Would I Know? How? And When?
Not long ago my son informed me that I was still talking about Samson out here. He pointed out that I’d been doing that since, when? Summer?
Yeah, something like summer.
“I don’t even read it now, Mom,” he said. “You’re not funny anymore.”
I don’t worry too much. I still catch him reading when he thinks I’m not looking. And blog or not, he never seems to run out of reasons to laugh at me.
But he’s right. Samson is starting to seem like forever.
The problem is, I can’t shake him off. Every time I think I’m about there, it’s something else. I finally got to give him his haircut, and there’s still more before he brings the house down in his big finale.
It’s like this: Samson never did ask a lot of questions after his riddle backfired.
But he sure keeps making me ask them.
Samson has become for me a looking glass. And every time I see something foul in him, I see my own eyes staring back. I see the work God still wants to do in me. Work I need Him to do in me.
And now he’s done it again.
Here’s the question: If all the fullness of God drained out and left me vacant, would I know?
How would I know?
And when would I notice?
::
Back up a second.
Let me square my theology with you first before you line up in the comment box to school me on grace. (Oh, I still need some schooling on grace, but it’s not because I think God will leave me.) While I do, from time to time, wrestle over whether or not God suffers buyer’s remorse when it comes to me, I also know that He will not bag me up and drop me off at the Returns counter at Wal*Mart. I cling for dear life to words such as those Paul put to the parchment in his letter to the church at Ephesus:
And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory. (Ephesians 1:13-14)
And while I have bouts of wondering how much time God spends scanning the Covenant (the new one) for a loophole, I take courage from what the writer of Hebrews said when he quoted Joshua, reminding believers that never is a long, long time:
Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said,
“Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” (Hebrews 13:5)
I stake my life on words like those.
So let’s just be clear that I’m not asking if God would leave.
He won’t.
I’m asking, in the very hypothetical what-if world, that if He did go, would I notice?
The real question is not about His presence, because it is more secure than anything I know. The question is about my awareness of that life-giving presence.
::
Samson, full of himself and full of the game, got tired. That sneaky-girl Delilah wore him down and his loose lips sunk the ship. He told her everything.
Exhausted, he lay his head on her lap and floated off to sleep. While he rested, she called in the Philistines to bring her their silver and snip off his hair. The game always ended with the call to arms. Samson! The Philistines are upon you!
He jumped up to fight, believing this was just like all the other times. He’d shake off the sleep and be ready to rumble.
But it ends with the most tragic words I have ever heard.
He awoke from his sleep and thought, “I’ll go out as before and shake myself free.” But he did not know that the LORD had left him. (Judges 16:20b)
He did not know that the LORD had left him.
::
He did not know.
God was, for him, a source of strength. Time after time, Samson received the dramatic empowering of God’s Spirit and crushed his enemies. Over and over, after moving in God’s strength, he stood tall and mighty, the victor.
And yet. And yet.
When that strength was gone, when the Lord left him, he. did. not. know.
So full of Samson was Samson that he did not know the difference between God’s fullness and his own.
God left.
Gone.
And until a Philistine thug poked out his eyes, Samson had no idea.
::
In the fourth chapter of 1 Samuel, Eli the priest sat at the city gate on a little stool while the soldiers fought for the life of Israel. In the throes of yet another failure to grasp Who God was, His children took the Ark in to battle as though it were no more than a good luck charm. God, Who would be a four-leaf clover for nobody, laid His own smackdown on the Israelites, allowing the Philistines to rout them. They killed thousands. And they took the Ark.
As far as the Hebrews were concerned, God’s presence left them with the Ark.
On hearing the news, Eli, sitting at the gate, fell off his stool and died.
Whether God really left or not, Eli’s reaction breaks me: To believe God was gone killed him.
Eli fell off his stool and died.
Samson, on the other hand, had no idea.
::
And that’s how we get to the wondering. I wonder . . .
. . . am I full enough of God that I would notice if He leaked out? Or would my own self mask the void?
Do I recognize His working in me such that if He stopped, I would know?
Would it take the punch to gut or the poking out of my eyes before the excruciating pain of utter vacancy set in?
Or would I know it from the very first chill?
O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. (Psalm 139:1-3) Let me be so intimately acquainted with Your ways and Your going out and lying down and sitting and rising that I might know Your presence every moment. Let Samson be full of Samson. I want to be full of You.
::
Related: No Ark, No Glory
More posts in the neverending Samson series
Lyla:
Most of us have heard the story of Samson since early Sunday School. However, your insight into the various aspects of the story have elevated the “Samson Saga” above super-human strength, long hair and a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
You are correct in that we may not miss God’s presence, particularly in the good times. And in the bad times, we go looking for him. Our relationship should be intense enough that we never have to ask “Where’s God”.
As an aside, I’m a little nervous about what is going to happen when you get to David. David provides enough material to keep you writing until the rapture.
Dad
2009/10/19 at 6:14 PM
Dad, interesting you should mention David…seems his long-haired son Absalom died when his locks caught in the branches as he rode a mule underneath a tree, and he was stabbed to death while had dangled helplessly. Makes me wonder if I should break down and make my kids get haircuts.
2009/10/19 at 6:45 PM
Your post may not be funny, but God’s Word is hard-hitting even without humor.
Even though I believe we can’t lose the Spirit that seals us until the day of salvation, I still worry that I will lose the intimacy I have with God and that I won’t know it until I’m miles away. Quite a compelling message to make me pray like you do here–to let me know immediately when I’ve turned from His throne so that I don’t take one step outside of His footprints that lead the way.
2009/10/19 at 8:35 PM
“I won’t know it until I’m miles away.” Yeah. That.
2009/10/19 at 10:06 PM
And this is why YOU get to wrestle with these OT characters! Your insight never ceases to amaze me and I thank you for challenging me to look deeper.
Thanks for taking Samson and putting him out there in a whole different light. I agee with Jennifer (fearing the loss of intimacy). When things are going great-I don’t seem to search for Him as deeply as when I am struggling with something. As time goes on and our relationship with Him grows I believe that we sense when we are off kilter and need to come back to our center. I pray for that sense that draws me back every time I rely to much on myself and not nearly enough on Him.
So, who are you going to tackle next? I can hardly wait!
2009/10/19 at 10:12 PM
Ah, Julie. Touché. You just wait. There’s a tricky OT figure just waiting for you to unravel. (Hey, I know, figure out Tamar for me. She makes my head hurt.)
I’m sitting here this morning and thinking. In 139, David also asks “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” It’s funny that we think we can get away from Him (I think it all the time) and yet He’s right there. We can neither flee nor wander off.
But we can cut off our awareness of His presence, stop noticing it — losing the intimacy, as you and Jennifer have aptly put it. I just never want to hear said that such a thing happened and “Lyla didn’t know . . .”
And Julie? As for what’s next, I just peeked forward into Judges 17. Here’s how it opens: Now a man named Micah from the hill country of Ephraim said to his mother, “The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from you and about which I heard you utter a curse—I have that silver with me; I took it.”
Then his mother said, “The LORD bless you, my son!”
When he returned the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, she said, “I solemnly consecrate my silver to the LORD for my son to make a carved image and a cast idol. I will give it back to you.”
Oh, my.
2009/10/20 at 9:31 AM
Tamar? Which one? Judah’s daughter-in-law or David’s daughter? lol
I think either way- you would do a better job…
2009/10/20 at 1:27 PM
They’re both a little complicated. But Judah’s dinlaw is the one that really creates the conundrum for me. Jennifer has her awesome Mystery File, but I’m afraid I’m not so patient. I have a long list of people I need to sit down with over a cup’a celestial Joe and say “Lucy, you have some ‘splaining to do!” Tamar is toward the top of that list.
2009/10/20 at 2:33 PM
Oh Lyla … Another stirring post here. A while back I asked my pastor why we still sing in church: “Take not your Holy Spirit from me.” (Part of our Lutheran liturgy quotes that portion of the Psalms every Sunday.) … It seems like it’s part of manmade Fear Factor built into our churches that God will up and leave us at any given moment. Thankfully, He won’t…
But of course, the bigger question you’re asking here is this: Would we know if He did? If I’m being completely honest, there have been times where I thought He really had left. (Even though He really didn’t.)
As I read this tonight, I thought of Mother Teresa and the wilderness in which she wandered all those years, and I wonder: “Could I have done that? Could I have stayed firm in the faith? Or would I have wandered miles away if I didn’t get so much of a hint of His presence?”
You’ve got me thinking — as usual. Looks like another one for the Mystery File …
2009/10/20 at 9:09 PM
Some days I wish I could turn the thinking off… You raise a good point – despite that those of us who accept a doctrine of eternal security will reject that His Spirit would depart, we still cling to all the words of Psalm 51. I love Keith Green’s Create in Me a Clean Heart and repeat that over and over as well. But yet His Word is His Word, whether in the OT or NT. Yeah, I dunno. Did your pastor give you a helpful answer?
As for Mother Teresa, oh my. We now know she served and suffered and gave all — but did so under the weight of bone-crushing doubt. It would paralyze most of us. And yet there is God’s presence — whether she saw it as that or not, it could have been nothing other than that which sustained her, don’t you think?
2009/10/21 at 7:47 AM
There have been times in my life I felt that God’s Spirit had left me. Unanswered prayers, difficult circumstances, failures and sin left me missing His presence. Brennan Manning wrote “Life is lived forward but understood backward.” When I look back now I see the Holy Spirit was there all along – drawing me closer, deeper into The Truth. God was using all the moments of desperation to grow me up. How I love your words, “Let me be so intimately acquainted with Your ways and Your going out and lying down and sitting and rising that I might know Your presence every moment. Let Samson be full of Samson. I want to be full of You.” Yes and Amen!
2009/10/20 at 9:43 PM
Nancy, you and Jennifer had me go to sleep pondering some of the best — David, Mother Teresa, Brennan Manning. It’s a wonder I slept at all…
You both talk of those times of wondering if God had left — some circumstance or place in life leaving you with the raw pain of sensing that vacancy. And I wonder if we sense His absence even when He is present, if that might quiet my concern some over whether I’d notice if He did in fact go. It’s interesting, in those moments where one (a normal person) might sense His absence, I don’t think I see it as quite that. I don’t fear His absence or departure so much as I see Him standing with arms folded across His chest, head cocked, leaning on the wall and brushing a bit of lint of His shoulder. I sense His indifference more than His actual absence, perhaps a vacant look from Him more than an actual vacancy.
And then I see Him again, taking the weight of all my sin, all my shame, all my fear, all my stupidity, and wonder why, if He did all that, would He ever dream of just checking out on me.
It’s good to know He remains, period. Even when I can’t see Him straight.
2009/10/21 at 8:00 AM