Hey There Delilah
By Grant Gaines
Steve Irwin had been playing with animals his whole life. But unlike you and me, the animals Steve played with were not dogs and cats. Oh no, Steve was playing with a whole different level of animals. And if you were a curious boy growing up in the exotic country of Australia, who knows, maybe you would have become The Crocodile Hunter.
That’s the destiny that befell Steve Irwin. After a lifetime of playing with crocodiles, snakes, and all other types of exotic animals as a kid, Steve was finally able to turn his passion into a career when Animal Planet hired him to become the host of the soon-to-be-popular television show, The Crocodile Hunter. The show featured Steve and his family catching dangerous animals in their natural habitats only to show them off to the audience who was comfortably sitting thousands of miles away behind the safety of a television screen.
Unfortunately for Steve, his time ran out and after a lifetime of being unscaved by these dangerous animals, he fell victim to a sting by a deadly stingray. While his death is sad and unfortunate, it’s actually quite amazing that Steve didn’t get harmed by these wild animals long before his death. Maybe that’s even the reason why Steve continued to play with these animals in the first place—he never got hurt before, so why would he get hurt now?
This is the same attitude that many of us have when it comes to sins—if it didn’t hurt me before, why would it hurt me now? Like Steve, we wrestle with these sins and often appear to leave unscaved by their consequences. This tragically encourages us to continue on committing those same sins assuming that their consequences will never catch up with us.
But what we fail to realize is that every sin does have a consequence, whether we can see it or not, Numbers 32:23 (NIV) warns us by saying, “…you may be sure that your sin will find you out”—just as they did with Sampson.
You remember Sampson’s story, don’t you? The young man with super hero like strength whom God used to rescue the Israelites from the Philistines. But like every super hero, Sampson had an “Achilles heel” or weakness which was exposed and led to his downfall. This Achilles heel was a drop-dead-gorgeous girl by the name of Delilah. Not only was Delilah a Philistine (which God had commanded Israelites not to marry—Deuteronomy 7:3), she also got in the habit of trying to kill Sampson.
You see, Sampson’s strength was from God and the only thing Sampson had to do to keep this strength was to never cut his hair. Pretty good deal, wouldn’t you agree?
At this point in the story, no one knew the source of his strength except for Sampson and his parents. But Delilah, prompted by the Philistine leaders (Judges 16:5-6), was determined to share in Sampson’s secret.
Three times Delilah asked Sampson to reveal the source of his strength (Judges 16:6, 10, 13) and each time Sampson lied to her about where his great strength might come from. On all three occasions, Sampson would wake up from a nap to the shouts of Philistine warriors who had come to kill Sampson after Delilah supposedly took away Sampson’s power.
Delilah continued to beg Sampson to tell her the secret to his strength and, “With such nagging she prodded him day after day until he was sick to death of it. So he told her everything…” (Judges 16:16-17, NIV). This time when Sampson went to sleep, Delilah cut off his hair and his strength left him which made him vulnerable to the Philistines who were once again waiting to take his life.
I firmly believe that the most intriguing part of Sampson’s story is not his strength, but the fact that he continued to hang around Delilah despite the fact that she tried to kill him time after time. I mean, how boneheaded do you have to be to hang around someone who is literally trying to kill you? And yet that is the perfect illustration of our relationship with sin. Time and time again, sin attempts to kill our relationship with God and yet we continue to wander back to sin’s deadly layer—just like Sampson and just like Steve Irwin.
Proverbs rebukes us for this type of behavior by saying, “As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly” (Proverbs 26:11, NIV). Stop running back to whatever your “Delilah” may be and join Job in asking God to, “Teach me what I cannot see; if I have done wrong, I will not do so again.” (Job 32:32, NIV).
Comments? Questions? Suggestions?
©Grant Gaines 2013
