Restored to Service

To commemorate and celebrate their triumph over the man who has given them such trouble, the Philistine lords and leading citizens gather to offer a great sacrifice to their god, Dagon. But the occasion is a great provocation to the God of Israel, for they attribute to their idol what God has done (delivering Samson into their hands) and they make sport of God’s champion.

As Samson stands before them in his blindness, enduring their laughter and taunts, he offers a silent prayer to God: “ ‘O Lord God, remember me, I pray! Strengthen me, I pray, just this once, O God, that I may with one blow take vengeance on the Philistines for my two eyes!” This prayer reveals that while his physical eyes have been blinded, the eyes of his spirit have been opened to many things. “He prayed to God to remember him and strengthen him this once, thereby owning that his strength for what he had already done he had from God,” Matthew Henry writes. Furthermore, “That it was not from a principle of passion or personal revenge, but from a holy zeal for the glory of God and Israel, that he desired to do this, appears from God’s accepting and answering the prayer.” Samson seems to have learned, at long last, that his strength was given to him for the glory of God, for delivering God’s people, and for executing judgment on God’s enemies. Just as his hair has been growing again in the prison, his heart apparently has been turning back to God in true devotion. Now he is ready to use the strength God once gave him as God intended—if God will restore it in answer to his prayer.

God does answer. Once again the supernatural strength God so often had afforded him surges through his sinews, and he brings down the pagan temple on all the lords of the Philistines and many more besides. At his death, we are told, he kills more Philistines than in all me rest of his life put together—such is the excelling greatness of the restoration God effects. Samson, too, dies in the collapse, not as a suicide but as one who went into battle counting his life as nothing. And when it is over, his family retrieves his body from the wreckage and lays it to rest in his father’s tomb with honor, a true judge of Israel who, though he lived much of his life in dissolution, yet finished his race well.