Then she cried, "Samson, the Philistines are here!" When he awoke from his sleep, he said, "I will escape as I did before and shake myself free." But he did not know that YHWH had left him." - Judges 16:20
The weakness of Samson, though his strength was indeed epic, can probably be summarized by one word, "women." Ultimately, it was a woman, to be fair, a woman plus unbridled hubris, that led to Samson's downfall and demise.
What went wrong?
The legendary strongman made a bad assumption based upon past achievement. Through multiple miraculous escapes Samson forgot where the power to escape originated. With each victory, he drew farther and farther from his Nazirite vow of consecration to God and began to believe in his own invincibility.
Relaxing in our spiritual disciplines, the act of believing this life can be lived apart from the abiding presence of Christ, is a common failing and also a prescription for disaster. Many a life lays shipwrecked on the shores of complacency. For Samson, the vehicle of his destruction was a female, but the fact is that in Christ, we are all "Samsons" capable of neglecting the source of our strength, and this neglect is the foundation of failure.
The greatest fault is to be conscious of none. - Thomas Carlyle
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