Samson is Yoked - Zack Morgan

All right, good morning. Welcome, everyone. It's great to see a lot of visitors here. It makes us really happy to see people come, and yeah, it's good to have you all here today.

So I'm going to be reading from Judges chapter 14. If you want to open your Bibles to Judges chapter 14. If I have a title to this devotions or sermonette, it's going to be "Samson is Yoked." So a nod to his strength and also an acknowledgment of his eventual bondage.

So for those of you who aren't caught up on your American slang, someone who's yoked is someone who has a lot of upper body strength. So I'll be talking about the strongman feats of Samson and his eventual bondage to the Philistines.

You can try to follow along. I'm going to be skimming over several chapters. There's a lot of stuff that Samson does, and there's a lot of women, so it gets a lot of confusion. It gets confusing. So I'm going to try to categorize things a little bit.

But you can follow along the best you can, and I think if you can read a little bit, it'll help. So first of all, I'm going to skip over his birth. So the first thing is the woman in Timnath. So Samson saw a woman of Timnath, daughter of the Philistines, and he told his parents, "Get her for me, for she pleases me."

Israel at this time was serving the Philistines, and on the way to visit the woman, at one point, a lion came out, and Samson took that lion, and it says he tore it as he would a kid.

The spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and he killed it. They get married, and then at the feast, he tells his 30 companions this riddle that we all know, "And if you can tell me the riddle and give me the answer to the riddle, I'll each give you a change of garment."

Of course, his wife then convinces him to tell her the riddle, and she then tells his 30 companions. And because of that, he goes out, 30 guys lose their life so he can take their coats and give them to his 30 companions.

Samson leaves in a rage. His new father-in-law thinks he hates his new wife, so he gives his daughter to Samson's friend. Sometimes Samson comes back with a present for his wife, but she's gone.

So he does the obvious thing and goes out and catches 300 foxes, ties their tails together to a torch, and lights them into the standing corn. This one right here is the one that baffles me the most. All these things where he does these great acts of strength. Going out and catching 300 foxes, that's the one where I have a hard time believing. But I don't know if I've seen 10 foxes in my life. And then he goes out and catches 300 of them tying them together. And then the fact that he came up with that, who would have thought that? The whole story leaves me scratching my head.

So the Philistines are angry. They blame his father-in-law, and they burn his father-in-law and Samson's wife. So because of that, Samson goes out and he kills the Philistines with a great slaughter. It doesn't say how many he kills, but he killed a bunch.

After that, he went on the top of the rock of Etham.

The Philistines come back again to take revenge, and they camp against the men of Judah. And the men of Judah ask them, "Why are you here?" And they said, "We're here to get Samson." So they go out to Samson and basically said, "You're out of your mind. Don't you know that we serve these people?"

And they said, "We're here to bind you." And Samson says, "Promise me, swear to me that you won't kill me." And they said, "Okay, we swear." So they bound him up. They take him to the Philistines, and when the Philistines saw Samson, they shouted, and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and his bands fell off, and his rope fell off, and he grabbed a jawbone and clubbed down a thousand men.

Okay, another time, Samson went to Gaza and he saw Harlot. That night, the men surrounded the city, and he rose up in the middle of the night, and he snuck through their lines. He tore the door off the gate of the city and carried that a long distance.

And then Samson and Delilah. Samson meets a woman in the valley of Sorek whose name is Delilah. The lords of the Philistines told her to entice him and figure out the secret of his strength. Samson tells her to try three different things, and none of them reveal his strength. So we all know this story. So I'm just going to skip ahead to verse 16, and I'm going to read from chapter 16, verse 16 through 22.

"And it came to pass when she pressed him daily with her words and urged him so that his soul was vexed unto death, that he told her all his heart and said unto her, 'There hath not come a razor upon my head, for I have been a Nazarite unto God from my mother's womb. If I be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall become weak and be like any other man.'

And when Delilah saw that he had told her all his heart, she sent and called the lords of the Philistines, saying, 'Come up this once, for he has showed me all his heart.' Then the lords of the Philistines came up unto her and brought money in their hand.

And she made him sleep upon her knees, and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head. And she began to afflict him, and his strength went from him. And she said, 'The Philistines be upon thee, Samson.' And he awoke out of his sleep and said, 'I will go out as at other times before and shake myself.' And he wist not that the Lord was departed from him.

But the Philistines took him and put out his eyes and brought him down to Gaza and bound him with fetters of brass, and he did grind in the prison house, albeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaven."

Samson flirted with the world until he finally caved.

Although Samson had a problem with loving worldly women, he did live obedient to what God had told him.

So if we go back and look at his miraculous conception, his mother was barren. They couldn't have children. An angel appeared to her, and he said, "You are going to..." He foretold of Samson's birth, and he said he gave her specific commands. He told her she should not drink wine or anything from the vine, and that Samson, that this child was not to have cut hair, and he was going to be a Nazarite from his birth.

Manoah, her husband, when he heard it, he prayed that the man would come again so that they could be instructed on how to raise the child. So sure enough, God sent the angel, and the angel, all he did was repeat what he had told Manoah's wife in the beginning. He said, "No wine and don't cut his hair." That was instruction for Samson.

And Samson obeyed that. But eventually, the world wore away at him. Where Samson failed was he knew that Delilah would cut his hair. This was the disobedience of Samson. He knew that she was going to cut his hair. He knew she was trying to figure out his strength, of course, and she was trying to undermine him. And it says his soul was vexed to death. That's what the world will do to you. It will just wear you down till death. And this is where Samson failed. He disobeyed God's command to not cut his hair.

Verse 21, "But the Philistines took him, put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza and bound him with fetters of brass, and he did grind in the prison house." The result of what the world will do to you, the world will blind you, they will bind you and grind you.

God gave Samson specific rules. Samson obeyed that. He did much good for God's kingdom.

And the result of Samson's disobedience was bondage.

So I assume that Samson was yoked to a pole that went around or something. He was grinding, and I assumed he was yoked to a pole and would just go around in circles, grinding, going in circles. And it was a mockery of Samson, what the Philistines did to him. "If you are so strong, then do this. Grind our grain."

Turn with me to Matthew chapter 11, verse 28 through 32.

This is Jesus' invitation to us. "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls, for my yoke is kind and my burden is light."

Jesus invites us to exchange the burden of sin for his burden. This is a burden of meekness and of the lowly.

So what is the yoke of Jesus? In Matthew 23, verses 3 through 5, Jesus tells his disciples. He says, "The Pharisees and the scribes, they sit in Moses' seat. All that they command you to do, observe." Or he says, "Do and observe. All that they command you to do, do that.

But do not after their works, for they bind heavy burdens that they themselves are not willing to bear." And so Jesus is saying that the rules of the Pharisees are hypocritical. Jesus used the word burdens, that the Pharisees bound on other people for the rules of the Pharisees.

They tell you to do one thing, but they do another. Cyprian points out that the burden that we come to Christ with was also the law. He quotes from Acts 15, the edict of the Jerusalem council, where they say, "We will impose no other burden than the stain from meats offered to idols, from blood and things strangled, and from fornication."

Also in Acts 15, Peter refers to the law as a yoke. He asked the Judaizers, "Why do they test God by putting a yoke on the disciples that neither they nor their fathers were able to bear?" So there's three instances where a yoke or a burden is affiliated with rules, with the law.

And so Jesus is coming and he says, "I have rules. I have a law. And my way is kind. My way is better."

And Jesus' rules are not hypocritical.

It's his yoke. And I like to envision a dual yoke where there's two ones where there's two oxen pulling. And so what Jesus is telling us is he says, "To do what I do."

And this is an invitation from Jesus. Jesus invites us to walk the humble path of humility with him.

In this world of easy believism, it's easy to start.

There's this tendency to think, "Why would Jesus even give us a yoke? Why doesn't he just take all our burdens away?"

Jesus knows that in this life, there will always be burdens. It's part of this world. It's part of the fabric of this world. We will always have burdens. And Finney Crovilla pointed out in one of his messages that there are burdens. For me, the burden that I have is making a living for my family and providing for my family. But then there's people who have a lot of money, and then their burdens are maintaining their wealth. And then there's burdens of your bucket list. There's burdens. Everything that we have, it ends up becoming a burden on us. So we can't get away from burdens in our life.

Jesus just can't magically erase and say, "There's no more burdens in this world." But Jesus gives us a better burden, something better for us to bear. And we won't be completely free until we are in eternity. That rhymes, doesn't it?

But our yoke determines our destiny. Oh, it continues to rhyme.

Wow.

Our yoke determines our destiny, and it's one that leads to freedom. The other yoke, the other burden, is one that's of bondage that leads to death.

The yoke that Jesus calls us to bear, as I mentioned, I want to picture this as a yoke that an oxen is pulling, the yoke for an oxen, that they're pulling a cart. The oxen is on a journey. They're going a certain direction. They're not going round and round grinding grain.

They're pulling a cart. They're pulling a load. They're heading somewhere. Jesus has a destiny. He is going somewhere, and he is inviting us to join him on the journey.

All right, so I'm going to tread on some ground that I hope I wasn't sure if I was going to share this, but I think it's fine. So if someone's preaching and they say, "I had a dream," and then they take their dream and use that in their sermon as an analogy, I think we'd always say, "Let's be a little skeptical, a little careful with that." Right? If someone says, "I had a dream," and then they preach on that. So I had a dream. Take this with a grain of salt.

Okay? Please take this with a grain of salt. I don't want to train anybody to just listen to people who have dreams. And I'm not saying that God gave me this dream, but this dream did bring some clarity to this concept of Jesus and following Jesus. And so I'm going to take the risk and share it with you. So in my dream, my wife and I were trying to climb a mountain. At the foot of the mountain, there was violence and war. This was several years ago. I don't think we had kids, so that moral obligation wasn't there. So it was just Abigail and I. We were trying to climb a mountain. We were trying to get away from bombings and violence down in the valley.

As we were climbing the mountain, it seems that every step we took, we slid down two steps.

And it felt like we were being sucked into the violence. As we were struggling up the mountain, I looked down, and there was a man that was below us. He was climbing. He had his head down, and he was heading a direction. He was making progress. And he quickly overcame us. As he came upon us, he kept walking. He was going to pass us. And in my dream, I yelled out and I said, "Are you my father?" He replied, "I am your heavenly father." I asked for help, and he told me to grab onto his belt.

So I grabbed onto his belt, and Abigail grabbed onto my belt single file. Now we were climbing the mountain. Instead of taking one step forward and two steps backward, we were now taking one step, which equaled two steps forward. And then I woke.

So the thing that I find interesting is that the story of humanity is still being played out. Jesus is at work. He is still moving forward. The king is on the move.

I've thought in the past of Jesus just being in heaven waiting for us, but Jesus is inviting us to join him in his conquest.

Now, whether we join him or not does not affect the path that Jesus is taking.

There's two options: join Jesus or get left behind.

Join Jesus or get left behind.

All right, so turn back with me to Judges chapter 16.

I'm going to read verse 23 through 30.

"Then the lords of the Philistines gathered them together for to offer a great sacrifice unto Dagan, their God, and to rejoice, for they said, 'Our God hath delivered Samson, our enemy, into our hand.' And when the people saw him, they praised their God, for they said, 'Our God hath delivered into our hands our enemy and the destroyer of our country, which slew many of us.'

And it came to pass when their hearts were merry that they said, 'Call for Samson, that he may make us sport.' And they called for Samson out of the prison house, and he made them sport, and they set him between the pillars.

And Samson said unto the lad that held him by the hand, 'Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them.' Now the house was full of men and women, and all the lords of the Philistines were there. And there were upon the roof about 3,000 men and women that beheld while Samson made sport.

And Samson called unto the Lord and said, 'O Lord God, remember me. I pray thee, and strengthen me. I pray thee only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.'

And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand and of the other with his left. And Samson said, 'Let me die with the Philistines.' And he bowed himself with all his might. And the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life."

So all the other times where Samson took revenge on the enemy, it says that the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and then he would go out and kill his enemies. The only time is where after the Philistines killed his wife and his father-in-law, it doesn't say that the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him. But the other times with the lion, with the jawbone, and with the 30 coats, he was filled with the Holy Spirit.

And I don't want to make anything out of this passage that doesn't exist.

But for me, I was looking at this, and it seemed like that it's almost like he couldn't help it. It was like the spirit overcame him, and he just went ahead and did what the spirit was giving him power to do. He was overcome with the spirit.

And he had plenty of energy and strength, and it seems like he didn't need to exert himself. The time where he ran out of energy was when he didn't have any water, and God miraculously gave him water. But he went out and one time killed 1,000 men. And that, to me, is just a symbol of he had infinite strength when he was filled with the spirit.

He had an infinite source of strength. So Samson, there was a downward progression after the several times where he was filled with the spirit. He went down to Gaza. He was with a harlot, and then he went to Delilah.

And Irenaeus says that, quote from Irenaeus, is that he wasn't filled with the spirit. The spirit didn't come mightily upon him after those two sins that he committed, those two, the fornication.

But when Samson was brought before the Philistines, he was blind and humble. He prayed to God and asked God that he would be able to take one more blow at the world. With all the strength that he had, he pushed against the two pillars and said, "Let me die with the Philistines."

And I believe that this is the reason why Samson is called a hero of faith. He didn't wait for the spirit to overpower him, to overtake him, but he petitioned God and said, "Lord, remember me. Remember me this one time and strengthen me." This was a prayer of faith and humility.

Samson was filled with the spirit in his life, but he died in faith. God used the failures of Samson for his glory and the advancement of his kingdom. When Samson first saw a woman of the Philistines, his parents said, "Isn't there a woman of Israel that you can marry?"

And the passage goes on, and it says, "They didn't know that this was of the Lord because the Lord was looking for a way to take revenge on the Philistines."

God used the yoke that the world put on Samson to humble him and bring him to a point where he could accomplish so much more. And I just want to leave you with the idea if God used the yoke of the world to humble Samson and defeat the enemy, how much more can God use the yoke, the humble yoke of Jesus, to help us through lowliness and humility defeat the kingdom of this world?