"Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men."
A Father's Preface
There is a question hiding in plain sight in 1 Corinthians 1:25.
Most of us read it and nod. Yes — if God were at His weakest, He could still do anything. He's God. We hear the verse as a statement about superior strength and move on without noticing that Paul has slipped something extraordinary into the sentence.
He assumed that God has a weakness.
Not comparatively weak. Not less strong than usual. A genuine weakness. Something that, in Paul's framing, is stronger than any man — but is still, somehow, a weakness.
Nobody stops to ask the question.
What is the weakness of God?
I want to suggest that the entire story of Samson exists to answer it. Not as a cautionary tale. Not as a catalog of moral failures wrapped in supernatural feats of strength. As a window — carefully, structurally, mathematically placed in the architecture of Scripture — into the nature of a Love that cannot be otherwise.
But before we read a single verse of Samson's story, we need to reset the lens we are reading it through.
The Verdict We Often Miss
When we think of Samson, what do we see?
Most of us see a man who couldn't control himself. We have been preconditioned to read him as the warning label — the example of what happens when extraordinary calling meets ordinary weakness. That reading is so deeply embedded that most of us carry it into the text without realizing it is not actually there.
Here is what is actually there.
Samson is in Hebrews 11.
The hall of faith. The chapter that lists Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses. And Samson. Not as a warning. Not as an example of what not to do. As a man of faith — placed in that company without apology or qualification by the author of Hebrews, writing under inspiration, looking at the whole of Samson's life.
That is Scripture's verdict on Samson.
It is not ours to overturn.
So let's lay down the lens we came in with and pick up the one the text provides. Let's read this story as if we have never heard it before — honestly, carefully, without inserting what the text does not say.
The Dash
Judges 14 and 15 tell the story of Samson's first attempt at marriage — a woman in Timnah, a betrayal, a jawbone, a thousand Philistines, water from a rock when he was ready to die of thirst. It is a story full of movement and violence and grief.
And then:
"And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years."
One sentence. Twenty years. A dash between two chapters.
We either fill that dash with our opinions and biases — the stories we imagine Samson living during those two decades — or we do the honest thing and acknowledge that Scripture gives us nothing there except silence.
Something caused the story to start being told again. Something happened after twenty years that was worth recording. We are not told what.
What we can observe is this: when Samson dies, he is buried beside his father. The closeness that implies — a son laid to rest beside the man who raised him — suggests a relationship that deepened over years we were not shown. Perhaps the pillar he leaned on during those twenty years was his father. Perhaps when that pillar was gone, something shifted — a grief that sent him walking toward something he could not yet name.
We don't know. The text gives us a dash. We hold it honestly, without filling it with what we wish were there.
What the Text Actually Says
"Then went Samson to Gaza, and saw there an harlot, and went in unto her."
Read it carefully. Read it again.
The text says Samson went to Gaza. It says he saw there a harlot. It says he went in.
It does not say he went to Gaza for a harlot. His reason for going is not stated. He arrived — and there she was.
Further we read:
"And Samson lay till midnight, and arose at midnight, and took the doors of the gate of the city, and the two posts, and went away with them, bar and all, and put [them] upon his shoulders, and carried them up to the top of an hill that [is] before Hebron."
The Hebrew word translated lay is Strong's #7,901.
It is the same word used in Joshua 2:1, when the spies entered Rahab's house and lodged there. The same word that can carry a euphemistic meaning — but only when the text explicitly names who lay with whom. Here it does not.
There is no evidence in the text that Samson lay with the harlot. That is our assumption, inserted into a gap the text deliberately leaves empty. The honest reading is simpler: he went to Gaza, he saw a woman there, and he went into where she was.
Note
There is an understood Jewish idiom on the words, "went in unto her" that circumstantially brings the idea that there was more going on behind closed doors. However, my contention is that everywhere else this idiom occurs, there is always a clearness that something happened... there was a conception, or this person lay with that person. We need to notice that the clearness of what happened is missing from this text, and therefore the idiom isn't enough by itself to prove Samson's guilt when Scripture is silent about what happened.
What God Sees
Now let the tools speak — not to build an argument, but to notice what is already there.
Hebrew Strong's #5,804 is Gaza — the city Samson walked into.
Take that number as a distance. The Bible has 31,102 verses. Subtracting 5,804 leaves 25,298 verses remaining from that point to the end.
Webster's Word #25,298 is Harlot.
Before Samson arrived. Before the story was told. The number of the city where she lived points — through the architecture of Scripture — to the word that describes what she was.
God saw her. God named her address. Samson saw her and stopped.
And we know from everything this series has shown us that when God looks at someone, He does not see only what they have become. He sees what He made. The little man of the eye. The reflection He has always held.
Samson walked into Gaza and saw a woman there. What did he see?
Perhaps what God had always seen.
The person behind the circumstance. The woman whose life would be permanently altered because someone stopped.
Closing Thought — Part 1
We have barely begun the story, and already the text is asking us to look differently.
Just like Adam that placed his faith in the words that God never said... Here, we have done the same.
A man of faith walks into a city after twenty years of silence. A woman is there. The text does not tell us his motives. It does not confirm our assumptions. It simply shows us a man who stopped — and a city whose number points to the word that describes her.
The question the text is quietly building toward is not "what did Samson do wrong?"
It is the question Paul asked and nobody answered:
What is the weakness of God?
We are about to find out.
Reflection Questions
- Hebrews 11 places Samson in the hall of faith alongside Abraham and Moses — not as a warning but as a man of faith. How does that change the lens you bring to his story? What other stories in your own life might look different through the same lens?
- The text says Samson went to Gaza and saw there a harlot — not that he went for one. We filled in a gap the text left empty. Where else in Scripture — or in your own life — have you filled in gaps with assumptions rather than reading what is actually there?
- The number of Gaza points through Scripture to the word harlot — as if God had already named her address. What does it suggest about how God sees people that He noticed her before Samson arrived?