Judges 14 – Samson, now grown and
imbued with God’s spirit (13:25), falls
in love with a Philistine woman and asks his parents to get her for him to
be his wife. They remonstrate with him a
bit, but do his bidding after all. The writer implies that God was using
Samson’s weakness here to foment a crisis with the Philistines that would lead
to their liberation, but we must wait and see the story play out (14:4).
Going
down to Timnah to see about the woman, Samson encounters a lion. “The spirit of
the Lord rushed on him, and he tore the lion apart. . .But he did not tell his
father or his mother. . .” (14:6). He arranges the marriage.
The
next time he comes along this way (on his way to marry her), he sees the dead lion with a swarm of bees in its
carcass—and honey. He shares it with
his parents, but does not tell them where it came from. While his father is
gone “to the woman,” Samson has a feast with 30 companions (he calls them
companions but they must be young people who are close to the bride’s family,
people he is not really friends with but from whom he might expect gifts), and
he asks them a riddle. “If you can explain it to me within the seven days of
the feast, and find it out, then I will give you thirty linen garments and
thirty festal garments. But if you
cannot. . .then you shall give me thirty linen garments and thirty festal
garments” (14:11-13). The riddle is
this: “Out of the eater came something to eat.
Out of the strong came something sweet” (14:14).
They
cannot guess, so they try to get Samson’s woman to help them find out the
answer. They are angry, thinking Samson
is with his riddle working to impoverish them. She first tries to get him to
tell her the answer by manipulating him—weeping, nagging, etc. He finally tells her and she passes on the
answer. When they guess, he becomes enraged and charges them with having found
the answer by “plow[ing] with [his] heifer” (14:18). “Then the spirit of
the Lord rushed on him, and he went down to Ashkelon [and] killed thirty men of
the town, took their spoil, and gave the festal garments to those who had
explained the riddle” (14:19). Not something you would think God’s spirit would inspire him
to do! Are the men of Ashkelon innocent by-standers? The woman who is his wife does not come back with
him to his father’s house, but is given to his “best man.”
Augustine (354-430 AD)
Confessions
2 - And how shall I call
upon my God— my God and my Lord? For when I call on Him I ask Him to come into
me. And what place is there in me into which my God can come— into which God
can come, even He who made heaven and earth? Is there anything in me, O Lord my God that can contain you? Do
indeed the very heaven and the earth, which you have made, and in which you
have made me, contain you? Or, as nothing could exist without you, does
whatever exists contain you? Why, then, do I ask you to come into me, since I
indeed exist, and could not exist if you were not in me? Because I am not yet
in hell, though you are even there;
for "if I go down into hell you are there." I could not therefore
exist, could not exist at all, O my God, unless you were in me. Or should I not
rather say, that I could not exist unless I were in you from whom are all
things, by whom are all things, in whom are all things? [Romans 11:36] Even so,
Lord; even so. Where do I call you to, since you are in me, or whence canst
Thou come into me? For where outside heaven and earth can I go that from thence
my God may come into me who has said, I fill heaven and earth? Jeremiah 23:24
How do I
call upon you? Where do I see you? Where have I found you? “Is there anything
in me . . . that can contain you?” I do not often call upon you in
formal prayer. My whole being “calls” to you – my eyes that see your glory in
everything around me; my ears that hear the life that is so cadent, so
interconnected. It feels like my heart and mind are constantly reaching out for
you. Did I get this way as an infant – seeking to know the world outside the
dark and watery space I came from? But I still look out and feel out seeking
that which brought me forth and has given me direction all my life. God is everywhere,
but while He is in me and all around me, there is the me that is not completely
God-filled. I feel the gap. I appreciate the liberty God has given me. And I
have had years when I would not have called the . . . . . . out there I reached
my arms out to “God” but “He” is “I Am Who Am.” Can I “know” Him? I can yearn
for Him, I can feel Him near, I can see Him in the very complex “order” of all
that is.
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