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This is Glendale Presbyterian Church, People Moving Power. This tape includes the reading of scripture and a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman titled "The Thundering Dawn." At the conclusion of side number one of this cassette, be sure to turn immediately to side number two for the remainder of the message. This tape is copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Any

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public or commercial use in full or in part requires the advanced written permission of Dr. Thielman. The private use of this material for the spiritual gain of yourself or others is heartily encouraged. Now the Lords of the Philistines gathered to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon, their God, and to rejoice. For they said, "Our God has given Samson our enemy into our hand." And

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when the people saw him, they praised their God, for they said, "Our God has given our enemy into our hand, the ravager of our country who has slain many of us." And when their hearts were merry, they said, "Call Samson, that he may make sport for us." So they called Samson out of the prison, and he made sport before them. They made him stand between the pillars, and Samson said to the lad

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who held him by the hand, "Let me feel the pillars on which the house rests, that I may lean against them." Now the house was full of men and women. All the Lords of the Philistines were there, and on the roof there were about three thousand men and women who looked on while Samson made sport. Then Samson called to the Lord and said, "O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen

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me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be avenged upon the Philistines." And Samson grasped the two middle pillars upon which the house rested, and he leaned his weight upon them, his right hand on the one and his left hand on the other. And Samson said, "Let me die with the Philistines." Then he bowed with all his might, and the house fell upon the Lords and upon all

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the people that were in it. So the dead whom he slew at his death were more than those whom he had slain during his life. Then his brothers and all his family came down and took him, and brought him up and buried him between Zorah and Eshtoel in the tomb of Manoah, his father. And Samson had judged Israel twenty years. And may God bless to us and to our

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understanding this reading from his holy word. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. John Milton has a line in which he sums the situation of Samson. The line contains only eight words, and they sound very much like the eight notes on a descending scale. For each word is more forbidding than the word which preceded it. Listen to this

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eight-word description of the sorry state of Samson. "Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves." The curtain goes up on Act 4, and the set is dark so that we can hardly see Samson sitting at the mill with the piles of ground grain about him. We can see him, for from the invisible ocean of moonlight above, there are some streams of light which splash against the walls and then trickle

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to the floor. Pools of light then gather on the stones and on the grain and on Samson. But these leaks of light into the darkness only serve to accentuate the blackness of the place. And if it seems to us to be dark and despairing in this dungeon, then how much darker for Samson? For Samson is blind. He knows the night, that is, to be without sight. And he knows also the dark, dark

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night of the soul. Now it's very important that we focus for a moment on this picture, not because it is pleasant, it almost leads us to tears, but because we need to see the cost of sin. You see, we are very inclined to turn away from the total of iniquity, and we need to bring ourselves to the place where we will stop and look full in the face what the results of evil inevitably are.

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Darkness, night, despair. This picture is painted for us very graphically by Paul in the first chapter of Romans. He talks there about men who reject God and establish themselves as sovereigns in their own lives. He talks there about mankind, a mankind that has said to God, "We will be our own God," rejected his will and way, and adopted instead the permissive principles which we call

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the right way to live. And then, having recounted this action on the part of mankind, Paul goes on to say what the results of it are, and the words he uses almost hit us in our society today, here in America in the 20th century, hit us like sledgehammer blows. Homosexuality, lesbianism, envy, murder, strife, lies, gossip, slander, arrogance, disobedience, foolishness, ruthlessness,

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heartlessness, and death. We look about in our society and wonder why it is the way it is. How can we expect anything other? We have turned away from God, we have turned away from his word, we have turned away from the fellowship of his people, and so God at long last turns away from us and says, "If you would run your own lives, then run them and see the results." And that's

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what we're seeing, the results. And that's the reason it's important that we see Samson, for Samson is the result of evil self-centered living, darkness, and despair. We are prone on occasion to kick against the goads of the faith. We protest the restrictions which obedience to the Lord place upon us. We'd like to go to Timna every once in a while. We'd like to spend some time in Gaza.

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The grass looks greener down there on the plains of Philistia. Why is it that we must obey these things which God has called us to obey? That price, we say, is too high. Well, God invites us to compare prices. God invites us to call out for competitive bids. But before you bow down before any other God, notice well what it will cost. There was a time when a whole European society

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set itself in pursuit of the God of wisdom, but the hidden cost on that was a man named Adolf Hitler. Here is a husband who decides that he will mortgage everything he has to his job. That sounds reasonable, till he recognizes somewhere along the way that the price of that mortgage is his wife and his family. Here's the woman who decides that she will invest her life in the

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pursuit of loveliness and beauty, but has she looked behind the frills of Hollywood to discover the bills of Hollywood? Alger Hiss and Whitaker Chambers decide in their religious liberalism that they will go after the God called communism. And look at the tragic testimony written in red ink, the story of their lives. There are individuals today who say, "Democracy is too difficult to deal

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with. We will accept the God called fascism." But are you really willing to pay the price of that kind of allegiance? Choose whatever God you want to. Select whom you wish from the hierarchy of hell. If you want it to be Venus in pursuit of beauty, then do it. If you want it to be Croesus and go after gold, then do it. If you want it to be Bacchus so that your life is nothing other than

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an orgy from the beginning to the end, then make that your choice. But remember the price that must be paid. The bill always comes due. No one should become a disciple of Jesus Christ without counting the cost. Count the cost before you bow to the God who is the only true God. Count the cost before you bow before his Son. Count the cost for your own sake and for the sake of the Church. But if

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you are going to make some other choice, then make sure that the choice you make is not going to cost you infinitely more. It will. For the cost of evil is darkness and despair. I see Samson sitting there at the mill in Gaza, and I think of Lady Macbeth. Her conscience presses upon her after the bloody murder which has occurred at her hands, and pressing upon her, she begins to walk in her

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sleep. And her doctor and her maid encounter her, and the doctor says, "You see, her eyes are open." But the maid responds, "Ay, but their sense is shut." Come to your senses, America! Come to your senses, you who have not made the choice of whom you will serve and to whom you will bow. See the price in the service of evil. Samson in Gaza at the mill with slaves. But the suffering of the man

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is not yet at an end. You see, in those days when one nation warred against another nation, the conflict was thought of in terms of one God warring against another God. When Philistia headed out against the hills of Judea, the war was seen as between Dagon, their God, and Jehovah, the one true God. And so now that Samson, the greatest of those who have come from Judea in the eyes of the

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Philistines, now that Samson has fallen, they organize a religious festival. They gather together in the house set aside for the worship of Dagon, and there they burn animal sacrifices. There they throw themselves into drunken revelries. There they call out those doggerel chants which are still typical of religious festivities in the East. And then, wanting to add the spice of cruelty to

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their celebration, they command that Samson be brought forth. And when he is brought forth, the scriptures say that they made sport of him. That means that they made him dance. They turned him into a kind of clown. They made of him a religious spectacle, a kind of buffoon at whom they could laugh in the midst of their drunken glee. See this Hebrew hero, broken and bruised and bleeding, and

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now ridiculed and spat upon and derided and criticized and belittled by the Philistines. It's a sad scene. It's a sad scene when it happens still today. For the Philistines still howl when any servant of God falls. You do not believe that? May I respectfully call to your attention that a few weeks ago, a hundred thousand Christian young people gathered in Dallas, Texas, and there was

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hardly a word about it in the Los Angeles Times. But at the same time, a single Navy chaplain was accused of entering into an adulterous relationship with several women. And no less than four stories appeared in the Los Angeles Times on the subject. Or make no mistake about it, let any man who claims Christ drop the banner of his allegiance for even a moment, and the Philistines are ready to howl,

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ready to laugh, ready to belittle, ready to scream the failure to the skies. It is of course logically absurd for them to do this. You see, when you throw the yellow stained charge of hypocrisy upon someone else, you imply that you are without hypocrisy yourself. And these who so readily laugh at the fallen Christian need to be reminded of their own sin. Let's call that lie what it is.

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I'll lay this down now axiomatically, and I will defend this thesis anywhere at any time. I have found more hypocrites per square inch in every other institution and organization that I have ever studied upon the face of this earth than I find per square yard in the Church of Jesus Christ. I look at the creeds and credos of some of the service clubs for men and women which are part of

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our society, and then I look at the men and women who belong to those clubs, and any similarity between those creeds and those characters is purely coincidental. I look at the affirmations of conduct and belief established by various professional organizations, and then I study the constituencies of those organizations, and I wonder if those people have ever read those

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noble affirmations. Well, make no mistake, I'm not excusing hypocrisy within the church by pointing out that there's greater hypocrisy outside the church, but I think that needs to be said, and said so that people hear it. I guess I'm especially sensitive to this because I am in ministry, and you would never guess how many times in the course of my life I have heard God the Father, God the

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Son, and God the Holy Spirit belittled, attacked, crucified again by someone who pointed out to me, a minister who slipped and fell. It happens. It happens usually to ministers who think of themselves as some kind of spiritual Samson, and who try to play themselves off as some spiritual giant who never falls to the sins which are common to other men. Anybody who sets himself

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up as being so big is bound to have a fall, and of course the bigger you are, the harder you fall. You know, what the minister needs to do is to confess to his people again and again that his feet are made out of clay just like theirs are, that he is weak just as they are weak, and that he sins just as they sin, and that not only is the responsibility of every minister, but of every

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Christian layman as well. Let us, as Scripture says, confess our sins to one another. Then we won't be so shocked when one of us falls. Not only that, we won't fall so often, for in confessing our sins to one another we will be enabled to strengthen one another, and in that strengthening, being propped up on our leaning side by each other, we will be able to stand and not to fall.

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I think back to the days when I was leading a Christian athletes group back in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and this group of about 20 young men, outstanding athletes all, and Christians put on an hour-long program in the largest high school in Pittsburgh. In those days you could still put on a religious program in the schools, and it was very effective. It built up to a climax in which

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the outstanding football star of the school, a great big blonde boy that all the other boys in school envied and all the girls in school loved, got up and gave his testimony and then asked for decision. He did it beautifully, and there were many people who were reached that day. Then three days later, it became common knowledge throughout the school that that boy's girlfriend was pregnant

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and was pregnant by him. And in one moment, everything which the program had accomplished was gone. Everything that was said was open to ridicule. How the Philistines howled, how they enjoyed it, how they proceeded to defame the group and every person who was a part of the group. That's sad enough in itself, but sadder than that is this, that that young man who, when he brought

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himself down, brought everything else in that moment of witness down with him, that young man had been part of that fellowship for three years. He had been seated every week with other Christian young men who had shared openly, who had brought forth their weaknesses and strengthened one another. And in that whole time, he never once mentioned the temptations which were his. He never once

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shared the difficulties which were his. He never once asked how he could be strengthened against surrendering to the lures of the flesh. He never brought it up and then fell. And everything fell with him. [Pause]

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Samson would not have been on his knees at the feet of Dagon had he stayed with his own people in Judea. But because he didn't, the Philistines laughed. Now tired, Samson says to a young man, "Take me to some place where I can rest." And the boy takes him to two pillars. As he leans against the pillars, Samson feels the tension in the pillars. The 27th verse of the chapter tells

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us that the temple is more crowded than it has ever been before. As a matter of fact, there are 3,000 people on the roof of the temple where persons do not ordinarily sit, so there is a tremendous weight coming down upon these pillars. And here, standing between these quivering pillars, Samson turns to God. It's the first time he's turned to God in a long time. It's sad that some

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people have to be brought so low before they will begin to look up, but sometimes that's the case, and you know it to be the case. So Samson turns to God and he prays a prayer of repentance, and that prayer of repentance is a paradigm of every prayer of repentance that has ever been prayed since. The first thing Samson says is, "Oh Lord, remember me." He is crying out and he's crying,

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"Help!" Now let's not apologize for that. There are some, you know, who say that all prayer is a cry for help, all prayer is a crutch, all prayer is a kind of escape mechanism, and they accuse Christians of using it as such, and some Christians draw back and attempt to defend themselves from such a charge. Don't do that. Much prayer is a cry for help. Much prayer is leaning upon the crutch

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called the power of the Holy Spirit. We should rejoice in the fact that we have a God who is ready to hear us and help us, a very present help in time of trouble. Never apologize for the fact that when we need help, we can ask God for it. There was an atheist in England named Brad Law who was marching back and forth across that country, belittling God and the people of God, and in the

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newspapers he issued a challenge to the leading evangelist of that day, Hugh Price Hughes, and he challenged him to debate the existence of God on a public platform. And Hugh Price Hughes in the newspapers said, yes, he would enter into the debate. And then in his reply to Brad Law, he went on to say this, "When we argue cases in court, it is customary to have witnesses. Therefore, I shall

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bring 100 persons to the debate who have been helped by the Christ in whom I believe. Let Mr. Brad Law bring 100 who have been helped by his gospel of infidelity. Such evidence will lend much weight to the argument. Brad Law never showed up for the debate. Samson cried out for help. Let's never hesitate to do that. As he cried out to help, he made his first step from the darkness

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to the dawn. The second thing he did was to testify to his sorrow for his sin. "Oh Lord, remember me, and then, oh Lord, strengthen me." Now you see, Samson's strength had been his greatest pride. The thing of which Samson was most proud was his Herculean strength. If there was anything that Samson loved about himself, it was his muscles. And now, suddenly, before God, he says, "God, give me

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strength. My strength is not enough. My dependence upon my strength has been nothing but folly. I end up in darkness and despair. Oh God, give to me the strength which you alone have, for without you, I am nothing." That's testimony to his weakness. That's testimony to his sin. That's testimony to his misguided love. All sin is misguided love. The sin of indolence, that's loving ourselves so much

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we refuse to work. The sin of lust, that's loving our desires so much we're willing to debase someone else. The sin of cowardice, that's loving ourselves so much we are unwilling to risk ourselves in defense of anyone else. All sin is misplaced love. And in this moment of asking for strength, Samson is saying, "I no longer love my own strength. I love the strength which only comes from you." And

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in the moment that he did that, admitted his weakness, he took the second step from the darkness to the dawn. And then the last step. Taking hold of the pillars, he cries out the last petition in his prayer, "Oh God, let me die with the Philistines." And here Samson is asserting the cost of repentance. He knows that if he is going to turn again to God, it is going to cost him something.

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It is going to cost him anything up to and perhaps including his life. Now for years in the church, we didn't talk much about the love of God, but instead of the cost of repentance. Today, we talk a great deal of the love of God, but not often enough of the cost of repentance. We see these signs, "Salvation is free." Don't you believe that? That is not true. It is not enough to get up and

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casually walk down the aisle at the invitation of some preacher. It is not enough to throw some log onto the fire in a church camp. It is not enough to give the right answer to a couple of questions put to you by some evangelism callers on a Tuesday evening. It is not enough to mumble some prayer in the minister's study, to say, "I'm sorry, I want to begin. Jesus, help me to do so." There must come in

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the act of repentance a turning away from evil. That's what the word repentance means. It means "about face." It does not mean "left face." It does not mean "right face." It does not mean "smiling face." It does not mean "crying face." It means "about face." Jesus puts it in these dramatic terms. If your right hand offends you, cut it off. Anything that keeps you away from me, cut it off. That is

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what repentance is. Though it pains you temporarily to lose it, you will rejoice eternally that you paid the price of losing it. The rich young ruler comes to Jesus. Jesus says, "Your money is between you and me." Now, it isn't like that for everybody, but it was like that for the young ruler. So Jesus says, "Get rid of your money and then you can come to me." The young man won't do it. He won't make an

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about face on his money. He goes away sorrowing. And Jesus sorrows too, for this young man has chosen eternal separation from God. I am not saying that at the moment of repentance we become perfect and never sin again, but I am saying at the moment of repentance we begin a hand-to-hand battle with sin which does not end until we close our eyes in death. Sin becomes the principal hatred in our

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lives and everything that we do is directed at driving out of our experience anything that keeps us apart from Jesus. I want to say this very slowly and deliberately so that no one here will be able to say they did not understand. If you are still nursing in your heart a sin of prejudice against those whose skin is another color from yours, and if you are not laboring with every bit of capacity

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you have to drive that sin out of you once and for all, then you are not a Christian. If you have a lying tongue, a deceitful mouth that cuts and slashes and hurts and wounds others, and if you are not laboring with every bit of strength that the Holy Spirit of God gives you to master that evil muscle between your teeth, if you are not struggling to repent of everything that that tongue has ever

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done it ought not to have done, and to discipline that tongue so that it never does that which is evil again, if you are not struggling to do that then do not tell me about your conversion, for you have not repented and without repentance there is no conversion. If you, claiming discipleship, are not struggling to bring every dimension of your being into line with what Christ would will for

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you, then you are deluding yourself. It is faith alone that saves, but the faith that saves is never alone. Faith without works is dead, and the question becomes do we die to our sins or do we die of them? A soldier was brought to Alexander the Great. He had been disobedient. Alexander says to him, "What is your name?" The soldier replies proudly, "My name is Alexander." The general

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responds, "Then you must either change your name or your conduct." I have a friend who has no fingers on his left hand. Here's how it happened. On the Anzio beachhead D-Day 1944, he threw himself out on the beach and his hand got caught in the track of an advancing tank, and slowly but surely his hand and his arm were being pulled into the grinding, smashing gears of that vehicle. And so

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he took his pistol, and with his pistol he shot off every one of those fingers to save himself. And that is what repentance is, to cut off anything that separates us from Christ, to pray like Samson, "If it takes my death, then let me die with the Philistines." And in the moment that he prayed that prayer, the dawn came, but it was a thunderous dawn. The world says we only have one chance. The

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moving finger writes, "And having writ moves on, nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it." That's what the world says. But the God who made the world says there is another chance. And so as Samson prays, God comes into him with power. And Samson clasps these pillars. Now it's important that you understand these

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pillars. They were not pillars of stone, they were pillars of wood. Macalester has done extensive archaeological excavations at Giza, which is very near where this event occurred at Gaza. He's found on the same strata of archaeological work a temple, much like the temple in which Dagon was praised. And there he found the great stone bases of the pillars. Now in these bases there was no

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evidence of any other stone ever having been on top of them. Instead there was only a small space in which a wooden pillar could find its rest. The pillars in this temple, you see, as all pillars in that time were like the pillars that are described in 1st Kings 7 in the house of King Solomon. They were made of cedar. So here are these two cedar pillars and they are narrow. And so that the weight

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of the house won't push that narrow pillar down into the ground like you might push a stake down into the earth. This pillar is set on a great stone base so that it cannot go down into the ground. And Samson puts his arms about these two wooden pillars. Now these pillars are under greater strain that they've ever been under before. Remember, 3,000 people are on this roof. They've

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never been there before. That's the reason it is mentioned as it is in Scripture. And suddenly, with this strength which comes from God, Samson grasps the bottoms of these pillars and pulls them toward him. And as he pulls them toward him, the tremendous weight above causes the whole structure to come crashing down so that all of the building and the thousands on top of it comes

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smashing to the unyielding, waiting earth. And in the panic that ensues, the Philistines perish by the thousands. And Samson dies too. And his family comes and picks him up and takes him away to the hills of Dan. And there they put him in the tomb of his father, Manoah. I think it's good to know that, that the father and son were back together again, even if it's only in death. And

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then they turn from his great frame, now at peace, and go away. And we shall turn away too, here, focusing, I hope, not upon this child of the sun's dark days, but upon this last bright and brilliant moment. Not upon his night, but upon this dawn. Not upon his eclipse, but on the moment when he turned again to his God. It was a dawn, a dawn though filled with thunder, the crashing of

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that great house. But that's kind of fitting, isn't it? We would expect Samson to go off to the sound of kettledrums. So I fell asleep, and I dreamed a dream. And in the dream, Satan stood before me. And in his hand he held long lists. And he said, "These are your sins." After my repentance, these are my sins. After all my struggling, these, these are my sins. Yes, these are your sins. Are these

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all of my sins? No, there are more. And Satan came again, and he had longer lists, so that he could hardly carry them. And he said, "These are your sins. You belong to me." And I said, "Are these all my sins?" And he said, "These are all your sins. You belong to me." I said, "Are there no others than these? Is this the total of them?" After all of my repenting and struggling to live as he would have

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me live, "Is this the total of them?" And Satan said, "This is the total of them." And then I said, "So be it." Right across them, the blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanses us from all sin. And in that moment, Satan disappeared, and there was a tremendous clap of thunder. And where there had been darkness, there was light. My friend, have you found the light? Have you repented? Have you had your own thundering dawn?

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Let us pray. O God, come upon us with such power that though we be strong as Samson, we be driven to our knees. And on our knees, pray the prayer of repentance. Begin the good fight of faith to cleanse ourselves of all iniquities, but to put our final confidence in the Christ, who will win for us what we cannot win for ourselves. O God, do this for the sake of Jesus, in whose name we pray. Amen.

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[silence]