The 5 Masculine Instincts - Lesson 3

Introduction

Shakespeare saw the 2nd stage of man as a restless lover.

He experiences a desperation for something more, for life to finally begin in all of its anticipated excitement and adventure.

It’s that unsettling feeling that many men are trying to ignore.

Samson’s Pursuit of Adventure

Outside the Russian Grand Palace of Peterhof sits a great statue of Samson.

It is a fountain made of gold.

Samson looks Herculean.

He looks the part of a hero.

He is the archetype of masculine adventure.

Throughout his life, Samson experienced many things.

Ventured into exotic new lands.

Battled wild beasts.

Connected to beautiful women.

Passing bottles of wine.

Constantly facing danger and daring escapes.

He was driven by passion and restless romance and his next adventure.

You probably remember Samson by his hair.

The more important feature was his eyes.

The story of his adult life starts when he saw a Philistine woman that he wanted for his wife.

Judges 14:1-2 “1 And Samson went down to Timnath, and saw a woman in Timnath of the daughters of the Philistines. 2 And he came up, and told his father and his mother, and said, I have seen a woman in Timnath of the daughters of the Philistines: now therefore get her for me to wife.”

It is a central theme in the book of Judges that the Israelites did that which was right in their own eyes.

Israel had conquered large swaths of the promised land.

But, much of it remained unconquered.

Israel began to accept a good enough existence.

The epic storyline of Israel just sort of fizzled out.

Each did what seemed best and necessary to themselves.

This doesn’t have to mean moral failure, it could simply mean a failed vision for what God wanted for them.

The Israelites lost any conviction or sense of God working a story in their lives.

Israel gave up expecting anything more.

They lost the adventure.

This is the world Samson was born into.

Can you blame him for wanting a more meaningful and adventurous existence?

God had called them to more than just survival.

Adrift with no sense of calling or purpose, the Israelites’ loss of story left them shrinking into the emptiness of a small, self-centered world.

It left the increasingly vulnerable to the seductive propaganda of Philistia.

We tend to think of Israel as an advanced and sophisticated religious society.

We picture the Philistines as backwards and barbaric pagans.

That is not the case at all during the time of Samson.

Israel had no king, nor any kind of centralized government.

They had no permanent place of worship.

They were a loosely connected association of tribes.

They were barely scraping by.

They had no great buildings or monuments.

No walls, no palaces, no chariots, no ports, and no army.

Samson was also born into one of the strictest and most peculiar Israelite customs.

Most religious vows were voluntarily taken, but not Samson’s.

Samson was born a Nazirite.

No wine

No contact with the dead

No cutting his hair

On the other hand, the Philistines possessed a rich culture.

Progressive

Achievement

Constant striving for more.

Known for their massive urban development and their technological advancements in metal.

Their armies were legendary.

Armed with iron, the latest in battlefield technology.

Their kings were rich beyond anything Israel had yet known.

Just beyond Samson’s modest Israelite home lay the glistening stone walls of those Philistine cities.

Time after time, Samson kept going down to their cities.

That’s how his story starts, adventure in the Philistine town of Timnah.

There is no reason to try to convince yourself that the same whirlwinds of infatuation and adventure don’t tear through the boredom of your life as well.

You know the subtle temptation to walk away and go looking for something more exciting.

The Call of Adventure

Men have long sought for adventure.

Men today seem especially restless for it.

Adventure vacations are increasing in popularity by 65% a year.

Relaxing by the pool or at some ski resort is being replaced.

Backpacking remote S. American trails

Arduous expeditions to Antarctica

Selfies taken at the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

The #1 reason travelers sought adventure was a desire for personal transformation.

In 1949, Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Campbell was a mythologist.

A 1940’s Indiana Jones type.

He travelled to many exotic places.

He developed a term called the monomyth.

A single plot encompassing all great legends across every religion and tribe.

He saw similar paths for every hero.

Leaves behind common life.

Defeats some monster.

Returns home a new man.

That’s the personal transformation so many adventure seekers are in pursuit of.

Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where you are or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you.

The religious people tell us we really won’t experience bliss until we die and go to heaven. But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you are alive…if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. I say follow your bliss and don’t be afraid.

This sounds very familiar.

Follow your dreams.

Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.

Life is short make every moment count.

Don’t you hear adventure calling?

You weren’t made to live in that cubicle.

Discover who you really are.

Who were you really meant to be?

I want adventure as much as the next person.

The idea of venturing off in pursuit of bliss sounds so compelling.

But, is your bliss that easy to follow?

Is it even an adventure if you get to plan it?

Samson’s story is about the realization that your heart’s desires and your instincts for adventure will eventually betray you.

Adventure is a compelling instinct, but what we actually experience is as one author put it...

You glimpse an unflattering vision of yourself as a being whose wants make no sense, don’t harmonize; whose desires, deep down, are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to as the very same time. You’re equipped, you realize, for farce (or even tragedy) more than you are for happy endings.

This is the story of Samson’s tragic life.

Wasted on a Drunken Pun

When you think of Samson’s life, it is a story of passionate self-pursuit against the nagging restraint of commitment.

This challenge began as Samson travelled with his parents to Timnah to arrange his marriage to the Philistine girl who had caught his eye.

At some point in the trip, a lion came roaring up against Samson.

Samson easily tore the lion apart.

It was Samson’s first realization of his hallmark strength.

It was a moment of divine clarity.

An adventurous burst of energy in an otherwise banal existence.

Sometime later, Samson passed through the same area where he had killed the lion.

He couldn’t help himself he had to stop and look at the lion’s carcass.

His curiosity had him wanting another taste of that momentary thrill.

When he found the lion’s corpse, he heard an unexpected sound, buzzing.

Samson discovered a swarm of bees.

A beehive in a carcass was not a natural sight.

Bees do not live in rotting flesh alongside flies and maggots.

It was not what he had expected to find.

It made no sense.

The sound of bees.

The smell of rotting flesh.

The image of the hive formed around the lion’s ribs.

The taste of honey on his tongue.

What did it mean?

Judges 14:9 “9 And he took thereof in his hands, and went on eating,.”

The Hebrew uses an interesting set of words to describe the lion and the bees.

It could be said that Samson found in the ruin of the lion a congregation of bees.

Samson never seems to have recognized that it was God that had given him the strength that day.

It was also God that placed this peculiar image in Samson’s path.

Samson never took the time to discern what God was doing.

Instead, Samson turned the whole experience into his own game.

Samson’s tendency was to exchange the mysteries of God’s leading for cheap self-indulgence.

He consistently lacked the discernment to sense what he was actually in on.

There was a better adventure already underway.

Samson would rather break his commitments for pleasure, as can be seen when he touched the carcass to draw out the honey.

A wedding in the ancient world was usually celebrated with several days of partying and drinking.

As entertainment, the men began to gamble on riddles.

Judges 14:14 “14 And he said unto them, Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. And they could not in three days expound the riddle.”

The philistine partiers had 7 days to figure out the riddle or they would owe Samson 30 pieces of garment.

Again, Samson takes the experience God had granted and sold it away as a game.

The roar of lions was traded for the chatter of drunken philistines.

The buzzing of bees for a cheap riddle.

All in poor taste, shallow, and small-mindedness.

The philistines eventually answered it.

Judges 14:18 “18 And the men of the city said unto him on the seventh day before the sun went down, What is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion? And he said unto them, If ye had not plowed with my heifer, ye had not found out my riddle.”

The philistines were unknowingly pointing to the girl Samson had married.

She had betrayed him by giving them the answer.

She was the answer.

She was stronger than the lion.

She was sweeter than the honey.

His for her had done what the lion couldn’t, she had beaten him.

Samson developed this pattern that would plague him throughout his life.

Desire would lure him away from home into his next adventure.

He would find himself in trouble.

The spirit would rescue him through miraculous strength.

Samson would turn it into another pun, another game, another self-indulgent boast.

Over time, his adventures became smaller and increasingly more self-obsessed.

With each adventure, the commitment to his nazarite vow grew weaker and weaker.

Forcing the Question of Commitment

Is there any adventure greater than love?

All the great adventure stories include it.

D’Artagnan’s love for Constance.

Odysseus’ love for Penelope.

As often as the Bible speaks of marriage, it rarely speaks of romantic love.

Characters marry.

Rarely does the Bible describe them as in love.

We are explicitly told that Samson was in love with Delilah.

Judges 16:4 “4 And it came to pass afterward, that he loved a woman in the valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah.”

She, however, was never really in love with him.

She had been paid a large sum of money by the Philistine kings to seduce Samson and discover the secret to his strength.

3x she pressed him for his secret.

3x he gave her half truths.

You remember what Samson told her?

If he was bound with green withs (fresh bow strings) he would be as any other man.

If he was bound with new ropes he would be as any other man.

If his hair was braided he would be as any other man.

Each time he would tell her something, she would call the Philistine assassins, she would do what he said, and then she would wak him up.

Each time, Samson would fight off the assassins.

Each time he kept playing her game.

Why continue to love and toy with a woman determined to kill you?

Here is where men today must be completely honest.

Is Samson’s dangerous game of love and betrayal all that different than your own infatuations and temptations for romance and adventure?

Are not your own commitments sacrificed for one more look, one more thrill, one more night, one more taste of adventure?

Our wandering so often costs us everything we had once committed ourselves to.

We give it all up.

When it comes to adventure, the danger often serves only to heighten the attraction.

Samson’s actions are not all that unusual.

You probably remember the story as Delilah tricking Samson.

That isn’t what scripture actually says.

Delilah kept pressing on Samson.

Judges 16:15-16 “15 And she said unto him, How canst thou say, I love thee, when thine heart is not with me? thou hast mocked me these three times, and hast not told me wherein thy great strength lieth. 16 And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death;

She pressed him for intimacy, for commitment.

No matter how far he wandered, commitment was not a question he could avoid.

Life always forces the question of commitment.

Samson told her all his heart.

He told her everything.

Judges 16:17 “17 That he told her all his heart, and said unto her, There hath not come a razor upon mine head; for I have been a Nazarite unto God from my mother's womb: if I be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall become weak, and be like any other man.”

It had nothing to do with magical hair.

His hair was nothing more than a symbolic image of his commitment to God.

He finally gave up his faith and offered himself to what he could feel.

He had spent his life trusting his first instinct to leave, to go, to abandon the ordinary in pursuit of the exotic.

That life of leaving had not made him wiser.

Nor had all of those adventurous experiences transformed him into a person of character.

His experiences hadn’t helped him better understand the world.

He now seemed to understand it less.

Cut his hair and he would become like any other man.

How sad to give up the incredible position God had granted him to become like any other man.

Betraying Yourself

After shaving his head, Delilah called out again,

Judges 16:20 “20 And she said, The Philistines be upon thee, Samson. And he awoke out of his sleep, and said, I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself. And he wist not that the Lord was departed from him.”

Samson’s strength was gone.

Without the Lord, there was no power.

He was like any other man.

The Philistines over powered him.

They gouged out his eyes.

They took him far away to one of their cities.

They bound him.

They forced him to grind in a prison house.

He became a source of mockery and entertainment.

Samson reaped what he had sown.

He had given his life to what he saw.

He was now blinded by it.

Everything Samson had ever pursued had been a lie, a self-betrayal.

One author said, “Life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.”

Samson’s adventure was over.

The greater story that god had for him was lost in his own pursuit.

Judges 16:28 “28 And Samson called unto the Lord, and said, O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.”

Samson prayed that his eyes would be avenged.

He realized that to be avenged, it would take divine intervention.

On his own there was nothing he could accomplish.

Samson was praying that his lack of sight, physically and spiritually, would not be the thing for which he would be rembered.

Samson wants another chance to live a better story.

Blinded, he could see things clearer than he had ever seen them before.

The Adventure Requires Discernment

The most important thing we could learn is that what we think we need is often wrong.

What you think matters is often the opposite.

What you think a meaningful life should feel like it is rarely what it does.

Your heart and eyes will betray you.

Untrained, they are not to be trusted.

What you need are new eyes and a new heart.

You need eyes that can see the adventure god already has you on.

You need a heart that can commit to it.

There is a risk of being lured away from your commitments by some call to a better adventure.

That risk is always secondary to the risk that you will lack the discernment to recognize the adventure God already has you on.

There is no better place to recognize God than in the place you are.

If the experiences of your day seem dull, meaningless, don’t blame them, blame yourself.

You haven’t cultivated a taste for recognizing the complexity of god’s presence in that place.

You’ll never find the adventure you’re looking for until you learn to commit to the one you’re already in.

When you do, the world will explode in senses of the Spirit’s work.

Your true adventure is here , recognizing the story God has placed you in.

Your problem is not a lack of adventure; your problem is a lack of discernment recognizing it.

"We shouldn't be here at all, if wed known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs... adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull... But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually-their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten.... wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?"

"I wonder," said Frodo. "But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale.

What kind of tale have you fallen into?

What adventure is unfolding just beneath your recognition of it.

The best stories never feel grand in the moments along the way.

In true adventure, uncertainty must be accepted from the beginning, with almost nothing else known.

The real battle is for belief, faith to stay the course.

Faith to believe a story exists where others have given up on it.

Faith to believe that something is happening even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Adventure is not a sin.

When it lacks discernment it inevitably leads to ruin and betrayal.

Have your adventure but never at the cost of commitment.

Commit yourself to the kind of discernment that doesn’t need distant shores or adrenaline fueled feats to feel it.

Learn to taste and recognize fully the adventure that is already at hand.

His Hair Began to Grow

Judges 16:22 “22 Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaven.”

There is nothing miraculous about hair growth.

Your hair is growing right now.

That realization for Samson came with life-affirming hope.

How had the philistines not remembered to keep it cut?

Samson hadn't done it.

You can’t force hair out of your follicles.

Forces were at work that he didn’t need to control or even recognize.

Samson’s story started as a strong man who is revealed to be weak, but it ends with a weak man who is stronger than he ever was before.

In the end, Samson tasted of the riches of God’s grace, a taste which can only be cultivated by faith, by embracing God’s bigger story through a deepening commitment to the adventure he has you on.

Your better adventure is before you; you need only the courage to abandon your own and the faith to receive the one God is leading.

I wonder what kind of tale you’ve fallen into.