Scripture Daily

Context No. 1765 of 4322 · Judges

Context · Reflection

Judges 16:6-10: in context

6Delilah said to Samson, “Please tell me where your great strength lies, and what you might be bound to afflict you.” 7Samson said to her, “If they bind me with seven green cords that were never dried, then shall I become weak, and be as another man.” 8Then the lords of the Philistines brought up to her seven green cords which had not been dried, and she bound him with them. 9Now she had an ambush waiting in the inner room. She said to him, “The Philistines are on you, Samson!” He broke the cords as a flax thread is broken when it touches the fire. So his strength was not known. 10Delilah said to Samson, “Behold, you have mocked me, and told me lies. Now please tell me how you might be bound.”

Delilah, in the pay of the Philistines, presses Samson to reveal the secret of his strength and how he might be bound. Samson toys with her: bind me with seven fresh cords, he says, and I will be weak. The Philistines bring the cords, she binds him, and cries that they are upon him; and he snaps the cords like burnt thread. Delilah complains that he has mocked her and lied, and asks again. And Samson, instead of fleeing the danger, stays and keeps playing the game.

The folly on display here is not weakness but a kind of reckless confidence. Samson knows that Delilah is trying to bring him down; her repeated probing, her handing him over to the ambush in the next room, make her intent unmistakable. And yet he stays. He plays games with her, gives false answers, flirts with the danger, imagining he can toy with the thing that is out to destroy him and remain in control. He treats the danger as a game he can win, dallying in the lap of the one plotting his ruin, sure he can handle it. And step by step, the game draws him in, until at last he gives away the secret and is undone. There is a warning here about the folly of toying with temptation. Samson's downfall was not that he was overpowered against his will, but that he chose to stay and play with a danger he should have fled. We are prone to the same: to flirt with a temptation, to keep company with what we know is trying to pull us down, to dally near the edge, confident we can handle it and stop before it is too late. But temptation is not a game we toy with safely; it draws us in by degrees, and the confidence that we can play with it and stay in control is exactly the confidence that undoes us. The wise response to what is out to destroy us is not to play with it but to flee it. Joseph, tempted, ran; Samson stayed and played, and lost everything. When we know something is out to pull us down, the folly is to linger and toy with it; the wisdom is to get away.

Is there a temptation I am toying with, lingering near a danger I know is out to pull me down, confident I can play with it and stop in time, and can I learn from Samson's folly that temptation is not a game we handle safely, but something to flee rather than dally with?

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