September 11 – Samson

September 11 – Samson
Judges 13:1-25

The next birth we read about is quite a few years down the road.

Israel had come into the Promised Land, but weren’t quite the people God wanted them to be.  By the time we get to the story of Samson, they’ve been through several leaders (judges) and many years.  The opening words of chapter thirteen don’t really tell a pretty story: “Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, so the Lord delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for forty years.” (Judges 13:1)

This story tells us just how far from God the Israelites had gotten.

The wife of a man named Manoah from the tribe of Dan was unable to have children.  One day, the angel of the Lord showed up to promise her that she was going to have a son.  However, she needed to ensure that during the pregnancy she drank no wine or ate anything unclean.  When her son was born, she was to ensure that his hair was never cut and he would be a Nazirite, a man set apart to God from birth.  It would be her son who would begin to deliver Israel from the Philistines (Judges 13:2-5).

She didn’t quite know what to do with that information, so she found her husband and told him the story.  Manoah was smart enough to pray about it and asked that the Lord send the same person back to help them learn how to raise this boy.  The angel showed up another day while Manoah’s wife was in the field.  Of course Manoah wasn’t around, so she took off in order to find him and bring him back to the stranger.  He offered to make dinner for the stranger, who told Manoah to prepare a burnt offering to the Lord.  Manoah and his wife still didn’t understand that they were talking to an angel of the Lord God.

When Manoah sacrificed the goat, the Bible says, “The Lord did an amazing thing.” At that point, the angel ascended in the flame toward heaven (Judges 13:19-20).  That scared Manoah and his wife as the realized who it was they’d been speaking with.  Manoah was certain they were about to die, but his wife was a bit more pragmatic. She recognized that he could have killed them at any point, but had accepted their offering and promised them a son.

She gave birth to a son, named him Samson, and as he grew the Lord blessed him.