G Allan Brown
Judges 14: 5, 6 (to “hand”), 8, 9 (to “as he went”), 14 (to “sweetness”), 18 (from “What is” to “lion”)
I am just carrying forward, dear brethren, an impression from Lord’s day. This is quite a remarkable passage of scripture. Samson at this point, I think, is a type to us of the Lord Jesus, and this young lion is a type of death, the power of death. Our opening hymn on Lord’s day contained the words:
The power of death has witnessed
The strength of love divine.
(Hymn 263)
This has been with me since then. What a matter it was: the Lord Jesus here, a Man in perfection! The penalty of death lies upon every other man, but not on Jesus, because there was no sin. “For the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6: 23), and every one of us has been touched by the awful effects of sin, and therefore the consequence of that is death. But in the Lord Jesus here there was no sin and therefore there was no penalty of death upon Him. This young lion, which seems to me to represent the power of death, which had gone unchallenged in the course of humanity from Adam onward, as has been said before, no doubt would have devoured Samson. Bringing it forward into the great anti-type, death, as another one of our hymn says:
Death had on Thee no claim (Hymn 152).
Death met its superior, its conqueror, when the Lord Jesus faced death. He went into it, not like other men who had to succumb to death; the Lord Jesus invaded death. He went in there as superior to it and overcame it and rose from the dead. That, I think, is what is implied when it says of this young lion, “he rent it as one rends a kid”. That is to say, the victory was unquestioned. The victory was total and it was glorious when the Lord Jesus came out of death, having broken its power for ever. It says, “nothing was in his hand”. The Lord Jesus used no sword, no weapon. He had no organisation, as men think of it, no armies behind Him, nothing. Alone He met that awful power and conquered it, alone! He needed no instrument to help. He did it in the power of His own Person. Nothing could challenge the Lord Jesus as He went into death.
But then what comes out of it, what I want to come to, was that when Samson looked at the carcase of the lion later, it says, “there was a swarm of bees in the carcase of the lion, and honey”. That speaks to us surely of sweetness. That is what has come out of the death of Jesus, sweetness. There is sweetness for us in the sense we have of joy that we have been relieved of all our burdens; certainly there is that for us. But there is something for Him too as He takes account of the fruit, the results of His death. Hymn 152 goes on to say,
Out of Thy death has sprung
A wondrous living throng.
Think of how the Lord Jesus must look around that glorious company of which we are part. However small a part we may be, we belong to this great, glorious universal company. The Lord Jesus looks upon it. What must it mean to Him because it says of the honey, “he took it out in his hands, and went on, and ate as he went”. How the Lord, I would say with reverence, enjoys what is His now as the fruit of His death:
Out of the eater came forth food,
And out of the strong came forth sweetness.
I was impressed with this suggestion in verse 18. The question is asked,
What is sweeter than honey,
And what stronger than a lion?
If we think of the lion in man’s estimation, it is said to be the king of beasts, one of the most powerful of animals. The Lord Jesus is stronger than that. The most powerful thing that exists in creation, the Lord Jesus is superior to all that, stronger than the lion. He has been able to overcome it, “rent it as one rends a kid”. That is what the Lord Jesus has done. But then, “What is sweeter than honey?”. I think in this setting the honey might represent what is natural. There is much to be enjoyed in the way of natural affections and other legitimate relationships. Dear brethren, the fact of the matter is there is something that is sweeter than all that, the love of Jesus!
The love of Jesus, what it is,
None but His loved ones know.
(Hymn 279)
“Sweeter than honey”: that is the Lord we know and love. May He become more and more attractive to us!
Word in meeting for ministry, Grangemouth,
10th October 2017