The Instinct of Adventure: The Story of SamsonSample

Traded for a Drunken Pun

Samson hadn’t known his real strength. It came on him in a moment of grave danger. Suddenly, Samson found himself possessing something he hadn’t ever recognized. He was strong, miraculously strong.

On his way to Timnah to arrange his marriage to the Philistine girl who had caught his eye, Samson found himself before a charging lion. In a moment, the beast was on him. The narrator of Judges tells us that at that moment the Spirit of God rushed over him, and his strength suddenly emerged. He tore the lion into pieces with his bare hands.

Can you imagine that adrenaline rush? Sometime later, when passing by the region, Samson went looking for the animal’s carcass. He was hoping to relive something of that heroic moment. Strangely, he found the lion’s remains and inside it a hive of honey bees. The Hebrew language used to describe the scene seems to hint at something more significant. It is called a congregation of bees, flowing with honey, in the ruin of the lion. I think it was symbolic, another work of the Spirit.

This was, after all, Samson’s calling. He was to be the one who would deliver his people from their own oppressors. This first realization of strength, a kind of foreshadowing of his greater work to come. How did Samson take this sign? He scooped out the honey and went on his way, eating it. He seems dumb to the fact that the whole thing breaks the Nazarite prohibition against touching dead things in the process.

It gets worse. At his wedding feast, the men turned to gamble over puns. Samson turned that strange image of honey bees inside a lion’s carcass into his own riddle. He takes the miraculous signs of God and trivializes them into drunk party puns.

It is a pattern that continually repeats itself in Samson’s story. God empowers him and he trivializes it for his own gain. His divinely appointed identity emerges and he wastes it on some self-gratifying pursuit.

What Samson lacked was discernment. His eyes fixed on all things Philistine, he lost his awareness of God. Obsessed with his own adventures and pursuits, he lost the story and call that God was working. He traded the adventure he was already a part of for the one he imagined better. In the end, it would cost him both.

There is nothing sinful about adventure. The Bible is filled with stories that seem adventurous, but true adventures don’t always feel that way. True adventures just feel hard, long, frustrating, and for most of the story unresolved.

We aren’t very good at choosing an adventure. I’m not sure you even can. Is a real adventure something you can book online? By choosing it isn’t something of the adventure lost?

What Samson needed were new eyes, eyes that could perceive what he was already a part of. That is what you need too. Discernment. A cultivated new sense for recognizing how God is already at work and how your own life is a part of something bigger than you may typically feel.

How might you be trivializing the things God is doing in your life?