This is a church number. You think if I call that? Yeah. Cold weather must have screwed everybody up. Yes. Good morning to Samson and Delilah, part four. And guess what? There's going to be part five. We're not going to finish today with Samson and Delilah. Next week will be the last week of Samson. And I looked at it, I thought, well, if I shove it all in this week, I'll have to skip things I want to say. So next week we're going to finish the destruction of the Dagon worship service and do a little summary of Samson's life as well. But this week we're going to pick up where we left off last week, and that's Judges, chapter 16. We actually went through verse 21 last week, or we're starting with 21, we went through verse 23, but we'll read 21, 22 and 23 and then pick up with new material in 24 after a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you for yet another beautiful morning that you have given us and an opportunity to dig into the word this morning. Pray that as we learn about Samson and the events of his life, that that would give us some strength for living our own, making good choices along the way. We ask it in Jesus name, amen. So I've called it Samson and Delilah part four. Actually, I probably should have given it a different name because Delilah is out of the scene now. She left us after she got the money. She took the money and ran. And that was last week. And so here we began with Samson's final feat that we looked at last week, where Samson had his eyes gouged out in verse 21, brought him down to Gaza. Four things that happened to him. His eyes were gouged. They took him to Gaza, they bound him with fetters of brass and he did grind in the prison house, but his hair began to grow and we talked about the little scarlet thread of redemption there, the hope that was given. So then last week we closed with this verse right here. The lords of the Philistines gathered them together for to offer a great sacrifice and to Dagon, their god and to rejoice. For they said, our god hath delivered Samson, our enemy, into our hands. This was their understanding, obviously, of what had happened, which we've done a lot of talking about the human psyche in this particular story. And here's one here I usually call it, and I suppose I think it's the right name, but there might be another name for it. I usually call it confirmation bias. If you're looking for something, you'll find it. And here the Philistines were convinced that Dagon, their god was true and real and lo and behold, they managed to capture Samson and therefore Dagon, their god must have delivered them into their hands. If that's sort of what you want, that's sort of what you're going to find or you look at it and use various circumstances to confirm what happened. It's a very powerful I don't know, what shall we say, self brainwashing technique. We convince ourselves so much that such and such is the scenario that lo and behold, we find evidence of it everywhere. But if we really backed up and looked at it, the evidence is not actually evidence of that. How's that? Now, of course, somebody would come along, I suspect rightfully so, and probably the worshippers of Dagon would come along and say, well, you Christians do the same thing. You Christians are convinced that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that sent his only begotten son to take the sins of the world, that he is God. And because you have this in your mind, you see all the confirmation for it. Well, that certainly could happen. And I think that a lot of times there is the case in which we as Christians unfortunately do that. Rather than looking at, let's say, the empirical evidence, we just go with the confirmation bias. I talked about this the other day on our Ask Theologian program. Somebody asked about an earthquake in Afghanistan last Saturday and that the Taliban leaders had called for destruction on Israel and 2 hours later they got a big earthquake. See, therefore God is protecting Israel. And I said, I think that's confirmation bias. I think you're just wanting that to happen. But why didn't God protect from the actual Hamas militants that are coming in? It's really more of a threat than the Taliban up in Afghanistan. But our brain has this way of filtering out the things we don't want to see and only accepting the things that we do want to see that will confirm what we want, that we really have to be very persnickety. There we go. We have to be very persnickety about what we accept into our mind as evidence and take it as that which doesn't really confirm. Anyway, that was all free. That's not part of the lesson. How's that? But they came and know our God hath delivered Samson, our enemy, into our hands. That was their perception of it. And what do they say? Sometimes perception is stronger than fact. It would be hard to convince them that their God Dagon did not hand Samson over to them. However, I have read the rest of the story, and it doesn't turn out so good for Dagon. But nonetheless, at this point, that's where it is. Okay, now we pick up with new material in verse 24 that says when. There we go. When the people saw him, they praised their God, for they said, our God hath delivered into our hands our enemy and the destroyer of our country. Which slew many of us along the same themes. Of course. I wish sometimes that the Bible gave more detail. I know it's already a pretty long book. And so what did John say? If the books recorded all that had happened, the world wouldn't hold the content thereof. That was a paraphrase. But here I would like to look in on that. I'm going to call it a worship service. Obviously it's not the worship of the one true God, it's the worship of Dagon. But wouldn't that be interesting to see as they praised their God, said, our God hath delivered our enemies into our hands. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't strangely familiar to us. That is to say, when we think of pagan worship services like the ancient god Dagon, my mind wants to think of like Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom. When they go in know, and they're having the little worship service to whoever it is in the temple of Doom, they're worshiping, I don't remember and they grab his heart out and that kind of thing. That's sort of what I want to think of when it's pagan worship. I suspect there was a little bit of order to it. There was a little bit of let's call it liturgy. They had the things that they went through, they know when to stand, they know when to sit, just like at our worship service here. Even if you normally attend a different church, you sort of know the drill, don't you? You know what's going to happen, what you're supposed to do. And I suspect that it wouldn't have been all that different even from what we do today, especially in maybe some of the bigger evangelical churches. The celebration, the praise, the show, if I can call it that, that is put on. Because the truth is that that kind of thing will stir the heart even if the spirit is not in it. I sound like such an atheist today, don't I? But this is why you go to I don't know, I was going to say a rock concert. I'm thinking more like Billy Joel or the Beach Boys kind of thing. And by the end of the thing, everybody's holding hands and they're swaying and they're holding up their phone like a candle and you go out of there with the I'm on top of the world experience. The same thing that a good worship service does to you. There is a spirit to it, lowercase s that you can mimic. In fact, there was a fellow the other day, a fellow a number of years ago, he was the son of Tony Campolo. I don't know if you know that name or not. Tony Campolo is kind of a left wing Christian preacher and his son, whose name might be Anthony, I'm not sure, I think it's Anthony Campolo, but I could be wrong on that. But anyway, it was his son left the faith and went off into atheism and he was trying to start atheist churches because he said we atheists don't have that experience of coming together and having potluck and singing together and we need that so he recognized you can sort of create that thing. It's this human psyche thing going on. Anyway, again, I keep chasing these little rabbits here today, but I wouldn't be surprised if we were to drop into that service if it wouldn't be like, oh, wow, that's good music. Wow, look at that, man. That sort of captures my heart and my imagination because this is what music does. It's the expression of the soul, so to speak, and it connects with us. And maybe one of these days we'll even study how I think it probably connects with us on a biological level, a molecular level. It affects our heartbeat, all these kind of things about us. So here they are nonetheless, celebrating. Our God hath delivered into our hands the enemy. Now, one thing I want to say about that is, you know that I'm an advocate of small churches here at America's greatest tiny church. I think that it's easy to get swept up in a really good production and walk away saying, ah, the spirit of God was in, that I could just feel him. Well, we could create the same show that you would feel the same thing in a completely atheistic or dagon environment. It's a human nature thing. Again, sorry to be sorry to throw a wet towel on your worship service, but it is a part of human life. So here they are. They're probably having this fantastic time of celebration, of singing, of dancing, maybe, because especially in that part of the world, dancing is much more prevalent than it is in our part of the world, especially towards in worship. And so they're carrying out all of this. Now, think about it from the other side. Let's say we're an Israeli Jew. Wasn't called Israel at that point, but our God has delivered into our hands our enemy. Well, if you're a Jew, you a little bit have to be saying, our God let our protector out of here. He didn't come through for Samson. Do you blame it on Samson? I don't know. Maybe. I mean, if you know the details of the story, you probably blame it on Samson. But if you're just a Jew living over the border listening to what's going on there, they're celebrating. They're about to parade Samson out. You kind of wonder, what's happened to our God? Why hasn't he come through for us? It might be a crisis of faith for you. Do we need to join with the Philistines? Do we need to go with the God of dagon? What's happening here? I would say that's yet another reason not to judge your faith and practice based upon circumstances on the ground right now. This story is not over with yet. It's too early to sign up with Dagon's parade. And yet they've got to be thinking of that. So the Philistines, of course, they call him their enemy and the destroyer of our country. That just tells me that there's got to be more even. I mean, we know a decent amount about the Samson story. In fact, we know more about Samson, I think, than any other judge. I may be wrong. Gideon might have a little more. I'm just going by page length. But Samson and Gideon anyway, are the top two, whichever one's. Number one. And so with that, even at that, we don't know all that much about Samson. We know five or six or eight or ten. We know 13 weeks worth of stuff in a bible study. So he's the destroyer of our country. He must have had a lot of stuff that wasn't even described here. Of course, he's got 20 years of judgeship, so we don't know anywhere near 20 years worth of stuff, which slew many of us. We know some of that in the feats of Samson, but nonetheless, probably a lot more to that. So verse 25, it came to pass when their hearts were merry. Oh, that's what I was trying to say right there, is that you can just get a merry heart by a lot of different ways. And what's the other passage of scripture? The heart is deceptively, wicked. Who can know it? Don't really trust your heart. The facts on the ground are a lot more important here. So here they're there at this, what I'm calling a worship service, their hearts were merry. They said, call for Samson, that he may make us sport. Now, that's a little bit strange terminology, make us sport. It works perfectly in King James English, and I think you would know already what it means. We would kind of turn it around the way we would say it now, that we can make sport of him, but basically make us sport was that he can give us a show. He can put a game on for us. We can watch this. So bring him here so that he may entertain us, but the entertainment is going to be at his expense, is what is obviously going to happen here. And so they called for Samson out of the prison house, and he made them sport, and they set him between the pillars. Now, I think that we could find a number. There's one really good one that I'll use. There's a number of others that are close. If I wanted to take an extra hour, I would go through the bible and then through history as well. And I would show that in the ancient world, it was somewhat common practice to take your enemy, especially if he was an enemy of fame, and to use him, to humiliate him publicly, to make fun of him, to let the crowd enjoy their captive, so to speak. And we see a number of cases like that in the bible. There are two that are very obvious. This is one of them, even though here it doesn't tell too much. But before I get to the other one, let me remind you that in the first century and later, the romans did have the thing like the gladiators and later on the putting the christians to the stake or to the lions out in the coliseum. So this kind of public humiliation and going even beyond humiliation was definitely a part of society, I would say somewhere, I don't know, it's probably been 150 years since it's been part of american society. But you're used to somewhat well, you had the hanging in the public square, I guess maybe you could get there. But also remember the thing that had to do with tar and feathers. Oh, yeah. Did it happen to you? Okay, so they would literally tar and feather somebody, making them run through town with hot tar and covered in feathers. This is the idea here that we want everybody to see this. We want to humiliate our leader. And especially would they do this? I think when you've got someone who is a public leader of the people, let's humiliate. Of course, today if there was any kind of arrest of a public figure or anything like that, there would be no show of it at all. It would be very subtle and not try to humiliate anybody. But back in the day, it certainly was done that he may make us sport, and this is that. However it is oh, let me tell you the most famous in the bible, there was this fellow who was a great leader of people and had a very big following, and he got arrested, and they put on him a purple robe and a crown of thorns, and they mocked him, saying king of the jews. It's the same thing here that's going on with Jesus. Is this make us sport? We want to watch, we want to laugh, we want to pluck his beard, all those kind of things that don't really connect with modern western civilization anyway. But we're not so far removed from it that we can't even think of it in our history. Back there, this was taken, I think maybe even today in more eastern societies, this might be a little more not to the degree that we see it here, but might be a little more of a thing. I saw just the other day, the Russians have had a wall street journal, I think, reporter arrested for spying for a while now. But anyway, they showed some video and he was in a little cage, and it was just a photo op for the people to come take a picture of our prisoner in a cage. Again, we get our photo ops here in the United States, but it's typically when they're going from the car to the building and whatnot, I think that bring him out and make a sport. It wouldn't take us too long to get back there if we were so inclined as a civilization. It's in there. So here, bring him out. Let us humiliate him. Let's laugh at him, let's make him kiss our know whatever it is that's going to go on here. And they called for Samson out of the prison house. He made them sport. They set him between the pillars. Now, this is just sort of given as narrative, descriptive event. But obviously, when you get something like that, you ought to hone in on it and say, something's going to happen with these pillars here. Why did they bring up the pillars? They set him between the pillars. I think that this week I tried to study ancient architecture, and as it relates to 3500 year old structures and temples and whatnot, it doesn't take much imagination, even if you think of, like, the parthenon which is not quite that old, but the pillars that go around it. And somewhere there appears to be some pillars that are key to the whole building. Even when you read about the construction of the temple in Solomon's Day, which is going to be after this, but a number of years after this, you have two pillars in the temple that are actually given names. I know one of them is Boaz, and I've forgotten the other one. I should remember. What's that? Jacin, I think. Yes, Jakeen is probably how it's pronounced. Well, it depends on who you ask, because we don't know what to do with that J sound from Hebrew. But anyway, yeah, Boaz and Jakina, I believe you're exactly right there. So here, between the pillars, probably, again, that was a common structural thing. Like, I think most places, if you go Midwest and farther east, anywhere over there, you kind of know when you see an old church building, right? It's like, oh, I can see that from a mile away. That's a church building. It's got a steeple. I know this is a church. So I think it was the same with these kind of structures that either that's a civic building, a major civic building, or it's a church building. And here, honestly, it never says temple. I'm kind of assuming it was a temple, but it could have been like the public arena that they were gathered in. There's going to be a lot of people, but he comes between the pillars. And then Samson said unto the lad that held him by the hand, suffer me that I may feel the pillars, whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them. I think that a couple of, I don't know, interesting things about these pillars. Obviously, Samson's got something in mind. He knows what he's going to do and he knows the building architecturally, which, again, I've argued all along that Samson was an intellectual powerhouse. I wouldn't be surprised. Samson, you're the Judge of Israel for 20 years. You've built public buildings. You know how these things work. You know what would bring the whole structure down. And he knows this, so he wants to go there. He's not upfront in his agenda. But those of us who know the rest of the story know he's got an agenda here. He's not just tired and wants to rest on the pillars. He wants those pillars. And in fact he says that I may feel the pillars wear upon the house standeth. So it seems to be that there's a well, I think in old colonial architecture we would call it the keystone. There's that piece or the cornerstone. Maybe in other architectures there's those pillars. This is the key pillars. These are not decorative pillars. These are something that says, hey, do this. The building comes down, he knows this and he specifically asked for those pillars. Now I think it's kind of interesting. Samson said unto the lad that held him by the hand the word lad there is not terribly specific, but it's not something you would use for a soldier. For example, it would be a young man, maybe early 20s, but probably not any older than that. Probably more like if we use the word lad, we probably would use it more of Trent than of John. So a younger man down to a boy somewhere in that age range is about as specific as you can get with that particular Hebrew word. You kind of wonder why the Philistines would entrust a major prisoner like this with a boy. What's going on? Are they so confident he's blind? What's he going to do? He's lost his strength. That we can put a lad there? Is that part of the show that, hey, let's put a little boy leading the warrior here, the former warrior. And as part of the humiliation that's going on, I don't know so much. I'd like to put Paul Harvey on this one and find out the rest of the story. Right. Because you even think, hey, could it be that this lad was assigned to him? Maybe. And maybe even they're working together. Maybe Samson has ingratiated himself and the boy feels some degree of sympathy for him. Who knows what's going on here? But all we have is the facts of the story there. And so in verse 27 the house was full of men and women and the lords of the Philistines were there. That is the civic and religious leadership. The lords of the Philistines were there. And there were upon the roof about 3000 men and women. That beheld while Samson made sport, just about 3000 people. That's a pretty good crowd there. That is given and it's the who's who that was given and somehow they were upon the roof about 3000. That doesn't tell us how many are under the roof. I can't quite figure this out. They are able to watch while Samson made sport. So as I always picture it, he's down in the lower level. I think you would have to be that's where the pillars are going to be. But now you got 3000 people up on top. But somehow they're able to see this. Is it a balcony that goes around? Maybe so maybe there's a hole, maybe it's some sort of an arena type thing, I don't know exactly what it would be. I tried to do some research on the word roof here and it means the roof, the top. I don't know exactly how this works but somehow there are 3000 people up there, they are able to see him who must be down here and he is obviously going to do a work with these pillars here in just a moment. So it's got all the who's who here. This is going to be a dramatic moment as it comes to play. And again I think in the scene itself you're bound to have music and dancing and a coordinated crowd that it's not a mob or anything, they're following the leader, whoever that is, in the way that this is all going. And maybe there's performances, maybe they have special music, maybe they take an offering, who knows, maybe they have an invitation for dagon their god. I don't know what all is going on, but it is at this that Samson is paraded in front of these 3000 men and women and made sport. 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. Now let's dig into this one just a little bit. So he is now at the pillars, they obviously must be close enough that he can manage both of them. And he prays unto the Lord that is the word Yahweh or Jehovah signified by the all capital letters there. So the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the covenant god, that's sort of when you call God by his first name. So Samson and God are on a first name basis and he says hey Yahweh Jehovah, however you want to pronounce it lord. I called unto the Lord and said O Lord God. Notice just so you can understand the text in the King James and a lot of others anyway, you notice that God is also capitalized on the second one but lord is not, it's just lowercase ord so here you've got all caps lord, all caps god here's lowercase lord. That is not just something that looks better for the eye. That's the clue for us English readers that the all caps is the Yahweh. So he called unto yahweh and said, o, adonai yahweh. So Adonai is always translated lord, but a lot of times Yahweh is translated lord. So the difference, Adonai is more of a master, whereas Yahweh is lord, covenant god on a first name basis relationship god. And we can tell by the cases now, when we come to adonai Yahweh, yahweh is normally translated Lord, but we can't say Lord, lord in this case. In the New Testament there's a couple of times it's repeated there, but you got to change them so they make it Lord God. And they put God in all capital letters, which is handy to know. So Lord Yahweh adonai yahweh in Hebrew. Let me back up. Samson called unto the lord. Could anybody hear him? Did he speak out loud, verbally as he called? Did you see the movie? No. Some witness had to know it. Yeah. Samson didn't survive. There must have been somebody around that. By the way, when we get to the end of the story, I did double check, it does not tell us that everybody died. So eyewitnesses, very much from the Philistine side or maybe even from the other side, could have seen this. So I'm going to assume that this is verbal also. So as he's being made sport of, I don't know if it's loud. I don't know if it must be loud enough that an eyewitness can hear it. The word called itself I looked up, I don't know. I put it on the outline 700 and some OD times in the Scripture and I couldn't find I didn't study terribly closely, but I did thumb through them quickly, scroll through them quickly, I should say. It looks to me like there's no silent call. That's not a word you would use for saying it to yourself. It would have just said prayed or something like that. Now, remember Hannah, who was upset that she didn't have any children. She went to the temple and prayed in First Samuel and she ended up with giving birth to Samuel. It does tell us that Hannah prayed, but there was no voice heard, just her lips were moving. So there's a way to say this if he was just praying silently, in which case the only way for the writer of the Book of Judges to know it would be divine revelation, which we wouldn't have a problem with either. But I think he's actually bold enough now to say this, so he calls, o Lord God, remember me, I pray Thee and strengthen me. This is the desire. Remember me and strengthen me. Now, remember I said last week I think we've only had about three or four weeks that have passed by, maybe up to three months, I think is what I said in the notes last week. So it hasn't been a long time, but he's been kind of out in a desert wilderness, spiritually probably for a long time. And so he says, Remember me and strengthen me. I don't know if I would have had the discernment if I was a worshiper of Dagon. I guess I wouldn't have had too much discernment. But if I was a worshiper of Dagon, would I have had the discernment when I heard that? To say, I gotta go get something from the car. I'll be right back. I'm going to get out of here for just a moment. I don't know. Remember me and strengthen me, I pray Thee, only this once. It seems that Samson knows he's going to die in the process, only this once. Maybe he doesn't know that, but obviously we know that's what's going to happen. And he just says, okay, one more time, only this once, O God, that I may at once be avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes. Now, it's a difficult Hebrew phrase. Let me try to give you the literal and see if we can go here. That I may be avenged of the Philistines one time for two eyes. Now, you could put this another way, and the Jewish English translation puts it this way, that I may be avenged for one of my two eyes. The Hebrew really does allow that. In fact, I would say if you take the Hebrew literally, it is I've got two eyes, I want to be avenged for one of them, which lends then to that being the most literal let me stop right here. We don't always, even in a literal translation like the King James, we don't always do the literal translation because there are idioms, for example. And to get from one language to another, idioms don't usually translate metaphors. A lot of times don't translate allegorical language, doesn't necessarily translate. So sometimes when you translate it, you have to translate it into what they meant, not what they said. But the problem is there's always a little bit of danger taking what they said and turning that into what they meant. So this is where going into a very literal translation, even like young's literal translation or an interlinear, even better, an interlinear keeps it in the exact same word order as it was previously. Especially in Hebrew, it's almost unreadable just to translate the word, keep it in that order all the way through. It's not good English. It works for Hebrew, it doesn't work for English. So we have to switch some of these things around and say, okay, what this means is to get this in English language. So there's that translation problem. But every now and then I think you cannot communicate what the idiom is here. Did he mean that I may at once be avenged for my two eyes? Could have, or did he mean I may be avenged for one of my eyes? The Jewish people say for one of my eyes, which leaves another. Now, what do they say about another? The Jewish people have, I guess you could say, had a lot more time to study their scriptures than we have. They get on these things very meticulous. And I suspect, though you've probably never done it before and maybe even never knew it was out there, you could probably read it would take a little while to collect it, but you could probably read hundreds and hundreds of pages on this verse right here and one eye versus two eye, all from Jewish rabbis and their discussions on these things. Oral tradition in the Talmud and the Mishnah, maybe you've heard those terms. Oral tradition says that Samson's hope and desire was avenge me once. Let me see if I can give you Rashi, the old Jewish commentary. Here's, his actual quote here, if I can find it. Did I give ah, yes, next to the last line there. Rashi says, and the reward for my second eye reserve for me for the world to come, but here pay me for the reward of one of them. Basically, he's asking for entrance into the kingdom through this. Now, that's a lot of reading into it, but you do have to say, why does it say it that way and what could it mean? And all the things so I'm not opposed to a little bit of speculation, as long as you recognize that it is speculation. And the wording here certainly seems to leave open, okay, I got another eye. We'll take care of that. I don't want to take care of that by you remembering me and having my strength. But this one time, that is what I'm asking for. And that brings us to the house. Come down. But I don't have time for that. So we'll pick that up next week and leave you on the edge of your seat one more time. Stay tuned for the next episode of Samson and we will push those pillars down and give a little bit of overview next time. In our last session on the book of Samson, we'll give a little bit of overview on the entire 20 years of his reign and what we know and his impact into society all the way up to I would. Say the well, we'll get into the Yom Kippur war next time because Goldemayer had a little comment to President Nixon about Samson that we shall bring up next week. Let me lead us in prayer. Heavenly Father, I am grateful for the record of history that we've got given through Samson. And we've been trying to look into and speculate and come to understand the things that were here on this and just pray that we've done it correctly. And that which we have done correctly, we would remember that which we got incorrect or is not of consequence, we would forget, move on to other things, and that as we go into our worship service today, looking at David the shepherd, that would be insightful and encouraging to us as well. We pray this in Jesus name, amen. So let's take about a ten minute break here or so, get started in our worship service in just a moment and do some singing and preaching and have a good time. God bless you. See you soon. Online, we'll have a new broadcast for you. Mary, welcome back. Haven't seen you in such.