Samson’s New Eyes
On Day 3 we have grain and fruit plants. They are the promise of bread and wine at God’s Sabbath table on Day 7.
The third elected judge was Deborah. Her song calls for a warrior like the sun. The seventh elected judge was Samson, “Sunrise.”
One theme of Day 7 is the Great Prophet, a man who has been tried and found faithful and included in the council of God. He has passed under the seven eyes of the Law (Day 4) and is now God’s Law incarnate, a lamb (bread and wine) with seven eyes.
Samson, the fallen bridegroom, lost his eyes. He was put to work grinding grain in a mill. There’s the bread. What was the wine? Samson’s blood. The wine of communion is a dose of death. It is a cup of judgment. Blind Samson, now humbled, became the flaming eyes of God among the Philistine rulers (the heavenly lights). Like Christ, in his death he put to an open shame the principalities and powers that had mocked him for sport. Christ was also perfected through suffering, but Samson’s story is more about the bride.
Samson prefigures not so much the crucifixion of Christ, but the suffering of Christ “filled up” in the firstfruits church. The Jews were blinded that the Gentiles might believe. Those Jews who were provoked to jealousy and did believe were humbled in the wilderness, excluded from the heritage they had boasted in, the things Paul called dung.
From the Revelation it seems that a remnant of converted Jews were slain in the besieged city before it fell. They were the true Nazirites, the warrior bride. [1] They brought down the pillars of Herod’s Temple and in death became founding pillars in a New Jerusalem.
For the saints, Jesus’ death as bread and wine was the promise of a greater rest they would enter into. Like Samson’s glorious hair, growing out of a bloodied Covenant head, their strength was made complete in weakness.
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[1] See Power on Her Head.
