Big Bad John - Pt 3

And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets— who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. (Hebrews 11:32-34 ESV). When the Egyptian army showed up, God could have made Israel a nation of Samsons. The Holy Spirit could have rushed upon them all, and they could have defeated the Egyptians with a bunch of donkey jaws. Why didn’t God do that? Well, remember Samson? When God gave Samson power to overcome 1,000 Philistines on his own, what was the song Samson sung afterward? “With the jawbone of a donkey, heaps upon heaps, with the jawbone of a donkey have I struck down a thousand men.” (Judges 15:6 ESV). The truth is that we typically don’t realize what it means for God to be our strength until we’re weak enough that he’s our only option.

There is no hymn to God by Samson after any of his exploits, and he didn’t survive the one that likely got him mentioned as a model of faith in our reading today. God was Samson’s strength, but Samson didn’t really recognize it. God wanted Israel to understand that he was their strength and their salvation so that he would become their song. That’s why he put them in that weak, helpless place. The same is true for us today. The Lord is our only real Strength. The exodus was the greatest Old Testament foreshadowing of the gospel of Jesus Christ. God delivers us all as helpless children, caught between the forces of evil and the sea of God’s wrath. Jesus is our deliverer, and his cross and resurrection our deliverance. But the exodus, along with all the other biblical stories of redemption, is also a reminder that God purposefully designs our weak places and assigns us to them. When we feel ourselves trapped in them, we can be deeply discouraged, panicky, and even angry. God’s purposes in such experiences are typically not clear to us at first. Things just look like he’s either made a huge mistake or he’s capricious. But he’s neither. The truth is that, as sinful people, we don’t really understand what it means for God to be our strength and our salvation until we are put in a weak enough place where he is our only option. At first, this doesn’t feel like a great mercy, but later, sometimes much later, we discover it was a gift of measureless mercy. And then God really becomes our song. If you are in that place of weakness, rest assured in His strength! He will prevail!