Context No. 3959 of 4322 · Judges

Judges 16:1-5: in context

1Samson went to Gaza, and saw there a prostitute, and went in to her. 2The Gazites were told, “Samson is here!” They surrounded him and laid wait for him all night in the gate of the city, and were quiet all the night, saying, “Wait until morning light; then we will kill him.” 3Samson lay until midnight, then arose at midnight and took hold of the doors of the gate of the city, with the two posts, and plucked them up, bar and all, and put them on his shoulders and carried them up to the top of the mountain that is before Hebron. 4It came to pass afterward that he loved a woman in the valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah. 5The lords of the Philistines came up to her and said to her, “Entice him, and see in which his great strength lies, and by what means we may prevail against him, that we may bind him to afflict him; and we will each give you eleven hundred pieces of silver.”

This passage shows Samson's great strength and his fatal weakness side by side. In one scene he displays astonishing strength, tearing up the gates of Gaza, posts and bar, and carrying them off on his shoulders. But it opens and closes with his weakness: he goes in to a prostitute in Gaza, and then falls in love with Delilah, through whom the Philistines will finally engineer his downfall.

Here is a man of extraordinary strength who could not master his own passions. Samson could carry off the gates of a city, but he could not control his desires, and it was there, in the area of his moral weakness, not his physical strength, that the enemy finally defeated him. There is a sobering lesson in this pairing of strength and weakness. Our undoing often comes not in the areas where we are strong, but in the place we feel invincible and let down our guard. Samson's physical strength was never the problem; his unguarded appetites were. It is a warning to watch not only the areas where we are visibly weak, but the very places where we feel strong and therefore careless, for it is often there that we grow careless and fall.

Am I guarding not only my obvious weaknesses but the very areas where I feel strong and invincible, aware that, like Samson, my undoing may come not from what is visibly weak but from the passions I fail to master?

Sources

Judges 16:3: "Samson... took hold of the doors of the gate of the city, with the two posts, and plucked them up, bar and all, and put them on his shoulders."
Judges 16:4: "It came to pass afterward that he loved a woman in the valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah."
1 Corinthians 10:12: "Therefore let him who thinks he stands be careful that he doesn't fall."