Bible Commentaries

Judges 15:20

Samson can only be spoken of as an unsuccessful great man; his name stands high on the scrolls of the faithful, but his life was after all a splendid failure, and few indeed are the lives to which that term does not apply.

I Two mistakes we make in life. (1) One of our great blunders is in beating our hands against the stern necessity which walls in our being, and expecting that it will give way to us; we set ourselves above our powers, and we quarrel with Providence because we have failed, perhaps, in the task we were never called upon to perform. (2) We are too much in the habit of testing power in life by its prominence, as if we said there were no stars in the heavens but those which glitter to the vision; the astronomer knows that there are multitudes of stars which ordinary eyes have not seen. All strength may honour God and fulfil its end, the weakest as well as the strongest seeing God as behind all strength, for God's law seems to be to honour weak goodness, and to make it more; so to every kind of strength is given its life and its law.

II. The theory of the great modern atheistic philosophy is that in the universe there is no place for weakness, all life is the conquest of strength, "the survival of the fittest." There is no place here for Divine grace; but every labouring gardener would give a widely different lesson and interpretation to life. If weeds and vegetables were left to a free fight, in which the strongest specimens only come to maturity, the garden would be a scene of license and disorder God does not permit mere hereditary goodness; "He giveth more grace." In all nature's weakness we put on our crown of immortal hopes. "By the grace of God I am what I am, but it is no more I, but Christ that dwelleth in me."

E. Paxton Hood, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xix., p. 358.

Reference: Judges 16:1-3.—E. Paxton Hood, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xix, p. 342.