God’s Eye
Psalm 33; 13-22 is the psalm for July 15 in the Treasury of Daily Prayer. It begins, “Shout for joy in the Lord….Praise befits the upright….sing a new song.” The reason for praise is, “The word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness. …the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.” In verse 13 informs us, “The Lord looks down from heaven; he sees all the children of man.” “The eye of the Lord is on those who…hope in his steadfast love, that he may deliver their soul from death….he is our help and shield.” The psalm concludes, “Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us, even as we hope in you.” The Lord delivers and protects us. We in turn, wearing Christ whom we put on in baptism (Galatians 3:26) are adopted into God’s family. God has sent the Spirit of Christ into our hearts enabling us to call out to our Father.
Martin Luther describes our adoption as, “This glorious triumph, accomplished for us through Christ, grasped not by works but by faith alone. Therefore faith alone justifies.”
However the Old Testament Reading features Samson in Judges 15:1-16:3 and stands in sharp contrast the Psalm 33 and Galatians 3:23-4:11. What does God see when his eye beholds the activity of his children? Samson, sent by God as a Judge, we might say “hero” and a flawed hero at that, stormed out of father-in-laws house a week into his marriage, because after seven days of tears he finally told his bride the answer to the riddle he had posed at the wedding. She told the secret to her fellow Philistines. When he returned for a conjugal visit, his father-in-law told him that he gave his daughter to the best man in the wedding. Samson, stormed out again, caught 300 foxes, no mean task given the fox’s solitary and elusive nature, (maybe they were actually jackals who do run in packs). Samson tied their tails together, put a firebrand in between each pair and set them loose in the Philistines’ wheat fields, now fully ripe and tinder dry. Surely no good can come of this. The Philistines raid Judah searching for their nemesis. To save themselves, a posse of3, 000 men of Judah capture Samson hiding in the cleft of a rock. They were a bit uneasy with their God –sent hero. They sent him back to the Philistines, bound with two new ropes.
The Philistines came out shouting for Samson’s blood, but the Spirit of God rushed on him and his bindings fell away like burning flax. He grabbed the jawbone of a donkey that had recently died and unmercifully slaughtered 1,000 of the Philistines. Then he threw the jawbone away. His blood thirst quenched, he was thirsty. He prayed; Lord, you surely didn’t grant me the power to provide such a great salvation to Judah only to let me die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised.
So God split open a rock and water poured out. Samson refreshed himself and went on to judge Israel for twenty year. Of course, the tale of Samson is hardly finished. We haven’t even met Delilah.
How does one bridge the gap between Psalm 33 and Judges 15 and 16? If we try to reason it out, it just doesn’t compute. But the key may be in Galatians 3:28, “(if you are Christ’s then) there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, (no circumcision or uncircumcision) for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Though God was with Samson as a tool to save his people, Samson's violent and unsavory life ended in a heroic, yet tragic death.
St. Paul will write to the Romans, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind…”
Characters like Samson appeal to us, the way the character played by Bruce Willis does in “Die Hard” or Matt Damon in the “Bourne” movies. But it was through One who would not quench a smoldering wick nor snap a bruised reed whose life was snuffed out on the cross who is our final and ultimate Savior, even Jesus Christ, our Lord.
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