When Your Purpose Is Forgotten

Introduction

Good morning church. It is good to see you this morning. I invite you to turn in your bibles to Judges 13. If you are in need of a bible, feel free to use one of the bibles in the back of the seat in front of you. If you have sitting in the front row, there should be a bible in the tray under your seat. While you are turning there, if I had not had the pleasure of meeting you, my name is Taylor and I am one of the elders here are Trailhead. I am starting an intermittent series in the life of Samson. It is intermittent because we won’t do it over the next several back-to-back Sundays. The next sermon in the series, Lord willing, will be several weeks down the road. Throughout this series, we are going to look at the life of Samson. Before we get more into it, let’s pray.

Did you know that your nose is always in your field of vision. If you look straight ahead, you can always see you nose. I looked it up. Your mind simply ignores it. It is static, unchanging data, so your mind ignores it and focuses on your always changing surroundings. It becomes white noise in the background of all you do. Did you know that our sin can be like that. We can get so used to it that it becomes white noise in the background and we try to and tend to forget about it. This is what we walk into with the Israelites in Judges 13. In the book of Judges, Israel has entered the Promised Land through Joshua, and Joshua has passed away. The Israelites were to drive out the inhabitants of their land, but they fail to do so and these inhabitants become thorns in the sides of the Israelites. They lead Israel astray and Israel rebels against God. Like Adam, instead of driving out the enemy from their land, they let the enemy stay and the enemy becomes a snare for them.

Over and over again, we see the pattern throughout the book of Judges of Israel rebelling, God giving them over to their enemies, Israel repenting and crying out to God, God raising up a judge to deliver them, and there being rest in the land. When we get tot Samson, however, something changes with the pattern. Israel rebels and God hands them over to their enemies, but Israel never repents. Israel has gotten so used to their sin that they stop repenting and just live with their sin and the enemy. Later in Judges, what becomes of Israel is what one author calls the “Canaanization of Israel.” Instead of driving Canaan out, Israel becomes like Canaan.

Samson is the last judge that God raises up to redeem Israel, but he, like Israel, fails to accomplish his purpose. There are reasons for this that we will get into, but Samson is the expression of the spiritual state of Israel. One writer observes that Samson has miraculous beginnings like Israel, has a great vocation like Israel, but he also rebels like Israel, being lured away by the enemy, and, like Israel, becomes blind and enslaved by the enemy. Samson gets used to his sin, like Israel, that he fails to turn from it, until the end of his life. Like Israel, Samson’s sin was like his nose. It was always in his field of vision, but he failed to see because it had become like white noise in the background. This will happen to us if we get used to our sin. We should never “manage” our sin. We should always seek to repent of it and kill it. If we try to manage it and live with it, it will blind us and we will end up like Samson, enslaved to it.

The story of Samson is a dance between light and darkness, vision and blindness. We will spend our time this morning in Judges 13, and what we will see today is the blindness of Samson’s parents: Manoah and his wife. What we can learn from this story is that our sin will blind us if we do not repent from it and turn to the Lord. I am going to walk us through the passage first, and then we will draw out our application.

Judges 13:1 ESV

And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, so the Lord gave them into the hand of the Philistines for forty years.

This is the pattern that we see with the Israelites in Judges. They rebel and God hands them over to the enemy. I pointed this out earlier, but one important difference in this moment compared to the previous moments of rebellion of Israel is that they don’t repent here. In fact, we will see later that Israel tries to deliver Samson into the hands of the Philistines so that the Philistines stop bothering them. That is how blinded the Israelites were. Samson was meant to deliver them from the Philistines. He could have had them stop bothering them by conquering them. But they wanted to take things into their own hands and do it their way instead of God’s way.