The Spirit’s power

Judges 15: 9 – 17

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 02 May, 2004

PENTECOST IS drawing near. We need to think about the Holy Spirit, and be ready so that that great festival of the Christian calendar is meaningful to us. Today we begin with Samson.
  I am essentially a New Testament preacher. I know that is one of my weaknesses. To understand the New testament more fully, we also need the Old. As Christians, we certainly do not reject the Old Testament. It is our book, and we need it.

EARLY HISTORY OF THE SPIRIT
  So we should look at the early history of the Holy Spirit as well as what he has been doing since Pentecost.

  The very first reference to the Holy Spirit in the Bible is in Genesis Chapter 1, where we read that

...the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

  Back in those early days, the Israelites were very much influenced by the thinking of the neighbouring nations. The Egyptians, the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, even the Persians, were far more sophisticated and technologically advanced than the Israelites were.
  And there was a tendency to imagine that they were better at everything than the Israelites.

  It's like the story of President Johnson visiting one of the Southern States during the Civil Rights era. The motorcade was roaring along a highway, police riders front and rear with sirens, Secret Service cars front and rear, helicopters overhead. Suddenly, in the adjoining swamp, Johnson spots two white men driving a speedboat with an African-American barefoot skiing behind.

  "Stop the motorcade!" Johnson shouts. The procession grinds to a halt. "Go and bring those two fine Southern gentlemen here!" he orders.

  A helicopter flies across and the two men are brought to shore. Johnson gets out of his car.

  "I want to shake you two fine Southern gentlemen by the hand and congratulate you for all you are doing for race relations in this area. If we could get more of this kind of grassroots thing going, the USofA would be a better place!"

  He shakes both men's hands, gets back into the car, and the motorcade speeds away.

  "Warn't that the President of the United States?" Jed asks Billy.

  "Sure looked like him," says Billy.

  "Isn't the President of the United States supposed to know everything?" asks Jed.

  "I thought he was supposed to," says Billy.

  "He sure don't know much about trawlin' for 'gators, then!" said Jed.

  We always tend to assume that the rich and the powerful know everything. And that was how it was even back in the days of the judges.

  So it was a temptation to listen hard and long to the way the neighbouring nations thought about God as well as how they thought about bronze casting or viticulture.
  Some of these nations believed in great sea monsters or in gods of the ocean who were as powerful in their own realm as the God of mountains and storms is.
  For the desert Israelites, there was a great temptation to believe these stories and old wives' tales.
  After all, the Egyptians were traders across oceans; the Philistines had migrated there from Greece or Crete. Surely seafaring folk would know about oceans.
  But, in the beginning, the Spirit of God was over the face of the deep. The creator God of the entire universe was above, and more powerful than, the forces of even the deepest ocean. God is God. His Spirit is there, wherever we go.

  We hear about the Holy Spirit in other places. In many instances, too, God appears to the Patriarchs as three men or three angels. There is a threeness in the one eternal God, right from the beginning. One of those three corresponds to the Holy Spirit.

SAMSON’S EARLY EXPERIENCES
  But we really see the Holy Spirit in Samson’s life.
  You know about Samson. You’ve probably read about his birth and know that he was, as the song says,

“...the strongest man
That ever lived on earth.”

  In Judges 13, we read that a Danite man, Zorah, had a wife who remained childless.
  One day an angel of the Lord appeared to her and said she would have a son. He told her to drink no wine or other alcoholic drink. He told her not to touch anything unclean. He told her that no razor should ever be used on the boy’s head. His hair was to be allowed to grow long and he was to fulfil all the requirements of a Nazirite from the day of his birth.

  We read that eventually the woman did give birth to her son, and she called him Samson.

  And we read that

...he grew, and the LORD blessed him, and the Spirit of the LORD began to stir him while he was in Mahaneh Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol.

THE SPIRIT’S POWER MISUSED
  A bit later, we read about Samson’s marriage. Now we should understand something about Samson. He is a very difficult man. He was self–willed, he brooked few boundaries or limitations, he was a bully and a man of great rages. In fact, a psychiatrist recently read his story and decided that Samson had a severe personality disorder and possibly a mental illness. If you read the story carefully, you can see that is probably right.

  Yet, as we already know,

...the Spirit of the LORD began to stir him while he was in Mahaneh Dan...

  God is never limited by our limitations. He has a perfect plan. You, too,  can find fulfilment and purpose within his Kingdom goals.
  So, Samson, this self–willed young man, goes searching for a wife, and decides to marry a Philistine woman from Timnah. He nags at his parents until they give in to him.
  As Samson and his parents approach the town of Timnah, a lion comes roaring out from the rocks, intent on killing and eating Samson and his parents.
  We read that

The Spirit of the LORD came upon him in power, so that he tore the lion apart with his bare hands as he might have torn a young goat.

  Later, Samson again breached God’s plan for his life by eating honey from the lion’s carcass, which meant that he was eating something unclean.

  Samson used this event to set a riddle for the young Philistine men who were appointed to look after him at the wedding. They couldn’t guess the answer, so they bullied Samson’s new wife until she got it out of him.
  Samson was enraged. He had promised them thirty new sets of clothing if they guessed the riddle, so he went to attack the Philistine village at Ashkelon.
Again we see,

Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon him in power. He went down to Ashkelon, struck down thirty of their men, stripped them of their belongings and gave their clothes to those who had explained the riddle.

  Samson had disobeyed God; Samson was not using his Holy Spirit power in a way most glorifying to God, yet the Spirit still came on him in power, because God is faithful to us, even when we are not faithful to him.

  After he came back with the clothes, Samson was angry because his Philistine father–in–law wouldn’t let him go in and see his wife. While Samson was off getting the clothes, his father–in–law had married her off to the best man!

  Samson flew into a rage. He was now an open enemy to the Philistines. He revenged himself by setting fire to their wheatfields.
  You can imagine how popular he was with the Philistines after that little lot!
  In fact, the Philistines were so angry that they burned Samson’s wife and father–in–law to death.

  The next step was that Samson began attacking Philistine settlements, and killed many of them.
  So then they began rampaging against the Israelites.

THE SPIRIT’S POWER USED RIGHTLY
  And that is how we came to the passage we read today, about the men of Judah capturing Samson and taking him to the Philistines.

  Samson let them capture him, as long as they swore only to hand him over to the Philistines, and not kill him. After all, then the Philistines would know that they didn’t need to keep attacking the people of Judah, because the people of Judah had helped them.
  The men of Judah tied Samson tightly and dragged him along to the Philistines.
  The Philistines were sure they had finally caught their Ace of Spades, their number one wanted man. They came running and shouting to take Samson and lynch him on the spot.

  As soon as Samson saw them coming for him, he flexed his muscles, and the ropes crumbled away; he stretched his arms, and the bindings dropped from him, because —

the Spirit of the LORD came upon him in power.

  Samson grabbed a jawbone, the jaw of a recently dead ass, and using it as a cruel, toothed club, he slew a thousand of them.
  All through, we see that the secret was not his long hair, nor was it his Nazirite vow, but that

...the Spirit of the LORD came upon him in power.

LESSONS FROM SAMSON
  Let’s learn several things from these passages. Although the New Testament opens up the Holy Spirit’s work to us in ways that the greatest of Old Testament prophets could not have dreamt of, there are many valuable lessons in there.

1. Holiness
  The first thing is that the Holy Spirit is God’s Spirit. He is holy, because God is holy. God said,

You shall be holy to me; for I, the LORD, am holy.

  God has a purpose of holiness for his people. And holiness means separation. Some Christians have misunderstood the idea of separation. They have acted out of fear, out of ignorance, out of prejudice. They reject people who are not like themselves, and don’t see the possibilities in men and women.
  Back in 1999, when we changed our name from Marrickville Baptist Church to Silver Street Mission, I wanted to say something, and that was that we are not, and will never be, a club for Baptists.

  I was reading yesterday about a man who is in the public eye at the moment, a man who is an active church member, a man who speaks loudly for conservative politics and conservative values, but he leaves the overall impression that conservatism is more important to him than Christianity, that his church involvement is more concerned about a club for nice conservative people than about transforming the world in the name of Jesus.
  It was sad in a way. He is charged, on fairly strong evidence, with doing some very unethical things, yet he can’t see that true conservative values are ethical values if they are anything.

  Being separate and holy is not about only mixing with people like yourself. It is about holding onto your own integrity in the midst of a world which wants you to conform because anything else is too uncomfortable, too threatening.

  It is this sense of separation which informs and directs Samson’s story.

  He is not a nice person. He is not even very ethical when it comes to the Philistines — not that the Philistines were paragons, either.
  But he is separated for the Lord’s purposes, and that is why the Holy Spirit can empower him.

  Sometimes I hear people look for the Holy Spirit’s power when they have no intention of becoming the Holy Spirit’s instruments.
  I have a very good friend who has prayed on many occasions for the Holy Spirit, but doesn’t seem ever to have prayed to surrender to Jesus as Lord. It will never work.

  In Old Testament times, people took a Nazirite vow to declare themselves separated for God‘s special purposes. Today, we surrender to Jesus as our way of being separated to God’s special purposes.

2. Empowerment
  The second thing I want us to see from these passages is that the Holy Spirit empowers what is truly done for God.

  In Judges 14, we see that Samson’s parents were not at all happy that Samson chose to marry a Philistine. But there is an important sentence there: It is,

(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.)

  God has an overriding aim. He wants to free his people from Philistine oppression. In the same way, he wants to free us from all kinds of spiritual oppression. After all, even social, economic or political oppression all arise from a spirit of oppression.

  And God does that through confronting the powers of darkness.

  As we read in James,

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

  Some people naturally assume that that means we all should become exorcists.
  I have seen some remarkable instances of deliverance from demonic oppression. You know I come from a rather rationalistic background, and I didn’t find it easy to believe in demonisation until I saw some strange things associated with spiritism.
  Certainly, we have power — if we are true believers in Jesus as Lord and Saviour — we have Holy Spirit power to resist spiritual attack on ourselves and to help liberate our friends from demonic power.

  But we are called to confront all kinds of powers and authorities.

  When Mother Theresa went to Lebanon to help evacuate children from orphanages being shelled daily, all the authorities refused to help. She had to confront those authorities, because helping the helpless is something we are honour–bound, as Christian people, to do.
  And it was not mere argument. It was faith in action against unbelief. She got ambulances through when no one expected that it would be possible. The authorities were not “bad” people. They sincerely wished that something could be done. But they were unbelieving people. They didn’t trust that the Lord had the answer. And so the devil controlled them, even when they didn’t realise it.

3. Sovereignty
  The final thing to see is that, in all this, God is sovereign. Samson was a bundle of troubles, but God used him. He was disobedient, yet God used him. He broke his vows, even, yet God used him.

  I know that every one of us here has broken our vows, that every one of us has been disobedient, that each of us is a bundle of troubles of our own. I don’t want you to give up. God can and will still empower you still use you, still achieve is aims through you.

  If you fall down, get up —in Jesus name! If you feed with the pigs, return home —in Jesus’ name! And, if you break your vows, renew them — in Jesus name!

  And may the triune God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — renew us all in a Spirit of love and holiness from today onwards,

AMEN
 

© Peter R. Green 2004. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)

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 All design and contents (c) Peter R Green 2002