The Divine Agitation: Samson's Consecration Text: Judges 13:24-25
Introduction: God's Appointed Misfits
We live in an age that prizes conformity, predictability, and above all, safety. Our bureaucratic overlords, both in the civil realm and often in the church, desire men who fit neatly into spreadsheets. They want Christians who are manageable, whose testimonies can be written up in a quarterly report without any sharp edges. We want our heroes to be respectable. We want our deliverers to have tidy resumes and no messy personal entanglements. In short, we want to worship a God who only works through people we would invite to a dinner party.
And then God gives us Samson. If we are honest, Samson makes us profoundly uncomfortable. He is a brawler, a womanizer, and a riddle-making show-off. He breaks every rule in the Nazirite handbook he was given before birth. He is an embarrassment to the committee for religious decorum. And yet, he is listed in the great hall of faith in Hebrews 11. He was God's man, chosen from the womb, blessed by Yahweh, and moved upon by the Holy Spirit. This is a divine scandal, and it is a glorious one.
The story of Samson is a direct assault on our tidy, domesticated religion. It is also a direct assault on the secular, materialist worldview that has no category for a man like this. The world can only explain a man like Samson through psychology or sociology; he had a difficult upbringing, he had unresolved anger issues, he was a product of his violent environment. But the Bible gives us a different explanation, a far more potent and terrifying one. The Bible tells us that the living God laid His hand on a man, set him apart, and began to trouble him for His own sovereign purposes. This is not about self-actualization. This is about a divine agitation.
These two verses we consider today are the bridge between the angelic announcement of his birth and the chaotic explosion of his public ministry. They are deceptively simple, but they contain the theological bedrock for understanding everything that follows. Here we see the pattern of God's improbable grace: a promised birth, a covenantal blessing, and a spiritual stirring. God does not wait for perfect vessels. He makes vessels, consecrates them, and then fills them with a restless, holy power.
The Text
Then the woman gave birth to a son and named him Samson; and the child grew up, and Yahweh blessed him. And the Spirit of Yahweh began to stir him in Mahaneh-dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol.
(Judges 13:24-25 LSB)
Covenantal Beginnings (v. 24)
We begin with the simple fulfillment of God's promise.
"Then the woman gave birth to a son and named him Samson; and the child grew up, and Yahweh blessed him." (Judges 13:24)
First, the birth itself is an act of God. Manoah's wife was barren, a common biblical motif to show that salvation comes from God and not from the strength of man. When God wants to do something extraordinary, He often begins with an empty womb. He did it with Sarah, with Rebekah, with Rachel, with Hannah, and with Elizabeth. This is to teach us from the outset that the hero of the story is not the man, but the God who makes the man. Samson's strength does not ultimately come from his muscles, but from the God who opened his mother's womb.
His name is Samson, which likely means "sunny" or "like the sun." This is not without irony, given the darkness of the times and the moral twilight in which he often operated. But it points to his God-given role. He was to be a bright, burning light against the encroaching darkness of the Philistines. He was a solar flare in an age when "everyone did what was right in his own eyes."
Then we have two statements of immense theological weight: "the child grew up, and Yahweh blessed him." This is covenant language. This is the blessing of God resting on a child of promise. This is not just about getting good nutrition and growing tall. The blessing of Yahweh is a creative, empowering, and consecrating force. It means God's favor was upon him. God was marking him out, setting him apart for a divine task. This is the foundation of everything. Before Samson does a single thing, before he rips up a lion or tears down a temple, he is the recipient of a divine blessing. His action flows from his identity, not the other way around.
This is a crucial lesson for us in our parenting and in our understanding of salvation. We are not blessed because we perform well. We are blessed in Christ, and therefore we are called to live out that blessing. God's favor is not a reward for our righteousness; it is the fuel for it. Samson was blessed before he was stirred. This blessing was his identity, even when his behavior was a chaotic mess. Our identity in Christ is our anchor in the storm of our own sanctification. God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing, and this is true even on our worst days. We must begin here, with the objective reality of God's covenantal favor, or we will be tossed about by the subjective whims of our feelings and failures.
The Divine Restlessness (v. 25)
Verse 25 introduces the active agent of Samson's power and the source of his turbulent life.
"And the Spirit of Yahweh began to stir him in Mahaneh-dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol." (Judges 13:25 LSB)
Here is the engine of the Samson narrative. The Spirit of Yahweh, the third person of the Trinity, the same Spirit who hovered over the waters of creation, "began to stir him." The Hebrew word for "stir" can mean to impel, to agitate, to trouble, or to thrust. It is not a gentle nudge. It is a divine provocation. God began to make Samson restless. He began to fill him with a holy discontent, a supernatural energy that could not be contained by the mundane routines of village life.
This is crucial. Samson's great feats were not the result of him "unleashing his potential" or "finding his inner strength." That is the language of Oprah, not Scripture. Samson's power was an alien power. It was the Holy Spirit working mightily in him. This is why his character is such a paradox. The flesh and the Spirit were at war in this man in a dramatic and public way. The Spirit would stir him to go and confront the Philistines, and his flesh would stir him to go and chase Philistine women. God, in His sovereignty, used both the divine stirring and the sinful inclinations to accomplish His purpose, which was to bring judgment on the enemies of His people.
This ought to be a profound encouragement and a sober warning for us. The encouragement is that God can use flawed people. In fact, that is the only kind of people He has to work with. The Spirit of God is not hindered by our weaknesses. The warning is that spiritual giftedness is not the same thing as spiritual maturity. A man can be mightily used by the Spirit in one area of his life while being a complete disaster in another. God gave Samson the power to rip a lion apart with his bare hands, but not the self-control to stay away from Delilah. The presence of spiritual power is not a validation of a man's personal holiness. This is a truth our modern celebrity-pastor culture desperately needs to learn.
Notice also the location. This stirring happens in "Mahaneh-dan," which means "the camp of Dan," between his hometown of Zorah and Eshtaol. This was the tribal territory of Dan, on the frontier, on the border with the Philistines. The Spirit of God begins to stir him up right on the front lines of the conflict. God's Spirit does not move us to a life of comfortable isolation. He stirs us up in the place of conflict. He agitates us where the battle is raging. He makes us restless with the status quo, right where the enemy has pitched his camp. If you are a Christian and you feel no divine stirring, no holy agitation against the darkness of this world, you must ask if you have quarantined yourself from the front lines.
A Troubled Type of Christ
Now, we must be careful here. Samson is a judge of Israel, and as such, he is a type of Christ. But he is what we might call a chaotic type, a deeply flawed picture of the one who was to come. He shows us what a deliverer looks like when sin is still mixed in with the Spirit's work.
Samson was set apart from the womb by a divine announcement. So was Christ. Samson was blessed by God. Christ was God's beloved Son, in whom He was well pleased. The Spirit of God came upon Samson mightily. The Spirit of God descended upon Jesus at His baptism without measure. Samson began his work to deliver Israel from their oppressors. Christ came to deliver His people from their ultimate oppressor, sin and death.
But the contrasts are even more instructive. Samson's victories were sporadic and often compromised by his sinful appetites. Christ's victory was perfect and unstained by sin. Samson was overcome by the temptations of a woman in the valley of Sorek. Christ overcame the temptations of Satan in the wilderness. Samson pulled down the temple on his enemies and himself in a final act of vengeance. Christ, through His death, pulled down the temple of His own body and in so doing destroyed the works of the devil, raising it up again three days later in glorious victory.
Samson shows us the desperate need for a better deliverer. He shows us that even the most blessed, most Spirit-endowed man is still a man, still capable of colossal failure. His story is in the Bible to show us that our ultimate hope cannot be in strong men. Our hope must be in the perfect Son of God, the one who was truly set apart, truly blessed, and who wielded the Spirit's power in perfect, holy obedience.
The Spirit of God still stirs His people today. He does not give us the physical strength of Samson, but He gives us something far greater. He gives us the power to put sin to death and to live in newness of life. He gives us the boldness to proclaim the gospel in a hostile world. He makes us restless with our own sin and with the rebellion of the world around us. He agitates us toward holiness and mission. The question for us is this: when the Spirit of God begins to stir, do we yield to His prompting? Or do we, like Samson, so often try to harness that divine energy for our own foolish and fleshly pursuits? May God give us the grace to be stirred by His Spirit for His glory alone.