Samson (1)

Manoah and his wife were sad because they had no children. For years and years, they had prayed. Other families had been blessed with children, but God had not given any to Manoah and his wife; only God can give children. Yet, a wonderful day was coming for them.

One day Manoah’s wife was working in the field when suddenly she saw a man standing before her. This man was really an angel of God, but the woman didn’t know that. She saw that his face did not look like that of other men, and she was frightened. The angel said to her, “You do not have any children, but you are going to have a child, and it is going to be a boy.”

Imagine how happy the woman was. Was it really true? Was the Lord now going to answer her many prayers? Then the angel of God told her, “Be very careful what you eat and drink. Do not drink any wine or strong drink, and don’t eat any of the things that God calls unclean because this child will be special. God will use him to save the Israelites from the Philistines.”

The woman heard this news, too, with happiness; God was going to deliver the Israelites from their enemies! For forty years the Philistines had been ruling them cruelly. Many people were again crying to the Lord for deliverance; now God was answering their prayers with her own son. The angel told her that her son would be a certain kind of person called a Nazarite, “and just like other Nazarites, he may never have his hair cut.”

As soon as the angel was gone, the woman hurried to her husband, Manoah. “A wonderful thing just happened,” she cried, “and we are going to have a baby!”

Manoah was very happy. He believed his wife’s message, but he wanted to hear again exactly how to bring up such a special child. “O God,” he prayed, “please send the man of God back to us so he can teach us what we should do to the child that will be born.”

God listened to Manoah’s prayer. One day, when his wife was again in the field, the angel suddenly appeared, just as before. This time the woman hurried to find Manoah. “Hurry, hurry,” she told him. “Come back with me; the man that came to me the other day is here again.”

So Manoah followed her. The angel was still standing there, and Manoah said, “Are you the man who spoke unto my wife before?” They still did not know that the man was an angel.

“Yes, I am,” answered the angel. Then he told them, “Your wife must do exactly what I told her to do the other day. She must not drink wine or strong drink; she may not eat anything except meat from animals God has called clean, such as meat from cows or goats; and you may never, ever cut your son’s hair.”

Manoah was very happy and humbled to hear God’s message again, and he invited the man to eat bread and meat with them. The angel said, “No, I will not eat your food, but if you want to offer a burnt offering, you must offer it to the Lord.”

“What is your name,” Manoah asked, “so when these things happen, we can reward you?” The angel wouldn’t give his name. “It is a secret,” he said.

Then a surprising thing happened. As Manoah burnt the goat as an offering, the flames reached toward the sky—and the angel went up to the sky with them. Then they knew that this surely was an angel. The angel did not come back, and Manoah was frightened. “Now we will surely die,” he said to his wife, “because we have seen God!”

However, his wife was full of trust in the Lord. “No,” she said, “if God wanted to kill us, He wouldn’t have accepted our burnt offering as He did, and He wouldn’t have told us all these wonderful things.”

It wasn’t long before a little boy was, indeed, born into their family. Manoah and his wife named the baby “Samson,” which means “little sun.” Was he not a bright spot in their lives? In bringing up their child, Manoah and his wife taught him about the God of Israel, and God blessed him greatly, preparing him for the work which God had for him to do.

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