JUDGES 14

I thought this was an extremely interesting chapter, in that it revealed two (seemingly opposite) things about God. First, God accepts failure. Second, God does not accept failure. How can both of those things be true?

First, let’s look at how God accepts failure. Did you get the sense while reading this chapter, as I did, that God is really starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel here? I mean, it seems to be getting harder and harder for Him to find people of integrity in Israel. He once had people of great character, such as Moses and Joshua. Even Gideon (who certainly had considerable faults) seems like a man of perfect character when put up next to Jephthah and now Samson.

For all His efforts with Israel, it seems God is having a lot more failure than success. Just look at Samson. If he is now the best God has to work with, God is in trouble. Samson was supposed to be (and, by all accounts, was) raised as a Nazirite. The point of that type of upbringing was so that he would be separate, set apart by God for a special purpose. A sense of God’s holy calling should have been permeating his life. Instead, he was ignoring this calling at every opportunity, doing things a Nazirite shouldn’t have been doing—touching dead things, marrying heathen women, going to a vineyard... God was definitely working in and through Samson, but it’s clear that Samson’s heart was divided.

So, when I say that God accepts failure, I mean that God accepts our failures. If we’re not perfect, He doesn’t leave us. If we’re not totally committed to Him, He doesn’t refuse to have a relationship with us. He takes us where we are, with all of our faults and flaws—just as He accepted the "best of the worst" that Israel had to offer.

On the flip side, however, it’s clear that God does not accept failure. That is, even when we fail, He doesn’t give up. How many times had He been ’round the mountain with Israel by now? Pursuing them whilst they ran away. Still coming after them, again and again. He was like that then, and He’s still like that now. As we fail the 807th time, God is already formulating Opportunity #808. He accepts our failures, but never allows those failures to coax Him into giving up.