Judges 15:1-5: a reflection

1But after a while, in the time of wheat harvest, Samson visited his wife with a young goat. He said, “I will go in to my wife’s room.” But her father wouldn’t allow him to go in. 2Her father said, “I most certainly thought that you utterly hated her; therefore I gave her to your companion. Isn’t her younger sister more beautiful than she? Please, take her instead.” 3Samson said to them, “This time I will be blameless in the case of the Philistines when I harm them.” 4Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took torches, and turned tail to tail, and put a torch in the middle between every two tails. 5When he had set the torches on fire, he let them go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up both the shocks and the standing grain, and also the olive groves.

The story of Samson burning the Philistines' fields is part of a spiral of personal revenge. Samson comes to reclaim his wife, finds she has been given to another, and responds by tying torches to foxes and setting the Philistines' grain, vineyards, and olive groves ablaze. It is a striking display of his God-given strength and cunning, but notice what he spends it on: a private vendetta, a tit-for-tat retaliation that will only provoke a worse response in turn.

Notice the waste in it. Samson had been set apart from birth for God's purposes, given remarkable strength to begin delivering Israel. And here that strength is poured into personal revenge, a cycle of grievance and retaliation that serves his own wounded pride more than any purpose of God. The gift is real; the use of it is small, spent on settling a personal score.

There is a caution here about our own gifts and energies. Whatever strength, ability, or influence God has given us can be poured into petty personal grievances, spent on retaliation and score-settling, rather than on the purposes God gave them for. It is a quiet tragedy to take real gifts and waste them on vendettas. Ask whether your own energies are being spent on God's purposes or drained into personal grudges and retaliation. Do not let what God gave you for good be consumed in settling scores. Spend your gifts on what they were given for.

Lord, Samson took the strength you gave him for your purposes and spent it on personal revenge, a cycle of grievance and retaliation. Keep me from wasting the gifts, energy, and influence you have given me on petty grudges and score-settling. Show me where my strength is being drained into vendettas, and help me spend what you gave me on the purposes you gave it for.