The Bible in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz) - Day 93: Strengths and Weaknesses (2024)

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

Today, Fr. Mike begins to read Samson's story and points out that Samson, despite his physical strength, has a lot of weaknesses. The readings are Judges 12-15 and Psalm 146. For the complete reading plan, visit ascensionpress.com/bibleinayear. Please note: The Bible contains adult themes that may not be suitable for children - parental discretion is advised.

Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Bible in a Year podcast, where we encounter God's voice and live life through the lens of Scripture. The Bible in a Year podcast is brought to you by Ascension. Using the Great Adventure Bible timeline, we'll read all the way from Genesis to Revelation, discovering how the story of salvation unfolds and how we fit into that story today. Today is day 93. We're reading from Judges chapter 12, 13, 14, and 15. There's no secondary book except for the book of Psalms, which we're

praying Psalm 146 today, kind of jumping ahead to Psalm 146. As always, the Bible translation that I am reading from is the Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition. I'm using the Great Adventure Bible from Ascension. If you want to download your own Bible in a Year reading plan, you can visit ascensionpress.com slash Bible in a Year. You can also subscribe in your podcast app. If you have not yet done that, that would be a nice thing to do. Anyways, day 93. Today, Judges 12, 13, 14, and 15, praying Psalm 146.

The Book of Judges, Chapter 12, intertribal fighting. The men of Ephraim were called to arms and they crossed to Zaphon and said to Jephthah, why did you cross over to fight against the Ammonites and did not call us to go with you? We will burn your house over you with fire. And Jephthah said to them, I and my people had a great feud with the Ammonites. And when I called you, you did not deliver me from their hand. And when I saw that you would not deliver me, I took my life in my hand and crossed over against the Ammonites.

And the Lord gave them into my hand. Why then have you come up to me this day to fight against me? Then Jephthah gathered all the men of Gilead and fought with Ephraim. And the men of Gilead struck Ephraim because they said, You are fugitives of Ephraim, you Gileadites, in the midst of Ephraim and Manasseh. And the Gileadites took the fords of the Jordan against the Ephraimites. And when any of the fugitives of Ephraim said, Let me go over, the men of Gilead said to them, Are you an Ephraimite? When they said no, they said to him, Then say Shibboleth. And he said, Sibboleth, for he could not pronounce it right.

Then they seized him and slew him at the fords of the Jordan. And there fell at that time 42,000 of the Ephraimites. Jephthah judged Israel six years. Then Jephthah the Gileadite died and was buried in his city in Gilead. Ibsan, Elon, and Abdon. After him, Ibsan of Bethlehem judged Israel. He had 30 sons and 30 daughters he gave in marriage outside his clan. And 30 daughters he brought in from outside for his sons.

And he judged Israel seven years. Then Ibsan died and was buried at Bethlehem. After him, Elon, the Zebulonite, judged Israel, and he judged Israel ten years. Then Elon, the Zebulonite, died and was buried at Aijalon in the land of Zebulon. After him, Abdon, the son of Hillel, the Priathanite, judged Israel. He had forty sons and thirty grandsons who rode on seventy donkeys, and he judged Israel eight years. chapter 13, the birth of Samson. And the sons of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord gave them into the hand of the Philistines for forty years. And there was a certain man of Zorah, of the tribe of the Danites,

whose name was Manoah, and his wife was barren and had no children. And the angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, Behold, you are barren and have no children, but you shall conceive and bear a son. Therefore beware, and drink no wine or strong drink and eat nothing unclean. For behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor shall come upon his head for the boy shall be a Nazarite to God from birth. And he shall begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines. Then the woman came and told her husband, a man of God came to me and his countenance was like the countenance of the angel of God,

very terrible. I did not ask him where he was from, and he did not tell me his name. But he said to me, Behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. So then drink no wine or strong drink, and eat nothing unclean, for the boy shall be a Nazarite to God from birth to the day of his death. Then Manoah entreated the Lord and said, O Lord, I beg you, let the man of God whom you sent come again to us and teach us what we are to do with the boy that will be born. And God listened to

the voice of Manoah, and the angel of God came again to the woman as she sat in the field, but Manoah her husband was not with her. And the woman ran in haste and told her husband, Behold, the man who came to me the other day has appeared to me. And Manoah arose and went after his wife and came to the man and said to him, Are you the man who spoke to this woman? And he said, I am. And Manoah said, Now when your words come true, what is to be the boy's manner of life, and what is he to do? And the angel of the Lord said to Manoah, Of all that I said to the woman, let her beware. She may not eat of anything that comes from the vine, neither let her drink wine or strong drink or eat any unclean thing. All that I commanded her, let her observe. Manoah said to the angel of the Lord, Please let us detain you and prepare a kid for you.

And the angel of the Lord said to Manoah, If you detain me, I will not eat of your food. But if you make ready a burnt offering, then offer it to the Lord. For Manoah did not know that he was the angel of the Lord. And Manoah said to the angel of the Lord, What is your name? So that when your words come true, we may honor you. And the angel of the Lord said to him who works wonders. And when the flame went up toward heaven from the altar, the angel of the Lord ascended in the flame of the altar while Manoah and his wife looked on, and they fell on their faces to the ground. The angel of the Lord appeared no more to Manoah and to his wife. Then Manoah knew that he was the angel of the Lord, and Manoah

said to his wife, We shall surely die, for we have seen God. But his wife said to him, If the Lord had meant to kill us, he would not have accepted a burnt offering and a serial offering at our hands or shown us all these things or announced to us such things as these. And the woman bore a son and called his name Samson. And the boy grew and the Lord blessed him. And the spirit of the Lord began to stir in him at Mahanadan between Zorah and Eshtoel. Chapter 14. Samson's Marriage at Timnah. Samson went down to Timnah, and at Timnah he saw one of the daughters of the Philistines. Then he came up and told his father and mother,

I saw one of the daughters of the Philistines at Timnah, now get her for me as my wife. But his father and mother said to him, is there not a woman among the daughters of your kinsmen or among all our people that you must go and take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines? But Samson said to his father, get her for me, for she pleases me well. His father and mother did not know that it was from the Lord, for he was seeking an occasion against the Philistines. At that time the Philistines had dominion over Israel. Then Samson went down with his father and mother to Timnah. And he came to the vineyards of Timnah, and behold, a young lion roared against him. And the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and he tore the lion asunder as one

tears a kid, and he had nothing in his hand. But he did not tell his father or his mother what he had done. Then he went down and talked with the woman, and she pleased Samson well. And after a while he returned to take her, and he turned aside to see the carcass of the lion, and behold, there was a swarm of bees in the body of the lion, and honey. He stripped it out into his hands, and went on eating as he went. And he came to his father and mother and gave some to them and they ate, but he did not tell them that he had taken the honey from the carcass of the lion. And his father went down to the woman and Samson made a feast there for so the young men used to do. And when the people saw him, they brought 30 companions

to be with him. And Samson said to them, Let me now put a riddle to you. If you can tell me what it is within the seven days of the feast and find it out, then I will give you thirty linen garments and thirty festal garments. But if you cannot tell me what it is, then you shall give me thirty linen garments and thirty festal garments. And they said to him, Put your riddle that we may hear it. And he said to them, Out of the eater came something to eat, out of the strong came something sweet. And they could not in three days tell what the riddle was. On the fourth day they said to Samson's wife, Entice your husband to tell us what the riddle is, lest we burn you and your

father's house with fire. Have you invited us here to impoverish us? And Samson's wife wept before him and said, You only hate me. You do not love me. You have put a riddle to my countrymen, and you have not told me what it is. And he said to her, Behold, I have not told my father nor my mother, and I shall tell you? She wept before him the seven days that their feast lasted, and on the seventh day he told her because she pressed him hard. Then she told the riddle to her countrymen, and the men of the city said to him on the seventh day before the sun went down, What is sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a lion? And he said to them, If you had not

plowed with my heifer, you would not have found out my riddle. And the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon and killed thirty men of the town, and took their spoil, and gave the festal garments to those who had told the riddle. In hot anger he went back to his father's house, and Samson's wife was given to his companion, who had been his best man. Chapter 15. Samson Defeats the Philistines After a while, at the time of the wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife with a kid, and he said, I will go in to my wife in the chamber, but her father would not allow him to go in. And her father said, I really thought that you utterly hated her. So I gave her to your companion.

Is not her younger sister fairer than she? Please take her instead. And Samson said to them, this time I shall be blameless in regard to the Philistines when I do them mischief. So Samson went and caught 300 foxes and took torches and he turned them tail to tail and put a torch between each pair of tails. And when he had set fire to the torches, he let the foxes go into the standing grain of the Philistines and burned up the shocks and the standing grain, as well as the olive orchards. Then the Philistines said, Who has done this? And they said, Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he has taken his wife and given her to his companion. And the Philistines came up and

burned her and her father with fire. And Samson said to them, If this is what you do, I swear I will be avenged upon you, and after that I will quit. And he struck them hip and thigh with great slaughter. And he went down and stayed in the cleft of the rock of Etam. Then the Philistines came up and encamped in Judah and made a raid on Lehi. And the men of Judah said, Why have you come up against us? They said, We have come up to bind Samson to do to him as he did to us. Then the three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam and said to Samson, Do you not know that the Philistines are rulers over us? What then is this that you have done to us? And he said to them, as they did to me, so have I done to them. And they

said to him, we have come down to bind you that we may give you into the hand of the Philistines. And Samson said to them, swear to me that you will not fall upon me yourselves. They said to him, No, we will only bind you and give you into their hands. We will not kill you. So they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock. When he came to Lehi, the Philistines came shouting to meet him. And the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and the ropes which were on his arms became as flax that has caught fire, and his bonds melted off his hands. And he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, and put out his hand,

and seized it, and with it he slew a thousand men. And Samson said, With the jawbone of a donkey, heaps upon heaps, with the jawbone of a donkey, have I slain a thousand men. When he had finished speaking, he threw away the jawbone out of donkey have I slain a thousand men. When he had finished speaking, he threw away the jawbone out of his hand and that place was called Ramath-Lehi. And he was very thirsty. And he called on the Lord and said, you have granted this great deliverance

by the hand of your servant. And shall I now die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised? And God split open a hollow place that is at Lehi, and there came water from it. And when he drank, his spirit returned, and he revived. Therefore, the name of it was called En-Hakor. It is at Lehi to this day.

And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years. Psalm 146 Praise for God's help. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, O my soul. I will praise the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praises to my God while I have being. Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man in whom there is no help. When his breath departs, he returns to his earth. On that very day his plans perish. Happy is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them,

who keeps faith forever, who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free. The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down. The Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the sojourners. He upholds the widow and the fatherless, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin. The Lord will reign forever. Your God, O Zion, to all generations. Praise the Lord. Father in heaven, we do give you praise and glory. We thank you so much for the gift of yourself, the gift of faith, the gift of your word that you've given to us every single day. These last 93 days, Lord, you keep speaking to us and you keep teaching us. You teach us not

only about ourselves and about the history, but you teach us about your heart. You teach us about yourself. And so we ask that you please continue to allow our ears to be open, our hearts to be open, our minds to be shaped by who you are and what you call us to. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. So we heard from a couple different judges. We had Jephthah, obviously. We had Ibsen, Elon, and Abdon, really briefly. And then we had Samson, who is probably, I would say, most famous of all the judges. One of the things to keep in mind is this theme. The theme is of couples who long for a child and Samson's parents are no different. This is one of those stories

we're going to hear in just even a couple of days in 1 Samuel. The same thing with Hannah, the mother of Samuel, who longs for a child. Here is Manoah and his wife who long for a child. And here is the Lord God who blesses them with a child. And so again, whenever we have this theme, I think it's so important for us to stop and to pray for all couples that are in crisis pregnancies, couples that are unable to conceive or have been unable to conceive until this point. And it's just been so powerful. So many people have reached out.

Whenever we bring this up and I invite this community, right, the people who are going through the Bible in a year to pray, some things, powerful things have happened. So many lives have reached out. Whenever we bring this up and I invite this community, right, the people who are going through the Bible in a year to pray, some things have, powerful things have happened. So many lives have been blessed, particularly when it comes to those couples that are, again, as I said, truly longing and praying, desperate, maybe even sometimes for a child. Here's the Lord God who comes to Manoah and his wife, and he is consecrated as a Nazirite from birth, which is, we talked about the Nazirite vow back in Leviticus. We talked about how people would go off on a retreat. And at the end of that retreat, during the retreat, they would basically retreat. That's our kind of common word for it. During that time, probably wouldn't shave, wouldn't really cut their hair, wouldn't

drink. They would have that retreat time. And at the end of it, they might cut off the hair that grew during that time, the beard that grew during that time, maybe even shave their head and then burn that. Now, the Nazirite vow would be a very brief vow, right? For maybe a week, maybe four weeks. It's very, very rare that someone has actually consecrated a Nazirite from birth and lives that way for their entire life. The three examples that we get is here, Samson, we get John the Baptist, and maybe, maybe, maybe Samuel, who is in the first book of Samuel. So we can introduce to him in first Samuel. We don't know necessarily if Samuel for sure is a Nazirite, but nonetheless, here we have Samson. And Samson is not a good guy. Samson is the hero, right? He is that figure of the action hero. He is the person that,

He is that figure of the action hero. He is the person that, I got to tell you, when I read my action Bible growing up, it was my favorite scenes were all the Samson scenes of this guy who was just ripped and jacked and the servant of God. And yet when you get to know the story, you realize, wow, Samson is not great. Samson is strong, but he's not wise. Samson is consecrated, but he actually isn't living a consecrated life. We even see that in the fact that he not only killed the lion, right? He goes back and he eats out of, killing a lion's not, that's not bad.

It's when he goes back and he eats honey from the carcass of the lion, right? He's touching a dead thing. We have, all of us have heard the rules when it comes to coming into contact with dead bodies. Not only that, but he also then gave his mom and dad honey that had come from a dead thing. So he made them ritually unclean without even telling them. And there's that sense of even when he defeats the thousand people at Lehi, he's using the job one of an ass, right? Of a donkey. And again, an unclean object.

And so one of the things we recognize is that Samson, while strong, right? Of a donkey. And again, an unclean object. And so one of the things we recognize is that Samson, while strong, has a lot of weaknesses. One is that while he's consecrated, he's not living a consecrated life very clearly. But also while strong, he has so many weaknesses. And one of his weaknesses is his passion, his anger that has gotten him into so much trouble, even in the chapters we've read, but also his lust, which we're going to hear about in the next couple of chapters tomorrow. Not only his lust when it comes to Delilah, as that story unfolds, but also some other, at least one other occasion where it just kind of gets him into trouble. One of the things we

recognize for all of us is that all of us have certain strengths, but also all of us have certain weaknesses. And those strengths do not make up for the weakness. We have to actually address the weakness. We can't just say, well, I'm strong in this area. Therefore I can tolerate the weakness. What we get to do is we get to say, okay, Lord, I am strong in these areas. You made me strong in these areas. And yet I also recognize that I am in great, great need of purification. I'm in great need of strengthening in a number of other places. And so rather than, A, despairing over that, we come to the Lord with them, or B, dismissing those things, we come to the Lord with them. So my invitation for all of us is acknowledge our strengths, praise the Lord for the times where the Spirit of the Lord does come upon us, but also address

the weakness, neither despair because of it or nor dismiss the weakness, but bring them and entrust them to the Lord saying, God, however, whatever you want to do with this weakness, I give you permission to purify it for my life. I give you permission to release me from it. I give you permission to heal me of this, or I give you permission to just simply give me the strength to not let these weaknesses become my downfall, because that is what's going to happen with Samson. Spoiler alert. Oh, we keep praying for each other. Man, oh man, I love the book of Judges. It is so powerful and it is so good for us, not because they're all great heroes that

save the day and are incredible, but because they reveal us to us. And thank you, that's what God's word does. Thank you, God, for doing that. Please keep praying for each other. I'm praying for you and please pray for me. My name is Father Mike. I cannot wait to see you tomorrow. God bless.