Now Who's the Strong Man?
(Judges 16:1-22) The book of Judges follows a pretty sad course. Israel starts out serving the Lord. Then they fall into sin and idol worship. They are then enslaved, and finally they cry out to the Lord. God raises up a judge who delivers them, and they serve the Lord again, for a time. Samson was one of those judges. In Judges 13, we read that an angel commanded that the boy would be a Nazirite, set aside for the Lord, as described in Numbers 6. Not every Bible hero is a priest or a king. Samson was a lay person, specially dedicated to God. The angel told Samson’s parents that he would become a Nazarite and would begin the deliverance of Israel from the hands of the Philistines (Judges 13:5b). The important characteristic of a Nazirite is that she or he is holy, set apart for God, marked for God’s service. Their vows required non-conformity from them; they were not supposed to act like the people around them. They totally abstained from wine – to the point that they wouldn’t ev...