1. No man could have had a better start than Samson. The account of his birth begins by saying that “the children of Israel had done evil,” and the Lord had in consequence “delivered them into the hand of the Philistines forty years.” Well might they ask, Where is our Joshua, and the victory, and the kingdom, and the power? It was then that the angel of the Lord appeared to the wife of Manoah, promising that to her, though barren, a child beyond nature should be given of God; but requiring the strict dedication of herself from that time, and of her son from his birth, as a Nazirite to God-one set apart and separate by a strict consecration to Himself.
Where God is steadfastly desired and worshipped; where the language of the heart is “What is His will?” “What wilt Thou have me do?”; where there is the constant desire to be like Him-there is consecration. Where consecration is, there will be the realization of God's presence. We may rely upon it that where one resolutely sets God before the soul as the object of desire, adoration, and obedience, there God will become a living reality. He will reveal Himself without doubt to such, and His presence will come to surround the soul. And there will be joy. That is to say, the sure fruit of consecration, like the fruit of the Spirit, is joy. We do not always regard the matter in this light. We are disposed to speak of the duty of consecration-the duty of setting apart substance or self to the use and service of God, and it is a duty, the rightful claim of God upon us. What we are apt to forget is that duty where it is discharged always comes to wear the robes of gladness and is apparelled in celestial light. That is especially true of our duty to God. In keeping His commandments there is great reward.1 [Note: C. Brown, in Youth and Life, 202.]
2. The Nazirite vow had of course a deep religious meaning: it meant that the person who adopted it sacrificed himself to the Lord. The Nazirite shunned all defilement from contact with the dead-even when those dead were the nearest relatives-in order to represent and remind himself of the purity which should be the law of his life. He drank no wine or strong drink, partly to express his separation from general society, and partly as a public symbol of religious asceticism.
The true place of asceticism in Christianity is never to be an end in itself, but only a means to an end. Manichæanism, and all kindred systems of thought, which regard matter, and therefore the body, as intrinsically evil, tend to make asceticism an end in itself. They view the body, with all its appetites, as an enemy, to be as far as possible destroyed, and consequently attach a positive merit to its destruction; further encouraging the morbid tendency that is sometimes found in human nature to take a voluptuous delight in pain. The revolting austerities of the Indian fakirs are, of course, the best-known examples of these perverse opinions, which, for all their wonderful exhibition of endurance, degrade instead of elevating human nature. And there can be no question but that Christian practice has, often in its history, been contaminated and compromised by the taint of these Eastern ideas. But, for all this, there is a distinctively Christian asceticism which moves upon a far higher plane, and is enjoined by Christ Himself. “If any man will come after me,” He says, “let him deny himself,” importing an ascetic element at the outset into every Christian life. Christian asceticism is primarily prudential. It springs from no under-estimate of the goodness of God's creation, but simply from the recognition of man's tendency to sin, and consequent need for the avoidance of temptation. He cannot trust himself, and so he must fly. But the man who feels this must be humbled by the feeling. Hence the Christian ascetic is as far removed as possible from all thought of accumulating merit by his austerities. They result expressly from his demerit, and are a perpetual reminder of its existence.1 [Note: J. R. Illingworth, Christian Character, 46.]
3. Samson, it is easy to see, must have been, in practice, an indifferent Nazirite at certain periods of his career; but his inconsistencies did not ruin his work so long as he was not unfaithful to its central idea: and so long as his hair was uncut he felt that his life was a consecrated life, and that he must keep its high purpose in view. Those seven locks of hair as they floated in the breeze taught other Israelites what to expect of him, and they rebuked in his own conscience all in his life that was not in keeping with the Nazirite law. And accordingly the preternatural gift of great physical strength was attached to this one particular of the Nazirite observance, which did duty as a symbol for all the rest, and upon the careful maintenance of which fidelity to the general principle of a consecrated life would appear to have depended.
The vow of the Nazirite was essentially a vow to abstain from fleshly lusts. He was to hold himself pure as God's instrument; he was not to yield his members unto evil; he was to nurture his life in Spartan severity and simplicity; he was to attain self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, and from that discipline his whole body and soul were to derive strength. Without any disparagement of the character of Samson, one may fairly say that his keeping of the Nazirite vow had all along been marked by adherence that was letter-perfect rather than spiritually faithful. He had been temperate in the direction of his vow.
Desire of wine and all delicious drinks,
Which many a famous warrior overturns,
Thou could'st repress; nor did the dancing ruby,
Sparkling, out-pour'd, the flavour, or the smell,
Or taste that cheers the hearts of gods and men,
Allure thee from the cool crystalline stream.
But in that direction only. In others he had been weak.
The Nazirite vow, rightly understood, was a divinely-given basis for moral development, a prophecy through outer separateness of spiritual consecration. Nor could any man be said to have drunk of its spirit who rested in the details of ritual, and did not seek to penetrate to its essence-consecration to God.
