About four years before my elderly dad died, a young woman approached him after church. With no job and no home other than a motel room, she needed money. True to his kindhearted nature, my dad gladly gave her some cash. Over time their “friendship” continued, with this pitiful woman creating one crisis story after another, all of which my dad believed. It got to the point where twice daily he sent her (untraceable) MoneyGram “loans” in response to her pleading. But he did it all in the name of Christ–“unto the least of these,” as he described it to me.
This meth addict pulled the wool over my dad’s eyes for almost two years. He believed he was doing what Jesus would do, and just couldn’t believe his friends or me when we tried to point out she was taking him for a ride. By the time it finally ended (thanks only to intervention by an insistent social worker) she had defrauded him of almost $40,000. He finally faced the facts, weeping with regret. His strong desire to rescue, his need to be the hero, had clouded his perception of reality and no friend could make him see.
Sometimes we wear blinders to keep from seeing the truth.
Samson exemplifies this willful ignorance (Judges 14-16). God instructed his parents to have him follow a Nazarite lifestyle by abstaining from three things: consuming grapes, touching anything dead, and cutting his hair. God wanted Samson set apart as Israel’s future hero.
But Samson wanted hero status without restricting himself to a consecrated lifestyle. And he paid no heed to any warnings.
We first see him waltzing into enemy territory, lusting after a Philistine woman, then vehemently demanding that his parents get her for him. Next he makes multiple trips through a vineyard (toying with grapes) and eats honey from a hive bees built inside the carcass of a (dead) lion. Later he angrily kills 30 men, stealing the clothes from their (dead) bodies as payment for an expensive bet with his wedding party–where he likely drank wine (grapes again). In another outburst he lights the tails of 300 captured foxes, then releases them into Philistine grain fields to burn all the crops–in retaliation against his would-be father-in-law. And to solidify his disregard for the Nazarite vow his parents made for him, Samson killed 1,000 men with the jaw bone of a (dead) donkey in another act of revenge.
Do you see a pattern here? Self-centered Samson lived to please himself and threw fits of epic proportion when things did not go his way. Rather than questioning his own behavior, he hustled through life wearing blinders. That is until his final foreign female entanglement (and more indiscretion) led to a haircut (the last Nazarite violation) and permanent physical blindness! At last, that’s when his true vision began–and he finally desired to fulfill his calling.
Amazingly, God worked all things together for good despite Samson’s years of willful blindness. And Samson died as Israel’s hero after all, destroying many of God’s enemies in his final surge of superhuman strength.
Have you ever done something that turned out badly and later thought, “I knew I shouldn’t have done that!” Too often, I, like Samson, do what I feel like doing and ignore friendly warnings God sends. Examples like these remind me that simply heeding God’s loving nudges can avert years of heartache.
