By J. N. Darby.
The Philistines were not a scourge, a chastisement sent from without; they dwelt in Israel’s own territory, in the land of promise. Undoubtedly, before this, other nations, whom the faithlessness of the people had left in the midst of Canaan, had been a snare to them, leading them to intermarriage with idolaters, and to the worship of false gods; and Jehovah had given them up into the hands of their enemies. But now those who had been suffered to remain in the conquered land assumed dominion over Israel.
Here, then, that which can give victory and peace to the heirs of promise is the strength imparted by separation from all that belongs to the natural man, and entire consecration to God, as far as it is realized. This Nazariteship is spiritual power, or rather that which characterizes it when the enemy is within the land. For Samson judged Israel during the dominion of the Philistines (Judg. 15:2020And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years. (Judges 15:20)). Afterward Samuel, Saul, and, above all, David entirely changed the state of things.
When the Canaanite—when the power of the enemy reigns in the land—Nazariteship alone can give power to one who is faithful. It is a secret unknown to the man of the world. Christ exemplified it in its perfection. Evil reigned amongst the people. The walk of Christ was a walk apart—separate from evil. He was one of the people, but, like Levi (Deut. 33:99Who said unto his father and to his mother, I have not seen him; neither did he acknowledge his brethren, nor knew his own children: for they have observed thy word, and kept thy covenant. (Deuteronomy 33:9)), He was not of them. He was a Nazarite. But we must distinguish with respect to this. Morally, Christ was as separate from sinners while on earth as He is now; but outwardly He was in their midst; and, as the witness and expression of grace, He was spiritually in their midst also. Since His resurrection He is completely separate from sinners. The world sees Him not and will see Him no more save in judgment. It is in this last position, and as having put on this character of entire separation from the world, that the assembly, that Christians, are in connection with Him.
Such a High-Priest became us. The assembly retains its strength, Christians retain their strength, so far only as they abide in this state of complete separation which the world does not understand, and in which it cannot participate. Human joy and sociability have no part in it; divine joy and the power of the Holy Spirit are there.
The life of our adorable Savior was a life of gravity, always grave and generally straitened (not in Himself, for His heart was a springing well of love, but because of the evil that pressed Him on every side); I speak of His life and of His own heart. With regard to others, His death opened the flood-gates, in order that the full tide of love might flow over poor sinners.
Nevertheless, whatever may have been the Lord’s habitual separateness He could say, with reference to His disciples, “These things I speak in the world, that they might have My joy fulfilled in themselves.” It was the best of wishes: divine joy instead of human joy, The day will come when these two joys shall be united, when He will again drink wine, though in a new way, with His people in the kingdom of His Father; and all will be His people.
But at present this cannot be; evil reigns in the world. It reigned in Israel, where there ought to have been righteousness. It reigns in Christendom, where holiness and grace should be manifested in all their beauty. The separation unto God, of which we have been speaking, is under these circumstances the only means of enjoying the strength of God. It is the essential position of the assembly. If it has failed in it, it has ceased to manifest the essential character of its Head, in connection with itself, “separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens;” it is but a false witness, a proof among the Philistines that Dagon is stronger than God: it is a blind prisoner.
Nevertheless it is remarkable that whenever the world draws away by its allurements that which God has separated from it to Himself, this brings down the judgment of God upon the world and leads to its ruin. Look at Sarah in the house of Pharaoh, and, in this instance, Samson, blind and a prisoner in the hands of the Philistines; and again also, Sarah in the house of Abimelech, although God, on account of the integrity of his heart, did but chasten the latter.
The Nazarite, then, represents Christ such as He was here below in fact and by necessity, and also such as He now is completely and in full right, seated on the right hand of God in heaven—hidden in God, where our life is hid in Him. The Nazarite represents the assembly or an individual Christian, so far as the one and the other are separated from the world and devoted to God, and keep the secret of this separation. This is the assembly’s position, the only one which God recognizes. The assembly, being united to Christ, who is separate from sinners and made higher than the heavens, cannot be His in any other manner. It may be unfaithful to it, but this is the standing given it with Christ. It can be recognized in no other.
Samson represents to us also the tendency of the assembly and of Christians to fall away from this position—a tendency which does not always produce the same amount of evil fruit, but which causes the inward and practical neglect of Nazariteship, and soon leads to entire loss of strength, so that the assembly gives itself up to the world. God may still use it, may glorify Himself through the havoc it makes in the enemy’s land (which ought to be its own); He may even preserve it from the sin to which the slippery path it treads would lead it; the state of mind which brought it there tends to yet lower downfalls.
God makes use of Samson’s marriage with a Philistine woman to punish that people. Still, in the freshness of his strength, his heart with Jehovah, and moved by the Holy Spirit, Samson acts in the might of this strength in the midst of the enemies he has raised up against him and, in point of fact, he never marries this Philistine woman.
I have said that God used this circumstance. It is thus He may use this spiritual strength of the assembly so long as in heart it cleaves to Him, although its walk may not be faithful or such as He can approve. For it is evident that Samson’s marriage with a daughter of Timnath was a positive sin, a flagrant infringement of Jehovah’s ordinances, which is in nowise justified by the blessing which the Lord bestowed upon him when wronged by the Philistines. It was not in his marriage he found blessing, but quite the contrary.
Accordingly, Samson has not Israel with him in the conflicts occasioned by his marriage: the Spirit of God does not act upon the people as He did in the case of Gideon, of Jephthah, or Barak.
Moreover, where Nazariteship is in question, opposition must be expected from the people of God. A Nazarite is raised up in their midst because they are no longer themselves thus separated unto God. And this being the case, they are without strength, and will allow the world to rule over them, provided that outward peace is left them; and they would not have anyone act in faith, because this disquiets the world, and incites it against them.
“Knowest thou not,” said Israel, “that the Philistines are rulers over us!”
Even while acknowledging Samson as one of themselves, the Israelites desire to give up to the Philistines in order to maintain peace.
But in the part of Samson’s life now before us there are some details which require more attention. His marriage was a sin; but the separation of God’s people had no longer that measure of practical application which the mind of God had assigned it. The fact itself was inexcusable, because it had its origin in the will of Samson, and he had not sought counsel from God; but, owing to the influence of circumstances, he was not conscious at that time of the evil he was committing, and God allowed him to seek peace and friendship with the Canaanite world (that is to say, the world within the enclosure of God’s people), instead of making war against them; so that, as to the Philistines, Samson had right on his side in the contentions which followed. Before his marriage, Samson had slain the lion, and found honey in its carcass. He had strength from God while walking in his integrity.
This is the “riddle,” the secret of God’s people. The lion has no strength against one who belongs to Christ; Christ has destroyed the strength of him that had the power of death. By the might of the Spirit of Christ our warfare is victory, and honey flows therefrom. But this is carried on in the secret of communion with the Lord. David maintained this place better in the simplicity of duty; Samson did not keep himself from these connections with the world to which the conditions of the people easily led. This is always a Christian’s danger.
But, whatever may be their ignorance, if the children of God make any alliance with the world, and thus pursue a line of conduct opposed to their true character, they will assuredly find disappointment. They do not keep themselves apart for God; they do not keep their secret with God, a secret which is only known in communion with Himself. Their wisdom is lost; the world becomes worse than before, and the world despises them, and goes on its own way regardless of their indignation at its behavior toward them.
What had Samson to do there? His own will is in exercise, and takes its share in the use of that strength which God, had given him (like Moses when he slew the Egyptian). We also carry a little of the world with us when, being children of God, we have mingled with it. But God makes use of this to separate us forcibly and thoroughly from it, making union impossible by setting us in direct conflict with the world, even in those very things which had formed our connection with it. “We had better have remained apart.” But it is necessary that God should thus deal with us, when this union with the world becomes a habitual and a tolerated thing in the church. (In this union, when it takes place between the world and true Christians, or those at least who profess the truth, the world always rules; when, on the contrary, it is with the hierarchy that the world is connected, it is then a superstitious hierarchy that rules, for it is necessary in order to restrain the will of man by religious bonds adapted to the flesh).
The most outrageous circumstances pass unnoticed. Think of a Nazarite married to a Philistine! God must break off such a union as this by causing enmities and hostilities to arise, since there is no intelligence of that moral nearness to God which separates from the world and gives that quietness of spirit which, finding its strength in God, can overcome and drive away the enemy, when God leads into conflict by the plain revelation of His will.
But if we are linked with the world, it will always have dominion over us; we have no right to resist the claims of relationship which we ourselves have formed. We may draw nigh to the world, because the flesh is in us.
The world cannot really draw nigh to the children of God, because it has only its own fallen and sinful nature. The approximation is all on our side, and always in evil, whatever the appearance may be. To bear testimony in the midst of the world is another thing. We cannot, therefore, plead the secret of the Lord, the intimate relationship of God’s people to Himself, and the feelings they produce; for the secret and the strength of the Lord are exclusively the right and the strength of His redeemed people. How could this be told to his Philistine wife? What influence would the exclusive privileges of God’s people have over one who is not of their number? How can we speak of these privileges when we disown them by the very relationship in which we stand?
We disown them by imparting this secret, for we then cease to be separated and consecrated to God, and to confide in Him as we can do in no other. This experience should have preserved Samson for the future from a similar step. But in many respects experience is useless in the things of God, “because we need faith at the moment; for it is God Himself whom we need.”
Nevertheless, Samson here still retains his strength. The sovereign will of God is fulfilled in this matter in spite of very serious faults, which resulted from the general state of things in which Samson participated. Once in the battlefield, he exhibits the strength of Jehovah, who was with him; and, in answer to his cry, Jehovah supplies him with water for his thirst (Judg. 15).
It is here that this general history of Samson ends. We have seen that the people of God, his brethren, were against him—the general rule in such a case. “It is the history of the power of the Spirit of Christ exercised in Nazariteship, in separation from the world unto God; but in the midst of a condition entirely opposed to this separation, and in which he who is upheld by the power of this Spirit, finding himself again in his habitual sphere, is always in danger of being unfaithful; and so much the more so (unless he lives very near to God in the repose of obedience) from his consciousness of strength.”
Christ exhibited the perfection of a heavenly walk under similar circumstances.
We see that no one understood the source of His power or His authority.
He must have given up all hope of satisfying men with respect to the principles by which He was guided. They must have been like Him to comprehend Him, and then they would not have needed to be convinced. To walk before God, and leave His justification with God, was all that could be done. He silenced His enemies by the well-known principles of God and of all good conscience; but He could not reveal the secret between Him and the Father the element of His life and the spring of all His actions. If the truth came out, when Satan pushed things so far that nothing else could be said, His enemies treated Him as a blasphemer, and He openly denounced them as the children of Satan. We find this particularly in John’s gospel; but at that time, Jesus held no longer the same relationship to the people—indeed, from the beginning of this gospel, they are treated as rejected, and the person of the Son of God is brought forward.
From the commencement of His ministry, He maintains the place of an obedient servant, not entering on public service until called of God, after having taken the lowest place in John’s baptism. This was the point at issue when He was tempted in the wilderness. The tempter endeavored to make Him come out of His place as the obedient man, because He was the Son of God. But the strong man was bound there; to remain in obedience is the only way to bind the adversary. Christ ever walked in this perfect separation of the inner man, in communion with His Father, and entire dependence upon Him in obedience, without a single moment of self-will.
Therefore was He the most gracious and accessible of men; we observe in His ways a tenderness and a kindness never seen in man; yet we always feel that He was a stranger—not that He came to be a stranger in His relationship with men, but that which lay deepest in His own heart—that which constituted His very nature, and consequently guided His work by virtue of His communion with the Father, was entirely foreign to all that influences man.
This spirit of self-denial, entire renunciation of His own will, obedience, and dependence upon His Father, is seen throughout the life of Jesus. After John’s baptism, He was praying when He received the Holy Spirit. Before calling the apostles, He spent the whole of the night in prayer. After the miracle of feeding the five thousand with five loaves, He went up into a mountain apart to pray. If the request is made to sit on His right hand and on His left in His kingdom, it is not His to give, but to them for whom it is prepared of His Father. In His agony of Gethsemane, His expectation and dread of death is all laid before His Father; and the cup which His Father has given Him, shall He not drink it? The effect is that all is calm before men. He is the Nazarite, separate from men by His entire communion with His Father, and by the obedience of a Son who had no other will than to fulfill the good pleasure of His Father. It was His meat to do the will of Him that sent Him, and to finish His work.
But it was when man would not receive Him, and there was no longer any relationship whatever between man and God, that Jesus fully assumed His Nazarite character—separate from sinners, made higher than the heavens. It is Christ in heaven who is the true Nazarite, and who, having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, has sent Him forth upon His disciples, in order that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, they might maintain the same position on the earth through communion with Him and with His Father; walking in the separateness of this communion, and capable, therefore, of using this power with a divine intelligence that enlightens and sustains the obedience for which they are set apart unto the glory of Christ, and for His service. “If ye abide in Me,” said He to His disciples, “and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.”
They were not of the world, even as He was not of the world. The assembly which was formed of His disciples should walk as separated from the world, and set apart unto Himself in a heavenly life.
Christ is, then, the antitype of Samson’s history, as to the principle it contains. But its detail proves that this principle of strength has been entrusted to those who were, alas! but too capable of failing in communion and obedience, and thus of losing its enjoyment.
Samson sins again through his connection with “the daughter of a strange god;” he connects himself again with women of the Philistines, amongst whom his father’s house and the tribe of Dan were placed. But he retains his strength until the influence of these connections becomes so great that he reveals the secret of his strength in God, His heart, far from God, places that confidence in a Philistine which should have existed only between his soul and God (Judg. 16).
To possess and keep a secret proves intimacy with a friend; but the secret of God, the possession of His confidence, is the highest of all privileges; to betray it to a stranger, be he who he may, is to despise the precious position in which His grace has placed us; it is to lose it, What have the enemies of God to do with the secrets of God? It was thus that Samson gave himself up to his enemies; all attempts were powerless against him so long as he maintained his Nazariteship. This separation once lost, although Samson was apparently as strong, and his exterior as goodly as before, yet Jehovah was no longer with him: “I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself. And he wist not that Jehovah was departed from him.”
We can scarcely imagine a greater folly than that of confiding his secret to Delilah, after having so many times been seized by the Philistines at the moment she awoke him. And thus it is with the assembly; when it yields itself to the world, it loses all its wisdom, even that which is common to man.
Poor Samson! His strength may be restored, but he has lost his sight forever.
But who has ever hardened himself against the Lord and prospered?
If the unfaithfulness of the assembly has given the world power over it, the world has, on the other hand, assailed the rights of God by corrupting the assembly, and therefore brings down judgment upon itself at the moment of its greatest triumph, a judgment which, if it puts an end to the existence as well as to the misery of the Nazarite, destroys at the same time, in one common ruin, the whole glory of the world.
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