Today's Sleeping Giant # 1

Today's Sleeping Giant # 1

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, 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 awakes, she will shake the world." Is not the Church the sleeping giant of today?

As today's Church thinks about the day of reckoning that is surely coming, of 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, they 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" Heb. 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.

Alas that today there is more evidence of religious sensation before our eyes than evidence of spiritual regeneration and supernatural phenomenon! Not many Christians today can forget the fact that the devil goeth about as a roaring lion, but we seem to have lost sight of the fact that the Lion of the tribe of Judah had defeated the roaring lion of hell, and therefore every anointed Samson or Gideon or church can also slay the lion of hell! Though wicked men are doing wickedly, God's promise to us is that "the people that do know their God shall be strong and do exploits" (Daniel 11:32).

God pity us that after years of writing, using mountains of paper and rivers of ink, exhausting flashy terminology about the biggest revival meetings in history, we are still faced with gross corruption in every nation, as well as with most prayerless church age since Pentecost!

This is a plea for the return of the supernatural; but I must also give this a word of explanation. For a decade, all over this land there has been a ministry of the miraculous (more or less), and thank God for all who honor Him and remain faithful. But having said that, here is a plea for sane thinking and a spiritual evaluation of the evangelistic field. To a large degree, have we not substituted seeing for hearing? In Acts, Philip the evangelist could have transferred the Ethiopian eunuch to a city seething with revival fever where the eunuch could have seen "the lame leap like an hart and the tongue of the dumb sing." Instead, he pitched right into the Word of the living God, and beginning at the same Scripture preached unto him Jesus. We need the miraculous but we also need Christ-centered teaching. Our crucified, exalted Christ must have preeminence over all other slants of truth, for while the Church is languishing, the world is perishing. "Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord..." (Isaiah 51:9).

Again let me say, Samson's size was not the secret of his strength. The fact that he was the same size after he backslid negates the idea that he was a giant. His only external peculiarity was his long locks, uncut because he was a Nazarite. Nor had his long hair in itself any abnormal power. Samson's secret was obedience. As long as Samson trod the straight and narrow path of obedience, he was invincible.

Let us remember, too, that Samson, who began in the Spirit, fell into the flesh, and so had a prison term to bring him to his senses. Finally, by one last mighty miracle, he finished in the Spirit. Backslider, this is a word for your recovery, for God can restore the years that the cankerworm and the caterpillar have eaten. He who is able delights in mercy.

Samson's final act of power was the crowning achievement of a spectacular lifes work. After he had slipped out from under the harness of obedience, he was forced into separation from the world in a prison. Once an army trembled at his very sight; later a single boy came to lead the blinded Samson into the temple of Dragon, the fish-god. How the mighty had fallen! Yet now, God took this "weak thing" into a temple full of lords of the Philistines and set him between the pillars. "Samson took hold of the pillars...the one with his right hand and the other with his left...and he bowed himself with all His might" (Judges 16:29-30). Holy jealousy gripped him. Mighty as he had been in other things, Samson now proved mightiest in prayer: "Lord, strengthen me...this once!" Would to God that every professed believer in the whole of Christendom would borrow this prayer and mean it! Then with dramatic conclusion, Samson sealed the doom of many more of the enemies of God in his dying than in his living.

Is this the dying hour of this dispensation? Many say it is. Some Christians have already hung their harps on the willows, and yet others seem to delight in speaking of the Church's present lapse as a proof of divine inspiration. But I myself believe that if the Church will only obey the conditions, she can have a revival any time she wants it. The problem of the Church is the problem in the garden of Gethsemane - sleep! For while men sleep, the enemy, sows his seed through his cults. Lest men sleep the sleep of eternal death, Oh arm of the Lord, Oh Church of the living God, awake!

~Leonard Ravenhill~

(continued with # 2)