Morning, ladies and gentlemen. Glad to see all of you. Sorry, we're a little, what's the Hebrew word? Haram scaram. Haram scaram. This morning. With vacation Bible school getting us all started, I'm going to step over here and turn this hello so that you'll be able to hear a little bit something other than the air conditioning. There's our air conditioned section right there, if you would like, like that on. Is this going to be the hottest Sunday of the year so far? I don't know, but we've got guests from Texas and they brought it with them. We appreciate you all being here, but not the heat. But anyway, we are glad to see everybody today. And let me lead us in a word of prayer and we will get started. Heavenly Father, it's a joy to be here in this wonderful little church and have this fellowship and the joy of this place, whatever the weather is. And so we are glad today as we come in and begin to do some study on a new section of scripture that your word is clear and the presence to us will be made clear as we take this rightly dividing the word of truth and learn a little bit about Samson in this period of the judges. And we pray this in Jesus name, amen. And we do come into a new series today on Samson, and I think we're going to have a good time doing it. I've gotten to where I kind of like doing these character studies because it is better marketing than saying we're going to do judges 13 through 16, verse by verse. If you tell people that, then I don't know about that. But we're going to do a study of Samson, which is judges 13 through 16, verse by verse. That's what we're going to look at. And Judges is one of the books that I have never done verse by verse. And I'm getting down to the hard books, all the easy books I've done verse by verse. We're working on Mark now on Wednesday nights, and that one we won't finish this week. But anyway, you get some of these longer books that are filled with great stuff. But it's just hard, I started to say in a modern audience, but maybe just always hard to take something that long and put it through. Well, Judges is one of those that I think is filled with fascinating stories and fascinating history. And yet maybe to go judges one through, I think 22 or 23, something like that, might be more than you would be eager to come. I know you all would do it because you are in the advanced class of the Taoist Theological Seminary and you would have no problem at all. But others might not like Trenton and Madison. They might say, no, that's not for me. Now. So we begin today a study of the life of Samson, which is judges 13 through 16. And we will go through all of these verses just like we did a number of weeks ago or months ago for Jereboham on our Wednesday night study, looking at that. And it's an opportunity to take a piece of history and look through it. Of course, Jarrah Bohem was from the divided monarchy period, and Samson is much earlier than that. Let's see, 8120, let's call it 200 years. How's that? 200 years earlier than Jerry Bohem. We come into Samson now, today. The good news is that we're beginning this to study the biblical narrative of Samson. The bad news is you're not going to learn much about Samson today. Rather, we're going to get the background of it, because when you're in the seminary class, this is what you have to do, a session for the background. And you need a little bit of background. And so we come to the book of judges. And in the book of judges, guess what? It's about? Judges. Very good. There are 13 judges mentioned in the book of judges. Some of them get a lot of territory, like Samson. As a matter of fact, no judge gets more page time than does Samson. He gets, again, 13 through 16, chapters 13 through 16. And Gideon is number two. Gideon gets three chapters. Samson has four chapters. Some of them, like we'll mention Shamgar, in a moment, he gets like one verse. So the book obviously has a lot in it in addition to the judges. As a matter of fact, when we finish judges chapter 16, there's still seven or eight or nine chapters to go in the book of Judges, and yet no judges are mentioned in that back portion. It is, in a great sense a history book. And when you learn the categories of the books of the Bible, typically you would put judges in the book of history. Now, it might throw our thinking a little bit. I'm sure you all have dealt with it already. But the word judges itself, of course, for us, has the idea of someone sitting, deciding a case, and they come in in the black robe and all rise and they hear the evidence and they put forth. These judges didn't do any of that. I'm sure there were cases in which the people came to them and said, hey, help us, what do we do here? But that was not really much of their ministry, their role, their career, if you will. They were really most known for being military leaders, but being military leaders, of course, they were also political leaders. And really the military portion of it is what is mostly included. But then there's a long portion after that in which they had somewhat of an administrative role in the country, holding the country together. They were sort of the de facto leader in the country, much like, I don't know, you might take a General Eisenhower or something like that, had his eight years afterwards of administrative leadership, executive leadership. But his claim to fame was World War II and what he carried out there. Well, it's the same way with Gideon. It's the same way with Samson, although Samson being a little bit different because we know him more for the bad stuff than for the good stuff. And yet he had some good stuff, and we're going to learn that along the way. The word judges comes from the Hebrew. Sophet sofit so actually, if we were reading in a Hebrew Bible, it would not be called judges, of course. It would be called sofa team. I am at the end of a Hebrew word, makes it plural. So you got the sofa and the sofa team, you've got the judge and the judges. This is a book about the sofa team. It is a book of history about a particular period of time that's often said to be 450 years. But last week we questioned the assumptions on chronology and learned that there's about 93 years that aren't counted. We'll talk about one of those periods today that aren't counted. If you go to the apostle Paul in Acts chapter 13, he counts all of them and comes up with, what did we say, 573 years or something to that effect? Not quite, because that includes Saul. So back off 40 on that. But nonetheless, he gets it about 70 or so years longer. I think Saul has it right. I think first kings has it right. I think that's last week's sermon, and we'll leave it at that. But it is this long period of time. Let's just call it 500 years. It's this 500 year period of time from the death of Joshua at the end of the book of Joshua, of course, after they had come in, they had conquered the land, took them about seven years to conquer the land. And then they lived. They lived out the time of Joshua. And then things begin to happen in that roughly 500 year period of time from the death of Joshua to the time they say, we want a king, and they got King Saul is 500 ish years that the Book of Judges covers. So without the Book of Judges, not only would we miss out on some great stories like Samson, but we would be missing a big chunk of Jewish history, I think. And we're going to talk about this at the end. I think that often the Book of Judges has been misunderstood and that it is not as horrible a period as we often characterize it to be. That 500 years of history, that is a long time. I think. What year is this? Three years from now we'll have our 250th birthday as the United States. So double that. It's a long period of time that you've got this period of the judges. Now, I've given you on your outline there a little bit of a list of the judges as they are found in the book of Judges or the Sofa team, as they are found in the book of Sofa team. Incidentally, I should say the English word judge came originally from the Latin word that had to do with judiciary and it originally in Latin had much more of a connotation of this being your jurisdiction. And as that word then came into English and then over time changed, our view of judge became very narrow. So you have to go way back to the broadest word you could get of judge in the English language and then broaden that a little bit for the Latin language, and then broaden that a little bit for the Hebrew language. It is this big word basically that means he is the guy in charge or she is the guy in charge and she is the guy in charge. That sounds like a modern statement, doesn't it? In one case at least with Deborah. Now, here's the list of judges again. We've already noted that Gideon's got quite a bit of space in verses six through eight. And then we see Samson chapter six through eight, samson in chapters 13 through 16. And Samson was a judge for 20 years. The longest judge was ehood, the Benjamite. If you know anything about ehood, you know one thing, he was left handed. ehood, the left handed Benjamite. There you go. We perhaps should question the assumptions on that because he might not have been left handed, but the way we read the Bible, it looks like ehood the left handed Benjamite, we'll go with it. The word sofit is also used of Eli and Samuel, but typically and you want to be able to pass the test, don't you? If the question is how many judges are in the book of judges, the answer is 13. There are 15 if you go out of the book of Judges and you count Eli and Samuel, but they don't come till the book of first Samuel. And the first several chapters is Eli and Eli's death. You remember his sons coming in. But both Eli and Samuel were priests and as priests the priestly role really was to be sofit the priest was supposed to be the sofit. So Eli and Samuel are really kind of back to the way things are supposed to be. That's how leadership is supposed to go. In a Theocracy is the priest talks to Theo and Theo gives the word and the priest is the one that announces the word. And that's kind of what Eli and Samuel did. So they were Sofa team, but they're not in the book of Sofa team. And all of the others in the book of Sofa team are a little different. You notice that I mentioned the tribe that these were from. The only one we're not sure of is Shamgar, but the tribe that they are from. And you notice that none of them, with perhaps again of the exception of shamgar, but I doubt it. None of them were of the tribe of Levi. Well, the priestly tribe was the tribe of Levi. So this is a time in Israelite society when they were supposed to be under a theocracy. And as a matter of fact, I would say they were under a theocracy for those 500 years. And as a theocracy, they looked to the priesthood for really moral leadership. A theocracy. Again, I'm going to talk a little more about this at the end. I don't want to jump ahead too much, but a theocracy can't work without morals. You got to understand who your God is and what your God expects of you, and that's what you do. And so they were living under this moral theocracy, which doesn't have much of a government, and the only government was the priest to say, here's what the word of God is. And at this point, they had the Torah. And so the priestly role was not even so much, though I'm sure there was some of this, but was not even so much hearing a fresh word from God. But it was taking the word that God had given through Moses and announcing that to the people or judging whether or not the people are in compliance with what God has said. As long as the people are doing that, then that's all we need. We don't have to have a government, we don't have to have anything else. We just have some priests to sort of guide the morality, if you will, of the country. And so every now and then, the priests did not do a very good job. Imagine that. I know it's hard to imagine because the clergy down through time has always done their job perfectly, announced the Word of God, interpreted it correctly, never made a mistake, never manipulated, never became selfish or self serving, but it did happen once in history, and that was during the time of the priesthood. So the priesthood would, I don't know if they would get lazy, if they would get too comfortable, if they would get sinful, whatever it was. From time to time, the priesthood got to where the priesthood just wasn't doing its job. And that is when enemies would come in and they would take advantage of the situation. The lack of morals in the society, a lack of morals. I'm going to use a scripture out of context, but it works. Where there is no vision, the people perish the word vision, there is revelation. Where there is no revelation from God, the people perish the word perish. There has the connotation of running loose. In fact, a couple of times I'll tell you how running loose it is. A couple of times the word parish, the Hebrew word for parish, is translated naked. So where there is no word from God, the people run naked. They have no protection or they run naked. I'll tell you where it's used as naked is when Aaron makes the golden calf and the people are running around it. I think it's the King James that says they're running around it naked. Some of the other more sophisticated translations say they're running around unrestrained. And so whatever it is there, when the priesthood left the vision or the Revelation, the people began to go unrestrained. Well, when the people run around unrestrained, that's when enemy governments come in and say I see an opportunity here, I smell something that I could make money on and power. And they swoop in and that's exactly what happened. The Book of Judges, this is not its primary purpose, but the Book of Judges is a pretty good study on sociology and power and the way people in societies work and the way governments work and operate. If you ever want to do an anthropological study on all that, the Book of Judges would be a pretty good place to go. So when this happened, other governments would come in, god would allow it and these governments would come in and there would be a time of oppression that we'll get to in just a moment. And after a long time of oppression, the people would say, hey, wait a minute, I thought we were supposed to be under a theocracy and looking to our priest. And so they would get religious again and cry out through their priest to God. And God would raise one up. But he didn't raise up a priest. He raised up someone like Gideon or someone like Samson who could I don't know if I'm supposed to say it like this, but you'll forgive me. The priest could kick butt, take names, he could get the job done and God would raise up someone like that, that you can do it, you can handle this job. Not the priesthood, which had kind of failed in their job. And so this guy would come up as a military leader, bring them unto some sort of government that we don't know much about, and kind of hold it together, get things back to where they should be, and times of peace would come again. And I think people would come more than into the priesthood like they were supposed to, into theocracy like they were supposed to. And probably much of these like ehood, the left handed Benjamite who served for 80 years, my guess is it was kind of a casual service. He was not having to go to the office every day to perform his executive duties as he wasn't the king, he wasn't the president, he wasn't the prime minister, he was such a respected leader that they would turn to him during that time, is what I suspect. So here is what you've got. Now with that, let's catch the one verse we're going to see of Samson today. That doesn't mention Samson, but it does give the introduction. And the introduction is right here. It says the children of israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord delivered them into the hand of the Philistines 40 years. Now you've got it. That is the background to the story of Samson. They've been going now for let's call it 300 years. I may be off a little bit there, but for 300 years in this rise and fall cycle that we're familiar with of the judges, and they were on the low end of this thing, and they did evil in the sight of the Lord. And the Philistines just happened to be next door, and the Philistines came in and began to oppress them. Now, I've given you at the bottom of page one there various times of oppression. There were four times already previous to this. So you notice there's 13 judges altogether, and including this one, in Judges 13, there's five times of oppression. So you can't always take remember the little cycle thing we teach in Judges that the people drifted from God. God raised up an enemy. The people cried out to God, god raised up a judge. That little cycle is not too broad of a brush. It is a good general cycle. But we don't have 13 times of oppression by enemies. So some of these follow one another. Sometimes the pattern is a little different, or sometimes the pattern is not given there. This is one thing that preachers probably do poorly, and that is we like to Summarize scripture and give the summary as if it's the truth all the time. And then good people like you go and you say, well, I don't see oppression there. I don't see an oppression that where's this cycle? And then we say, well, farther along, we'll understand, and we dismiss your question because I don't know. I guess everybody likes a summary. Well. Summaries serve their purpose. But Summaries are just Summaries. That's all they are. So here we see these various oppressions, the Mesopotamian oppression, the Moabite, the Canaanite, the Midianite, and the Ammonite. I said five. There's six altogether, because when we come to Judges chapter 13, we come into the 6th oppression, which is the longest one, and that is 40 years the other. Did I give the length of it? Yeah. There's eight years, 18 years, 20 years, seven years, and 18 years were the previous oppressions that were given. Those are numbers that come actually from the Scripture, and so we can trust those numbers. And here, as we saw a moment ago in Judges chapter 13, it tells us they were under oppression of the Philistines for 40 years. When you add up all the years in the entire book of Judges, there are 93 years of oppression that are given altogether. That is the secret to the chronology that we talked about last week, that First Kings talks about 450 years, and Paul talks about 573 years, whatever those numbers are again. And it's that one counts the years of oppression saul, the other first kings, does not count the years of oppression. It only counts the years in which God is actually dealing with his people there. So you've got these years that Go and you've got 40 years of the Philistines. Now, you have heard of the Philistines, right? I thought so. Just wanted to check on a warm Sunday morning to make sure you have heard of the Philistines. But surprisingly, we don't know all that much about the Philistines. Some of what I'm going to tell you is always told. But I suspect if we were in a court of law and had to prove this to be the case, we might lose the case. Sometimes you lose the case not because the guy didn't do it, but because you can't get the evidence to show that the guy did it. So here's the best case that we put together on the Philistines. The word kind of means the Sea Peoples. Sea Peoples. Okay, that doesn't help us too much when there's a lot of ocean in the world, right? But you could begin to put some things together. The theory goes, and I guess we'll have to say it's the best theory we've got. The theory goes that these are people who came from the Aegean Sea, so let's call them pre Greeks. They're from that Greek portion of the world. And they came, what would it be, 4000 years ago. And some of these Sea Peoples made their way through the Mediterranean to the coast of what today would be Israel. They settled in the southern end of that coast, which today would be called the Gaza Strip. Down south of Tel Aviv. From Tel Aviv to about where Egypt goes, there's a little strip of land. There are five known city states that were in the scripture called Philistine, like Gath. Remember there was a famous person from Gath, his name was I pretty sure I heard you say Goliath and Gath and four other cities. There five of them altogether. There probably were more, but we know of those five cities and they're all down in that area. The Philistines had already by this time been enemies of the Hebrew people. When the conquest came under Joshua, they didn't push out the Philistines. So that Gaza Strip area, as we call it today, was not really we'll use the word conquered by Israel until the times of King David and King Solomon. After that, that's when they got all this. So this is long before any of that happened, and the Philistines are living down there. Shamgar. Shamgar gets one verse in the Bible. Shamgar is the guy that we don't know much about. We don't know what tribe he is. All we know is that the scripture tells us the verses in your outline there. The scripture tells us that Shamgar killed 600 men with an ox goad, which is kind of impressive. It doesn't say 600 men, it says 600 Philistines. This is long prior to the time of Samson, but we don't know were the Philistines under a leadership kind of oppression like we have in Judges, or were they just constantly a problem? God rises shamgar. He takes an ox goad. An ox goad, if I understand it correct, is a pointed stick. Would that be right? John, you seem like you ought to know what an ox goad is. Okay, we'll go with a pointed stick. You goad the ox with the pointed stick and he killed 600 men with it. 600 Philistines with it. The Philistines, by the way, from what we know of history, and this one probably we could verify, they were very advanced warriors, chariots and iron. And these things they used and they did quite well with that. So to kill 600 Philistines with an ox goad, that's worthy of at least one verse in the Bible, right? And indeed, he got his one verse in the Bible. We don't know, by the way. Did he do that all at once or did he do that over time? It's easier for me to picture. Philistines kept bothering him and he kept his ox goat at hand. And when one came, he would take care of that Philistine. But who knows how it all happened? Nonetheless, that's what we know. So the Philistines are these people that were a constant problem. Eventually they came in and basically they just took control of the country and the Israelites. During this 40 year period, I think we could call it occupied Israel. The Philistines had come and occupied the land. The government of the land was Philistine at that point. This is not the last time it's going to happen. It's not the first time it's happened. It's not the last time that it's going to happen. You may remember that in the days of King Saul, the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant and it brought a great curse upon them. And eventually they said, Take this, we don't want it under David. And David brought it back into the city of Jerusalem, where it remained until it went in a storage vault in Berlin, I think. At least I saw that in a movie. Or was it Washington DC. I forgot. Washington DC. Thank you. Okay, mixing up the lines of the movie. I'm sure it's there anyway. But the Philistines were this problem. Samson is our guy who is going to come and take care of the Philistines, and we're going to see how he does that as we progress again from this. All we know today is that the Lord delivered them into the hands of the Philistines 40 years. Next week, we'll get into the birth of Samson. Samson is unique in that he is the only one of which we know who was born to be a sofa. Sofa team. He was born to overcome the Philistines. Let me say before I say the last point of the sermon here the Bible study this morning. Let me add one more thing about the Philistines. The Philistines eventually were conquered under Solomon they were conquered, and after Solomon, the Philistines are really no more. They don't exist any. It's the Assyrians, it's the Egyptians, it's the Babylonians, that's the enemy. The Philistines are never seen again. So for all practical purposes, they are as a people group anyway, they're wiped off the map, they don't exist anymore. But later on, a long time later on, 1000 years later on, the Romans came in. And you know that eventually the Romans grew a tremendous hatred for the Jews because the Jews would not submit to their Roman ways. And eventually with a Jewish revolt, the Romans came in to Israel and eventually in Ad 70 destroyed the city of Jerusalem and thought they had things taken care of, but turned out they didn't quite. Because in 135 Ad there was another Jewish revolt. And at this Jewish revolt. It's called the Barkakba Rebellion. In Ad 135, the Romans decided we're done wipe Israel off the map. And so it is at that point they took the province of Judea and the city of Jerusalem as well, but the province of Judea, they decided at 135 Ad we are not calling it Judea anymore, we hate these Jews. And so they sat down in a council meeting of Romans and said what could we name the place that the Jews claim as their own? And one of them in Latin said, let's name it Palestina Philistia, name it after the ancient Philistines. And that's how in modern times, the land of Israel became known as Palestine. And from 135 Ad up until 1948, that was the name of it, Palestine. And today, if you call it Palestine, it tells me you watch CNN too much and today there is a Palestinian Authority, but there is no such thing as a Philistine. The Philistines ceased to exist as a people 3000 years ago. It's just a name that was used of the enemies to be placed on there. Now, let me say one more thing here in closing before we go, so that I think this will help, this background information will help to understand this period of time. Judges 17 six and Judges 21 five both say in those days there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes. Now, that particular verse, it may even be one mentioned once more in there, and I may have paraphrased that, I should have looked up the exact wording, but everyone did what was right in his own eyes and his own sight. And this is inevitably taken as a bad thing. I may be the only one in the world that says this is a good thing, because the next thing you know after the book of Judges is that the people come together and say we want to have a king, we want to have. A king. Well, these verses say, in those days there was no king. Everyone did what is right. And then when they ask for a king, god says, you don't want a king, which tells me you would rather live in which everyone does what is right in their own eyes. That is, you'd rather have independence, you'd rather have freedom. God says, stay away from this whole king business. You're going to get taxed, you're going to get oppressed, they're going to tell you what kind of light bulb you can use, how gas can come out of a can, how much you can do this and how much you can do that, and when you can do it. And even sometimes they're going to tell you whether you can go to church or not go to church, you don't want a king. He says, I've got a better plan. And the plan was a moral society. I am convinced that a moral society does not need a central government or at best needs a very limited central government. And that's what God provided. Now, granted, there was one thing that Israel had that society today would not have, and that is that God was the army for that particular country. And country today probably is going to have to say there's philistines that God's not just going to wipe out, we're going to have to wipe them out, but a very limited role. If a government has excuse me, if a society has morals, I'm even going to go so far to say, I think almost any morals would do. I know that's a weird thing for a Baptist preacher to say, but a society that sticks together on its values, you don't need 453 men and women deciding every little detail of your life. Society decides that through its morals, through its values, and carries that out one at a time. And that, I think, becomes that's what the period of the judges was supposed to be. And God, honestly, when I look at the period of the judges, especially when the people are living right, I understand there were 93 years in which they weren't, but 500 years in which they were. That was a pretty good 500 years in which to live. God protected you. You do what is right in your own sight. That is, we have our morals, our values, our standards that are recorded in the Torah. We look at this, we carry this out. This is what we do, this is what our society does. And that's the way it was supposed to be. And Samson came in a period which was not so good, in fact, maybe the worst that it had been in this 40 years of oppression. And Samson is going to be the instrument of God to help get rid of the philistines and let the people back into this peaceful existence. Take the book of judges and look at it positively. Those particular verses especially. I think that it is okay? That's the intro to Samson. Next week we are going to have Samson's birth announcement. He's one of three people in the Bible that get a birth announcement ahead of time by an angel. We'll check that out next week, and then we will in just a moment. Well, I'll say a word of prayer, and then I'll tell you what the sermon is going to be about. Heavenly Father, thanks for your presence, for the book of judges and the learning that we'll have in these four chapters on the book of judges as we go over these next few weeks, months, whatever it takes. And we pray that it's an encouragement to help us to understand both history and our world. I pray this in Jesus name. Amen. Well, we have been questioning the assumptions. We're going to do that in our sermon in just a little bit. On. Go ahead and come on in. I'm just announcing and so we'll take about a 1015 minutes break and get started again. God bless you. Have at it.