GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
JUDGES 16:22
22 But after Samson’s hair had been shaved off, it began to grow back again.
Shaved. Scraped. Shamed. But…
When we look into the law of God and we are honest with ourselves, we see nothing but failure, guilt, and death. We are liars and thieves. Drug-dealers and prostitutes are more honest than we are because they don’t pretend to be doing something else when they’re sinning. But we stand condemned before God Almighty himself. We are condemned because we inherit a sinful human nature. But we shouldn’t dream of thinking that our human nature stands as the biggest of God’s charges against us.
We, even we Christians, put other things above God. I don’t just mean our comfort zone and our pride and our attitude, but we put our opinions above God. And worse—this is where we should envy the scum we scrape out of our toilets, because that’s filth that can be removed, but our filth sticks to us and penetrates us and stares back at us in the mirror—so much worse, is that we put our sins themselves and our sinfulness above God, like a fool praising a cow pie over a rose. We are sinful snobs, reveling in our sins, denying that they’re sins at all, and we point our fingers back at God and we swear that it’s all his fault. We stand shoulder to shoulder with Adam chewing his apple and we say that God is responsible. And isn’t that just bizarre enough to be typical of all humans? We want our sins on the one hand not to be sins at all, but on the other hand, they’re God’s fault. We want it both ways, and that’s our corrupt human logic. We’re like a toddler with frosting all over our faces claiming we don‘t know what happened to the cake. That’s the fallen human mind grasping at straws in a burning haystack doused in gasoline.
God commands us not to have any other gods, so we knock wood and say we don’t. He commands us not to take his name in vain, and we swear up and down that we won’t. He commands us to remember the Sabbath Day, and we embrace our U.S. Constitution as we take our weekend mini vacations and swear that we will defend our rights to worship as we choose, even if it’s on a lake staring at a bobber, and say that we’re glorying in God’s holy creation, but the gospel has no place there at all.
We memorized Luther’s explanation to the Fourth Commandment: “…that we do not dishonor or anger our parents.” But why don’t we remember to apply that to our Supreme Judge? Shouldn’t we be terrified of dishonoring or angering Him? If we do, then we will finally look into the law of God and be honest with ourselves, and see nothing but failure, guilt, and death.
We will see that we have been captured by the devil, shackled by sin, blinded by our sinful human nature, shaved of all of our good deeds and former glory, and that we have become like dumb animals, plodding around in circles, doing nothing but an animal’s work for an animal’s pay, and deserving no better.
It is only here in our despair that we will be able to behold the miracle! For blinded, shaved, shackled Samson, treated like a brute, God’s providence worked as it always does, by the simplest of means, like a fragile blossom pushing its way through the sod on a spring day. Tiny strands of hope emerged on Samson’s shaved and shamed head, and just as everyone should have known it would, the greatly humiliated man’s hair began to grow back. Like the grace of God, it came without being earned or deserved, but it was there. It could be felt and seen and touched and proved, as God’s grace is there for us, in the wet curls of a baptized baby, in the swallowed elements of the sacrament, in the echoed words of the absolution, there it is in our hearts: the forgiveness of our sins.
God’s law crushes us and brings us down, but his gospel rescues us and brings us back. We are never so far gone that Christ cannot find us, embrace us, and forgive us. His love for you is infinite. Look to the blood of Jesus on the cross and see dripping there the end of your guilt. He didn’t only die because you and I are terrible sinners who put him there. If that were so, we would feel worse about our sins than our souls could stand. No, he died there to pay for our sins, to end the tyranny of our flesh and mistakes. And he rose from the dead as proof of what he had done; as the receipt for our paid debt and the ticket we keep in our pockets for passage to paradise. “Why are you downcast, O my soul?” Psalm 43:5 teaches us. “Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” Samson had woven his hair into seven braids, and they were gone. But God was causing and uncountable army of hairs to break forth as Samson’s crown, and they were increasing and increasing and growing and growing every single day.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: http://www.wlchapel.org/worship/daily-devotion/
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota