There are parts of Samson’s story that are so familiar I can read right over them.
I know Delilah cuts his hair. I know he loses his strength. I know the Philistines capture him. I know how the story ends. But this time through Judges 16, I got stuck on his eyes.
After Delilah discovers the truth about Samson’s strength and his hair is shaved, the Philistines seize him, gouge out his eyes, bind him with bronze shackles, and take him to Gaza where he is forced to grind grain in prison.
His strength was gone. His freedom was gone. And then his vision was gone. I cannot get past his eyes. Maybe because Samson’s story has always been a story about what he could see.
Go back to Judges 14 and notice how the trouble begins. Samson goes to Timnah and sees a Philistine woman. He comes home and tells his parents, essentially, I saw her, I want her, go get her for me. A couple of chapters later, Judges 16 begins with Samson going to Gaza where he sees a prostitute and sleeps with her.
Samson sees. Samson wants. Samson takes.
There is something about that pattern that feels painfully familiar. Our eyes have an incredible ability to convince our hearts that because something looks good to us, it must be good for us.
That is essentially the tragedy of the entire book of Judges. The book ends by telling us that everyone did what was right in their own eyes. Samson’s life feels like a living example of what happens when our own eyes become the authority for our decisions.
And then they take his eyes.
I want to be careful with that because I do not think we should create a neat little theological formula that the Bible does not give us. Scripture does not say Samson sinned with his eyes, therefore God took his eyes. I am not saying that.
But I cannot ignore the irony. The man who spent so much of his life being led by what he saw eventually could no longer see. That makes me want to guard my vision.
Not simply in the obvious sense of guarding my eyes from things I should not be looking at. I mean guarding what I allow myself to stare at long enough that it starts shaping what I want.
- Guarding what gets my attention.
- Guarding what I envy.
- Guarding what I consume.
- Guarding the things I keep exposing myself to because I have decided I can handle them.
Because what we repeatedly look at has a way of becoming what we eventually long for.
And I do not want my appetites deciding my direction. There is another part of Samson losing his vision that gets me. After taking his eyes, the Philistines put him in prison and make him grind grain.
Think about that. Samson had been set apart before birth. He had been given extraordinary strength. He had been called to begin delivering Israel from the Philistines.
Now the man called to defeat the Philistines is blind, imprisoned, and working for them. Sin promised Samson freedom his entire life. Do what you want. Take what you want. Sleep with whom you want. Follow whatever appetite is loudest. And eventually, all that freedom put him in chains.
That is worth sitting with. But thankfully, there is another verse.
Judges 16:22 might be one of my favorite little verses in this entire messy story: “But the hair of his head began to grow again after it had been shaved.” His hair started growing.
I love that Scripture tells us this while Samson is still in prison. His circumstances have not changed. His eyes have not returned. His chains have not fallen off. He is still living inside the consequences of everything that brought him there.
But something is growing. Grace. God was not finished with Samson. Eventually Samson prays again. God hears him again. His strength returns. God uses him again. The story we thought was over still had something left in it.
Grace restores Samson. But grace does not regrow his eyes. That is haunting to me. His strength comes back. His eyes do not.
I think sometimes we have reduced grace to the idea that if God forgives us, everything goes back to the way it was before. But that is not always what restoration looks like. Forgiveness is real. Redemption is real. Restoration is real. God can take the absolute wreckage of our decisions and somehow create something meaningful from what remains.
But grace does not always erase consequences.
Samson was forgiven, heard, strengthened, and used again, but he was still blind. And strangely, that does not make me trust grace less. It makes me treasure grace more. It also makes me want to steward what I have been given before I have to experience the pain of losing it.
I believe in the God who makes hair grow again.
I believe there is no prison so dark, no failure so final, and no mess so complete that God cannot meet us there.
I believe God restores people who have made terrible decisions because, thankfully, the character of God is not dependent on the perfection of people.
But I also do not want to discover the value of my vision only after I have lost it.
I want to guard what I see before it shapes what I want.
I want to guard what I want before it determines where I go.
I want to guard what God has entrusted to me before I find myself grieving something I once assumed would always be there.
Because grace can restore what is broken. Grace can redeem what remains. Grace can even make the hair grow again. But sometimes, the eyes are gone. And that makes me want to guard what God has given me while I can still see it.
Onward, Chari x