Stockholm Syndrome

I will tell you the story of Beauty and the Beast. No, it is not a story about me and Jono.

It is the tragic story of a young girl who finds herself in captivity with a savage, feral monster.

We watch, painfully, as she descends into madness, talking to herself and imagining the furniture and dishes responding to her, singing and dancing.

She exhibits all the signs of Stockholm Syndrome, identifying with and then falling in love with her captor, until, in a final betrayal, she helps the beast fight off her friends, family and neighbors who have come to rescue her.

And she breaks with all reality and imagines that her terrible and cruel beastly captor is really her Prince Charming in disguise.

One of the most heart-breaking films of all time, not recommended for children.

I will tell you the story of another beast: Samson.

Samson the Beast

Recap story so far...

Samson lust for the Philistine woman, he sets up the marriage. Then at the feast he gives this ridiculous and terrible riddle. They press his wife for the answer, she whines to Samson for seven days and he gives in. They tell Samson the riddle and he declares “If you had not plowed with my heifer you never would have solved it!” Nice. He goes to the big city, 23 miles away, kills 30 men, strips their clothes, and brings them back to pay his bet.

Samson the Beast.

But wait, there’s more.

After some days, maybe months, Samson comes back to visit his new wife as if nothing has happened.

Judges 15:1–2 ESV

After some days, at the time of wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife with a young goat. And he said, “I will go in to my wife in the chamber.” But her father would not allow him to go in. And her father said, “I really thought that you utterly hated her, so I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister more beautiful than she? Please take her instead.”

And Samson took that well? Nope.

Judges 15:3 ESV

And Samson said to them, “This time I shall be innocent in regard to the Philistines, when I do them harm.”

You’re making me angry!!! You won’t like me when I’m angry!

Judges 15:4–6 ESV

So Samson went and caught 300 foxes and took torches. And he turned them tail to tail and put a torch between each pair of tails. And when he had set fire to the torches, he let the foxes go into the standing grain of the Philistines and set fire to the stacked grain and the standing grain, as well as the olive orchards. Then the Philistines said, “Who has done this?” And they said, “Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he has taken his wife and given her to his companion.” And the Philistines came up and burned her and her father with fire.

Probably jackals (same Hebrew word).

The Philistines respond and his would-be wife pay the price.

And how do you think Samson responds to that? Almost the same words as before:

Judges 15:7–8 ESV

And Samson said to them, “If this is what you do, I swear I will be avenged on you, and after that I will quit.” And he struck them hip and thigh with a great blow, and he went down and stayed in the cleft of the rock of Etam.

“hip and thigh” either is a reference to him kind of hand-to-hand combat… or that he “ripped them limb from limb” as some translations have it. He tore them apart, he beat them up, he attacked and defeated them. And then he fled to a cleft, a cave, where he wouldn’t be easily approached by a lot of men.

Skipping forward, he ends up bound and taken to the Philistines.

Judges 15:14–15 ESV

When he came to Lehi, the Philistines came shouting to meet him. Then the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon him, and the ropes that were on his arms became as flax that has caught fire, and his bonds melted off his hands. And he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, and put out his hand and took it, and with it he struck 1,000 men.

He goes hulk mode, by the Spirit of the Lord, and rips through his bonds as if they were flax (or straw) on fire. He grabs the nearest weapon… a donkey bone.

Fresh = moist.

As a student of donkey-fu myself (which is martial arts using various parts of a donkey), it is well known that a jawbone is the best weapon available amongst the available bones of a donkey!

My question is, didn’t some of the first guys killed have a sword? Swap out, Samson! He kills 1000 men (or the whole company) this way. And then he makes a crude little ditty, almost a limerick, I picture him dancing and singing after:

Judges 15:16 ESV

And Samson said, “With the jawbone of a donkey, heaps upon heaps, with the jawbone of a donkey have I struck down a thousand men.”

There is a pun here because “ass” and “heap” are the same word in Hebrew (ḥămôr)

One translator says “With the jawbone of an ass I have piled them in a mass” to try to capture the crude wordplay. Samson is very punny here.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the judge, the hero of Israel:

Judges 15:20 ESV

And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.

This guy? This guy judges Israel? In what sense? We don’t have any record of him sitting under a palm tree calmly deciding between tribes. I don’t think he was that kind of judge. Instead, Scripture appears to be calling what Samson is doing here, his one man war against the Philistines, it is calling that “judging” Israel.

Somehow an act of leadership?

Freedom fighter or terrorist?

Who is this guy?

From the perspective of his people, he could be called a troublemaker, a rebel, a guerilla fighter, the Rebellion. From the perspective of the Philistines, he is killing non-combatants, he is attacking food supplies: Samson is a terrorist.

His motivations: anger and lust (as we saw last week). God doesn’t wait until Samson is righteous and perfect, he uses even his sin to accomplish his will.

But Samson wouldn’t be dangerous if the Holy Spirit didn’t keep giving him super powers! So what is God doing here?

But what is God’s will here? I think we get a hint in the part of the story I skipped. We can see what God is doing to his enemies, to the Philistines. Samson is a one-man army, a point of resistance, a stumbling block to the Philistines, a rabble-rouse, a troublemaker.

But what is God doing through Samson to His own people?

How are the Children of Israel responding to God’s work through Samson?

In response to Samson first burning the fields and then ripping apart some Philistines who attacked his almost-wife:

Judges 15:9–13 ESV

Then the Philistines came up and encamped in Judah and made a raid on Lehi. And the men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?” They said, “We have come up to bind Samson, to do to him as he did to us.” Then 3,000 men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam, and said to Samson, “Do you not know that the Philistines are rulers over us? What then is this that you have done to us?” And he said to them, “As they did to me, so have I done to them.” And they said to him, “We have come down to bind you, that we may give you into the hands of the Philistines.” And Samson said to them, “Swear to me that you will not attack me yourselves.” They said to him, “No; we will only bind you and give you into their hands. We will surely not kill you.” So they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.

They bound him. Their judge. The man of God among them, empowered by the Holy Spirit.

“Do you now know that the Philistines are rulers over us?” Think how much trouble we are going to be in!

When the men of Judah were confronted with the conflict between the trouble-making Spirit of God and the enemy, they bound the man of Spirit and handed him over to the enemy.

When the men of Judah were confronted with the conflict between the trouble-making Spirit of God and the enemy, they bound the man of Spirit and handed him over to the enemy.

They were comfortable in their captivity.

They were complacent in their chains.

They wanted peace above freedom.

Security above God’s Sovereignty.

In their defence, they were probably still there for this jawbone battle and there were 3000 (or 3 companies) of them. They apparently stood back and watched Samson kill all the Philistines with the jawbone. And, keep in mind, they are the ones celebrating this almost mythological feat hundreds of years later in this text.

But they are turning over, in the person of Samson, they are fighting against the work of the Holy Spirit to rescue them. And God uses even that sin for His glory and His purpose. He works to rescue them anyway.

How amazing is that! But the Philistines will plague Israel for another 200 years, and I think this attitude of the Israelites has everything to do with that.

They were comfortable in their captivity. They liked their chains… as long as they weren’t too tight and no one stirred up the enemy too much.

But the trouble-making Spirit of God was not content that His people should remain in captivity. He is a chain-breaker.

God was not, and is not, content that you and I should remain in captivity of any kind.

Jesus the Troublemaker

It all reminds me of another trouble maker.

A stumbling block, both to the enemy, the rulers of the world in that time, the Romans; and to the people of God. Once again, the men of Judah bind the man of Spirit, the man of God, the freedom fighter… they bind him and turn him over to the enemy. But this man of God goes all the way into the teeth of the enemy. Through Roman judgment, through crucifixion, to the true enemy: sin and death. And there he defeats them utterly.

He shattered the chains, he forever ended our captivity to sin and death, to this world and the powers of this world.

And that trouble-making Spirit of God… he is not content that we should be content or comfortable pretending that we are still captives.

There is no such thing as comfortable Christianity.

Instead, Jesus says to us:

John 16:33 ESV

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”

In Him we have peace, but in relation to the world we have trial. Trouble. Tribulation. These are words of strife and conflict and even war.

Why? Because we live in occupied territory!

We are freed prisoners, but we are still learning not to love our chains.

Christians dressing up in chains and rags to look at the other prisoners and say “look, I am just like you.”

“Hey, Spirit of God, keep it quiet, please.” We don’t want trouble with the world, with the government, with the culture, with our peers. Life will be easier if we don’t cause any trouble.

Fight to Follow. Fight for Love.

God calls us to the battlefield of love, which sounds like a soft word, but is, in fact, the very hardest road to travel. There is no such thing as comfortable Christianity. We are about love… but love is hard thing.

To the addicted: love looks like intervention and the long road of recovery.

To the broken, love looks like physical, mental, emotional, spiritual surgery. Painful but healing.

To the ignorant, love speaks truth.

To the lost, love doesn’t say “go wherever you want.” Love says “here is how you get home.”

And we are addicted and broken, ignorant and lost.

And my neighbors are broken, hurting, their spirit groans in the chains of captivity.

Your friends, your co-workers, your classmates… they don’t need you to look like them, act like them, conform to the patterns of this world.

They need you to fight for their freedom, fight for their salvation, fight to love them and to speak and be the love of Jesus to them.

We are engaged in a spiritual battle. Will we be comfortable and complacent? Or will we follow the trouble-making Spirit of God?