1. Have you made peace with your chains?

Have you made peace with your chains?
There’s a moment in that strange novel The Life of Pi where Pi, a boy who grows up in a zoo, tells a story I’ve never forgotten. It’s a story about a bear.

One day, a zoo worker is walking through the grounds, going about his usual duties, when suddenly, he freezes. An enormous, wild-eyed bear is walking straight towards him. Out of its cage. The worker drops what he is carrying and bolts and spreads the alarm. And all the staff of the zoo spring into action, scanning the paths, the bushes, the picnic areas – looking for a predator on the loose.

And then they find it. Back in its cage.

The bear had climbed out. Roamed free. And then… it climbed back in.

Climbed back into the pit. Back into confinement. Back into what it knew.

And Pi’s point is haunting:

Animals love their enclosures. Even when the gate is open, even when freedom is a few steps away, they go back.

But it’s an even more devastating point about human beings. For though we have mercy, redemption, and freedom through the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we develop a kind of spiritual nostalgia for our sins. Christ unlocks the door, but we refuse to leave.

Spiritual amnesia gives birth to spiritual inertia. We forget the wonder and rejoicing at the goodness of God, and so we do not follow him into the adventure of holiness. Sin is a cage we know how to decorate.

This was the spiritual condition of Israel at the start of Judges 13. By now, we know the pattern: Israel did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and so he delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for a generation.

But there the pattern breaks. What is supposed to come next?

That’s right. Israel is supposed to cry out to the Lord in their distress.

But the silence is deafening. No one cries out.

Life under the Philistines wasn’t so bad that they thought they needed freedom. They’d not only forgotten the Lord; they'd forgotten how sweet life with him could be.

It’s one thing to be in pain and cry out to God. It’s another thing entirely to be so numb, so compromised, that you don’t even realise you're enslaved. That’s where Israel is. And that’s where we often are.

2. Samson the Spirit-filled sensualist

a) The birth of the redeemer

Yet God still acts. He raises a deliverer for Israel even before they repent.

And it’s perhaps unsurprising that this deliverer is not just a saviour but a symptom of the spiritual disease that Israel is afflicted with. Samson is like a Marvel hero gone rogue. He turns out to be a man governed by his passions. He is wayward and destructive. A man of surprising strength but obvious weaknesses.

The story of his birth is remarkable. And it sounds like so many other biblical births of saviours. We can’t help thinking of Jesus’ birth when we hear the angel declaring to Samson’s mum that she will become miraculously pregnant.

And the promise is that the boy will ‘take the lead in delivering Israel from the hands of the Philistines’ (vs 5). Not only this, the boy is to be set apart for this sacred purpose. He will be a Nazirite, which is like being a kind of monk. He’s not supposed to cut his hair, or to drink alcohol, nor is he supposed to touch anything dead and so become unclean.

What are we expecting, then? A kind of disciplined holy warrior, dedicated to God. And at first, it all looked promising because the Lord blessed him and the Spirit of the Lord began to stir in him.

b) A man of passions

But the adult Samson is simply a ball of destructive passions. He does what is right in his own eyes. Whatever lust, hunger, greed, anger, or vengeance tell him to do, is what he does.

First: lust. He becomes fixated by a young Philistine woman (14:1-3). She catches his eye, and he must have her. And so, like a man-child, he demands that his parents get her for him, even though getting foreign wives is so often seen as a spiritual trap for the people of Israel. He says: ‘Get her for me. She’s the right one for me!’ – or more literally, ‘Get her for me, for she is right in my eyes’.

And here there’s nudge for us of what’s going on for Samson. Israel were enslaved because they did evil ‘in the eyes of the Lord’. What matters is how God sees what we do.

But Samson has become his own judge, who will do what is right ‘in his own eyes’.

And the Philistine woman seems pretty right in his eyes.

Does this sound like the liberator of Israel, a marked holy man, who will procure for himself a wife from the Philistines? It sounds more as if he wants to adapt himself to Philistine ways.

Secondly: hunger. There’s the strange story of the lion and the honey. It sounds at first like an extraordinary tale of superhuman strength. He tears it apart with his bare hands. But later, the guy who’s not supposed to touch dead things finds honey in the corpse of the lion and can’t help but eat it, and gives some to his parents.

Third: greed and anger. There’s the riddle at the feast of the Philistines. Samson thinks he is being so clever and that he’ll win himself a pretty good prize. He’s greedy. But the Philistines set his wife to nag him into giving her the answer. Overcome by anger, he murders thirty of the Philistines so he can pay his gambling debts and then leaves his wife.

But fourth: vengeance. His wife has been given to someone else. So he now wants to get even with the Philistines. So he puts the foxes together to unleash a fire on their crops. And this led to a terrible cycle of violence. They burnt his wife and her dad to death. Samson killed more of them. And so the Philistines mobilised their army against Judah, so that they might capture him and do to him what he did to them.

Is this looking like salvation? Not at all. In fact, three thousand men of Judah go to Samson to say ‘Will you just back off? What have you brought down on us? The Philistines are our overlords!’

Samson just replies with an answer that sounds like it comes from the school playground: ‘I merely did to them what they did to me’.

You and I know that feeling, don’t we? When rage becomes so familiar that it feels righteous. When passion disguises itself as purpose. And we start to give reasons for what our hearts tell us we need.

Samson is a walking contradiction – the redeemer who is spirit-filled but spiritually immature. The man who is called to save his people but can’t help himself. He’s chaos on legs. He’s all biceps. No boundaries.

3. The Spirit moves – but not how we expect

And here’s the real riddle of this story.

What is the Lord doing during this series of disasters? When we read that the Spirit of the Lord descended on Samson, how is it that holy power seemed to be a force that uses him to do unholy things? Is this what the Spirit looks like? What does it mean that God empowers someone so... unruly?

If Marvel cast Judges 13–16, Samson would be played by The Hulk—fierce, impulsive, tragically alone.

Like the Hulk, Samson possesses terrifying, God-given physical power that can destroy enemies, buildings, and even lions. Like the Hulk, Samson is triggered by rage, betrayal, and wounded pride. And both characters are deeply lonely. Their strength separates them from their community. They don't truly belong.
In Samson, strength becomes a curse when it's divorced from surrender.

So why has God raised this complicated hulk of a man to lead his people?

When I was in Sunday School, I thought of Samson as a straightforward superhero. The point was his amazing strength. The 1960s folk singers Peter, Paul, and Mary, sang a song about Samson that cast him in the role of noble freedom fighter for justice, like an ancient Nelson Mandela.

But the Bible is far more subtle than either of these.

Samson so obviously does only what is right in his own eyes. But in following that path, God uses him anyway to achieve his purposes. As we shall see in a couple of weeks, the overthrow of the Philistines will come about. God will use Samson to shock the Israelites out of their spiritual lethargy. They’ve become too comfortable with the Philistine way of life. They think that they don’t need God. But the Lord uses the career of Samson as a major disruptor for them. He’s not the military hero who raises an army. He’s the wild man who makes normality impossible.

The point isn’t that Samson is holy. The point is that God is holy. And He is still determined to save His people—even if He has to use someone who can’t even save himself.

Because grace doesn’t wait for moral tidiness. It breaks in. It breaks open. It burns even in the ruins. And perhaps that’s the riddle at the heart of the gospel: that God would choose the impulsive, the angry, the self-undoing to begin saving His people.

But even though he’s so deeply flawed, in Samson we see the faint outline of Jesus Christ. We see the longing for someone else, whose strength lies not in muscle but in meekness. Whose passion is not for revenge, but for redemption.

Jesus was also set apart from birth to be a saviour. Jesus was also filled with the Spirit of the Lord.

But his rage was directed against the spiritual forces that hold human beings captive. He died to overthrow sin and death, and to set us free. To unlock the doors to our cages, so that we might live in the true freedom of the Spirit of God.

4. Living in the True Freedom of the Spirit

This story allows us to take a spiritual diagnostic test.

We need to ask ourselves honestly: have we lapsed into spiritual inertia? Have we made peace with our chains? Have we become so used to sin and evil that we simply accept it as the way things will always be?

For Christians in our part of the world, this is always a danger. We’ve got everything so good, really. We have no need of God, we think. And what we’re left with is a gigantic feeling of ‘meh’, when it comes to the grace of God. God made the world and everything in it. Shrug. Jesus died for my sins. I suppose. He rose from the dead. If you say so. But whatever you do, don’t upset people.

Is that what we’ve come to here today? Are we afraid to truly be disciples of Christ because it might upset the people who run business, government, and the media? Do we continue to flirt with the Philistines?

To be honest, I suspect that might be true.

But to become Samson is not the answer. Samson has spiritual power but not spiritual fruit. He is still driven by his appetites. He does not do what is right in the Lord’s eyes, but follows the devices and desires of his own heart.

But the way of the Spirit is forgiveness, not revenge. Self-control and not unruly passions. Patience, not displays of power.

That’s the kind of strength that Jesus gives us. This is the kind of courage we need to have. This is the adventure we are called out on.

And this is who we are becoming.

But lastly, we will see in this story that God will use Samson. Martin Luther is reputed to have said: ‘God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick’. Samson was certainly that. The ways of God look very hidden in this story. There’s a lot of crookedness in it.

That’s familiar to us. We live with a lot of crookedness. And yet, in all the mess and violence and grief, God is at work—hidden, very often subversive, sovereign.

So don’t lose heart at the sight of the ruins—within or around you. If grace found a foothold in Samson’s chaos, it will surely find you too. For even in the crooked shadows, God is drawing straight lines of mercy.

So if you’re feeling too broken to be useful, remember Samson—and take heart. God’s grace knows how to start revival in the ruins.

Benediction