Today, I am reading and commenting on Judges 14-16.

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We rarely talk about something very important about Samson: he did not follow God’s commands concerning sexual relations with women.  In fact, the writer tells us that God used Samson’s lack of discipline when it came to Philistine women to weaken the Philistine hold over Israel.  God used Samson’s weakness and unfaithfulness to further His plans.  This is an important lesson for us to learn.  Sometimes God uses the failures of those who calls to lead His people to save His people.  That does not mean that we should embrace our sins “because God is using them for His purposes.”  God had told the people of Israel not to take wives from the pagan people living around them, but Samson chose to marry a Philistine woman anyway.  He then made a wager with the Philistines who were his wedding companions using an unfair riddle.  There was no way anyone other than Samson could have answered his riddle, since he was the only one who knew either part of the riddle (not even his parents knew that he had killed the lion, nor did they know that later he got honey from the carcass of the lion).  The next thing we see is that the Philistines were an evil people.  They threatened to burn down his bride’s family home with her family inside if she did not get the answer to the riddle.  And we see later that this was not an idle threat.

I also want to point out a relationship lesson we should take from this passage.  Two different women in Samson’s life used persistence to get him to reveal information to them to pass on to his enemies.  This says something about the women Samson chose to be in relationships with.  They were using him.  Both his wife and Delilah badgered him until he told them what they wanted to know.  They then revealed that information to his enemies.  Samson’s failure to recognize what was going on with his wife is understandable.  He had not had this happen to him before, and he did not know that she was going to use what he told her against him until it was too late.  Delilah on the other hand used the things he told her repeatedly and he still both stayed with her and eventually broke down and revealed his secret to her.  It would be easy to say that this is something which only women do to men, but that would not be true.  Men do the same thing to women.  We must be careful not to stay in relationships where the other person tries to wear down our resistance to doing something we do not wish to do. Of course, we should not be the person on the other side, the person using the relationship to wear down someone else’s resistance to doing something.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.