not that the Lord was departed from him.” Poor Samson! What a sorry awakening! The giant had become a weakling and without knowing it. You are not to suppose that his strength went from him in an hour because he told a woman his secret and let her shave his head. I take it that that is simply a dramatic and forcible way of telling how he degenerated and his strength left him. He had been gradually weakening, falling, departing from the spirit of his Nazarite vow. His power had been going without his knowing it and one day he awoke to find it gone.
Here again the story is true to life. This is the way strength usually goes in regards to physical strength, the invalid, after a few days illness, thinks he can rise and walk and work but finds his strength has gone. In regards to mental strength, politicians, preachers, singers, keep on after their power has gone. That is how moral strength goes too. Men smile superciliously when you suggest that trifling with wine cups, having a shilling in their fancy, sporting with Delilah may ruin them. “Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?” They know when to stop. But the question is stopping when you know you ought to. The evil you are flirting with is sapping your strength and will hand you over to slavery.
Religious strength goes this way too. We all know people who neglect the means of grace, allow the family altar to fall into ruins and the dust to gather on the Bible, and who are rather sarcastic towards earnest folk who keep these things up. They declare that they are growing broader and not weaker, and yet, we can read the story of Samson with a religious interpretation.
My friends, we cannot help the loss of physical and mental strength and there is no tragedy when they go. But we need not and ought not to lose our moral and religious energy. We can go from strength to strength. Is it not written that, though youths faint and be weary, they that wait upon God shall renew their strength?
STRENGTH MAY BE RECOVERED BY A RETURN TO FAITH
Turn now to the closing scenes of Samson’s life. I have nothing to take back of the solemn and stern words I have tried to say, but I must proclaim the gospel Samson’s closing days preach. Look at the man. “Ask for the deliverer now, and find him eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves. Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke. With his heaven-gifted strength put to the labor of a beast.” What a sorry spectacle! Sightless, a slave, ageing fast. But it is not the sorriest spectacle in that tragic life. In some respects, it is the most hopeful. Blinded by his enemies, Samson is recovering his inward sight. Never again will he look upon the dazzling sights of earth, but there is still opportunity to look upon the face of God. The lonely prison cell became a house of God, a place of prayer and penitence. In the night of his blindness Samson spoke with his God and held Him fast.
The day of his disgrace was his day of grace. The cutting of his hair was the outward sign of his inner dislocation and departure from God. In the prison, “the hair of his head began to grow again.” He got back to purity, to faith, to the spirit of his vow. He prayed, “Remember me, O Lord, just this once.” And you know the sequel. Call it a mean, petty, personal revenge if you will, I cannot join you. I have to judge this man in the light of his day, by the rude and rough laws of his time and not by Christian standards. I have to remember that the Philistines were the sworn foes of Israel’s integrity as a nation and of their faith in the One God, and that slaying Philistines was thought to be serving God. And, anyway, I have to preach the gospel that the miracle of Samson’s life may be worked in yours. His fall has not been yours, nor his temptations. But how many of us have failed to keep the vows, the purity, and the faith of other days.
Think of the vow you made at your mother’s knee, when you gave yourself to Christ and joined the church. When God delivered you from some threatening trouble. Have you allowed the enemies of God and your soul to rob you of your strength, your faith, your purity, your zeal? I am here to call you back. Back! I pray you to the old pure vows. Back! To your loyalty to God. Back! To the old sense of separation to a holy life and Divine service.
For some of you, the day is far spent and the night is at hand. For others, the sun is still high in the sky. For all of you this gospel is that if you will return to your faith, your strength will return to you. If you will pray God will bless you with his reviving grace and make his strength perfect in your weakness. Pray Samson’s prayer, “Remember me, O Lord.” Cry, “Give me back my heart, my purity, my power.” God always answers that prayer when it comes from a penitent heart, and in the abundance of the answer the failures of the past shall be swallowed up in the victories yet to be.
16. The actual quote of John Greenleaf Whittier, taken from the last two lines of the work, is: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen / The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” This is a quote from a poem entitled “Maud Muller” (1856).
17. This is taken from Alexander Whyte’s Dictionary of Bible Characters (1901), the entry on Samson.
18. From Tennyson’s poem of 1842, “Sir Galahad.”
“GOD AND BREAD”—Ruth 1.6
(Preached twelve times including Spring Head Mission 9/20/36 and Prees Green 10/7/51; a Harvest Sermon)
Ruth 1.6 “The Lord had visited His people in giving them bread.”
“The loveliest little idyll that tradition has transmitted to us.” That is how Goethe described the book of Ruth, and the German poet was a judge of such matters. The book opens in tragedy and ends in sheer romance. It begins with a famine and ends in a harvest field. It contains a lovely love story leading to a romantic wedding. You are left with the picture of a sweet-faced granny crowing over a little boy. And you know that that boy was the destined grandfather of great David and an ancestor of great David’s greater Son. The story is set in the background of a harvest field and it mimes to the swish of the scythes in the golden corn and the greetings of the song of the reapers as they bind the sheaves. That fact makes the book a happy hunting ground for preachers in search of a text for a Harvest Festival.
In it I found the simple and direct message which seems a word in season for us. As definitely as any passage I know the text relates the Harvest to a gracious Divine visitation. Standing in the midst of signs and tokens of an abundant harvest, seated at our well-spread tables, we can change our word, and read the text in the present instead of the past tense and say, “The Lord hath visited His people in giving them bread.” Then the first fact to be emphasized is that of—
THE GRACE OF DIVINE VISITATIONS
That is not how we usually think of Divine visitation. In the presence of some inexplicable tragedy, some judgment of disaster and death, our juries return a verdict of “died by the visitation of God.” We associate plagues and catastrophes with the same visitation, when we quote the words, “Prepare to meet thy God,” we are positively afraid of the meeting. Doubtless God does sometimes come in swift condemnation of judgment of the sins of a people or an individual. But as Isaiah says, that is His “strange work.”
God’s ancient people were versed in this matter. They associated God’s visits with mercy rather than with judgment, with compassion rather than condemnation. God visited His people when He saw their need and heard their sighs. He came down to deliver them. Their statement of redemption was, “God hath visited and redeemed His people.” The day of Jerusalem’s visitation was the season of God’s loving pleading and patient waiting for them to turn to Him.
We ought to learn the lesson, to associate Divine visitations with redemption and blessing. Instead of dreading we ought to welcome and pray for the visits of God, to
