Today's Sleeping Giant

Solemnly and slowly, with his index finger extended, Napoleon Bonaparte outlined a great stretch of country on a map of the world. "There," he growled, "is a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! If he wakes up, he will shake the world." That sleeping giant was China. Today, Bonaparte's prophecy of some one hundred and fifty years ago makes sense.


Today lucifer is probably surveying the church just as Bonaparte did China. One can almost behold the fear in his eyes as he thinks of the Church's unmeasured potential and growls, "Let the Church sleep! If she  wakes, she will shake the world." Is not the Church the sleeping giant of today?


Some years ago the newspaper headlines carried the story of a young Chinese student who "flunked" his exams here in America. So humiliated was he and so withered by anticipated scorn that for three years the youth hid in the belfry of a church and became skin and bones. Because of his shame, he froze in winter and blistered in summer under that church's thin roof. As today's Church of Jesus Christ thinks about the day of reckoning that is surely coming, oh that a holy fear would come upon her (even if it drives her to extremes) in order to arouse her from her present paralysis!


Consider Samson's fall. He didn't get drunk; he didn't commit murder; he didn't steal. Samson fell simply because he succumbed to the natural, and fell asleep.  That one small act put him into captivity, made a false god popular, and scattered the forces of the true and living God.


If even yet you feel a hangover of the old interpretation that the Samson of the Bible is a distant relative of Hercules or Atlas (famed in mythology for carrying the world on his back), then think again. Samson was no human monstrosity. He was no super-edition of a Goliath. If Samson had been a colossus, then why did Delilah ask the question, "Wherein lieth thy great strength?"


Let the final word be from the Word of God itself, for in telling the story of men mighty in faith, the writer of Hebrews says: Time would fail me to tell of Gideon, and of Barak, and of Samson, ... who through faith ... stopped the mouths of lions" (Hebrews 11:32-33). Only two men in Scripture stopped the mouths of lions - Daniel and Samson. But no giant could single handedly, as Samson, "put to flight the armies of the aliens," or toy with opposing armies. Here, Samson slays a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass; there, he kills another thirty men. Here, he takes the gates of Gaza for a ride; there, he tears a lion like paper. To add insult to injury, the Spirit's comment is "he had nothing in his hand."


Note well, yea, read for yourself the whole story of the secret of this mighty exploiter, this more-than-conquering believer: "The Spirit of the Lord rested mightily upon him." Everything in the story adds up to this staggering fact: Supernatural power was upon Samson.


~Leonard Ravenhill~


(continued with # 2)