Gość chelsybernard927 Opublikowano 21 Marca Udostępnij Opublikowano 21 Marca Hello! Article about looking for love in all the wrong places: There are certain stories in the Bible which fit into a very special category. Those are the stories which reveal the essence of the people in the story. Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places. Click here for Looking for love in all the wrong places There are certain stories in the Bible which fit into a very special category. Those are the stories which reveal the essence of the people in the story. That is to say, if you know the story, you know what the people are like even if you don’t know anything else about those people. A handful of Bible stories fall into this category: David and Goliath. Cain and Abel. Abraham and Isaac. Samson and Delilah. It is a story which is altogether true, and yet has become legendary. It has been told and retold and told again throughout the course of a hundred generations. There is in the story of Samson and Delilah the stuff of real human drama. It is one of the great classic tragedies of all literature—sacred or secular. It is a story that fathers tell their sons and mothers tell their daughters and Sunday School children learn soon after they start coming to church. It’s one of those stories which having heard it, you realize you are coming to the essence of the man and the essence of the woman. Just to know the story is to know what the people are all about. Didn’t You Used To Be Samson? The story of Samson and Delilah, found in Judges 16, really could be titled “Didn’t you used to be Samson?” It’s the story of a man who having reached the pinnacle of his career and having accomplished everything a man would want to accomplish, in one sudden, violent turn went from the top right down to the bottom. It’s the story of a man whose name was a household word, whose picture was on every wall, whose deeds were celebrated by poets and priests. It’s the story of a man who had it all and who in a moment lost it all. The amazing thing about the story of Samson and Delilah is that it comes at the height of his career. That really is the most shocking fact. In the end, Samson was tricked by the same thing that tricked him in the beginning. And in that one fact is the shock and surprise. Or perhaps it is no shock and no surprise at all that after all these years, the thing he struggled with in the beginning—that thing reached out and bit him on the heel and finally brought him down. Samson’s Mid-Life Crisis. The key to the story is found in the last verse of Judges 15. “Now Samson led Israel for twenty years in the days of the Philistines.” (15:20) That’s exactly the kind of verse which we would tend to pass right over, but it’s very crucial to properly understand the story of Samson and Delilah. Samson, from such a great beginning, went down, down, down and then came back and won that great victory and delivered his people. He was about 20 years old when he burst on the scene. This verse is telling us that he led Israel for 20 years. From the time he was 20 until the time he was about 40: twenty years of peace, twenty years of prosperity, and twenty years of relative freedom from the Philistines. So it was that Samson, as he approached the mid-life years, began to feel restless. He began to feel ill at ease. He began to wonder if there wasn’t more to life. And Samson at the age of 40 begins to take a turn for the worse. Not that it appeared obvious. I imagine his old friends looked at him and said, “At last he has conquered his problems.” They would have said, “When he was growing up, he had quite a temper. Back in those days, you didn’t want to get him mad at you.” And when his old buddies would get together, and talk would turn to the old days, someone was bound to say with a snicker, “He used to be the biggest skirt-chaser in town.” They would laugh and then somebody would say, “I guess he just grew up or something.” It truly looked like Samson had finally put all his problems behind him. The Hardest Thing You Will Ever Say. The truth of the matter is, Samson hasn’t put all his problems behind him. He’s covered them up. He’s ignored them. He’s played them down. He’s pushed them away. He’s managed to live a pretty straight life. Samson, you see, never really dealt with the problems that plagued him way back there at the beginning. And now at the end of twenty years, those same problems are about to come out and trip him again. Only this time they’re not just going to trip him. The same problems he refused to deal with are the same problems that are going to bring him down now. That’s the way it always is, isn’t it? The hardest thing that you will ever say in your life is, “I have a problem.” Nobody likes to say that. Samson is just like you or me. He wanted to forget what had happened. He wanted to just kind of rock along peacefully. He wanted to pretend the things of the past were in the past. And as long as they were twenty years away he didn’t want to have to worry about them anymore. But the jig is up. It’s time to pay the piper. Because he hasn’t dealt with his problems, they’re going to come up again, and this time they are going to destroy him. One Wild And Crazy Night. The story begins in Judges 16:1 where Samson does a very unusual thing. One day Samson went down to Gaza where he saw a prostitute. Gaza was a Philistine city. It was about 25 miles away from Zorah, where he grew up. Gaza was not only a Philistine city, it was also the headquarters for the Philistines. It was the place where they had the temple of Dagon. It was a crazy thing for Samson to do. It would be like Mikhail Gorbachev coming to Washington, D.C. one Friday night, and hoping he wouldn’t be recognized. The odds weren’t in his favor. Everybody in Gaza knew Samson, he was Public Enemy Number One. Maybe he thought he was far enough away that either they wouldn’t recognize him or maybe word wouldn’t get back to Israel. Who knows? It was a crazy, insane chance to take. In one sense it wasn’t a “chance” at all, because there was absolutely no chance the mighty Samson could slip in and out of the capital city of the Philistines unobserved. No chance. None whatsoever. It’s like the stories we sometimes hear about certain preachers and politicians who take such reckless chances with their private lives that it almost seems as if they have a professional death wish. Maybe that’s what is happening here. Maybe Samson is fed up with the unending pressure of 20 years at the top of the heap. Maybe he’s so fed up with the humdrum that he almost doesn’t care if he does get caught. That kind of thing happens all the time, and more so as successful men approach the mid-life years. So Samson leaves his own people again. He goes to the capital city of the Philistines and there he sees a prostitute. He went in, the Bible says, to spend the night with her. By the way, Samson is the only man in the Hall of Fame of Faith in Hebrews ll, who ever slept with a prostitute. This famous man of God went in to spend the night with a prostitute. The word got out. No surprise. When the people of Gaza found out that Samson was in their city, they surrounded the place where he was and they lay in wait for him all night at the city gate. It’s not hard to read their thinking. They think Samson’s going to go in, do his thing, and when it’s all over he’s going to sleep all night, so they’re going to get him at dawn. Verse 2 says, “They made no move all night saying, ‘At dawn we’ll kill him.’” But Samson crossed them. He stayed with the prostitute only until the middle of the night. Then he got up and he took hold of the doors of the city gate, together with the two posts, and he tore them loose, bar and all. He lifted them to his shoulders and carried them to the top of the hill which faces Hebron. (16:3) There are two things you need to know about this. Looking for love in all the wrong places country song Looking in all the wrong places I been looking for love in all the wrong places Looking for love on all the wrong places Finding love in all the wrong places Looking for love in all the wrong places karaoke Cytuj Odnośnik do komentarza Udostępnij na innych stronach Więcej opcji udostępniania...
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