GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
JUDGES 15:10-13
10 So the men of Judah said, “Why have you come to attack us? ”
The Philistines replied, “We have come to tie Samson up and pay him back for what he did to us.”
The Philistines certainly missed the irony. They were used to the idea of allowing a single strong man from their midst decide a point, or even a battle, as Goliath’s challenge to Israel shows (1 Samuel 17:8-9). But now, faced with a man they couldn’t beat, they changed their own rules and tried to go to war against… whom? Israel? Judah? Samson alone? Not really. They were going to war against God.
The Philistines had an opportunity here to repent; to turn to the God of Israel for forgiveness and peace. But they were too proud, too stubborn; too convinced that they were right to even consider that the LORD might see things differently. “In his own eyes he flatters himself too much to detect or hate his sin,” (Psalm 36:2).
11 Then three thousand men of Judah went down to the cave at the rock of Etam, and said to Samson, “Don’t you realize that the Philistines rule over us? What have you done to us? ”
He said, “I have done to them what they did to me.”
Shamgar killed a brigade of Philistines with a single oxgoad. Now five brigades from Judah assemble in front of Samson’s cave. The foolish ones in the group were probably unafraid; even bored. The wise ones were shaking in their boots. There was a pattern developing with this man, Samson. Every time the Philistines tried to do something to him, it backfired. It was only going to escalate. Commentator Dale Ralph Davis calls it a “solution-failure” pattern (Such a Great Salvation, pp. 177-178).
Episode 1 (14:5-20)
Solution – answer to riddle
Failure – Samson slaughters 30 Philistines at Ashkelon
Episode 2 (15:1-6a)
Solution – Samson leaves; girl given to best man
Failure – foxes burning fields
Episode 3 (15:16b-8)
Solution – Burn the Timnite girl and her father
Failure – more slaughter by Samson
And this isn’t the end of it. What would happen now, if Samson were captured? Surely a tied-up Samson couldn’t hurt anyone.
12 Then they said to him, “We’ve come to tie you up and hand you over to the Philistines.” And Samson said, “Swear to me that you won’t kill me yourselves.”
13 They answered him this way: “We will not kill you. We will only tie you up and hand you over to them.” So they tied him up securely with two new ropes and led him away from the rock.
Samson permitted himself to be bound and carried off to the Gentiles. There is an echo here, a slight foreshadowing, of Jesus allowing himself to be bound and led away from the Garden of Gethsemane. There are differences, of course. Samson was hiding, and Jesus said, “Am I leading a rebellion that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me?” (Mark 14:48).
When Jesus did this, he was displaying what we call his passive obedience. In his state of humiliation, Jesus obeyed God the Father perfectly in our place (remember that Jesus’ states of humiliation and exaltation apply only to his human nature, not to his divine nature). His obedience was both active and passive. In his active obedience, Jesus did things and said things that were always in obedience to God. He didn’t break any of the commandments, and he kept God’s law perfectly in every way. He could pray with confidence, “Let no sin rule over me” (Psalm 119:133) and know that no sin would ever rule over him. He also allowed himself to be punished and crucified for us. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). This included submitting to torture: “Plowmen have plowed my back and made their furrows long” (Psalm 129:3),
As long as we’re on the subject, we might also remember here that the Bible’s teaching about Jesus’ humiliation is that Jesus always had and has the divine majesty, from the moment of his conception (the pre-incarnate Christ is not subject to our topic of the humiliation). Christ never renounced all use of the divine majesty. We see this because the full “weight” of his deity is attached to his death in Scripture, which makes his death infinitely meritorious. “God,” Paul says, “was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). He was “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). An exceptionally clear passage about this is Colossians 1:19: “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him [in Christ], and through him to reconcile all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”
One difference between Christ’s state of humiliation and his state of exaltation is that his divine majesty was limited during his humiliation, subject to the demands of his office as Christ. Later, in the state of exaltation, he uses his powers as God to their fullest extent, and still on our behalf. Everything he did, he did for our sake. “Though the LORD is on high, he looks upon the lowly” (Psalm 138:5); “He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap” (Psalm 113:7). He has lifted us up from the guilt of our sins. And this is why we praise him forever.
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