Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 338 · December 4
He Wist Not
“And she said, The Philistines be upon thee, Samson. And he awoke out of his sleep, and said, I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself. And he wist not that the LORD was departed from him.”
What had already gone from Samson before the morning he found out? Delilah calls out, "The Philistines be upon thee, Samson," and he wakes up expecting this day to be like every other: "I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself." Then comes a line that should stop every reader: "And he wist not that the LORD was departed from him." Wist means knew. He did not know that the Lord had left him.
Stay with that for a moment before you try to explain it. The terms of Samson's life were set before he was born. The angel told his mother to drink no wine and eat nothing unclean, and said, "no razor shall come on his head: for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb." A Nazarite was a person set apart to God. Long before the haircut, Samson had grown careless about that. He scooped honey out of the dead body of a lion and ate it, and he held a seven-day feast at Timnath, the kind of feast whose Hebrew name comes from drinking. His hair was simply the last thing left. Nobody warned him at the end, and there is no prophet at the door. Samson learns what he has lost by trying to stand up.
"But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house." The very next verse adds, without comment: "Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaven." Later, blind and mocked at a feast for a false god, Samson prays, "O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once." The strength comes back, and the house falls, with about three thousand people on its roof. Centuries later, Hebrews names Samson among the people of faith.
So ask yourself honestly: is something in your life slowly giving way while you have stopped noticing? If so, bring it to God now, while you can still see it. And if you already feel like Samson at the mill, remember the hair that began to grow again. The Lord heard a man who had thrown away almost everything, and He still hears those who call to Him from the prison house.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 338 is Pleasure in the Fearful (Psalm 147:11).