The Strength of Consecration
“And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.” — JUDGES xvi. 30.
IT is in many senses that the Bible is justly called the “Book of Life.” No doubt that name belongs to it peculiarly because of the great revelation of the higher spiritual life, the life with God, the life in Christ, which fills its pages; but it would also describe the wonderful profusion and variety of vitality of every sort with which the sacred book abounds. Think over the Bible from beginning to end, and ask what other book so overruns with character? What other book so shows the endless diversity of human action? What kind of man is there that is not here? What human strength and weakness is assembled in this company! Where is there such another Book of Life?
For instance, think of two men, one from the Old Testament and one from the New, one the hero of the verse which I have read you for our text, the other the gentle disciple of the Lord — Samson and
St. John, the savage hero of Dan and the spiritua,. youth of Gallilee. How large must be the system of truth which can conceive of the relations which both of these men hold to God, which can see God using both of them for His purposes! How broad must be the stage on which these men have both their parts to play! One of them is the world’s picture of saintliness and love; the other is the perfection of physical vitality. “As holy as St. John,” we say, and “As strong as Samson”; and the same Bible holds them both. The same God uses them both, and so shows, in the long history where they both have part, the completeness of humanity. It is no partial picture. The man who walks the Bible pages is the full man, body and soul together, and so the Bible is the Book of Life.
I am led to speak this morning of the great champion of Israel whose name has become through all times the proverb and synonym of physical strength. I should like to reach with you some of the meanings of his singular life. And first let me recall to you his history. It was a time of depression for Israel. The Philistines had conquered the Israelites, and they were subject to their savage neighbors. In the country of Dan, which bordered on the Philistine country, one day an angel came to a childless woman in a field and told her that she should have a son whom God would use for the deliverance of His people from their enemies. The next day the visit and the promise were repeated, and then the woman’s husband, whose name was Manoah, saw and heard the angel. He who gave the promise made the conditions. This child was to be made a Nazarite, set apart, that is, and consecrated to the Lord. The symbols of his consecration were to be two: he was to taste no wine nor strong drink, and no razor was ever to touch his hair or beard.
By and by the child was born, and he grew up to manhood, and he was very strong. It would seem as if there were periods of excessive strength which he recognized as given to him by God for a peculiar purpose. ‘The spirit of the Lord began to move him at times” — that is the description which is given of the strange phenomenon. Soon he began his attacks on the Philistines, and they all had a wild, grotesque, almost ludicrous character. He played with his enemies as a lion plays with its prey. His full, frolicsome life breaks out in all he does. He is a great, good-natured boy, passionate and excitable, but susceptible and impulsive, and apparently keeping no strong hatred even for the people whom it was the mission of his life to punish. He marries a Philistine woman, and at the wedding feast he provokes a quarrel with the guests about a foolish riddle, which led to his killing thirty of the men of Ashkelon and leaving his wife and her people in disgust. He comes back to find -his wife given to another, and he revenges himself by the fantastic malice of turning three hundred foxes with firebrands tied to their tails among the standing corn of the Philistines. He falls into their hands and as soon as they have bound him,” the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him and the cords that were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire, and his bands loosed from off his hands. And he found a new jaw-bone of an ass, and put forth his hand and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith. And Samson said, ‘With the jaw-bone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men.” It is the cry, the laugh, of an almost boyish triumph over the havoc he has made.
And so the stream of his life flows on like a mountain-stream, falling from one cascade into another, until at last it sweeps into dark shadow. The catastrophe approaches. Once more he comes among the Philistines. In the city of Gaza he falls in love with a woman named Delilah, and after many times playfully deceiving her, he gives her at last the secret of his strength. He bids her cut the flowing locks which represented his consecration to Jehovah. When those were gone his strength was gone. The Philistines bound him and made him captive and blinded him. As his strength slowly returned they used him for their purposes. They bound him to a mill, and made him labor there like a beast. At last came the day of his revenge and his death together. He was brought out by his tormentors to show his strength at a great festival for their amusement. And there, when he had amused them for a time, he found his opportunity to seize the pillars of the house where the flower of Philistia were gathered for the pageant. “And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might, and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people that were therein, so the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.”
Such is the story. It is a story which at once we feel belongs to the youth of any people. Long before David and Isaiah comes this champion of physical power, revelling in the strength of his right arm, doing all kinds of wild, fantastic things in the exuberant consciousness of being so strong. It has been often pointed out how like this story of the Hebrew Samson is to the Greek myths of Hercules and all his mighty labors; There is the same vast strength and the same weakness, the same yielding to the power of woman, the same captivity, the same open, free, fearless, passionate character. Perhaps the stories may have some connection with one another, or perhaps, what is more likely, they only indicate how back of all conceptions of power always lies this first, crudest, but most manifest and indisputable sort of power, physical strength. It is the first thought of God which man receives. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork.” “How strong He is!” is the thought that starts the fear or wonder of the soul which is just getting sight of God, and makes the beginning of its religion; and whatever deeper things it learns concerning Him, whatever tidings of His love and wisdom may be brought to it, it never must lose the first thought of God’s power. Any religion which loses that loses its masculineness, grows weak and feeble. The “fear of God”
comes to mean something very much higher and finer than the mere sense of His power. It comes to mean a deep and awestruck perception of all His perfect qualities, but it can never leave out its first meaning; it can never cease to mean the sense that He is strong, that He can do with our lives and the earth on which they swim through space whatever He shall choose to do. All other truths of what He will choose, of the wisdom and the love with which He will select, must be clustered and twined around this first truth of His power, that He can do what He will.
And much the same is true of man. There, too, all higher culture makes us see that there are qualities higher than physical strength in man. In a certain sense civilization is always making physical strength of less and less importance. But no culture, no civilization, can ever wholly do away with its significance. There is still an instinctive admiration for the strong man in our human nature. All young men will begin by holding it in honor, even though old men’s philosophy proves that it is of little worth. It is the crudest sort of force, but it is the most manifest and the most immediately effective. Men are always coming back to it, and out of the most artificial standards of what is honorable are always returning to the simplest of all tests and applauding the man who can strike the hardest blow, or lift the heaviest load, or march the longest journey. And if we told the truth, down at the bottom of all our hearts lies an envy and admiration, which perhaps we should be slow to own, but which no higher standards ever totally obliterate, for the man who is very strong. There come times which hear no music in the harp of David and are unstirred by all the aspirations of Isaiah, but Samson is never without his honor.
As we think, then, of Samson’s life, let us remember it in its periods; first in its strength, then in its fall, then in its disgrace, then in its second chance.
i. Of Samson in his strength what I want you to notice is how God used him, with all his imperfections, and his crudities, just as long as he was true to the consecration of his life. A wild, irregular, unaccountable creature, full of passion, running into sin, he still kept through it all the broad birth-consecration of his life to God. Before he was born he was named a Nazarite. His unshorn locks were the witness of his consecration; wherever he went and men saw them floating wildly like a banner, men knew that there went a man who, recklessly as he sometimes lived, terribly as he sometimes sinned, still knew and owned that he belonged to God, counted his strength a trust of God — not his, but God’s, — and knew that he ought to use it not for himself but for the purposes of Him to whom it belonged. Such a man God could use. A wilful, wayward weapon he would often be in the Divine Hand, but wilful and wayward as he was, far as he was from being a perfect servant, still the confession of servantship was in his heart, the consecration to the Lord was always the under-fact of his existence to himself, and so God used him.
And that is a perpetual truth. One man may be more wayward than another, the sort of force that men possess may differ vastly, may be in one man crude and coarse and in another fine; but, after all, the use which God is able to make of two men in this world depends on the amount of the consecration-consciousness that is in their lives and souls. One man is fine, clear, orderly, cultivated, finished, but it has never entered into his thought that he lives for any one beside himself. Another man is like Samson, wild and disorderly, passionate and boyish and frolicsome and wanton, but all the time, wrought into the very muscle of his strength, there is a tough, persistent consciousness that he belongs to God. Which does the work? Samson may go blundering through it, doing it in bad taste, dis honoring it very often, breaking as much glass as he saves, never seeming to realize how great the work is that he is doing, frolicking over it and never appearing to get hold of its best motives or meanings, but after all he does it. The Philistines fall before him. He believes that God sent him. But the other man, who has no dream of any consecration, works out his fine conception, criticises and refines, and says what ought to be done, and does nothing. More and more clear it grows, I think, that it is the sense of consecration, however crude and rough be the characters in which it works, that God uses to change and save the world.
2. And this makes clear the next point. If this was Samson’s strength, then we can see where Samson’s fall came from. He lost his consecration. It seemed a little thing. In a weak moment he let a wanton woman cut his seven-twisted locks of hair. But Samson was just the man to whom a symbol was everything. Those locks were so bound up with the vow that had been made before his birth, that they not merely stood for, they were his consecration. When he revealed the secret that his strength lay in them, and really bade her cut them off, he knew that he was casting away that tie between his life and God’s which had given him all his power.
Ah, men will talk of little things and great things as if they knew what things were little and what things were great. Men read this story and they say: “What a droll, fanciful old legend! As if the cutting of the hair could have had anything to do with the man’s strength!” And so they read the third chapter of Genesis and shake their heads and say: “What! could the eating of an apple be the ruin of the world?” As if their own experiences had not been scattered through with events which ought to have explained to them how powerful and influential may be an act which seems insignificant. Have they never come up to a time when one single act, that seemed nothing to the men who watched it, meant for them either the acceptance or the rejection of the mastery of God over their souls, and so had in it all the power of the endless blessing or the endless curse?
Why, we are always taking or refusing to take the apple, sacrificing or saving the locks of our consecration. There was one oath in your life that threw away your reverence, one lie that decided you would not be true, one cheat that petulantly cast off the restraining hand of God, one act of lust that gave your soul up to impurity, one drink that broke the consecration of your temperance. You cannot think of any act so little — the saying “Yes” instead of “No,” the going up the street instead of down — that it may not be, when you do it, such a focal act as to assume most tragical importance. It may be the casting aside of the whole purpose of your life, the saying, “I will not have this man to rule over me,” the giving up of God, the taking up of self, just what the act of Samson was when he told the secret of his locks. And if any act of ours be thus the sacrifice of the purpose and consecration of our lives, then for us as for Samson there comes weakness. Strength goes when purpose goes; and our unconsecrated powers may be bound with any cords that men may choose to bring.
Is not this what the story of Samson’s fall really means for us, — that if we sacrifice our consecration and our purpose all our strength is turned to feebleness? It is true even of our physique, I think. The very strength of the arm is weaker when the man has no faith in his cause and no passionate desire for its triumph. The soul’s devotion passes into the muscles and prevails to conquer the foe or break open the dungeon door. “If ye have faith ye shall remove mountains” — those words of Jesus have almost a literal and physical truth. But it is truer of the other forms of strength, perhaps, than of the strength of the body, — at least one wants to dwell on it most concerning them. Of intellectual strength it is supremely true that it gives up its vigor when it loses its moral purpose. How many witnesses there are of that! How many ages full of ability and wit, but with no earnestness! How many men, living to-day, or dead and buried long ago in graves from which no inspiration rises, who had strength of mind, clear brains, vivid imaginations, scholarship, taste, and yet were very weak. They laid no hand upon their time, they exercised no influence on men. What was the reason? There can be only one. They had no moral purpose. They cared nothing for the good of man or the glory of God. They had given up their consecration.
In days when every other element of strength is glorified, and that which completes them all and makes them really strong is so continually forgotten or despised, surely the story of Samson is good for us. It is not, I think, for the labor of science, which, however it may sometimes lose sight of the best truth, is laboring earnestly for the human good, — it is not for this that we ought to regret and fear to-day. It is for the vast amount of wholly purposeless literature, — the way in which so much of the best intellectual ability of this time is working solely for self-satisfaction, — it is in the prevalent selfishness of culture that its greatest weakness lies; for there is no real strength in anything that is devoid of moral purpose. The book that is written, the state that is built, the life that is lived, without a consecration is weak, however brilliant it may be. It is Samson without the locks of his Nazarite dedication.
O my dear friends, let us know — oh, that ah the world might know, indeed — that everything, every triumphant work of genius, every assertion of dogma, every construction of system, ecclesiastical or social, is weak, weak and not strong, that is shorn of the crowning glory of moral purpose, that is not bent and bound and dedicated to the achievement of goodness.
3. This, then, was Samson’s fall. Think of him next in his disgrace and misery. It is a terrible sight. “The Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass, and he did grind in the prison house.” That last clause has the sting of the story in it. Milton in his wonderful poem has drawn for us the same picture:
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves,
and when his father Manoah comes to him, he asks
Wilt thou then serve the Philistines with that strength Which was expressly given thee to annoy them?
That is the true depth of his wretchedness. Not merely he has fallen out of his loyalty to God; he has fallen into the slavery of these brutal savages. Look at him where he toils! — the mighty chest, the brawny arms, the limbs like columns, the muscles of twisted power all through the frame, the great form bent down upon the heavy mill-crank which he almost gnaws in his rage as he slowly heaves it around; and all about him, mocking him, goading him, these miserable Philistines who are his masters Oh, if he could have left his strength behind him when he fell! oh, that, if he could not slay them, at least he might not serve them and give them the advantage of his God-given power!
And if the bad man always could leave his strength behind him when he crossed the line into sin, if in proportion as he grows more wicked he grew more weak, his wickedness would not seem so terrible. That was David’s ejaculation: “If I for get thee, O Jerusalem, the City of Holiness, let my right hand forget its cunning!” It is the skill, the thought, the subtlety, the work that is laid out for wickedness, the cheat and burglar lavishing an ingenuity that was made to enrich the world, the deceiver arguing with a power, glowing with an enthusiastic genius that belong to truth; — these are our Samsons, at their mis with slaves. Many a bad man in his better moments curses his skill in badness as Samson must have cursed his strength when the Philistines had it all. “Samson” means “the Sunny.” The name belongs to the open, bright, breezy freshness of his better days; see him now as he grinds away, moody, blind, desperate, with his hands clutching the mill as if they would tear it. Yet that is something — something that he should hate himself and hate them as he toiled for them — something that he should grudge them the strength that belonged to God. It were a lower fall still, if he had come to consent to his slavery, to do the will of God’s enemies and be happy, without a self-reproach.
4. And so we come to what I called Samson’s second chance. While he was toiling at the mill his hair was growing again, his consecration to God was renewed, and his strength became once more complete. Then came the Philistines’ festival, the bringing out of the prisoner, his feats of strength, and at last he seizes the columns of the palace and drags it and the Philistines and himself down into death together. There is where the story ends. The champion is himself again, and once more he does the same service for God and God’s people; he is the same ruin to God’s enemies as at the beginning. “The dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.” The consecration has come back into the strength, and once more he wins the fame and works the deliverance.
Samson hath quit himself like Samson, and heroicly hath
finished
A life heroic, on his enemies Frlly revenged, hath left them years of mourning.
But see the difference. In this second chance he can conquer only at the price of his own destruction. Look at the youthful hero, rushing with a shout after his foes, clad in a strength which “made arms ridiculous,” and then at this gray, rugged, silent man, bent down between the columns of the palace roof and tugging at their weight to drag them on himself as well as on his foes. No longer is there the radiant, sunny, easy, joyous, almost frolicsome, air of his first victories. That is all gone forever.
Now, nothing but the heavy, desperate endeavor to die at work.
Yes, God does give men a second chance; but the first chance never comes back to them. A wicked man turns from his wickedness. An old thief struggles back to honesty. The long accumulations of a godless life are cast aside. The wanderer comes home. The consecration is renewed. There is work. There is patience. There is even hope. But there is not, there cannot be, the exhilaration, the first swing of life which was there before the purity was stained, before the vow was broken. It is worth while — oh, how well worth while! — for the oldest and vilest to take the new chance that God gives him. It may be that even he in his chastened and subdued old age may not merely save himself but do good service for his Master; but let us not, in our glad thankfulness for the willingness with which God takes the wanderer back and gives him another chance, — let us not get to think that the wandering and the fall were anything else but bad. Let us not extenuate it or excuse. There are men now serving God in their old age, serving him nobly in their second chance, but still the first chance was the brightest, bright with a brightness that never comes again, — the daylight before they fell, before those blank, dark years of sin. Most shameful and most terrible, as one sees more of men, becomes that wretched proverb about the “wild oats” which fathers and mothers quote so lightly, which expects men to be bad before they can be good, which robs men of the bright and joyous first chance, and only hopes for them the dogged and desperate second chance of Samson. Let us hate it with all our hearts!
How shall I speak to this congregation, made up as it is of young and old? Here are young Samsons in the freshness of their purity and strength. Here are old Samsons toiling at the mill of sin. Oh, that I could preach to you the double truth — the first and second chance — and let neither weaken the other! If you are still believing — pure true, consecrated to the Lord and to His high works, and therefore strong, oh, keep that consecration! Let no promise that some day He will bring you back to Him tempt you to wander into wickedness. If you have already wandered, now come back! It never is too late! If only that you may die in His service, give up your sins, renew your consecration, and do what yet you can for Him before you die!
This, then, was Samson’s strength, and fall, and misery, and restoration. Out of the whole survey of him there comes one clear impression which the vividness of his personality is well adapted to convey. It is of the personal responsibility of the man. That is so evident all through! This healthy human creature illustrates splendidly the human mastery over circumstances and events. There is not a particle of feeble and unmanly whimpering about his fate. Philistines conquer him only when he yields and puts himself into their power. Once more to turn to Milton’s poem. There is a passage there in which the Philistine harlot meets the hero whom she has ruined, and reproaches him that he should lay all the blame on her. It is a reproach which we can put into the mouth of the world, and fancy it rebuking the man who charges it with having through its allurements and temptations led him into sin. Delilah says:
Was it not weakness also to make known, For importunity, that is for naught, Wherein consisted all thy strength and safety? To what I did thou show’d’st me first the way,
Ere I to thee, thou to thyself wast cruel.
These words tell the whole story of the world’s leading men into sin. We say: “If I had not met this companion I never should have been so frivolous or mean.” “This sceptic made me sceptical.” “This failure made me bitter.” “These many distractions drove my deeper thoughts away.” “This badness made me bad.” And every one of them, all these bad things, and the world which altogether is made up of them, lifts up its voice and flings back our pusillanimous reproach: ’ ‘Ere I to thee, thou to thyself wast cruel.’ You betrayed yourself, or I never could have betrayed you.” It will be the bursting forth of that voice from all the things, animate and inanimate, which we have turned into excuses of our sin, that will make up the Judgment Day. It anticipates the Judgment Day in time, when a man hears that voice now, and stops saying, “These things have ruined me,” and begins to say frankly, “I have sinned.”
And now, let us come back a moment to where we began. I spoke at the beginning of this sermon about two strangely contrasted characters — Samson and St. John. They seemed to stand very far apart; can we see anything which they have to do with one another? In other words, what has the Christian faith to do with Samson, the man of primitive human nature, strong in the first strength of man, and making that strength powerful as he used it in dedication to God?
We answer, that Christianity, if it took this Old Testament giant in hand, certainly would not try to destroy or to restrain the fresh and breezy freedom of his life. Its joyousness and spirit she would try to keep. Its simplicity and humor she would love. Its childishness she would undertake to educate, but its childlike-ness she would treasure and exalt.
To make Samson a Christian! In our modern ears, with our modern associations, that sounds ridiculous. It makes us laugh to think of taking this boisterous young savage, and teaching him our doctrines, and bringing him to our meetings, and making him talk our religious talk; for that is what we often understand by being a Christian nowadays. But Christ could have made a Christian out of him, and it is easy to see how. Keeping his strength, that strength which, as we saw, depended wholly on his consecration to God, Christ could have made his consecration to God perfect. First, He could have shown him God as that poor bewildered boy of Dan never saw Him. Instead of that dim Jehovah after whom his dull imagination reached, He could have set before him the love and richness and perfaction of Divinity in His own perfect life. And then, having shown him God, He could have bound him to God by personal love for Himself. Imagine this brave young soul in all its freshness, perfectly seeing God and perfectly bound to Him by love, seeing Him and devoted to Him in Jesus. How strong his consecration then! What tempter could have overcome it? How brave his onset! What foe could have withstood it? Where shall we find the picture of what it would have brought him to, except in that Christ Himself, who, stronger than Samson, had in Himself perfectly what Samson had so imperfectly? Jesus is the Samson of the divine life — strength filled with consecration. His strength was perfect because His consecration was perfect. “Verily, verily, I say unto you,” He said, “the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do.” That which He was, He would have more and more made His servant; not robbing him of one glorious flower of his strength and freedom, but making all his strength pure and permanent by filling it with God through the channel of consecration to Himself.
The Christian Samson, then, is simply the man in whom Christ does this work to-day. Fighting and conquering the enemies of God, joyful and radiant with present pleasure and perpetual hope; springing up with a sleepless fountain of vitality; so free that nobody can bind him from doing what he knows is right and thinking what he thinks is true; so strong that no wickedness can stand before him or in him; happy and busy, and making happiness and work about him as the sun makes light; — but all this only because he is perpetually and completely consecrated to God in love and service of Jesus Christ. To him there can come no blindness. No man can make him a slave, or chain him down to any work of sin. He is strong in the Lord and in the power of His might; and he goes from strength to strength until at length in Zion he stands in perfect love and consecration, and so in perfect power for his eternal work, before God.