“And Samson went down
to Timnath. - Judges xiv:
1.
There are two sides to the character
of Samson. The one phase of his life, if followed
into the particulars, would administer to the grotesque
and the mirthful; but there is a phase of his character
fraught with lessons of solemn and eternal import.
To these graver lessons we devote our morning sermon.
This giant no doubt in early life
gave evidences of what he was to be. It is almost
always so. There were two Napoleons the
boy Napoleon and the man Napoleon but both
alike; two Howards the boy Howard and the
man Howard but both alike; two Samsons the
boy Samson and the man Samson but both
alike. This giant was no doubt the hero of the
playground, and nothing could stand before his exhibitions
of youthful prowess. At eighteen years of age
he was betrothed to the daughter of a Philistine.
Going down toward Timnath, a lion came out upon him,
and, although this young giant was weaponless, he seized
the monster by the long mane and shook him as a hungry
hound shakes a March hare, and made his bones crack,
and left him by the wayside bleeding under the smiting
of his fist and the grinding heft of his heel.
There he stands, looming up above
other men, a mountain of flesh, his arms bunched with
muscle that can lift the gate of a city, taking an
attitude defiant of everything. His hair had never
been cut, and it rolled down in seven great plaits
over his shoulders, adding to his bulk, fierceness,
and terror. The Philistines want to conquer him,
and therefore they must find out where the secret
of his strength lies.
There is a dissolute woman living
in the valley of Sorek by the name of Delilah.
They appoint her the agent in the case. The Philistines
are secreted in the same building, and then Delilah
goes to work and coaxes Samson to tell what is the
secret of his strength. “Well,” he
says, “if you should take seven green withes
such as they fasten wild beasts with and put them
around me I should be perfectly powerless.”
So she binds him with the seven green withes.
Then she claps her hands and says: “They
come the Philistines!” and he walks
out as though they were no impediment. She coaxes
him again, and says: “Now tell me the secret
of this great strength?” and he replies:
“If you should take some ropes that have never
been used and tie me with them I should be just like
other men.” She ties him with the ropes,
claps her hands, and shouts: “They come the
Philistines!” He walks out as easily as he did
before not a single obstruction. She
coaxes him again, and he says: “Now, if
you should take these seven long plaits of hair, and
by this house-loom weave them into a web, I could not
get away.” So the house-loom is rolled
up, and the shuttle flies backward and forward and
the long plaits of hair are woven into a web.
Then she claps her hands, and says: “They
come the Philistines!” He walks out
as easily as he did before, dragging a part of the
loom with him.
But after awhile she persuades him
to tell the truth. He says: “If you
should take a razor or shears and cut off this long
hair, I should be powerless and in the hands of my
enemies.” Samson sleeps, and that she may
not wake him up during the process of shearing, help
is called in. You know that the barbers of the
East have such a skillful way of manipulating the
head to this very day that, instead of waking up a
sleeping man, they will put a man wide awake sound
asleep. I hear the blades of the shears grinding
against each other, and I see the long locks falling
off. The shears or razor accomplishes what green
withes and new ropes and house-loom could not do.
Suddenly she claps her hands, and says: “The
Philistines be upon thee, Samson!” He rouses
up with a struggle, but his strength is all gone.
He is in the hands of his enemies.
I hear the groan of the giant as they
take his eyes out, and then I see him staggering on
in his blindness, feeling his way as he goes on toward
Gaza. The prison door is open, and the giant is
thrust in. He sits down and puts his hands on
the mill-crank, which, with exhausting horizontal
motion, goes day after day, week after week, month
after month work, work, work! The
consternation of the world in captivity, his locks
shorn, his eyes punctured, grinding corn in Gaza!
I. First of all, behold in this giant
of the text that physical power is not always an index
of moral power. He was a huge man the
lion found it out, and the three thousand men whom
he slew found it out; yet he was the subject of petty
revenges and out-gianted by low passion. I am
far from throwing any discredit upon physical stamina.
There are those who seem to have great admiration for
delicacy and sickliness of constitution. I never
could see any glory in weak nerves or sick headache.
Whatever effort in our day is made to make the men
and women more robust should have the favor of every
good citizen as well as of every Christian. Gymnastics
may be positively religious.
Good people sometimes ascribe to a
wicked heart what they ought to ascribe to a slow
liver. The body and the soul are such near neighbors
that they often catch each other’s diseases.
Those who never saw a sick day, and who, like Hercules,
show the giant in the cradle, have more to answer
for than those who are the subjects of life-long infirmities.
He who can lift twice as much as you can, and walk
twice as far, and work twice as long, will have a
double account to meet in the judgment.
How often it is that you do not find
physical energy indicative of spiritual power!
If a clear head is worth more than one dizzy with
perpetual vertigo if muscles with the play
of health in them are worth more than those drawn
up in chronic “rheumatics” if
an eye quick to catch passing objects is better than
one with vision dim and uncertain then
God will require of us efficiency just in proportion
to what he has given us. Physical energy ought
to be a type of moral power. We ought to have
as good digestion of truth as we have capacity to
assimilate food. Our spiritual hearing ought to
be as good as our physical hearing. Our spiritual
taste ought to be as clear as our tongue. Samsons
in body, we ought to be giants in moral power.
But while you find a great many men
who realize that they ought to use their money aright,
and use their intelligence aright, how few men you
find aware of the fact that they ought to use their
physical organism aright! With every thump of
the heart there is something saying, “Work!
work!” and, lest we should complain that we have
no tools to work with, God gives us our hands and
feet, with every knuckle, and with every joint, and
with every muscle saying to us, “Lay hold and
do something.”
But how often it is that men with
physical strength do not serve Christ! They are
like a ship full manned and full rigged, capable of
vast tonnage, able to endure all stress of weather,
yet swinging idly at the docks, when these men ought
to be crossing and recrossing the great ocean of human
suffering and sin with God’s supplies of mercy.
How often it is that physical strength is used in doing
positive damage, or in luxurious ease, when, with
sleeves rolled up and bronzed bosom, fearless of the
shafts of opposition, it ought to be laying hold with
all its might, and tugging away to lift up this sunken
wreck of a world.
It is a most shameful fact that much
of the business of the Church and of the world must
be done by those comparatively invalid. Richard
Baxter, by reason of his diseases, all his days sitting
in the door of the tomb, yet writing more than a hundred
volumes, and sending out an influence for God that
will endure as long as the “Saints’ Everlasting
Rest.” Edward Payson, never knowing a well
day, yet how he preached, and how he wrote, helping
thousands of dying souls like himself to swim in a
sea of glory! And Robert M’Cheyne, a walking
skeleton, yet you know what he did in Dundee, and
how he shook Scotland with zeal for God. Philip
Doddridge, advised by his friends, because of his
illness, not to enter the ministry, yet you know what
he did for the “rise and progress of religion”
in the Church and in the world.
Wilberforce was told by his doctors
that he could not live a fortnight, yet at that very
time entering upon philanthropic enterprises that
demanded the greatest endurance and persistence.
Robert Hall, suffering excruciations, so that often
in his pulpit while preaching he would stop and lie
down on a sofa, then getting up again to preach about
heaven until the glories of the celestial city dropped
on the multitude, doing more work, perhaps, than almost
any well man in his day.
Oh, how often it is that men with
great physical endurance are not as great in moral
and spiritual stature! While there are achievements
for those who are bent all their days with sickness achievements
of patience, achievements of Christian endurance I
call upon men of health to-day, men of muscle, men
of nerve, men of physical power, to devote themselves
to the Lord. Giants in body, you ought to be giants
in soul.
II. Behold also, in the story
of my text, illustration of the fact of the damage
that strength can do if it be misguided. It seems
to me that this man spent a great deal of his time
in doing evil this Samson of my text.
To pay a bet which he had lost by guessing of his
riddle he robs and kills thirty people. He was
not only gigantic in strength, but gigantic in mischief,
and a type of those men in all ages of the world who,
powerful in body or mind, or any faculty of social
position or wealth, have used their strength for iniquitous
purposes.
It is not the small, weak men of the
day who do the damage. These small men who go
swearing and loafing about your stores and shops and
banking-houses, assailing Christ and the Bible and
the Church they do not do the damage.
They have no influence. They are vermin that you
crush with your foot. But it is the giants of
the day, the misguided giants, giants in physical
power, or giants in mental acumen, or giants in social
position, or giants in wealth, who do the damage.
The men with sharp pens that stab
religion and throw their poison all through our literature;
the men who use the power of wealth to sanction iniquity,
and bribe justice, and make truth and honor bow to
their golden scepter.
Misguided giants look out
for them! In the middle and the latter part of
the last century no doubt there were thousands of men
in Paris and Edinburgh and London who hated God and
blasphemed the name of the Almighty; but they did
but little mischief they were small men,
insignificant men. Yet there were giants in those
days.
Who can calculate the soul-havoc of
a Rousseau, going on with a very enthusiasm of iniquity,
with fiery imagination seizing upon all the impulsive
natures of his day? or David Hume, who employed his
life as a spider employs its summer, in spinning out
silken webs to trap the unwary? or Voltaire, the most
learned man of his day, marshaling a great host of
skeptics, and leading them out in the dark land of
infidelity? or Gibbon, who showed an uncontrollable
grudge against religion in his history of one of the
most fascinating periods of the world’s existence the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire a book
in which, with all the splendors of his genius, he
magnified the errors of Christian disciples, while,
with a sparseness of notice that never can be forgiven,
he treated of the Christian heroes of whom the world
was not worthy?
Oh, men of stout physical health,
men of great mental stature, men of high social position,
men of great power of any sort, I want you to understand
your power, and I want you to know that that power
devoted to God will be a crown on earth, to you typical
of a crown in heaven; but misguided, bedraggled in
sin, administrative of evil, God will thunder against
you with His condemnation in the day when millionaire
and pauper, master and slave, king and subject, shall
stand side by side in the judgment, and money-bags,
and judicial ermine, and royal robe shall be riven
with the lightnings.
Behold also, how a giant may be slain
of a woman. Delilah started the train of circumstances
that pulled down the temple of Dagon about Samson’s
ears. And tens of thousands of giants have gone
down to death and hell through the same impure fascinations.
It seems to me that it is high time that pulpit and
platform and printing-press speak out against the
impurities of modern society. Fastidiousness and
Prudery say: “Better not speak you
will rouse up adverse criticism; you will make worse
what you want to make better; better deal in glittering
generalities; the subject is too delicate for polite
ears.” But there comes a voice from heaven
overpowering the mincing sentimentalities of the day,
saying: “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy
voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgressions
and the house of Jacob their sins.”
The trouble is that when people write
or speak upon this theme they are apt to cover it
up with the graces of belles-lettres, so
that the crime is made attractive instead of repulsive.
Lord Byron in “Don Juan” adorns this crime
until it smiles like a May queen. Michelet, the
great French writer, covers it up with bewitching rhetoric
until it glows like the rising sun, when it ought
to be made loathsome as a small-pox hospital.
There are to-day influences abroad which, if unresisted
by the pulpit and the printing-press, will turn New
York and Brooklyn into Sodom and Gomorrah, fit only
for the storm of fire and brimstone that whelmed the
cities of the plain.
You who are seated in your Christian
homes, compassed by moral and religious restraints,
do not realize the gulf of iniquity that bounds you
on the north and the south and the east and the west.
While I speak there are tens of thousands of men and
women going over the awful plunge of an impure life;
and while I cry to God for mercy upon their souls,
I call upon you to marshal in the defense of your homes,
your Church and your nation. There is a banqueting
hall that you have never heard described. You
know all about the feast of Ahasuerus, where a thousand
lords sat. You know all about Belshazzar’s
carousal, where the blood of the murdered king spurted
into the faces of the banqueters. You may know
of the scene of riot and wassail, when there was set
before Esopus one dish of food that cost $400,000.
But I speak now of a different banqueting hall.
Its roof is fretted with fire. Its floor is tesselated
with fire. Its chalices are chased with fire.
Its song is a song of fire. Its walls are buttresses
of fire. Solomon refers to it when he says:
“Her guests are in the depths of hell.”
Our American communities are suffering
from the gospel of Free Loveism, which, fifteen or
twenty years ago, was preached on the platform and
in some of the churches of this country. I charge
upon Free Loveism that it has blighted innumerable
homes, and that it has sent innumerable souls to ruin.
Free Loveism is bestial; it is worse it
is infernal! It has furnished this land with about
one thousand divorces annually. In one county
in the State of Indiana it furnished eleven divorces
in one day before dinner. It has roused up elopements,
North, South, East, and West. You can hardly take
up a paper but you read of an elopement. As far
as I can understand the doctrine of Free Loveism it
is this: That every man ought to have somebody
else’s wife, and every wife somebody else’s
husband. They do not like our Christian organization
of society, and I wish they would all elope, the wretches
of one sex taking the wretches of the other, and start
to-morrow morning for the great Sahara Desert, until
the simoom shall sweep seven feet of sand all over
them, and not one passing caravan for the next five
hundred years bring back one miserable bone of their
carcasses! Free Loveism! It is the double-distilled
extract of nux vomica, ratsbane, and adder’s
tongue. Never until society goes back to the
old Bible, and hears its eulogy of purity and its
anathema of uncleanness never until then
will this evil be extirpated.
IV. Behold also in this giant
of the text and in the giant of our own century that
great physical power must crumble and expire.
The Samson of the text long ago went away. He
fought the lion. He fought the Philistines.
He could fight anything, but death was too much for
him. He may have required a longer grave and
a broader grave; but the tomb nevertheless was his
terminus.
If, then, we are to be compelled to
go out of this world, where are we to go to?
This body and soul must soon part. What shall
be the destiny of the former I know dust
to dust. But what shall be the destiny of the
latter? Shall it rise into the companionship of
the white-robed, whose sins Christ has slain? or will
it go down among the unbelieving, who tried to gain
the world and save their souls, but were swindled
out of both? Blessed be God, we have a Champion!
He is so styled in the Bible: A Champion who
has conquered death and hell, and he is ready to fight
all our battles from the first to the last. “Who
is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments
from Bozrah, mighty to save?” If we follow in
the wake of that Champion death has no power and the
grave no victory. The worst man trusting in Him
shall have his dying pangs alleviated and his future
illumined.
V. In the light of this subject I
want to call your attention to a fact which may not
have been rightly considered by five men in this house,
and that is the fact that we must be brought into judgment
for the employment of our physical organism.
Shoulder, brain, hand, foot we must answer
in judgment for the use we have made of them.
Have they been used for the elevation of society or
for its depression? In proportion as our arm
is strong and our step elastic will our account at
last be intensified. Thousands of sermons are
preached to invalids. I preach this sermon this
morning to stout men and healthful women. We
must give to God an account for the right use of this
physical organism.
These invalids have comparatively
little to account for, perhaps. They could not
lift twenty pounds. They could not walk half a
mile without sitting down to rest. In the preparation
of this subject I have said to myself, how shall I
account to God in judgment for the use of a body which
never knew one moment of real sickness? Rising
up in judgment, standing beside the men and women
who had only little physical energy, and yet consumed
that energy in a conflagration of religious enthusiasm,
how will we feel abashed!
Oh, men of the strong arm and the
stout heart, what use are you making of your physical
forces? Will you be able to stand the test of
that day when we must answer for the use of every
talent, whether it were a physical energy, or a mental
acumen, or a spiritual power?
The day approaches, and I see one
who in this world was an invalid, and as she stands
before the throne of God to answer she says, “I
was sick all my days. I had but very little strength,
but I did as well as I could in being kind to those
who were more sick and more suffering.”
And Christ will say, “Well done, faithful servant.”
And then a little child will stand
before the throne, and she will say, “On earth
I had a curvature of the spine, and I was very weak,
and I was very sick; but I used to gather flowers out
of the wild-wood and bring them to my sick mother,
and she was comforted when she saw the sweet flowers
out of the wild-wood. I didn’t do much,
but I did something.” And Christ shall
say, as He takes her up in His arm and kisses her,
“Well done, well done, faithful servant; enter
thou into the joy of thy Lord.”
What, then, will be said to us we
to whom the Lord gave physical strength and continuous
health? Hark! it thunders again. The judgment!
the judgment!
I said to an old Scotch minister,
who was one of the best friends I ever had, “Doctor,
did you ever know Robert Pollock, the Scotch poet,
who wrote ’The Course of Time’?”
“Oh, yes,” he replied, “I knew him
well; I was his classmate.” And then the
doctor went on to tell me how that the writing of
“The Course of Time” exhausted the health
of Robert Pollock, and he expired. It seems as
if no man could have such a glimpse of the day for
which all other days were made as Robert Pollock had,
and long survive that glimpse. In the description
of that day he says, among other things:
“Begin the woe, ye woods,
and tell it to the doleful winds
And doleful winds wail to
the howling hills,
And howling hills mourn to
the dismal vales,
And dismal vales sigh to the
sorrowing brooks,
And sorrowing brooks weep
to the weeping stream,
And weeping stream awake the
groaning deep;
Ye heavens, great archway
of the universe, put sack-cloth on;
And ocean, robe thyself in
garb of widowhood,
And gather all thy waves into
a groan, and utter it.
Long, loud, deep, piercing,
dolorous, immense.
The occasion asks it, Nature
dies, and angels come to lay
her
in her grave.”
What Robert Pollock saw in poetic
dream, you and I will see in positive reality the
judgment! the judgment!