some announcements tonight and specifically about the Chafer Conference, which will be we will be in the middle of two weeks from tonight. But due to the topics that are during the day, especially if you're a pastor, if you're not a pastor, don't worry about it. But if you're a pastor or missionary, you're a student, we have put up on the website background materials that you not only need to read before to give you some idea of what the issues are that are going to be addressed during the conference, but they also relate to things that, a lot of things you need to continue to read and study. We have some links to, there are links to YouTube videos that Associates for Biblical Research have on their on their channel, which is called Digging for Truth. Isn't that a good title for archaeologists? Digging for Truth. But there are some that are done by Henry Smith, who will be one of our speakers just on this issue of Genesis 5 and 11 and the genealogies. And a lot more. And so we have links to that and to articles, pro and con, it's controversial. And then we have also other material related to, I don't think we have anything related to what Dr. Petrovich will be teaching, but most of you who are here in the congregation will have heard it a couple of different ways and times. So it'll be good review for you new for others. But anyway, there's a lot of resource material up there on the website. You go to DeanBibleMinistries.org and then what you need to do is go to the, you can do slash chaffer, DeanBibleMinistries.org slash chaffer and then in the top left corner there's a box and in that box one of the links is to study materials. So that is, you can download a lot of good background material in preparation for the conference. Also this Thursday night, and I hope most people can come out and be here, because this is a special night, because we are observing a remembrance of this war in Ukraine. This is the anniversary. On Thursday night, at somewhere between 8 o'clock and 8.20 p.m. here. It's between 4 and 4.20 a.m. on the 24th in Ukraine, and that is when I woke up to the sound of explosions. That is approximately when the war started. So, Egers Molyar and Egers here today, they flew in this afternoon. The family's at home trying to get adjusted to time zones and all those things, and he hasn't slept in 24 hours, so I told him, in 10 minutes after I start talking, you'll be sound asleep. And anyway, so they are here and he will be speaking. We're going to have a video from Oleg Luzhinsky and then Jim Myers also. These are missionaries. We have been invested in what Jim Myers Ministries has been doing in Ukraine and eager and the students and the graduates for the last 17 years, 18 years since this church has existed. And so this is a great opportunity to hear from them about what is going on spiritually in Ukraine now during the war. And also for the Chafer Conference, one other thing is the donation of cookies. So we wouldn't want pastors to go into diabetic shock, so they need to have their cookies and their sugar. All right. How shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to thy word. Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Jesus prayed to the Father, sanctify them by means of truth. Thy word is truth. For the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God shall stand forever." Before we get started, we'll have a few moments of silent prayer so that we can be in right relationship with the Lord. Walking by the Spirit, Scripture says, we're either walking by the Spirit or the sin nature. So we need to, if necessary, confess sin in silent prayer And so after a few moments of silent prayer, then I will open in prayer. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your grace to us. In many ways we fail, we sin, and yet we know that when we confess sin that we have forgiveness. We have forgiveness positionally at the cross and that we have eternal life and the righteousness of Christ that can never be taken from us. But there are times when we fail. And tonight as we study, we see this in Samson. that he has failed consistently, repetitively, over and over again. But now, at the end of his life, we see his great fall, and then your grace in restoring him and answering his prayer at the end of his life. So, Father, as we study tonight about Samson's fall and his restored to grace, we pray that we might be a challenge to understand the key principles that are here for a nation and for individual spiritual lives. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen. All right, let's open our Bibles to Judges chapter 16. This is the last episode in the life of Samson. We will cover it. It's the longest episode of the various episodes that are told in these chapters from chapter 13 with the birth, and chapter 14 where he has his eyes lustfully on this young Philistine maiden, and then chapter 15 where he is tying the fox's tails together putting a torch between them and having them run through the wheat fields, wrecking the economy of the Philistines. And then we get to where we are tonight in chapter 16. We started it last week and we'll wrap it tonight. So we have seen this study that in the book of Judges there's often folks who come to the judges through the lens of Hebrews 11, where the writer of Hebrews says he just doesn't have enough time to talk about Gideon and Ehud and Barak and Samson and Jephthah. And so they're included in the heroes of faith. But as we have studied, they became, especially Barak at the time of Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson, they are progressively worse. Their lives are progressively more like the lives of the Canaanites. They become more influenced by the paganism of the Canaanites. And you see this decline in a nation that is foreshadowing our own nation and our world, because we live in a world today that is shaped by postmodern relativism, where people are their ultimate own authority, and they're going to decide what is right in their own eyes. And it's interesting, you go through passages of scripture, we'll see at least one verse tonight, where you have different people, David was one of them, that did right in the eyes of the Lord. But here we have a culture that is doing what's right in their own eyes, and that's the contrast. And then what we have seen is when they go into this cycle of disobedience, we read a statement like we have in chapter 13, that the sons of Israel again did evil in the sight of the Lord. So these words like eyes and sight are important knowledge because when we, knowledge is often related to what we see. So eyes, when it talks about the eyes of the Lord, often talking about his omniscience. And what we see is this theme, this subtext that goes through Samson, he has lust for the woman in Timnah because he tells his dad, it's not translated this way, but what the Hebrew says, she is right in my eyes. So Samson is a picture of the whole nation. They are doing what's right in his eyes and he wants this woman, this beautiful young woman who is right in his eyes. And so you see that it is this personal desire that becomes the standard for truth. So we're in that last judgeship of Samson where nothing really good is said about Samson until you get to the end. He is rebellious against his parents' authority, disrespectful of them. He is very paganized. He's a womanizer. He has a very low view of women. And the writer wants us to recognize that. That's why none of the women other than Delilah are named in the account, because as far as he's concerned, they're really irrelevant to his life. Now, we saw that after the birth narrative in chapter 13, verses 1 through 24, that the introduction to the next two chapters It's given at the end of chapter 13 the Spirit of the Lord began to move from Mahanadan between Zorah and Eshtoel. And so this is seen in 14.1 that the Spirit of the Lord is stirring up Samson. He's going to be a very different judge. He doesn't raise an army or deliver the people. He's not successful in delivering them. But God uses him to prevent assimilation of the Jews to the paganism of the Philistines. And then we're told about those episodes there with his marriage. The groomsman goes on into chapter 14, dealing with the consequences of that and his retaliation, tying the fox's tails together. And all of this took place early on. This is the beginning of his judgeship. And at the end of that period, in Judges 15-20, it says, he judged Israel 20 years in the days of the Philistines. Now, that kind of a statement, a summary statement, is usually found at the end of the judgeships. And what I am suggesting is that this is really the introduction to the final episode, which begins with Delilah and ends, of course, with his literally bringing the house of Dagon down around the ears of the Philistines and killing so many of them. But this is it. And so in the meantime, there's been obviously a lot of activity because as we start tonight, when we get down to verse 4, what we see is that, especially in verse 5, is that by this time, There is a enormous bounty put on his head. They are offering an incredible sum of money to Delilah to entice Samson to give up the secret to his strength. So it's this moving upon Samson that gets everything going. And here's a map just to get these places back in our head. Up here in the hills of Judea, this is really on the western edge just before it goes down into the plains. All the shaded area here indicates the topography of the hills. You see, this is where Samson is born and where he is reared in this area. And the young Philistine woman that he's attracted to at first is from Temna. But he goes down and now he's going, we saw at the beginning of chapter 16, he goes down to Gaza. And that little episode, not much is said, where he goes down to this prostitute in Gaza. And then he leaves by taking, carrying these massive gates that probably weighed 300, 400 pounds and he hauls them uphill about 40 to 45 miles to Hebron, that it moves the scene of action down there to Gaza. So this is what we see and we see that he has, again, he has just caused great disruption among the Philistines. So now the lords of the Philistines, there's five cities that we see in this map. You have Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath. Goliath was from Gath. And these are the five cities, and each one is ruled by a lord. And so these are the five lords of the Philistines. And they're going to put a bounty on Samson's head, and each one of them is going to give 1,100 shekels of silver as a bounty. So the bounty will be 5,500 shekels. So that's coming up. So last time we looked at the episode in Gaza and taking the gates of Gaza up a hill. He went uphill 2,500 feet carrying that to Hebron. So what we see in all of that is that Samson continued to fraternize with the enemy. He's looking to Philistine women and not to Jewish women. His eyes are always west. His eyes are not east. But he has become a national enemy. And he is really focusing more and more away from home down among the Philistines. And I pointed out last time you have these various words for seeing that are used. They are words related to cognition and recognition of things, to see and to know. And you don't know the Hebrew, but it's important to see that all through this section God is bringing out a point about seeing things as a picture of knowing things. So we have Deuteronomy 13, 18 where Moses says to Israel, because you have listened to the voice of the Lord your God to keep all the commandments which I command you today, to do what is right in the eyes of the Lord your God. That is in contrast now to the generations of the judges. We see this idiom of the eyes also used. It's used in 1318 to show God's knowledge, doing what's right. It's an ethical value there, what is right in the eyes of the Lord. It's really what's right in God's thinking. And it's used in a similar way in 2 Chronicles 16.9 for the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth." He's looking. He's seeking knowledge to show himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is loyal to him. That doesn't mean they were sinless. Later we learn that David is a man after God's own heart. It doesn't mean that David was sinless. But the contrast of David with Saul before him and with Solomon after is what happens to Saul. He disobeys God and in 1 Samuel chapter 15 he is indicted by Samuel who says that rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft and it is compared to idolatry. And here And then with Solomon, Solomon actually goes over and is influenced by his many wives to be an idolater. And so God is looking for someone whose heart is loyal to him. When we talk about David's heart, he's a man after God's own heart, it doesn't mean he didn't sin. He sinned egregiously, but he never abandoned God as a rebel. He never turned to idolatry. And he was always loyal to God even when he, even though he sinned. So this is what Second Chronicles 16.9 talks about. Notice it goes on to say, in this you have done foolishly. Foolishness is how God characterizes idolatry. So we come to Judges 16.4 and 5. What we see here is that afterward we're told that he loved a woman in the Valley of Sorok. And this Valley of Sorok went down from the hill country of Judea down to the coastal plain, which is where the Philistines lived. And so he is going in the opposite direction, away from his people and away from the Israelites. And so this shows that his focus is not on the things of God or the people of God. We also looked at her name. Her name is Delilah, the only one of the women in the account of Samson that is named. And there's some debate over what it means, but the one that I find most commentators emphasizing the most is the one that it comes from a the meaning of someone who is a devotee of a god or goddess. And so it is suggested, we can't prove it, but it's suggested that she is linked to the fertility goddess Ishtar. And so she was very likely a temple prostitute. that is going to be bribed by the reward that the Lords of the Philistines offer in order to get her to entice Samson. They figured she's had a lot of experience, and so she is going to be used by them to get him to give up the source of his strength. Now, the next thing we see here, they say, entice him. Find out where his great strength lies and by what means we may overpower him. That we may bind him to afflict him. What that means is we want to tie him up so we can torture him. And that's what they want to do because of all the problems that he has caused. They want to go a lot further than just waterboarding him. They want to torture him until he dies. And not only are they going to afflict him, But they are going to gouge out his eyes. Now that's important because what's the background theme here? It's seeing things, it's knowledge, and because of his rebellion against God, he ends up being blinded. So he can't see the light anymore. And what are they offering? 1,100 pieces of silver. Now, there's a couple of different ways that you can look at this, but probably, you know, some people I've read, they look at this and they try to weigh it out in terms of how much dollar value that would have in today's world. And it doesn't come out to what is a lot. It comes out to maybe $200,000 or $300,000. Now, some people think that's a lot of money. But that's not going to last long in today's world or today's economy. Now, if each one of them, five lords, gives 1,100 pieces of silver, that's 5,500 shekels. Now, let's look at some comparison. Gideon, after defeating the Midianite kings and taking all the spoil and plunder from the Midianite army, He had 700 shekels of gold from that spoil. So that's not a whole lot compared to 5,500 shekels. I know we're comparing silver and gold, but back then there wasn't maybe a lot of difference between the two. Bimelech was given, now this is his son. He's given 70 shekels of silver to hire his gang, his army, mercenary army of reckless and violent men, 70 shekels. We're talking 5,500 shekels of silver. Abraham, now this is 600 years earlier, so it's not exactly comparing at the same time frame, but he bought the burial plot in Machpelah, which is near Hebron. And for his burial site and for Sarah's burial site, And that was 400 shekels. So we're talking 12 times that amount. David paid 50 shekels. That's less than a tenth. 50 shekels for Arunah, the Hittite, to sell him the threshing floor on the Temple Mount, which would be the site of the future Temple Mount. And it was the land itself, the threshing floor, and the oxen. But the closest comparison is right in our text. In Judges 17, in the next chapter, Micah is going to start his own alternate religion, and he hires an apostate Levitical priest, and he offers him 10 shekels of silver a year a suit of clothes and his sustenance. So he's going to give him room and board and ten shekels of silver a year. Now, if you work out those details, what you end up with is that You have 550, 5,500 rather, pieces of silver. So you have 550, you divide 5,500 by 10, you have annual living for 550 years. That's a lot of money. And that tells you that Delilah would have been one of the richest women not just in the Middle East, but probably in the world, to have that much money. So that shows how important they think the death of Samson is. His life isn't worth 100 shekels or 1,000 shekels. It's worth 5,500 shekels. They want him dead. So this is hard for her to resist that. And so there are going to be four attempts to get him to give up his secret. Only the fourth one, only the last one is one that is going to be successful. And what happens is, after we look at the introduction in verses 4 and 5, we see that Delilah comes to him in verse 6 and begins to plead with him, to wheedle him, to work her feminine wiles on him in order to seduce him into telling her what his secret is. What's interesting is there's great drama here. This is one of those great stories in the Bible that that lend themselves to films and movies and dramatic short stories because it has all of the elements of a good story. And he just wants to kind of play with her. He's not really going to give it up, but there's something going on in the text that indicates that he gives, because you know what the answer is, he's giving away little hints. And that builds suspense in the reader, because in each one of these, he kind of gives up a little more. He doesn't quite give up the whole thing. But you say, you're playing with fire here. You are getting too close to the truth. And are you going to give it up or not? So. And also in the midst of it, there are indications about his attitude towards his Nazareth Nazarite vow. So he says, Delilah says to him, please tell me where your great strength lies. And with what you may be bound to afflict you. How can anybody ever tie you up? You are so strong. Feel those muscles. Flex your muscles for me. Oh, it's so wonderful. Tell me, how did you get so strong? And he's just a sucker for it. But at this point, he's not going to give it up very easily. And he says, if they bind me with seven fresh bow strings. Now that doesn't mean a whole lot to most of you here, even if you are into archery, because we use a lot of things today to make bow strings that are made from lots of different kinds of material. But in the ancient world, they would make it Like, you know, we talk about guitar strings made from cat gut, from the intestines, and the same kind of thing that you'd make bow strings from cat gut or from parts of animals. And as you see in the box at the bottom, the Hebrew word is yeter, and it is used in Psalm 11.2 and Job 30.11 for bow strings. It is used in Job 421 for tent cords. And what they used was tendons from animals. They would take the tendons of the ligaments and they would use them to make these cords. And if you took fresh tendons, then as it dried out, it would draw tighter and tighter. So he is, tells her, well, if they bind me with seven fresh, notice the emphasis there, fresh bow strings, not yet dried, then I shall become weak and be like any other man. But see, what he's playing with here, he's violating his Nazarite vow again, because the tendons come from a dead animal, and he is not supposed to touch a carcass, or come close to a carcass. And so he is going to be touching something unclean. And so what happens is the Lords of the Philistines brought her seven fresh tendons, not yet dried, and he apparently falls asleep. And he must have been tired or he felt fairly secure. He falls asleep into a deep sleep. And she tied him up with these fresh tendons. And so these men are lying in wait. They're hiding out outside the house, waiting for her to give the signal. And she yells at Samson, the Philistines are here. They're about to jump on you. And he stands up and he just breaks the bro strings. An interesting comparison. as a strand of yarn breaks when it touches fire. If you've ever taken a string and held a match to it, then it just, well, that's how it was. These tendons just fell off of him. So that the secret of his strength was not yet known. Well, that's the first attempt. Then we come to the second attempt, and this is going to involve tying him up with new ropes. And so as they tie him up with these new ropes, her learning about it, Delilah then says to Samson, and you can tell she's probably a little miffed at this point. She wants those 5,500 shekels. She said, you have mocked me. You're just teasing me. You told me lies. Now, please tell me what you may be bound with." And, you know, from the language later on, she's just wheedling. She's beginning to kind of whine and she's just looking at him and maybe her eyes are watering. You don't trust me. And so he says to her, well, This time he's saying a little more. He says, if they bind me securely with new ropes that have never been used. Now, so if they've never been used, then they've never touched anything that's unclean. And so he said that would be the indication there. And he says, well, I'll become weak and be like any other man. So did Lila took new ropes. Now there's a lot of time goes by because she's got to go down to the hardware store and go to Lowe's or Home Depot and get the new never before used ropes and bring them back. And she's probably has to learn what proper knots to use to tie it. My experience today is that most people do not know how to tie the right kind of knots for various things. And if you were in the Navy or had anything to do with the Navy, I was in Sea Explorers at one time, you had to learn all kinds of knots. It was pretty standard when I was a teenager that you learned how to tie all kinds of knots. And when I was a camp counselor, that was one of the things I always taught the boys in my cabin was how to tie various knots. So she would have to learn how to tie knots to do this effectively. So there's a little bit of time that goes by here for her to go over that learning curve and then she he falls asleep again and she ties him up. Now that always raises a question in a lot of people's minds is how is it that that he manages to sleep so soundly that she can tie him up and he doesn't wake up. I don't know, but I think God had something to do with that because of where the story goes. But I can't prove that. That's just my opinion there. So she takes the new ropes and then as soon as she gets him tied up again, she cries out, the Philistines are on you, Samson. And men were lying in wait staying in the room. They have snuck into the house and he doesn't wake up. But as soon as he does, he wakes up and he just breaks them off. That is the, the ropes that have tied, tied him up, uh, broke his, as if he would just tied up with a thread. So two tries, two strikes, she's out. She goes for a third one. Now he's getting a little closer. He says, he's going to talk about the seven braids of his hair. So he's getting close to the real issue here, which is his hair. And he says, she says to him rather, until now, you've just mocked me. So she starts whining a little more and cajoling and trying to whittle him to give up his secret. You've mocked me and told me lies. Tell me what you can be bound with." And this time he said, if you weave the seven locks of my head into the web of the loom. Now the reason I have that underlined is in some passages it calls it the baton of the loom as a translation, but that's based on the Masoretic text, which is odd, and the batten or the web of the loom would be part of the loom itself. But the septuagint, the septuagint has it translated as the material, the fabric of the loom. That's what I have down here at the bottom. If you weave the seven braids of my hair into the fabric, so in the loom you're weaving the fabric And then his hair would be woven into the fabric itself and then secured with a pin, which makes a little more sense. And he again, but he's pointing to the real issue here, which has something to do with his hair. And he says, if you do that, then I'll become weak and be like any other man. So. Then in verse 15, she says, well, how can you really say you love me and not tell me the truth? So she's going back to the strategy of the temna woman and make the issue out of love. How can you say you love me? So she's pressuring him and nagging him continually. She says, you've mocked me these three times and have not told me where your great strength lies. And it came to pass when she pestered him daily. So this goes on day in and day out. And finally, he said, I like the translation, his soul was vexed to death. I don't know if anybody here has ever been around somebody that vexed them to death, but you get the idea. And so this is what happens after After verse 14, did I leave a verse out? No, in verse 16. And so she's trying to figure this out. And in 16, then we follow that with 17. He told her. Then he finally tells her what has happened and what the reality is. And she says, no razor. He tells her about the Nazirite vow. And it seems like he knows something about this vow, in some sense, and he tells her. He says, no razor has ever come upon my head, for I have been a Nazarite to God from my mother's womb, which literally, it's an idiom, which means from birth. He says, if I am shaven, then my strength will leave me and I shall become weak and be like like any other man. So she has now gotten the truth and it has the ring of truth. And so she realizes that he has given it up. And in verse 18, we read when Delilah saw that he had told her all his heart, she sends for the Philistines. And she says, come, and he's told me everything. And this time when they come, they bring the bribe money. And so she's ready for her 5,500 shekels. And she lulls Samson to sleep again. You know, whatever she was doing, they need to bottle it and put it in a sleeping aid for a lot of people. and he falls asleep and she is able to shave off the seven locks or the seven braids of his head and then she begins to torment him. She's beginning to torture him a little bit and he doesn't have any strength anymore. So she calls out that the Philistines are upon you and he wakes up from his sleep and says, and he's thinking, I will go out as before, and I'll just shake myself free." But he did not know that the Lord had departed him. Now, his strength wasn't magic. His strength was not really tied to his lucks. His strength came from the Lord, who gave it to him. And the hair length was simply a sign of his Nazirite vow. now the Lord had departed from him, because that's the real strength. The Spirit of the Lord had strengthened him. So we come to verses 21, 22, and we read that the Philistines took him and they gouged out his eyes. They are torturing him. They gouge out his eyes And they bound him with bronze fetters. And the word that is translated fetters in the Hebrew, Hebrew is a little different from English. In English, we have a singular and a plural. But in Hebrew, they have a dual. So if you're talking about two people, you would use a dual ending. If you're talking about three or more, you would use a plural ending. Well, the ending on the fetters is a dual ending. And that indicates that there are two sets of fetters. So he is chained up by his hands, his wrists, his forearms. And he has his legs chained together at the ankle. And they take him, and he's running a grist mill in prison. This is woman's work. So here's this man that was the most feared man among the Philistines, and now he is blind, he is helpless, and he is reduced to doing the work associated with women, with the lower working class type of woman. And so he has been brought low. This gives him time to reflect. He finally does. He gets out of his self-absorption and realizes what the real problem was, and that was his relationship with God. And then we are left at this part of the story with thinking that things are pretty hopeless for Israel. The great hero, the judge God raised up, has not had victory. And he has now been laid very low working in a mill as a grinder. But then we have hope. However, the hair of his head began to grow again after it had been shaven. That's really interesting. I don't know about you, but I've always noticed that my hair pretty normally grows about a quarter of an inch or so a month. That's not very fast. And for his hair to grow long where people would notice it, probably three or four or five months needs to go by and he might have an inch of hair. I have a sense here that maybe it grew a little faster because we see the impact of what he says next. And what he does next is that he has gotten right with the Lord. And so it is not the fact that his hair is a little longer, it's that he's turning to God. Now in verse 23, now the lords of the Philistines gathered together to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon their God. Now this is what we're seeing here is this is the part of the spiritual revolt. Because we know from passages we've studied in Deuteronomy and other passages that behind each of the idols and each of the false gods, there's a demon. There's a reality. They're not just figures of stone or wood or metal. These gods and goddesses are actually empowered by demons. And I always found that to be very interesting that when John Milton wrote a paradise lost, that when he is naming the demons, he names them Zeus and Jupiter and Malik and Baal and El, the names of the false gods in the various pagan pantheons. And so Dagon was this great god of the Philistines, and they're saying that their victory over Samson was due to Dagon. And their victory over Samson wasn't due to Dagon at all, it was due to Yahweh. Because Yahweh is allowing Samson to be defeated as he has throughout his life. God is going to work in spite of Samson to bring about the confusion that he wishes to create between the Israelites and the Philistines. And so they're saying that our God has delivered into our hands Samson, our enemy. And they're praising Dagon. They're attributing to him the fact that Samson was delivered into their hands. And God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Yahweh, is not being honored. And God isn't going to stand for that. And so it happened when their hearts were married. So they're having just a drunken party and orgy and everything. They said, bring out Samson that he may perform for us. So they're drunk and they don't realize anything, but they're going to make fun of him because now he's blind and he's lost his strength and can't do anything. And so he comes out and he is between these massive pillars holding up the giving support to the temple of Dagon and Samson is being led by this young boy who has gone in to get him and he can't find his way around anything and this kid has to lead him out which is not the picture of a hero and he says well let me feel the pillars which support the temple so that I can lean on them so he's a little bit uh... deceptive there he's gotten he's candy he understands what needs to do and he doesn't need to make a big deal about it and then we're told in verse twenty seven the temple is filled with people there's a massive crowd here and these temples could be quite large i don't think it was large as the parthenon uh... in in uh... athens but it was fairly large and there's probably several hundred, if not thousand, people who are all gathered there for this drunken celebration. Three thousand men and women, it says, on the roof. How many more were below? Several other thousand. And Samson calls upon Yahweh. That's the first time we really see that. Earlier he calls upon Elohim, but here he makes the point he's calling upon Yahweh. And he says, Oh, Yahweh Elohim, Lord God, remember me, I pray. He is humbling himself under the mighty hand of God. Strengthen me, I pray, just this once, oh God, that I may with one blow take vengeance on the Philistines for my two eyes. So we still see he's self-absorbed there. And so Samson then takes hold of the two pillars, which support the temple, and braces himself against them, one on his right, the other on his left, and says, let me die with the Philistines. And he pushed with all his might, and the temple fell on the lords. So he does away with the leadership. This is going to wreak havoc in the social structure of the Philistines. He's taking out their cadre of leaders. Let me die with the Philistines. And he pushed with all his might, And the temple fell on the lords and all the people who were in it, so that the dead that he killed at his death were more than he had killed in his whole life." That's just remarkable. And I think that this is the time in Samson's life when he truly trusted God and fulfilled his mission in submission to God as opposed to just being a wild man. And that's why he's listed in Hebrews chapter 11. And so then we come to the conclusion, the conclusion to the Samson story. And this is the conclusion to the narrative of the deliverers that started with Othniel back in chapter 3. And his brothers and all his father's household came down and took him and brought him up and buried him between Zorah and Eshtoel in the tomb of his father Manoah. He had judged Israel 20 years. So that tells us that when you go back to 1520 that he tells us that he judged Israel 20 years that this is that final episode and a lot took place in between. So what we have looked at here is that Samson has a unique and distinctive role. Sometimes God raises believers up this way. They're rebellious, they're carnal, but God is using them in different ways to disrupt other Christians, to get other Christians to maybe focus on the Lord. He can use anybody to accomplish whatever he wants in his life. As I was reflecting today upon our president's speech, I kept thinking, there's a reason why God has permitted this man to be our president. A lot of us don't care for him very much. We think he's demented. We think that he is basically a puppet of others, and that may or may not be true. But God has given us, at different times in our history, men who did some things in their role that was why they were there. And we would not necessarily have voted for them. But God wanted them there because of certain decisions that they would make for good or for ill. So he may be a judgment on this nation, taking us further down the slide into self-destruction. And so we can't really figure it out. In the church age, God's not sending us a prophet that's going to tell us how to properly interpret all of these events. So we really don't know. All we can do as we can trust the Lord and not lean on our own understanding. There's too many Christians who are trying to interpret all of these events, and that just is a sign of arrogance. And God is going to direct our paths for good or for ill. I constantly have thought about what happened in the 30s in this country. In the 1920s, we were very close to going down the postmodern path, because as Europe had, and we were just a little bit behind them. But the Depression, the Great Depression, and then World War II prevented that so that our culture had a sort of a renewal of patriotism and focus on the Constitution. But we had a president who was very, very liberal and very, very progressive at that time. And he did a lot of things to try to solve the problem of the Depression. And many economists who understand reality and not the fiction of socialism have made the points that things that he did did nothing to really help get us out of the Depression. And he made other decisions and led us closer in many ways to socialism. And his wife was much worse and wanted much worse. But as I have read about Franklin Roosevelt, I'm convinced that there probably wasn't anybody else on the scene who understood what was happening in in Europe and the need for the United States to be involved and stop the evil of Hitler. Now, he didn't do much, granted, to stop the Holocaust, but he understood that you weren't going to stop the Holocaust unless you just stopped Hitler. And he was able to lead this nation in a way that I don't think anybody else would have done. That's just my opinion. But when the time came, God took him out in, what was it, April, early April of 45, and put Harry Truman in. And Harry Truman became president, and I believe God put him there because no one else would have done what Truman did. Truman, within 15 minutes of Israel declaring their independence, recognized the state of Israel. Roosevelt never would have done that. But God knew that. That's why he took Roosevelt out and he put Truman in. We can't fathom, and only history gives us enough distance to perhaps see why God is moving certain people into certain positions. And I'm sure there were a lot of people in And Israel who thought, what's going on with Samson? He's not raising an army. He's not doing this. He's not doing that. He's just going down there and chasing Philistine prostitutes all the time. What kind of leader is he? And yet God was using him to do what God wanted to accomplish, which was to cause a disruption to stop the assimilation of the Jews to the paganism of the Philistines. So we need to think a little deeper about some of the things that are going on in our own times. Some of these things we'll never figure out. We're too close to them. And we just need to trust the Lord and relax and not get bent out of shape every time we see something on the news that upsets us. Now, I'm talking to myself as much as I'm talking to anybody here. I know most of you don't do that. But we've got to put our focus on our spiritual life and our biblical responsibilities and quit watching the news and living moment to moment on the basis of what these idiots in Congress do. That's not a biblical focal point for any of us. So I think there's some good lessons to learn based on the negative from looking at how God used a man like Samson. So next time, we're going to come back, and we're going to be into the final appendices, as it were, the final two sort of epilogues of judges which are brutal. But let's face it. When paganism rules, life is brutal for people. And that's what we're seeing in our country now. So there are still many lessons to learn from the negative. Father, thank you for this opportunity. to look at how in your grace you used a man who was rebellious, who was not concerned at all with your will, who ignored his vow for the most part, and only realized the issues at the very end of his life. But you used him. Our desire is that we do what you want us to do so that you use us in a positive way that we may participate in the blessing that comes from your work in our lives. But unfortunately, there are too many that are disobedient, and you use them anyway, but they don't get a blessing out of it. So Father, we pray that you might encourage us and give us fresh insight into things as we think about Samson. We pray this in Christ's name, amen.