FBC Daily Devotional – August 30, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:05

Well, a good Monday morning to you. I hope you awoke today refreshed and ready for the week.

00:11

Hopefully, physically refreshed from a good night of rest, but also spiritually refreshed from being able to attend

00:17

God's house yesterday with God's people, fellowshipping together and worshiping the

00:23

Lord, learning His truth, and being encouraged in your Christian walk.

00:28

I hope you are able to do that and that that gets your week off to a great start. Well this week, today and on Wednesday, we'll be reading the account in our

00:40

Bible reading plan of the story of Samson, a tragic, tragic story.

00:46

Usually when you think of Samson, the story has the name and Delilah attached to it.

00:52

But there's more to the story of Samson than just his relationship with Delilah, as we will see.

01:00

But in today's reading, chapter 13, it starts off with wonderful promise.

01:08

Because the angel of the Lord comes to Samson's parents. His mother has not been able to have a child and the angel says to her, miraculously, you're going to conceive and have a child.

01:20

She finds that incredible. Dad finds it even more incredible. And so dad asks for confirmation and sure enough, the angel comes back a second time and says, yes, this is what's going to happen.

01:31

And the instructions for the rearing of that child are very clear. The angel tells them he is to be a

01:39

Nazarite from birth. And what that means is, the angel explains to his mother that she is not to eat anything from the vine.

01:51

So no grapes, no grape juice, no wine, nothing from the vine.

01:56

Not to eat anything that's unclean. And so forth. And the child, when he's born, is to be a

02:03

Nazarite and he's to grow up with those kinds of restrictions throughout the course of his life.

02:11

And so those are the parameters. But it isn't long. You know, he's born and then the years of growing up are skipped over pretty much until he reaches adulthood, at least old enough to marry.

02:26

And very quickly we see that command to be a Nazarite is is violated by by Samson.

02:35

And he, you know, eats the he eats the honey out of the carcass of a lion that would be considered an unclean thing.

02:46

And he wants to he wants his parents to get him a wife that's not an

02:52

Israelite. That's a violation of the law. And so forth. And the thing that I want us to catch in in this, when we think of the book of Judges, it's it's easy if we just if we just think of it on a cursory level because of the fact that God uses different individuals over and over again to deliver his people from oppression.

03:17

It's easy to think of the book of Judges as a book of heroes and great characters.

03:22

But what what we're seeing in this book is that's not the case. These individuals who are judges very rarely are they individuals of great character.

03:35

In fact, every one of them has, except for maybe one or two, has some kind of grotesque character flaws.

03:42

And this is certainly true in the case of Samson. And so in chapter 14, for example, he wants this

03:50

Philistine wife. Philistines are enemies of the Israelites, but his eye is drawn to this

03:57

Philistine woman and he wants his parents to get her for him. And this was, of course, the protocol.

04:05

You have mom and dad make the arrangements for, you know, getting the wife and they they protest, but they go along with it.

04:13

They shouldn't have, but they did. And so that's in the first four verses of chapter 14.

04:20

And then later on in verses 8 and 9, he eats the honey out of this carcass, a violation of that Nazirite vow.

04:30

But here's the thing. Here's the thing. These violations, we are rightly critical of him and his parents for going along with it, for the violations of God's law and the requirements that were placed upon him as a

04:46

Nazirite. But, the thing of it is, the

04:51

Lord is determined to use even those wrong and sinful choices of Samson to accomplish his, the

05:02

Lord's, purposes. And we read this a little, a little further on.

05:09

And it says his father and mother didn't know, you know, his father and mother, you know, they protested about the

05:14

Philistine woman and and yet he says, no, get her for me at the end of verse 3 because she pleases me well.

05:20

But then verse 4 says, his father and mother did not know that it was of the Lord, that he, the

05:27

Lord, was seeking an occasion to move against the Philistines. So the point is that, here's

05:35

Samson, he's supposed to be meticulously obedient to this Nazirite vow and to the law of the

05:40

Lord. He's not. He violates God's law by wanting to marry a non -Israelite woman, a

05:49

Philistine, nonetheless. And he's violating his Nazirite vow and yet, the

05:58

Lord is going to use that. It's part of God's plan and purpose to deliver his people.

06:06

Now this boggles our minds because we are inclined to think that, you know,

06:12

God only wants to use the holy things that people do, the right things, the right actions and behaviors of people.

06:20

But what we should be learning from the book of Judges is that, and particularly the life of Samson, and we're gonna see this again in a couple of days, is that God uses the sinful, even the sinful choices, to accomplish his ultimate purposes.

06:37

That doesn't mean that the one who engages in those sinful choices is exonerated and is not held accountable.

06:47

He is. He is responsible for what he does and he will be held accountable when all is said and done. But God uses it.

06:54

That's the thing. That's the amazing thing, that God even uses the sinful choices and the wrong behaviors of even his people to accomplish his ultimate purposes.

07:07

This is a, this is pointing out the inscrutability of God, how his ways are really beyond our comprehension, how he pulls together all of the threads in the fabric of life to accomplish his purposes.

07:25

What an amazing God. Our Father and our God, we thank you for who you are, for your power, your wisdom, your knowledge, your authority, your sovereignty, how you can use even the sinful, wrong choices of your people to accomplish the ultimate good for your people.

07:49

This is beyond our understanding, but we praise you for it. Thank you for these truths that we learned from your word that reveal to us who you are.

07:59

We pray your blessing upon us as we learn them and understand them and apply them in Jesus name.

08:05

Amen. All right. Well, have a good rest of your, what is this, Monday?