What Controls you?
By Matt Watson
Samson is the most famous of all the judges. Whether it's his superhuman strength or his dalliance with Delilah, everyone seems to know about the big, violent, herculean ox who is really, really good at killing things.
For example, in Judges 14 he fights a lion and rips it apart. Not a kitty. A lion. “Then the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon him, and although he had nothing in his hand, he tore the lion in pieces as one tears a young goat” (v. 6). I’m not sure I could rip a raw chicken apart without tearing my rotator cuff, let alone a young goat, but here Samson is ripping a lion apart like King Kong fighting a T-Rex (the relevant time stamp starts at 6:30).
But for all his brute strength, Samson keeps finding himself in trouble because he always thinks with the wrong organ, such as the time when he was willing to forsake a solemn vow to the Lord and break all sorts of other commandments by marrying some hot chick from Philistia.
A Hollywood Marriage
At the seven-day wedding feast, Samson is hosting a barbecue with his new in-laws, and they bring thirty men to be his companions. For some reason, Samson decides to have a game of riddles and wagers thirty pairs of underwear, and thirty suits if they could guess the answer to his riddle (vv. 10-13).
Halfway through the feast, the men threaten the bride to get her to tell them the answer. “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?” (v. 15). The Hebrew word for entice is also used for seduction and persuasion, which surprises nobody. So, she manipulates Samson to give her the answer by seducing him. And when that doesn’t seem to work, she nags and cries until he finally gives in on the last day. She knows exactly what buttons to push to get her way.
When the thirty companions answer correctly, Samson calls his wife a cow and then goes into town, kills thirty other guys, steals their stuff, and then gives it to the thirty frat bros at the wedding feast. Then he goes home to his parents' house to pout and his wife is given away to his best man (vv. 19-20). He is married for all of seven days, a record beating any Hollywood celebrity today.
What is Your MO?
Samson’s MO is to get angry, kill things, and be dumb around women. His body counts, both in men killed and women bedded, are not signs of emotional health. They control him, entangle him, and are tools of the enemy to kill him.
The temptations and struggles Samson faced are just as real for people today. Unlike Samson, we must be on guard against letting our fleshly desires and sinful patterns control us.
Men are prone to either laziness or aggression; that's our MO. The culture wants passive men and creates them by accusing others of being aggressive men. Men who are fat, dumb, and stupid won’t stand up for the important things like providing, protecting, and leading. And a lot of the time, we take the bait.
The path of passivity and laziness is easy. In the West, we can DoorDash anything we want to eat. We can have all our shopping delivered to our house. We can watch anything we want on the legion of streaming platforms. We can watch all the porn we want, for free, on little portable computers conveniently located in our pockets. It's an "I want what I want and I want it now" culture.
Admittedly, the flip side seems better but is just as empty without Christ. The opposite of potato chips is deer jerky. Instead of streaming, there is jiu-jitsu, lifting, and David Goggins yelling at you to stay hard while running in the heat (what is he running away from?). Instead of comfort, the pursuit is glory. There is still a self-centered obsession that controls us, even in discipline, when we remove Christ from the picture.
What Controls You?
That is because whatever controls you owns you. We are controlled by what we worship. God says through Paul,
“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. … Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.”
What do you allow to control you? Maybe like Samson, it is sex. The allure of sex controls both those with real-life body counts and those with virtual body counts. Every young man, and increasingly young women, have this lifelong battle to fight.
Maybe it's anger or emotionalism. I sometimes think I have only two emotions: anger and hunger. Likewise, while writing this, I had to pause to hold my two-year-old who had not napped and was throwing his biggest tantrum yet because he couldn’t decide between eating an applesauce pouch or crackers. When we lose control, we act like toddlers throwing tantrums.
Maybe it's greed; you can never be satisfied with what you have and always desire more and more. Maybe it's pride; you constantly insist on your own way, your independence, and your “rights.”
Don’t Take the Bait
Satan wants to control you through your desires. He holds them out and says they look good, taste good, and feel good, so they must be good. But if it is outside of God’s Word, will, and ways, then it is not good. Don’t take the bait. God says,
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. ”
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2).
The Westminster Shorter Catechism says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. The Heidelberg Catechism says that our only hope in life and death is that we belong to Jesus.
When we let things control us, whether it’s consumeristic things or disciplined things, we are slaves to it. We say, “My only hope in life and death is ‘getting my way,’ or ‘having as much sex as possible.’” We say, “My chief end is to glorify myself and enjoy whatever I want forever.”
Free in Christ
That isn't freedom. That is bondage. Those in Christ are free in Christ because he did what our flesh, and even the law of God, could not do:
“For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit … You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”
Nothing can separate us from Christ. He is greater than all our sins, and he is more glorious than all the things we think we want. Because Christ's death and resurrection set us free, we do not have to be controlled by our inordinate desires or the temptations of our flesh. We can walk in repentance, turning (even repeatedly!) away from our sin and back towards God.
This article was originally published by Matthew Watson with Awake! Put on strength!, and is used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.