JOHN 8:1-30
The account of the woman caught in adultery is interesting. It does not feature in the oldest and most reliable manuscripts of John’s Gospel and seems logically better located just after Luke 21:38; indeed, a limited number of manuscripts do have the account appearing there in Luke. Regardless of where it ‘should’ be found, it is a beautiful story of God’s grace and kindness towards someone breaking the Law of Moses – which perhaps sums up Jesus’ entire ministry! It doesn’t contradict the rest of scripture in any way; it demonstrates an approach by Jesus that is entirely consistent with his attitude, words, and theology. It neatly summarises the same dilemma that God himself has: How do you deal justly with sinful behaviour, whilst being gracious to the sinner? “I don’t condemn you; go and sin no more” – this was the conclusion of Jesus.
The other significant fact – contained within the account – was that adultery led to death by stoning if at least one of the participants were married or even just betrothed and, if so, both participants were to be stoned. There seemed to be a missing man! Clearly this was a ‘set-up’ by the Jewish authorities to see if Jesus kept to the Law (Deuteronomy 22:22-24).
Furthermore, the Romans did not permit the Jews to execute the death sentence – so this debate was theoretical, at best. Their only aim was to provoke Jesus either to side with the Romans and forbid the death penalty, or to side with the Law and recommend stoning, or to neglect the Law for merciful reasons and be exposed as a wishy-washy liberal. In the event – due to a word of wisdom from heaven – Jesus did none of these things. He stooped and wrote things in the dust of the ground and waited for inspiration from Heaven. Here are echoes of the Book of Daniel 5:5 ESV: Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace, opposite the lampstand. And the king saw the hand as it wrote. The remainer of that chapter explains that it was the hand of God sending a warning message to its readers.
What Jesus wrote is never revealed to us. I speculate that it might have been the first few words of the scripture from the Prophet Hosea (4:14) that had come into his mind: “I will not punish your daughters when they turn to prostitution, nor your daughters-in-law when they commit adultery, because the men themselves consort with harlots and sacrifice with shrine prostitutes…”. The Jewish leaders would have memorised this scripture along with others from their youth, and merely seeing its first few words would have triggered total recall. After a long pause, Jesus gave his questioners his verdict and, within a short time, they had all slunk away. The Law required the accusers (those who had discovered the act of adultery) to cast the first stone – and Jesus simply said that those people who were without sin must cast this stone. Since no-one matched that criterion, no stone was cast, and so the woman had to be declared ‘Not Guilty’. However, Jesus, in deciding not to condemn her, strongly commanded her to leave her sinful life!
“I am the light of the world”, he said. The Son is like the Sun. We need no other moral or spiritual light than Jesus. Those who ignore that light will “die in their sin” – meaning that they will be punished by the weight of the sins that they still carry. The only way to avoid this punishment is “to believe that I am He” (8:24). And how many of us can say: “I always do what pleases him”?
JUDGES 16
“Every person has their price” – this seems to be a bit of a theme today. Samson with his infatuation with exotic foreign women booked up a session with a prostitute in a Philistine stronghold of Gaza. Being Samson, he wasn’t quiet about it either! So half the population, bent on revenge, made plans for a dawn raid. God was gracious with his wayward son and prodded him awake at midnight to escape – which he duly did – removing the city gates, posts, bars, and frames as a souvenir and carrying them 38 miles to Hebron! Not content with this close escape, he then linked up with another Philistine woman, Delilah, and of course fell in love again – this time in a non-financial way. However, ultimately it cost him his life! What is it about Philistines and riddles! “If you loved me, you’d tell me”, she nagged, on and on and on. He didn’t pay her, but the Philistine rulers did – a vast sum of money, so desperate were they to overpower him. So eventually he gave in to her demands and, whilst he slept, the barber broke the final Nazirite vow for him. For the first time in his life, Samson was powerless. His strength had gone, and the Lord had departed from him.
The Philistines were more interested in humiliating and torturing him than in merely killing him; they enjoyed gouging out his eyes and forcing him to pull the grinding wheels around over the grain – in effect paying homage to their grain god, Dagon. They chose to humiliate him at Gaza, the place of his previous triumph. Crowds jeered and mocked him, and the whips cracked incessantly on his bare back. Then a note of hope: as he rested his aching head in his hand, he noticed that the hair had begun to grow again! Numbers 6:9-12 refers to a fresh period of consecration for the Nazirite, after their hair had been cut off, and it seems that Samson had not been forgotten entirely by the Lord; a fresh hope and a new faith stirred in his heart, giving him the expectation that he could still be useful to the King of Kings. (And don’t we all so want to be useful to him!)
And so, it was the turn of the Philistines to act arrogantly and to delude themselves that they, and not the Lord, were in full control. They stood their enemy in, architecturally, the most dangerous position in their temple, between the two wooden supporting pillars on stone bases that held the entire roof up. Three thousand worshippers were on the flat roof and many thousands were below surrounding the statue of Dagon. What restored Samson’s immense strength was not his hair, but his prayer; it barely carried any overtone of repentance and spoke more of revenge, but God’s gifts are given unconditionally and for one last time the awesome power returned – long enough to part those two great pillars and to bring the house down. As killings go, it was spectacular; as judges went, Samson’s life was sad and baffling. In theory he had led Israel for twenty years, yet he did all his work in a fiercely independent fashion and stood out as a loner with few friends and fewer followers. This last judge was arguably the worst!
The Big Picture 