The Young Man Who Was an Athlete
What a roomy place the Bible is! It is not filled up with model men and women. It is not filled up with nice little boys and girls, all neat and sweet, good enough to be angels right off with no alterations. It is peopled with imperfect, blundering folk like ourselves.
Some of these samples of human life are offered to us for our imitation, and some by way of warning. The wide variety exhibited shows how God can use and bless the better elements in many a life where the wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest. The divine purpose shows an amazing measure of hospitality. "The love of God is broader than the measure of man's mind."
We come for example to the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. It is the roll call of men of faith. "By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain." By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death because he walked with God. By faith Noah built an ark for the saving of his house. By faith Abraham went out to found a nation in which all the nations of the earth should be blessed, not knowing whither he went. "By faith Moses chose rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season."
"And what shall I say more," the author remarks in passing. "Time would fail me to tell of all the men who by faith subdued kingdoms and wrought righteousness, obtained promises and put to flight the armies of evil, Gideon and Barak, Samson and Jephthah."
Samson! The very presence of his name in this catalogue of moral heroes all but takes away one's breath. What does this big husky fellow, this wild, fun-loving chap have to do with the working out of the divine purpose for the race? We are as much surprised as we would be if we had found Jack Johnson undertaking to preach the Gospel, or John L. Sullivan trying to be elected as a professor in Princeton Theological Seminary. Samson as a hero of the faith! Surely this is "Saul among the prophets." We will be interested in studying the life of this young man who had the build and the mood of an athlete.
He had in his youth the strength and promise of a mighty man. He caught a young lion and seizing it by its jaws ripped it apart as an ordinary man would have rent a kid. He caught up the jaw-bone of an ass and slew heaps and heaps of his enemies in personal combat. He carried off the gates of a city and hid them on the top of a hill as if he had been celebrating Hallowe'en. He would have been the making of any football team. If he had furnished the forward thrust of a flying wedge it would have gone through any line that might have stood in its way.
It would not be easy to draw a hard and fast line here between the prose and the poetry of these narratives. Something of history and a great deal of folk-lore undoubtedly are blended in these stirring tales. There are many passages in the earlier portions of the Bible which have more value for the history of ideas than for the history of actual occurrence. They are full of truth though they may not always conform to sober fact. They are parables rather than records.
But we may be sure that this interesting young giant had something more than mere physical prowess. He had in him some of the elements of genuine leadership else he would not have been regarded as a judge and a leader in Israel, raised up for a great work. The people would never have woven these stories about his name nor enrolled him among the moral heroes of their race had he not possessed some of the elements of real strength. He had in him the sense of power—it is a quality which all men covet and all women adore.
He had a keen sense of the joy of living. We are glad that the element of humour was not left out of the Bible. It would not have been so human, so complete, so unmistakably "the Book of Books" had this been lacking. I am sure that the Almighty has a sense of humour. He must have or He never would have created pelicans and monkeys. "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh," we read—and He must have laughed when He made these curious creatures. He was willing to give this fun-loving Samson a place on the roster of the Army of the Lord.
Samson stands out on the pages of Scripture as a big, overgrown, rollicking boy looking upon life as one huge joke. His major study was to turn the laugh on the dull-witted, slow-going Philistines. He tore the young lion and when a swarm of bees had made honey in the carcass Samson made this riddle,—"Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness." He propounded his riddle to the Philistines and made them a bet that they could not guess it. And when they wheedled the answer to the riddle out of Samson's wife he retorted upon them in coarse fashion, "If ye had not plowed with my heifer, ye would not have guessed my riddle."
He carried off the gates of the city of Gaza and hid them. He caught foxes and tied firebrands to their tails and then turned them loose in the ripe wheat fields of the Philistines, roaring aloud over the havoc they made. He slew his enemies with the jaw-bone of an ass and then made a clever pun (which the Hebrew reveals) upon the name of his homely weapon.
He was the joker of the pack. Time and again in the days of his power he was able to take the trick. When he came to die that element of grim humour was still in his heart. He had lost his strength because he had slept for a night with his head in the lap of his enemy. His foes had put out his eyes and had made him to grind as a slave in one of their mills. Now he was brought as a kind of paid jester to one of their feasts to make fun for the party.
There in the house of his foes, holding fast to a door-post he prayed in grim fashion that his former strength might for a moment be renewed, "that he might be avenged upon his enemies for the loss of one of his two eyes." He would leave the rest of the account to be settled later. When he had them roaring with laughter at some of his sallies, he pulled down the house upon their heads and killed them all, perishing himself in the disaster. He was full of humour and had a deep sense of the joy of living.
He was a strange mixture of good and evil. Here was a blend of weakness and of strength! Here was the baser metal mingled as an unworthy alloy with much that was fine gold. "Samson got the laugh on the Philistine men," as William R. Richards said once in Battell Chapel, "but their sisters avenged themselves on him by making a slave, a tool, and a fool of him. This old writer tells his story straight on without stopping to moralize. But where can you find a better sermon on the need of personal purity? Of the two forms of sin which especially assail young men, Samson might guard us from one by way of example, and from the other by way of warning. Touching no wine, for he was a Nazarite from his birth, he excelled in strength. But placing his head in the lap of a false woman whose name was Delilah, there came to him weakness, blindness, the prison house, and the grave."
He refused the cup which cheers and also inebriates, but he gave his heart and his strength to that alluring enemy of the divine purpose who ruined him. Where a young man is a physical weakling, then if his mind is dull and his heart mean, he is at least all of a piece. He is consistent in his make-up. Where his body is strong as was the body of this young giant, revealing in every movement of it that joy and vigour which come with abundance of life, then if his mental and moral life are weak and thin, there is something tragic in that walking lie. The outward man promises so much, but the inward man is a wail of disappointment.
"The Philistines took him," is the terse comment of the writer upon Samson's unhappy career. But his sins had already taken him captive. He had become the bond servant of his own passions. He was already a slave through his lack of self-control.
"The wages of sin is death"—if you doubt it read through to the end the story of any man who is headed wrong and keeps going in that direction. You will find the word "Death" written over against his name in five capital letters. Read the story of this young man who in his youth was so "strong and sunny," as his name in the original has it. When you read on you presently find him dead in his eyes, as he gropes his way about the prison house in the land of the Philistines. He is dead in his muscles as he weakly turns the wheels of a mill, which was the work commonly assigned to women in those rude tribes. He is dead in reputation—the fool and the jester brought in to make sport at the table of his captors! He is dead in his soul for he is unaware that the Lord has departed from him. The wages of sin is death. Whether pay day comes the following Saturday night or at the end of the year, or in the final outcome, in every case the sorry result will be the same.
We are compelled to say that Samson's life was a tragedy because he failed at these three points. He never learned to take life seriously. The joker is not the best card in the pack, except by an arbitrary rule—and in all the better games at cards, the joker is thrown out. When all is said and done, life is serious business. The humour, the amusement, the recreation are only the sauce on the table to give an added zest and relish—they are not the roast beef and potatoes. You cannot live on them nor by them. The man who laughs and laughs loudly and laughs at everything will have the laugh turned on him. The very fact that he has never brought his life under the power of a serious, definite, compelling purpose will cause him to be left far in the rear by those men who waken up early to the fact that the world is not to be taken as a joke.
There was a certain joy no doubt in carrying off the gates of Gaza. I can recall certain episodes on the evening of the thirty-first of October when the carrying off of the gates of some neighbour seemed to me to fill the cup of life to the brim. There is a certain joy in getting a cow up into the pulpit of the College Chapel or into the belfry of some church on a dark night—the young fellow who has never helped to solve that problem in physics has missed something. There is a time to read the paper we call "Life," and to see some man on the stage who can be as funny as William Collier. Where all these are the diversions of a mind devoted to serious ends, where they are only the by-product of human interest, they have a rightful place in our regime.
But their lines are soon spoken, and the stage must be cleared for those who have something of more moment to tell. "How much do you really care?" the world is asking. "How ready are you to think intently upon something which has no more fun in it than a page of figures or an array of unyielding facts? How far are you ready to bend all the best energies of body, brain and heart to the gaining of some worthy end? How completely have you set your heart upon that which is vital?" Your answer to these questions will in large measure tell the story of your future achievement.
This young man failed because he had not acquired the habit of persistence. His big deeds were all done in a hurry, and they were soon over. He carried off the gates of the city in ten minutes. He tore the young lion apart in an instant. He slaughtered the Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass in less time than I am taking in telling it. He tied torches to the tails of the foxes and let them loose in the wheat fields in a careless half hour of thoughtless sport. You do not find the man binding up a lifetime of effort into a moral unit by an all-inclusive and dominant intention. He was never ready to work and to keep on working until achievement of a worthy sort should crown his effort.
You cannot drive a long nail in to the head by hammering around all over the board. You must hit the nail on the head and keep on hitting it on the head until you have sent it home. You cannot sink the shaft of a mine by digging all around over the mountainside. You must dig in one place and keep on digging in one place persistently until you have sunk your shaft to the vein of ore. You cannot build a life that is worthy to be the life of a child of God unless you gird yourself for that persistent effort which lies between you and the goal upon which you have set your heart. It cannot be done in an hour, or in a day, or in a year. The hard task of presenting to Him a life which will bear His own eye and win His approval will mortgage the best strength of all your best years.
You may have the body of an athlete. You may have a mind with splendid capacity in it for real achievement. You may have a heart which reacts as promptly as gunpowder when a spark of genuine aspiration is applied to it. You may have all these—I hope you have—but unless you have learned the high art of staying by, of holding on, of keeping at it no matter what comes, you are doomed to defeat.
How often you see a young man of generous impulse, of kindly disposition, like Esau, faltering and failing as the years come and go until at last he is little better than a vagabond upon the face of the earth. How often you find a man of purpose and persistence, like Jacob, with many an unfortunate trait in him, with a heavy moral handicap to overcome, finally winning out by the sheer force of his spiritual tenacity. "Be thou faithful unto death," the promise has it, "and I will give thee the crown of life." The crown is held in reserve for those who persist clear through to the end.
This young man failed because he lacked the favour of God. In the early stages of his career we read of a divine element in his life. "The woman bare a son and called his name Samson, and the Lord blessed him. And the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him" for those deeds of valour.
However we may interpret these expressions the fact is plain that so long as he kept his life clean and true he had the sense of divine reinforcement making him equal to the tasks which fell to his lot. Then there came a time when by his own actions he forfeited all this. He became as weak as a rag in the face of temptation, in the presence of duty, in some great opportunity for valiant effort which opened before him. And he did not realize how weak he was until he went down in defeat. "He wist not that the Lord had departed from him."
The spirit of self-indulgence, I care not whether it goes straight for the coarse sins of the flesh or moves in more refined ways towards the life of selfish ease and barren culture, will take the iron out of a man's blood. It will take the vim out of his muscles, the power to hold fast out of his will.
The man who saves his life for his own personal gratification will soon find that he has no life to save. That which makes life life is gone. It is the habit of self-control, the spirit of self-surrender to the will of God, the purpose of self-dedication to the highest ends in sight, which puts power into the thrust of each man's effort.
The circular letter which Lord Kitchener, head of the War Office, sent to every British soldier when the English troops were ordered to the Continent reads like a classic:
"You are ordered abroad as a soldier of the King. The honour of the British Army depends upon your individual conduct. You have a task to perform which will need courage, energy, and patience. Be on your guard against excesses. You will find temptation both in women and in wine. Resist both and do your duty bravely. Fear God. Honour the King.
"(Signed) KITCHENER."
Hang those great words up in your mind! Hang the picture of that strong, stern, brave man in your heart that you too may wear the cross of honour.
If it is good for men to be sober and clean in war time, why not at all times? Have we not sore need of these same qualities in the more exacting pursuits of peace? Every man who is worthy of the name of man is set to guard some sacred interest, though he carries neither gun nor sword.
Here is the everlasting fight being waged three hundred and sixty-five days in the year—and it is waged year in and year out for there is no discharge in that war—against hunger and cold, against disease and death, against poverty and crime! Why not have men at their best in the mill and in the mine, on the farm and in the factory, in the counting-room and in the places of trade? The armies which are sent forth to save, to feed, and to clothe men's lives, no less than the armies of bloodshed have need of the same high discipline. They, too, are crippled and broken, they are driven back and hurled to defeat by those moral foes which march under the banner of self-indulgence.
Here is an evil traffic which flaunts its wares in our faces in every city block where the forces of righteousness have not risen in strength to cast it out. But we have fallen upon times when the economic forces are lining up solidly with the verdict of medical science and the power of religion in a relentless opposition to the use of alcohol as a beverage. In these days the man who thinks more of his job than he does of his grog has the floor.
The wise railroad managers know full well that a tippler in the cab of an engine or at the flagman's post means sooner or later a frightful accident with loss of property and life. The owners of intricate and delicate machinery in the great factories know that placing in control men whose brains have been clogged and drugged with liquor is as foolish as throwing sand into the ball bearings. "Safety First" means "Sober First." The taxpayers are becoming no less insistent—they have learned that the open saloon means added crime and poverty where they must foot the bills. Decent people have grown tired of cleaning up the muss and the dirt occasioned by the rum sellers. The moral forces of the community recognize the fact that the liquor business allies itself openly with immoralities of every sort. The people are saying in state after state, in country after country, "Time's up! You have failed to show your right to be! You will have to go." The habit of indulgence in that which robs men of strength, of intelligence, of conscience, finds every good man's hand against it.
We read in this strange story that Samson's strength was in his hair. When his locks were cut away by the fair and false hand of evil he was as weak as a woman.
How much of sober history and how much of poetic allegory there may be in these glowing statements it is not easy to say. But the moral content of this record is clear. When those slender and delicate lines of contact which, as he believed according to his vow as a Nazarite, bound him in loyalty to the source of all strength, were broken, then his splendid prowess was no more. "It is that little half-inch rim of the tree where the sap runs up to the sun that makes the tree alive or dead." However you phrase it in the clearer light of this twentieth century of ours, guard with all diligence those lines of communication between your own inner life and the life of God. Maintain within yourself that faith and hope and love which will bring to you your own full measure of strength and joy.
The dull, sad picture of this defeated man is not wholly unrelieved by any brighter touch. When he was shorn of his strength, robbed of his honour, stained in the quality of his manhood, we read, "Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shorn."
It was only a gleam of hope, but it was a gleam. It was a far-off promise of that divine redemptive process which has become the basis of our trust. His claim upon the divine favour and his hold upon the sources of strength were not utterly forfeited by his acts of evil-doing. His hair began to grow again and a hope of moral recovery was begotten in his heart. "If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves; but if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
Let me close with this plain, straight word of appeal as strong as I can make it! You need God in your life. You need Him not as a philosophical belief touching the origin and ground of all finite existence; not as a mere dogma to be written at the head of your Confession of Faith; not as a name to be introduced into some liturgy which you may occasionally employ. You need God as a present, personal and profound experience. To know Him is to live, and to live well.
It was Phillips Brooks who said once to an audience of Harvard men, "Here is the last great certainty, be sure of God! By simple, loving worship, by continual obedience, by keeping yourself pure even as He is pure, creep close to Him, keep close to Him, and in the end nothing can overthrow you."