W. Robert Godfrey

Now, that may be so self-evident that we hardly need to see it.

But when you read any other book, you try to figure out what the author's after.

You look at the way he puts it together.

You watch the way the story unfolds.

You don't try to lift one sentence out of the book and make something of it disconnected from everything else in the book.

And we need to get back to reading the Bible a little more that way.

And so I hope this will encourage us to read the Bible.

and to grow in our understanding and appreciation of the Bible, and particularly then learn the lessons that God would have for us from the life of Samson.

And what we're going to see, I think, is very often to get the real message of the Bible, we have to keep both the big picture of the Bible and the specifics of the context we're looking at, the text we're looking at, in our minds together.

If we let the text at hand get disconnected from the big picture, we may not see what this text is really after.

But if we just look at the big picture, then the text at hand becomes kind of bland and sounds like every other text.

So we want the text to have its unique message, but we're really going to understand that only when we look at the whole big picture and see the message as a whole.

So what is the context?

What is the context we're going to be looking at?

Well, Samson was a judge.

That's the first thing we need to bear in mind.

The clue is that he's in the book of Judges.

That's sort of the giveaway.

Titles are important.

So Samson is a judge.