Alamo Stone Church | San Antonio

Judges Part 13 – Love Protects, Surrenders, and Takes Risks

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We pick up the story of Samson in Judges chapter 16 and while this is not the last chapter in the book of Judges, it is the last that we will read on Samson.

So what we see in verse 1 is no surprise…once again we see Samson being led by his eyes… ‘he saw a woman’ but not just any woman, a  harlot, a prostitute, a woman of the evening. And so he has relations with her, and he’s such a gentleman that he doesn’t even bother to stay until morning so he takes off at midnight.

But his activities are not going unnoticed. There are Gazites, so these are Philistines, realize that Samson is there and they decide that when morning comes, they’re going to kill him. And while that plan does not work, they do noticed two things: They notice both Samson’s strength and his weakness! His strength is, of course, just that. It’s his physical strength. As he departs the city, he literally rips the doors and posts right out of the ground and carries them on his shoulders all the way to Hebron, which is about 40 miles up the mountainside! And by the way, we sort of get this image of Samson carrying this tremendous weight all the way to Hebron and just tossing it to the ground, I almost picture him spitting on the ground when he does this, because Hebron is in Judah. You might recall, it was the men of Judah who, rather than fighting alongside Samson against the Philistines, brought 3,000 men to capture Samson and turn him over to the Philistines.