Sleeping with One Eye Open

It’s good to sleep with the lights off.

At my house, it helps dispel that nagging sense of being watched.

A few years ago I saw my ophthalmologist for a solution to some headaches that seemed to originate behind my right eye. I rejected the notion that they were tension related or migraines, more out of defiance than anything else.

He reminded me of how people my age start to have trouble focusing, and set me up in some old-people glasses. I was as defiant  about the bifocals as I was the migraine. When I pressed him because I was not having any vision changes except when my head hurt, and that mostly related to an eyelid that couldn’t support itself, he dug a little deeper.

I left his office with a bottle of goo to squirt into that eye to help bring moisture to a dry band running across my cornea.

As it turns out, one of my motherhood trademarks is not just figurative.

I do, in fact, sleep with one eye open.

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I wondered tonight if perhaps Samson didn’t as well.

Judges 16 opens with a short story as a prelude to his appointments with Delilah. Samson met up with a prostitute in Gaza, one of the larger Philistine cities. The recklessness of the physical risk — showing up in a city where every man within its walls thirsted for his life — was matched only by the recklessness of the spiritual risk.

The one set apart would again fulfill the external requirements of the written code, but defile his heart and flesh to spend the night with this beautiful woman.

The men of Gaza seized upon their opportunity, making plans to kill him when he arose at dawn.

He felt confident in his strength, enough to lie down in a hornet’s nest.

They felt confident in their numbers, enough to leave him lie until morning.

One day Samson went to Gaza, where he saw a prostitute. He went in to spend the night with her. The people of Gaza were told, “Samson is here!” So they surrounded the place and lay in wait for him all night at the city gate. They made no move during the night, saying, “At dawn we’ll kill him.”

But Samson lay there only until the middle of the night. Then he got up and took hold of the doors of the city gate, together with the two posts, and tore them loose, bar and all. He lifted them to his shoulders and carried them to the top of the hill that faces Hebron. (Judges 16:1-3)

The men of Gaza misplayed it.

Samson awoke during the night and left the walled city. Never mind that the gates were locked. He tore out the massive wooden doors and their posts, hoisted them on his shoulders and carried them to the hilltop, believed to be about twenty miles from town.

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He paid for a full night with the girl. Yet he stole away before she’d earned a full night’s pay. It isn’t every day — or night — that we see Samson walk away from what was rightfully his.

The text doesn’t tell us why he got up. Only that he did.

I don’t believe the text even gives us a solid basis for speculation.

So I’m just stumped.

Matthew Henry was not. When he penned the wisdom bound in his commentary, he saw reason enough to conclude that Samson did not stay the full night because he sensed the risk, telling us to “observe Samson’s danger,” both physical and spiritual.

Henry goes on to say this:

Oh that all who indulge their sensual appetites in drunkenness, or any fleshly lusts, would see themselves thus surrounded, way-laid, and marked for ruin by their spiritual enemies! The faster they sleep, the more secure they feel, the greater their danger. We hope it was with a pious resolution not to return to his sin, that he rose under a fear of the danger he was in. Can I be safe under this guilt? It was bad that he lay down without such checks; but it would have been worse, if he had laid still under them. (Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary on the Bible)

These words pull my feet from beneath me and throw me to the the ground tonight: Can I be safe under this guilt?

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Whether by the Spirit’s prompting or just common sense, whether an awareness of a spiritual threat or a physical one, Samson recognized the danger. He got up, ripped a hole in a fortified city wall and walked out.

He took note that he was not safe.

At least not while he lay getting his fill of a girl who was not his wife. A girl he regarded only for what she could give him in exchange for a little coin.

Henry illuminates a view of Samson I seem so reluctant to allow. I see God’s Spirit come on Samson in power. Henry sees that, but also sees the Spirit come on him in conviction. A gentle prodding in the night to remind him that he has placed himself in close range of danger.

A prodding to which Samson tuned his ear.

Samson entered the walled city to take for himself. He would flaunt his strength before the Philistine men while he brought more shame to a young prostitute.

Matthew Henry will have Samson asking himself, Can I be safe under this guilt?

And he also has him answering a resounding No!

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Then the mirror that is Samson turns on me, as it always does. And I wonder. At those times when I choose to go my way, to find what fills me up. When I look God in the eye and sin anyway, do I recognize the danger? Do I believe I can be safe under this guilt?

Henry goes on to observe what is the far worse thing. It is one thing to sin and to follow my flesh. It is another to know it and lay still under it.

The Spirit, He will prod. He will seek to wake me in the night.

When He does, will I sleep soundly through it?

Or will I rise and go?

Will I keep one eye open, attentive?

Or will I lie still?

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Related: More posts in the Samson series