Catching Foxes
Catching Foxes
Judges 15:4-5
So Samson went and caught 300 foxes and took torches. And he turned them tail to tail and put a torch between each pair of tails. And when he had set fire to the torches, he let the foxes go into the standing grain of the Philistines and set fire to the stacked grain and the standing grain, as well as the olive orchards.
In which endeavor would you have a higher probability of success: wrestling a roaring lion with your bare hands, or catching 300 foxes, tying their tails together without getting bitten, and lighting 150 torches between them? Have you ever tried catching one fox? Now, let’s assume that Samson’s set up some clever, old-fashioned trapping method employed by shepherds and farmers from ages past. Even so, this feat is still mind-blowing. For one thing, how many miles did he have to travel just to set the traps? I doubt he stumbled across a covert Philistine fox-breeding operation in the back hills and the foxes just sort of fell into his lap. That said, maybe the LORD miraculously directed 300 foxes from their various burrows and nooks to come to Samson the way He must’ve drawn animals to Noah during the flood days. We don’t know. Still, the whole operation is so outlandish and so hair-brained and so unprecedented that we have to call Samson a genius for simply concocting it.
Throughout our study of Judges, I’ve tried to put myself in the shoes of these human agents, to see what they see in their immediate scope and not what we see through generations of hindsight and special revelation, and to view their successes and failures not as though they’re one-dimensional characters in a fable whose lives can be condensed into a pithy moral principle, but as unique, one-of-a-kind servants of the LORD, who each faced different challenges and each brought different industriousness to their respective occupations. To that end, I’m encouraged to finally witness something redeeming in Samson—something other than lust and disregard for loved ones and hot anger. We see in this episode both ingenuity and industry, both the ability to envision a seemingly impossible task, and the endurance to see it through.
Friend, no matter how daunting or impossible today’s tasks seem, trust the LORD to provide the foxes you lack, and get busy catching them.