samson was superhuman in his strength. He was indeed. He was not the guy who took the Charles Atlas course and got double his money back like somebody I know.

I mean, this was the real deal. What I'd like us to do now is to bring this down to where we live and to help us to understand what's going on in the text and what's going on in our own lives. I'd like to give you three lessons. First of all, keep in mind this. It is possible to be used of the spirit.

Follow this carefully. It's possible to be used to the spirit and still not be controlled by the spirit. Let me ask you something. Given the vanity and the sinfulness of Samson's life, are you surprised that it says in verse six, the spirit of the Lord came upon him in power so that he tore the lion. And then it says again in verse 19, then the spirit of the Lord came upon him in power and he went down to Ashkelon and struck down 30 men. Are you surprised at the fact that Samson has the mighty power of God upon his life and yet he acts in such an immature, disobedient way?

Let's keep something in mind. You know, there's a verse of scripture I deliberately omitted a moment ago and some of you probably thought, you know what Pastor Luther does when he gets to a difficult verse, he skips it. Well, I'm sure that I've done that on occasion. When you get to a really difficult verse, you just pause and make a few comments and then go on on the other side. And that's verse four. You'll notice it says, but Samson said to his father, the last part of verse three, get her for me. She had four. She is the right one for me.

She looks good to me. Parenthesis. His parents did not know that this was from the Lord who was seeking an occasion to confront the Philistines for at that time they were ruling over Israel.

What is going on there in the text? Does that mean that God was approving of Samson's marriage? God was saying, yes, that's okay. Samson, go ahead. Be disobedient. Go to the Philistines. When clearly in the book of Deuteronomy, God says, thou shall not marry the Philistines. Thou shall not intermarry with the heathen nations around you. Israelites are supposed to marry Israelites and now God is approving the breaking of his own word.

I don't think so. What the parents didn't know is that God was going to override this foolish decision that was being made to use Samson to punish the Philistines who were having a great impact in Israel. But it does not approve or condone Samson's disobedience.

And that's so good to know. And I'm sure that there were times when the Holy Spirit of God came upon Samson. In fact, we're going to find that especially in his relationship to Delilah, where the Spirit of God comes upon him and he becomes the mighty man and he picks up the posts of the city and he carries them away and he can do whatever he like. And it seems as if God is always on his side.

God is always working for him despite his silliness. There's a lesson to be learned here when I speak about this distinction between having the Holy Spirit of God give you ability and being controlled by the Spirit. There's something that we must keep in mind that the blessing of God should not be confused with the approval of God.

Think that through. There are times when God may bless someone even though God does not approve of their actions. You would be surprised at some of the people whom God sometimes uses. By the way, have you ever noticed that God sometimes uses some people that we wouldn't use if we were God? Have you ever been surprised at whom God uses?

Big shock, of course, is that he uses any one of us. The simple fact is this, that the goodness of God is supposed to lead us to repentance. Sometimes the goodness of God leads us to presumption. And I think that's what happened in Samson's life. It seemed like no matter what he did, God was with him and gave him ability and strength. So what happened is he kept plunging headlong into stupidity and eventual sin with Delilah.

And instead of him being able to be in control of the Philistines, they were in control of him and they gouged out his eyes and they brought him into the prison. So let's not presume upon God. Don't ever think that because God keeps blessing you that he's approving of your disobedience.

He doesn't. It's possible to be used of the Spirit and still not be controlled by the Spirit. But God is after control, I can assure you. And in the end, your presumption will get the best of you.

I'm trying to say, don't toy with sin. That's the first lesson. There's a second lesson and that has to do with marriage, of course. When it comes to marriage and when it comes to our dating life and when it comes to our relationships, it is so important that we must follow not just the lead of our hearts, which are constantly deceiving us and our emotions and our hormones, but rather we must be willing to follow with our head and with wisdom and not just the way in which we feel the deceptions of the heart here at this point are innumerable.

Happens every day in America. There's a man who has a business and he's sitting there in the office and he notices a young woman who has just been hired and he finds her attractive and he watches her as she goes over to the water cooler for a drink. He happens to track her when she goes across the aisle and she is filing in the filing cabinet and when she walks by, he says a kind word. Day number three, she's bringing him coffee. Day number four, they're having a long talk. By day number five, they discover that they are soul mates. He's finally been able to find somebody with whom he can relate in a way that he's never been able to relate with his wife because absolutely he shouldn't have married her anyway and now he's finally found someone who's going to fulfill the desires of her heart. Like one man said to me, I've been living in a desert for 20 years.

I found an oasis. Now you're telling me to go back when what I have is so beautiful. What do you say to that? Do you tell him, no, it's not beautiful.

He'll never believe you. How do you know what's in his heart? How do you know how beautiful this relationship is? Always keep in mind that when it comes to Eve in the garden, she saw the fruit of the tree, that it was beautiful, that it was wise, that it was the kind of tree that would make her wise and as a tree to be desired and she saw its beauty, but even beautiful relationships, if condemned by God, must be avoided.

Do not allow your heart to deceive you on this point because the deceptions well out within us, all of the rationalizations of the heart, there is no point at which we are so willingly deceived as at the point of love and physical attraction. Jesus said this, he was talking about lust. He says, if thine eye offend thee, and all of us men know that our problem is our eyes. Women, we tell them that, but I'm not sure that they fully understand that. But if thine eye offend thee, look at Samson.

He saw the woman, get her for she pleaseth me, and he's never met her. Jesus said that if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee, for it is better for thee to arrive in heaven with one eye than to be in hell with two. You say, well, he wasn't speaking literally, was he? No, he wasn't speaking literally. Of course not, because it would be possible to gouge out your right eye and still lust with your left, for one thing. But what he was saying is literally true, isn't it? It would be better to arrive in heaven with one eye than to be in hell with two.

That is literally true. What Jesus is saying in the strongest possible language is that in these relationships, it is so important for us to do whatever needs to be done to put them to death, to put them to death. I remember talking to a man who was falling in love at work with a woman who was not his wife. I said, you know what you have to do? You're going to destroy your marriage and the whole bit. I said, you need to switch jobs.

You need to get out of there. And he said, I can't. He said, I have a wife and four children to support. Jesus said, and I said to him, I said, you know, leaving your job isn't quite as bad. I said, what would you rather have? I said, would you rather leave your job or have your eye gouged out? And he said, oh, he said, I'd rather leave my job.

And I said, well, then, you know, you've got it easy. Jesus said that we must be willing to take drastic action when it comes to marriage and attraction. Please keep in mind that we must not just follow our emotions and our chemistry, but we must follow our minds and we must ask God to put to death that which could erupt into a disastrous relationship. Samson did not learn that.

In fact, I don't think he ever did. 20 years later, he's seduced by Delilah. There's a third lesson. Many people are not helped because they refuse to be hurt.

Many people are not helped because they refuse to be hurt. Here, I'm simply drawing a lesson from Samson's experience. Why was it that Samson didn't come through this and say to himself, it's really time for me to get my act together and to confess my disobedience and my silliness. And it's time for me to grow up.

He didn't see that. You see, if we confess to a need, it means that we have to deal with that need. It is better for us to deny it. It is better for us to blame others rather than to take responsibility.

So we do not have to change. Others do be interesting, wouldn't it? If we could interview Samson, we'd say, Samson, can you tell us, please, whose fault was it that your marriage turned out so badly? Do you think he would say, well, it was mine, obviously, disobedience bad?

No, no, no, not Samson, not at this point in his life. What he would say is it's her fault. He'd say it's her father's fault. It's my mom and dad's fault because they were not 100% in favor of this marriage from the beginning. It's the 30 guys who found the secret of the riddle.

It is their fault. Look at what this got because there are some people who are incapable of seeing themselves as others see them, much less seeing themselves as God sees them. I have no doubt today that I'm speaking to many people who are in interpersonal relationships that are very excruciating and very difficult. I'm also of the opinion, however, that oftentimes it is because you and I absolutely refuse to see ourselves as others do in the way God does. We could say to Samson, Samson, you know, the scripture said in the book of Deuteronomy, you're not supposed to marry a woman from the Philistines.

What were you doing? And he'd say, well, you know, the Bible does say that, but God says it is because you're going to accept their gods. And there is no way I would have accepted the God of this woman. There's an exception for me. It doesn't apply to me.

It's an old, old story, isn't it? I have a friend who has on his desk a sign that says the truth sets you free, but it hurts you first. I guess I have to ask my own heart as I ask you today, what is there within us that we have harbored, the sins that we have allowed to accumulate and to grow? What is there within us that we are protecting that is hindering us for full exposure in God's presence to be able to pray with honesty?

Show me what you see when you look into my heart and grant me the grace to deal with whatever happens to come up on the radar screen. What is there within you and me that prevents us being that honest with God? That hurts, doesn't it? But the truth hurts, but lies hurt even more, and it is the truth that sets us free. Some of you have to begin at an earlier stage in your relationship with God. You have to accept the truth that you are a sinner, that there's nothing that you can do to save yourself, that your goodness will not cut it with God.

You must come to him in humility and accept the truth of Jesus Christ's death as the scripture says we have an advocate with the Father. If we place our trust in him, our sins can be forgiven. That for some of you is truth that's difficult to accept, but that's where it begins, and if you will not let the truth hurt you, you will not be helped and you will not be healed. So we come before God today yielding ourselves, giving ourselves, asking him to take over every centilica of who we are in his presence.

Let us learn negatively from Samson that if we avoid the truth, we will not be helped. Let's pray together. Our Father, we do thank you today that you have given us clear instruction in your word and that you do desire that we walk in light. We know that that's not easy, and we thank Father today of all of the interpersonal relationships. We ask today, God, that you shall pour grace into our souls. Help us to be open and truthful with ourselves, first of all, so that we might be truthful with others as well. Help us, Lord, in the decisions that we make to constantly seek you and not to be led astray by our deceitful, our deceitful hearts. In Jesus' name, amen.

My friend, could I just have a minute of your time? I'm holding in my hands a letter that comes to us from an Arabic-speaking listener, and interestingly, speaking about deceit. He says, I was struggling with the sin of lying. I contacted your ministry because I wanted to stop and I needed prayer, and although I was familiar with Christianity, I never truly understood the Bible and what it means to follow Jesus. When I heard the message of the gospel, I accepted Christ.

You, my friend, are a part of that testimony through your prayers and through your gifts. Well, today is Friday, and it's your last opportunity to take advantage of our matching challenge. Any gift that you give will be doubled. Help us to end our fiscal year strong. Would you help us? Would you consider praying about making a gift today to the ministry of running to win? Many of you already contribute. Perhaps you have never contributed before, but this is your great opportunity, and you know that the investment will be made for the cause of the gospel.

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It ends today, rtwoffer.com. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. Pastor Erwin Lutzer concluding A Marriage Doomed to Fail, the tenth of twelve messages taken from the book of Judges, all on the topic we've been down this road before. Next time we'll encounter Samson as a man with two hearts. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.