Stronger at the Very End

The baby the angel promised grew up to be the strongest man in Israel. Samson tore a lion apart with his bare hands, and for twenty years he fought the Philistines, who ruled over God's people.

His strength came from God, and as a sign that he belonged to God, his hair had never been cut.

Then Samson fell in love with a woman named Delilah, and the Philistine rulers came to her. "Find out what makes him so strong," they said, "and each of us will pay you eleven hundred pieces of silver." Delilah pestered him day after day until Samson was sick to death of it and told her the truth. While he slept with his head on her knees, she had a man shave off all his hair. The LORD had left him, and his strength was gone.

The Philistines grabbed him and put out his eyes. They chained him with bronze chains in the prison at Gaza and set him to grinding grain, pushing a heavy millstone round and round. (Samson had once ripped the gates off this very city and carried them up a hill. Now he walked in circles there like a donkey at a mill.)

But in prison his hair began to grow again, and nobody thought to cut it.

One day the Philistine rulers threw a great feast for their god, Dagon. The temple was packed, and about three thousand more people crowded onto the flat roof to look down.

"Our god has handed us Samson, our enemy!" they sang. "He wrecked our fields and killed so many of us!"

"Bring out Samson!" someone shouted. "Let him put on a show for us!"

So they fetched him from the prison, and the crowd laughed at the blind strong man. (The Philistines thought Samson's story was over. They had not been watching his hair.)

A young servant led Samson by the hand. "Let me feel the pillars that hold up the house," Samson said to him, "so I can lean against them."

He stood between the two middle pillars, and he prayed. "Lord GOD, remember me. Please make me strong just this once, so I can pay the Philistines back for my two eyes."

He put his right hand on one pillar and his left hand on the other. "Let me die with the Philistines!" he cried, and he pushed with all his might.

CRACK. The pillars gave way, and the temple came crashing down on the rulers and on everyone inside. Samson died there, and so did thousands of Philistines. The Bible says he killed more of them when he died than in his whole life. Afterward his brothers came, carried his body home, and buried him in the tomb of his father, Manoah.

Samson's rescue ended in that tomb. His last prayer had asked for payback for his two eyes, and on the day he was buried, the Philistines still ruled over Israel.

Years went by, through more judges and then kings and prophets, and God's people kept hoping for a rescuer whose strength would never run out.

Then another man stood before a crowd that laughed at him. He let soldiers stretch out his arms on wooden beams. This man did not ask God to pay his enemies back. He prayed, "Father, forgive them." A dying thief beside him begged, "Remember me," and he promised the thief paradise that very day. His death rescued more people than anyone could count.

And this time the tomb could not keep him. On the third day, Jesus walked out alive.