Most of us are familiar with the story of Samson and Delilah. Samson was a man of supernatural strength granted to him by the Lord to deliver Israel from the Philistines. Delilah, a woman of the Philistines, captured Samson’s attention with her beauty. She used her feminine charms to get Samson to divulge the secret of his strength and the rest is history. He was captured, his eyes were put out, and he became the ridicule of the Philistines. Even so, God granted him one last display of strength to bring down the house where 3,000 of the Philistines had gathered to make sport of him and to praise their god for giving Samson to them. The Scriptures record “the dead whom he killed at his death were more than those whom he had killed in his life” (Judges 16:30).
What is often overlooked in this marvelous record of Israel’s deliverer is the fact that God superintended his birth, upbringing, and preparation for this time of service to God. Probably as much as forty years prior to Samson’s death, we read “the people of Israel again did evil in the sight of the Lord, so the Lord gave them into the hand of the Philistines for forty years” (Judges 13:1). Israel’s disobedience resulted in their servitude.
But God had already planned to provide a deliverer, Samson. the “angel of the LORD appeared to the woman [Samson’s mother] and said to her, Behold, you are barren…but you shall conceive and bear a son…the child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb, and he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines” (Judges 13:3-5).
What a testimony to God’s control of all human events past, present, and future! He didn’t pick a man alive at the time of Israel’s woes to empower for service. Rather, he chose and prepared a man years before the time he would be needed. God ordained Samson’s birth and watched over him all the years of his youth protecting and preserving him for his role as deliverer.
Samson’s story is not an isolated event in history. God told Jeremiah, the prophet, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you: I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (Jeremiah 1:5). The Apostle Paul declared “it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me” (Galatians 1:15-16). “Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world” (Acts 15:18). History has rightly been called His Story. Consequently, God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11). “All things” is all things, from birth to death.
Now make the divine plan of this sovereign God in human history very personal. I am here by the design of an all-knowing and all-powerful God. When Isaiah writes “he [God] giveth breath unto the people upon it [earth], and spirit to them that walk therein” (Isaiah 42:5), that includes each of us. When John writes “thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created” (Revelation 4:11), that includes each of us. Have you considered God’s purpose for you?
From the Chaplain 