Long considered a series of “loosely connected and grossly editorialized traditions” about the hero Samson,1 Judges 13–16 has been seen as increasingly unified in recent decades, with studies arguing for the coherence of its structure, theme, and even plot. 2 A 1974 essay by James Crenshaw extols the narrator’s skill at achieving a unified composition organized around a universal theme, “the conflict between filial devotion and erotic attachment.” 3 Cheryl Exum’s series of articles published between 1980 and 1983 reveals structural and thematic webs connecting scene to scene, episode to episode, and cycle to cycle, many of them lifting up the theological message that despite his strength Samson is nonetheless utterly dependent on the Lord for life and death. 4 A 1990 essay by Robert Alter describes the structural, thematic, and even psychological connections between episodes forged by the root -36, which underscores Samson’s compulsive drive toward foreign women. 5 Yairah Amit’s 1...
Don't Waste Your Life: Fiery father used was the story of a man converted in old age.The church had prayed for this man for decades. He was hard and resistant. But this time, for some reason, he showed up when my father was preaching. At the end of the service, during a hymn, to everyone’s amazement he came and took my father’s hand. They sat down together on the front pew of the church as the people were dismissed. God opened his heart to the Gospel of Christ, and he was saved from his sins and given eternal life. But that did not stop him from sobbing and saying, as the tears ran down his wrinkled face—and what an impact it made on me to hear my father say this through his own tears—“I’ve wasted it! I’ve wasted it!” This was the story that gripped me more than all the stories of young people who died in car wrecks before they were converted the story of an old man weeping that he had wasted his life. In those early years God awakened in me a fear and a passion not to waste my...