Samson message 3
Judges 15:1-11 Now it happened that after a while, in the time of the wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a young goat and said, “I will go in to my wife in her room.” But her father did not let him enter. 2 And her father said, “I really thought that you hated her intensely; so I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Please let her be yours [a]instead.” 3 Samson then said to them, “This time I shall be innocent in regard to the Philistines when I do them harm.” 4 So Samson went and caught 300 foxes and took torches and turned the foxes tail to tail and put one torch in the middle between two tails. 5 Then he set fire to the torches and sent [b]the foxes into the standing grain of the Philistines. So he caused both the shocks and the standing grain, along with the vineyards and groves, to burn. 6 Then the Philistines said, “Who did this?” And they said, “Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because [c]he took his wife and gave her to his companion.” So the Philistines came up and burned her and her father with fire. 7 Then Samson said to them, “If you act like this, then I will surely take revenge on you, but after that I will cease.” 8 And he struck them [d]ruthlessly with a great slaughter; and he went down and lived in the cleft of the rock of Etam. 9 Then the Philistines went up and camped in Judah and spread out in Lehi. 10 So the men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?” And they said, “We have come up to bind Samson in order to do to him as he did to us.” 11 Then 3,000 men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam and said to Samson, “Do you not know that the Philistines are rulers over us? What then is this that you have done to us?” And he said to them, “As they did to me, so I have done to them.”
Well today we come to the exciting conclusion to the story of Samson in the book of judges. And we've been presenting Samson as an example of bondage to sin. Bondage to sin can be categorized by who the person is who is in the bondage. If you are not a Christian, you are a slave to sin.
John 8:34 “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin.”
Romans 8:7–8 “Because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”
If you are a believer, who is living in disobedience to God, You have resubmitted yourself to bondage To sin.
Romans 6: 16 Do you not know that when you go on presenting yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin [a]leading to death, or of obedience [b]leading to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you obeyed from the heart that pattern of teaching to which you were given over, 18 and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, [c]leading to further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, [d]leading to sanctification.
It should be a scary thought for any Christian that they can resubmit themselves to slavery to sin. Because slavery to sin will lead, in a Christian, two discipline from God even sickness or death.
So that's why we encourage Christians To confess and repent.
1 John 1:8–9 “If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves… If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
James 5:16 “Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed.”
The older I get the more I feel the presence of God continually working on me. I feel conviction concerning things that I didn't feel convicted for in my younger years. I think our struggles in our youth are different than those in our older years. Maybe in our older years we tend to think back over our lives and consider what the consequences have been for the choices that we made as youths.
So, we continue to look at Samson today as an anti example of bondage to sin.
This is what we have considered so far. You come in too bondage To sin When you forget your high calling, when you quit repenting, when you have no standard, when you act on impulse, and finally when you can't perceive the spirit of God. We are going to continue with Samson's acting on impulse and then conclude his story with his losing his perception of the presence of the spirit of God.
As I said last time, God used Samson to exact judgment on the Philistines, but he did so through Samson who seemed to just fly by his impulses.
He goes into a philistine city for no apparent reason, sees a pretty woman there and decides he wants to marry her against the law and his parents' wishes. He slays a lion with his bare hands, and then bees billed a hive in its carcass and he later gets honey out of the carcass, violating his nazareth vow. He goes to the wedding feast for his marriage to this Philistine an impetuously proposes a riddle to 30 men. If they can guess it he will give them 30 garments they get the answer out of his wife he leaves angry and kills 30 men in order to get the garments for his wager. Weeks go by and he decides to visit his wife, but her father has given her to another man. So he won't let Samson in. Samson is angry because of this and catches 300 foxes or jackals ties a firebrand between sets of two of them and releases them into the grain fields of the Philistines. The Philistines, discovering why he did this, burn the wife and her father with fire. Samson is angry about this and Scripture says that he went and slaughtered a great number of the residents for the loss of his wife and future father in law.
Knowing that the Philistines will be seeking his life, now Samson flees to a stronghold The cleft of the rock at Etam. The cleft of the rock at Etam Would have been a cave or rocky area up on a high hill that was easily defensible by a small group or a single man.
Here's where we pick up with our story. The Philistines do indeed come after Sampson.
9 Then the Philistines went up and camped in Judah and spread out in Lehi. 10 So the men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?” And they said, “We have come up to bind Samson in order to do to him as he did to us.” 11 Then 3,000 men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam and said to Samson, “Do you not know that the Philistines are rulers over us? What then is this that you have done to us?” And he said to them, “As they did to me, so I have done to them.”
Now remember that all of this was an illustration of Samsung's impulsiveness. And his impulsiveness was a symptom of his bondage to sin.
Now, we’ve talked about Samson’s impulsiveness. He just does whatever feels right. But the he is just a mirror of Israel. At this point in the story, you might have thought that the Israelites would recognize that God was with Samson. They might have seen that he was empowered by God’s Spirit to fight. They might have remembered God saying that if they would serve God, no one would be able to stand against them.
Joshua 23:10 One of your men will pursue one thousand, for Yahweh your God is He who fights for you, just as He promised you.
That verse was a perfect description of Samson; one man chasing a thousand. You might have thought that they would have recognized that God was raising a deliverer. But they didn’t. They have become comfortable in their service to the Philistines. So, when Samson goes out and does these heroic acts of strength, instead of following him to a victory and freedom from the Philistines, they seek to appease the Philistines.
11 Then 3,000 men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam and said to Samson, “Do you not know that the Philistines are rulers over us? What then is this that you have done to us?”
They take 3,000 men. That kind of tells you that they think there might be trouble with Samson. But what a picture. The men of Israel, sending a posse to arrest their own deliverer to turn him over to their enemy. They are acting on the impulse of the moment.
This reminds me of the passage where Moses goes to Pharaoh to demand that the Children of Israel be let go. And the Pharaoh increases their workload. And the people go back to Moses saying,
Exodus 5:20–21 “May the LORD look upon you and judge you, for you have made us odious in Pharaoh’s sight… to put a sword in their hand to kill us.”
All they saw was that Moses came, and now their work was harder. And that’s how it was with these men of Judah. They are more concerned with maintaining the status quo than coming back into their covenant relationship with God. They live by the impulse of the moment.
And we as believers can get caught in bondage to sin when we fail to train our minds, not to simply follow impulse. It always amuses me people who say, “Well, that’s just who I am.” I speak my mind. I eat or drink what I want. I’m not going to let anyone tell me what to do. I’m not going to let a man or a woman tie me down. I am my own man or woman.
Do you know what that is? That’s an infant. That’s what infants do. I scream when I want to scream. I eat what I want, I'll eat off of the floor. I hit people if i want to hit people. I’ll go in my pants when the urge comes over me. Nobody is going to tell me what to do.
But most of us recognize that maturity is defined by our controlling harmful impulses. Most of us recognize that we have reached adulthood when we learn to control impulses, and do what is right, even against our impulses. The men of Judah didn’t do that. Look again at what they said.
Judges 15:11: “Do you not know that the Philistines rule over us?”
That’s not the Philistines speaking. That’s Israel. They come to Samson—not to join him… but to bind him. They say, in essence: “Stop causing trouble. This is how things are now.”
And note this; Bondage to sin dulls the desire for freedom.
So, what happens? Samson turns himself over to the men of Judah, at their request.
12 And they said to him, “We have come down to bind you so that we may give you into the hand of the Philistines.” And Samson said to them, “Swear to me that you yourselves will not [e]kill me.” 13 So they said to [f]him, “No, but we will bind you fast and give you into their hands; yet surely we will not put you to death.” Then they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.
They tie him up to deliver him to the Philistines. Then they march him down to where the Philistines are gathered in Lehi. Now, the Philistines, upon seeing Samson, are elated. The word quickly spreads across their camp that their great enemy is being perp walked into their hands.
So, spontaneously they let out a cheer of triumph. But their celebration only lasts for a moment. Just in that moment, the Spirit of God comes on Samson. He is filled with strength. He breaks his bonds.
I’m sure quite a commotion was happening. Some of the Philistines see this happen, and are immediately afraid, as though a lion was being released among them. Others are still caught up in the elation of the capture unaware of what is about to happen.
Well, Samson breaks free, and immediately begins looking for a weapon. He grabs whatever he finds at hand. He finds the jawbone of a donkey that is fallen there. And with that primitive bludgeon he tears into the troops gathered before him. He is like a wild man seemingly striking whatever presented itself. But with God’s Spirit guiding his hand, his blows hit precisely and decisively.
We don’t know how all of this went. But we can imagine that at first some of the Philistines rushed toward Samson, hoping to take him down with sheer numbers. But it wasn’t long before their courage turned to terror in the face of this unearthly rampaging man.
At some point I suspect that the Philistines started fleeing. And Samson started pursuing them, taking them down one man at a time until after some time he finds himself miles from where all this had started and there were no more enemies left before him. He had killed 1000 men.
At that moment he stops, looks around to see no one around, and he drops the jawbone. I can almost imagine him letting out a scream of triumph.
And apparently Samson liked riddles and songs. Remember that he had his honey and lion riddle.
“Out of the eater came something to eat, And out of the strong came something sweet.”
He also had his response to his wife revealing the answer to his riddle.
“If you had not plowed with my heifer, You would not have found out my riddle.”
Now, in this desolate place, in celebration of his defeating the Philistines he says,
“With the jawbone of a donkey, [i]Heaps upon heaps, With the jawbone of a donkey I have struck down 1,000 men.”
God performed a great judgement and deliverance there by Samson’s hand. This is the closesst to what his calling was. The army of the Philistines had marched into Israelite territory. They were looking for blood. And if the men of Judah had not been willing to produce Samson, you can be sure that they would have sought to spill Israelite blood.
But, we can’t leave this point without highlighting another one of the evidences that Samson was in bondage to sin. After the slaughter of 1000 men, this is where Samson finds himself.
17 Now it happened that when he had finished speaking, he threw the jawbone from his hand; and he named that place [j]Ramath-lehi. 18 Then he became very thirsty, and he called to Yahweh and said, “You have given this great salvation by the hand of Your slave, but now [k]shall I die of thirst [l]and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?” 19 So God split the hollow place that is in Lehi and water came out of it. Then he drank, and his spirit returned, and he revived. Therefore he named it [m]En-hakkore, which is in Lehi to this day.
Let me highlight two things about this. First, notice that none of Israel was with him in this moment. He is out in the wilderness where he had pursued one after the other of the Philistines who were running away from him alone.
Again, this points out that Israel was in a fallen state of compromise. Three thousand men of Judah had been there to arrest him. And when they see him start fighting the Philistines and winning, instead of joining him in the fight they run home.
Second, it says that he is very thirsty. We can imagine. So, he prays to God. This is the first recorded prayer of Samson. This is one of only two prayers that we read coming from Samson. In his last one, he asks for vengeance. In this prayer he is thirsty. That tells us something about Samson. He is not a deeply spiritual man. His first recorded prayer comes when he is asking God for something. And he doesn't even really ask. He accuses God of not caring for him.
You know, we have had sermons and lessons on prayer. There are a number of acronyms that have been created to teach how a person ought to pray. I’ve taught using the ACTS acronym; in prayer we should start with A adoration of God, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication- asking about our needs. Notice that Adoration comes first, and our needs come last. Another one I’ve heard of is PRAY. Prayer starts with Praise, then repentance, then asking for others needs, then asking for yourself last.
Samson asks for himself first. And he never gets to adoration or praise. Listen again to his prayer.
“You have given this great salvation by the hand of Your slave, but now [k]shall I die of thirst [l]and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?”
In this one, he is thirsty. He is asking God to take care of his need in an offhanded way. And addresses God in almost an accusatory tone, “I fought your battle, now are you going to let me die of thirst?”
This is further evidence of Samson’s bondage to sin. Well this is the end of our point about Samsung's impulsiveness.
5. You are in bondage to sin when you can’t perceive the Spirit of God.
16 Then Samson went to Gaza and saw a harlot there and went in to her.
Well, I think we can definitively say that Sin now controls Samson. He has demonstrated that he is driven by the flesh when he chooses a wife based entirely on physical appearance. And he violates his Nazarite vow of not touching a dead body when he eats honey out of a lion’s carcass. His hunger overrode his calling.
And despite the fact that He has been used mightily by God, his personal spiritual journey always seems to take him to the redlight district. In the beginning of chapter 16, he goes to one of the primary cities of Philistines. Why? Is he making battle plans against Israel’s enemy? Is he going to present a message about their God being God alone? No, none of that. He goes to Gaza to visit a prostitute.
Gaza is the largest of the 5 Philistine cities. Now, I find this amazing. By now, Samson is definitely a wanted man. He is a famous and wanted man among the Philistines. Why in the world would he go into the most populated Philistine city to see a prostitute. The only explanation for this is that he feels invincible, and I think he likes the forbiddenness of going into Philistine territory, and the forbiddenness of Philistine women.
And of course, when he comes to Gaza, he is recognized. But those who recognize him determine to let him stay the night but to try and capture him in the morning. They lock the gates and wait. But instead of staying all night, Samson gets up at midnight to leave. He finds the gates locked. So, this is what Scripture says that he did.
At midnight he arose and seized the doors of the city gate and the two posts and pulled them up along with the bars; then he put them on his shoulders and brought them up to the top of the mountain which is opposite Hebron.
Now, we don’t know how big the gates were. That is not the important part. The important part is that the Spirit of God is still protecting him and strengthening him, but he is presuming on God. He is following his flesh, and just presuming that God will always give him the strength to get out of any bind.
This is where bondage to sin leads. It starts with forgetting your calling, you quit repenting of sin, you have no have no standard, you act on impulse, you can’t perceive the Spirit of God.
And, at this point in Samson’s life, he seems to be totally given over to lust. Because the very next verse says this.
4 Now it happened afterwards that he loved a woman in the valley of Sorek, and her name was Delilah.
Now this just seems like par for the course. Samson finds another Philistine women that he falls for. But there is an interesting detail here.
A woman in the valley of Sorek.
The word “Sorek” comes from a Hebrew root meaning “choice vine” or “vineyard,” indicating that the valley was likely known for its fertile land and abundance of vineyards. This detail is especially significant because Samson was a Nazirite, and under the Nazirite vow, he was to avoid anything that came from the vine (Numbers 6). Even the setting, then, subtly reflects the tension between Samson’s divine calling and the choices he continued to make. Spiritually and culturally, the Valley of Sorek represents far more than a physical location—it is a place of danger, temptation and compromise. It was not fully Israelite territory, nor was it entirely Philistine; it was a borderland where influences mixed and loyalties could easily blur. This mirrors Samson’s own life, as he repeatedly drifted toward Philistine culture and formed relationships that steadily pulled him away from the calling God had placed on him. Well, just as in Gaza, he seems to be wandering into Philistine territory for no other reason than to cruise for chicks.
Well, the Philistines have been watching him. They can’t figure out how to capture him. Any time they have attempted to do so, he has either averted capture by his great strength, or there has been a slaughter of the Philistines. So, they want to figure out his weakness. Well, it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that he has a weakness for women. First, he is driven by lust, and second he is easily manipulated by them.
So, they see that he goes to see this woman named Delilah. Now, we don’t know much about Delilah. It simply says that he loved her. He sees her and falls for her. And immediately the lords of the Philistines get word of this, and hatch a plan.
5 And the lords of the Philistines came up to her and said to her, “Entice him, and see where his great strength lies and [a]how we may overpower him that we may bind him to afflict him. Then we will each give you 1,100 pieces of silver.”
Now that sounds like a lot of money.
Each of the five Philistine rulers offers Delilah 1,100 pieces of silver, for a total of 5,500 pieces of silver. The phrase “piece of silver” likely refers to a shekel, which in the ancient world was a standard unit of weight rather than a minted coin. One shekel weighed about 11 grams (roughly 0.39 ounces), so 1,100 shekels would amount to approximately 12,100 grams, or about 12.1 kilograms (26.7 pounds) of silver. Using a rough modern estimate, with silver around $25 per ounce, that would make 1,100 pieces of silver worth about $10,000–$11,000 or $50,000–$55,000 total from all five rulers. However, simply converting by modern silver prices significantly undervalues the true impact of this sum. In the ancient world, a single shekel could represent several days’ wages, meaning that 1,100 shekels could equal years of income. If one shekel is estimated at 3–5 days’ wages, then 1,100 shekels would represent roughly 9–15 years of labor for each ruler’s offer. Multiplied by five rulers, that totals 45–75 years of wages—an amount comparable to hundreds of thousands of dollars today, and potentially even $1–2 million or more in real economic significance. So, it would seem that they want him bad.
And Delilah is enticed by the offer.
So, she sets about in her plan to entice information out of Samson.
6 So Delilah said to Samson, “Please tell me where your great strength is and [b]how you may be bound to afflict you.” 7 Samson said to her, “If they bind me with seven fresh cords that have not been dried, then I will become weak and be like any other man.”
Hold it! Haven’t we been here before? At his wedding feast, “Why haven’t you told me your riddle?” Tell me your riddle, you don't love me. Which ended with, Her telling the riddle. “If you hadn’t plowed with my heifer, you wouldn’t have found out my riddle.” He has had experience with women trying to get information out of him with emotional manipulation. But here we go again. He gives her an answer, “bind me with seven fresh cords that haven’t been dried.” And while he sleeps, she did it.
8 Then the lords of the Philistines brought up to her seven fresh cords that had not been dried, and she bound him with them. 9 Now she had men lying in wait, sitting in an inner room. And she said to him, “The Philistines are upon you, Samson!” But he snapped the cords as a string of tinder snaps when it [c]touches fire. So his strength was still not known.
Now, we think that Samson is dumb for falling for this. But he’s Not just dumb , he's really dumb
She repeats this three times, each time he tells her his secret, something that is supposed to make him weak. Each time, she puts him to sleep, then tries the thing he said, then cries, the Philistines are upon you! And each time he wakes up and breaks the bonds. Then she accuses him of not loving her.
“Behold, you have deceived me and told me lies; now please tell me [d]how you may be bound.”
“Up to now you have deceived me and told me lies; tell me [g]how you may be bound.”
“How can you say, ‘I love you,’ when your heart is not with me? You have deceived me these three times and have not told me where your great strength is.”
So it says
16 Now it happened when she pressed him daily with her words and urged him, that his soul was [j]annoyed to death.
He is thinking. How do I get this woman to shut up. Oh I've got an idea, get out of there. You shouldn't be there to begin with.
17 So he told her all that was in his heart and said to her, “A razor has never come on my head, for I have been a Nazirite to God from my mother’s womb. If I am shaved, then my strength will leave me and I will become weak and be like every other man.”
Now, I’ve said this before, Samson tells her all that is in his heart. But the secret of Samson’s strength was not his hair. The secret of his strength was God. When the Spirit of God came on him, he was invincible. Now, he may have thought it was his hair. The hair was part of the Nazarite vow. It may have been the only part he hadn't violated . One part was that he wasn’t to touch a dead body. He had violated that one in getting honey from the carcass of the lion. He wasn’t to drink wine or eat any products of grapes. There is no place that explicitly states that he ever drank wine. But he is found in some very compromising places. At his wedding feast, it was likely that wine was present. And when he is with Delilah and she gets the info she wants from him, it says that she “made him sleep on her knees. I think there is at least the possibility that she made him sleep with some intoxicating drink.
So, maybe he had broken all of his Nazarite vows except the hair. And that was all he felt he had left that ingratiated him before God. One thing that is sure is that his righteousness would not have made him right before God. So maybe he thought it was his hair. So, that’s what he tells her. And guess what? She believes him. She cuts his hair.
19 Then she made him sleep on her knees and called for a man and had him shave off the seven locks of his head.
Again, I think he must have been drunk, or how could he sleep through a haircut.
Then she began to afflict him, and his strength left him.
20 And she said, “The Philistines are upon you, Samson!” And he awoke from his sleep and said, “I will go out as at other times and shake myself free.” But he did not know that Yahweh had left him.
This is the most tragic Verse — Judges 16:20: “He did not know that the Lord had left him.”
And that gets us to our last point.
Bondage to sin blinds you to what you’ve lost. He could no longer perceive that the Spirit of God wasn’t present with him, He couldn't hear the still small voice .
Hebrews 5:11–14 “You have become dull of hearing…
Your prayers are hindered.
Psalm 66:18 “If I regard wickedness in my heart, the Lord will not hear.”
You can be affected physically.
1 Corinthians 11:30–32 “For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep… when we are judged, we are disciplined by the Lord…”
Your spiritual understanding can become clouded.
Ephesians 4:17–18 “…darkened in their understanding… because of the hardness of their heart.”
You can lose your joy.
Psalm 51:11–12 “Do not cast me away from Your presence… Restore to me the joy of Your salvation…”
and he was a mirror of Israel.
Throughout the book of Judges, Israel repeatedly demonstrates a tragic spiritual blindness in that they seem largely unaware that they have lost the empowering presence and favor of God’s Spirit. After the death of Joshua, each generation drifts further from the Lord, turning to idols and adopting the practices of the surrounding nations, yet they continue on as if nothing has fundamentally changed. Like Samson, who one by one violated God’s commands until it was only his hair that he clung to. So, The pattern of Israel becomes cyclical: sin, oppression, crying out, and temporary deliverance, but each time, their repentance is more false, and then their return to sin is deeper. They have little lasting awareness of the root problem—their separation from God. Unlike moments when the Spirit comes powerfully upon a judge for deliverance, there is no sustained sensitivity among the people to His absence. They suffer the consequences of that loss—defeat, bondage, and moral decay—without fully recognizing that their greatest need is not merely relief from enemies, but restoration of God’s presence among them. Ohh how sad, a form of godliness but denying the power thereof.
Do you know where this leads? After judges, in history we have 1st Samuel, and almost immediately we have a conflict with the Philistines where they captured the ark of the covenant from Israel. In one battle, Eli the high priest, and his two sons die. The Ark of the Covenant is captured . And as the wife of one of the two sons is giving birth , having heard about the losses , says this.
1 Samuel 4:21 And she called the boy Ichabod, saying, “The glory has departed from Israel,” because the ark of God was taken and because of her father-in-law and her husband.
It is in that story we are introduced to the word Ichabod. “The glory of the Lord has departed.”
As Christians, if we are in bondage to sin, we lose the awareness of the Spirit. A believer can lose awareness.
Ephesians 4:30 says “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.”
Sin does not remove the Spirit from a believer, but it grieves Him, disrupting fellowship and sensitivity to His leading.
1 Thessalonians 5:19 says “Do not quench the Spirit.”
Sin and disobedience can extinguish the Spirit’s active influence in our lives. The picture is of putting out a fire.
Galatians 5:16–17 “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you do not do the things that you want.”
Living in the flesh creates conflict that dulls spiritual awareness.
Hebrews 3:12–13 “Take care… that none of you has an evil, unbelieving heart… But encourage one another… so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”
Sin deceives and hardens, making us less aware of spiritual reality.
In Judges 16:22–31, Samson’s story ends with a final act of judgment, but not a true deliverance. Samson is captured, they gouge out his eyes, they emprison him, and they put him to work at a mill, pushing the mill stone to grind grain. This is a sad state . Bondage To sin and spiritual blindness have turned to literal bondage And blindness. But, his hair begins to grow again, Why do they mention this?
Judges 16: 22 However, the hair of his head began to grow again after it was shaved off.
Because, this is what Samson put his faith in. We can almost imagine Samson, over months, maybe years, his hair is growing and he begins to regain some hope that he will win in the end. But, note that it wasn’t enough that his hair grew. He will have to call on God to regain his strength.
Well, on some special occasion,
23 Now the lords of the Philistines assembled to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon their god and to be glad; and they said, “Our god has given Samson our enemy into our hands.” 24 Then the people saw him and praised their god, for they said, “Our god has given our enemy into our hands, Even the destroyer of our country, Who has slain many of us.”
25 So it happened when their hearts were merry, that they said, “Call for Samson, that he may amuse us.” So they called for Samson from the prison, and he [k]entertained them. And they made him stand between the pillars.
he is brought into the temple of Dagon—blind, bound, and mocked. He asked to be propped against the pillars that hold the upper decks of the temple—and there he prays.
28 Then Samson called to Yahweh and said, “O Lord Yahweh, please remember me and please strengthen me just this time, O God, that I may at once be avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.”
Yet even his prayer is revealing: he does not ask for holiness or restoration, or repentance, but for strength one more time, for the sake of vengeance. God grants his request, and as Samson pushes against the pillars, the temple collapses, killing thousands. The text tells us he killed more in his death than in his life, but we must not miss the deeper reality—there is no revival in Israel, no repentance, and no national deliverance. God uses Samson, but the nation remains in bondage. This becomes a sobering truth: God can use a broken man without restoring his brokeness. The Philistines continue in power beyond Samson’s death. It is not until the days of Samuel that Israel begins to awaken spiritually, under Saul that they begin to resist, and ultimately under David that the Philistines are subdued. Samson did not fully deliver Israel; he only began a process that would take generations to complete.