Daily Archives: March 29, 2010

It’s monday afternoon- which has yet to go as planned. But, it’s Monday. The rest of the week is crazy busy, so I thought I’d share a little bit today. I’ve been studying the life of Samson (Judges 13-16) in preparation for my monday Bible class. Interesting. It struck me today that part of our challenge as believers, more particularly as church-folk, that sometimes we are more interested in protecting and preserving the institution of ‘church’ because of our personal feelings about the ‘church.’ In other words, we are more about preserving the status quo and less about discovering God’s agenda. Judges 14:4 indicates that God had a purpose, an agenda. My question is : how could Samson have missed so much? Certainly he was used by God- at least three times we are told the Spirit came upon him. We are told he ‘judged’ Israel for 20 years…but there is no indication that land had rest or that the Philistine oppression lessened during those 20 years. Though Samson killed many of the enemy, he did nothing to establish the reign of God among the people of God. Though in his death Samson made a strong statement about the sovereignty of Yahweh in light of the Philistine god, Dagon, there was no significant return to God on behalf of the people of Israel.
I guess all this comes around to the question- my generation showed so much promise for advancing the kingdom of God. Have we, like Samson, become so self-interested, so self-involved, that we have missed all that God wants to do?