Scripture Daily

Context No. 1108 of 4322 · Judges

Context · Reflection

Judges 13:1-5: in context

1The children of Israel again did that which was evil in the LORD’s sight; and the LORD delivered them into the hand of the Philistines forty years. 2There was a certain man of Zorah, of the family of the Danites, whose name was Manoah; and his wife was barren, and childless. 3The LORD’s angel appeared to the woman, and said to her, “See now, you are barren and childless; but you shall conceive and bear a son. 4Now therefore please beware and drink no wine nor strong drink, and don’t eat any unclean thing; 5for, behold, you shall conceive and give birth to a son. No razor shall come on his head, for the child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb. He shall begin to save Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.”

Israel has again done evil, and God has handed them to the Philistines for forty years. In the town of Zorah lives a Danite named Manoah whose wife is barren and childless. The angel of the LORD appears to her, not to her husband, with an announcement: you will conceive and bear a son. She must drink no wine or strong drink and eat nothing unclean, for the boy will be a Nazirite to God from the womb, and he will begin to save Israel from the Philistines.

The pattern is a familiar and beautiful one: when God is about to do something great, he often begins with an announcement to a barren woman. Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, and here Manoah's unnamed wife, and later Elizabeth, all women whose emptiness God fills with a child who matters to his purposes. There is a deliberate lesson in it. God loves to start his deliverances in the place of human impossibility, in a womb that cannot conceive, so that the child, and the rescue he brings, are unmistakably gifts and not human achievements. The deliverer of Israel begins not with an army but with a barren woman told she will bear a son. And notice that the angel comes to her, the woman, with the whole message, and that the boy is set apart, a Nazirite from the womb, consecrated before he is even born. God was already at work in this child before his mother felt him move. The great deliverances of God so often start small, hidden, and impossible, an announcement of life to someone who had given up hope of it.

Do I limit God to what seems possible, when he loves to begin his greatest works in places of barrenness and impossibility, announcing life where hope had run out?

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