UG 13{S. When God sent a good judge did the people get good again?
M. No. They never got back to where they were at first. They turned quickly out of the way their fathers walked in, they forgot the Lord, and worshipped idols; yet when they cried to the Lord, He sent deliverers, and God was with the deliverer; but the people were not changed, and as soon as each deliverer was dead they worshipped idols again, and each time they got worse and worse.
S. Is this story of the people's sin like anything now?
M. Yes. The Book of Judges has a great lesson for Christians. When Jesus went back to heaven, He sent down the Holy Spirit to teach His people, that now they were to belong to heaven and not to earth; they were to have their possessions in heaven, because He was there, and they were to have their joys in heaven, because He was there; they were to be like a strange people in this world, like people who had so much in heaven, that they did not want the things that the people of the world cared for.
But I am sorry to tell you that after Peter, and Paul, and John died, Christians began to forget this, and they forgot how badly the people of the world had treated their Lord Jesus, and they forgot that He Was waiting for them in heaven. And so Christians were content to make a league with the people of the world and went with them, and learned their ways. Now and again God sent good men to remind His people of Himself, and some listened to them and they gave up what was wrong, but a great many did not care. Yet God loves His people still, and Jesus waits in heaven for them still, and soon, very soon now, Jesus Will come and He will take all His own away out of this careless wicked world, to His own presence, where nothing unholy can enter.
S. Are there any people now like those men who went with Gideon?
M. Yes. There are thousands of people who are afraid to confess the name of Jesus, and there are thousands more who like the pleasant things of the earth better than the toil and danger of serving the Lord. But Jesus has a few in this world too, who have heard His voice, for He calls His own sheep by name, and says to them, Follow me, and they gladly give up the pleasures of a moment to do what pleases Him.
S. What do you mean by serving the Lord?
M. To be the Lord's servant is to obey Him; as a servant obeys his master, all day long, and every moment of the day. Gideon said, Look on me. And the servant of Jesus has to look on Him, by faith always, and He guides His servants, by His Holy Spirit, how to serve Him; pleasing Him is serving Him. It need not be some great thing; it was a small thing to carry a lamp, or to blow with a trumpet, but God made it a great service, because it was exactly what He wished them to do.
S. What kind of people does God make servants of?
M. Devoted people; God's servants need not be great, or learned or wise, but they must be devoted to Him, and this is beautifully shown in a time of failure when His people are careless and forgetful of Him, the greatest servant is the one who is most devoted. So it was with Israel, they had done evil again and God had let the Philistines rule over them for forty years, a longer time than they had ever been oppressed before. And this time God said that a Nazarite should be the one to deliver them.
S. You told me that a Nazarite, was one who wished to separate himself to God, and he did not drink any wine, and he let his hair grow.
M. You are, quite right. A Nazarite was a devoted person. All God's people ought to have kept themselves separate to Him, but they did not, they joined with the Gentiles, and worshipped their idols. Then God chose a Nazarite to do His will; the man who was entirely separate to Him, was the only one that God would use.
We do not hear that the people ever cried to be delivered from the Philistines. But there was a man and his wife who loved the Lord, and they had no child. And the angel of the Lord came to the woman, and said to her, You have no child, but you shall have a son; and now you must not drink any wine, or eat anything unclean; and your son that shall be born, must not drink wine, and you must never cut his hair; for he shall be a Nazarite to God from the moment he is born, and he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.
S. Did she believe what the angel said?
M. Yes. For she went and told her husband, whose name was Manoah; she said, A man of God came to me, and His countenance was like an angel of God, very terrible; and she told her husband all that the angel said. Then Manoah prayed to God to send the angel again, to teach them what they ought to do to the child, that should be born.
And when the woman was sitting alone in the field the angel came again, and she ran for her husband, and he talked to the angel. Then Manoah asked him to wait till he brought a kid, and he did so, but the angel would not eat; he said, If you offer a burnt offering offer it to the Lord. And Manoah asked him his name, but he said, It is secret. Then Manoah put the kid with a meat offering on a rock, and he and his wife looked on, and a flame went up to heaven from the rock, and the angel of the Lord went up in the flame. And when they saw it they fell on their faces to the ground. And Manoah said, We shall surely die, because we have seen God. But his wife said, If the Lord meant to kill us, He would not have received a burnt-offering and a meat-offering from our hands, and He would not have told us all these things.
The Lord gave her a son, and she called him Samson; and he grew up, and the Lord blessed him, and the Spirit of the Lord led him to go down and look at the camp of the Philistines, for he longed to fight against them.