Then, lastly, after Jephthah, you have the Philistine invasion, or rather supremacy, and God's deliverance, or rather His designed deliverance, through Samson the Nazarite. The Philistines represent profession in a more intense way, though they are associated originally with Moab. You remember that Shamgar wrought a deliverance from the Philistines just at the close of Ehud's victory over the Moabites. The Philistines represent profession, and more than that. They represent an active profession, which declares that it is everything, that it has the right to give the name, as it were, to the whole inheritance of the people of God, and to assume entire control of everything connected with it.
That you get in Rome in all her claims to be the Church, to be the repository of all the revelation of God. She claims to be the director of the people of God, and to declare what is, and what is not, the will of God. All authority is centered in the pope, and administered through human priests, and celebrated by human ritual. The whole spirit and system of Rome is the Philistine power which controlled at one time the entire professing Church, and which in its spirit even now lays its hands upon the fairest portions of God's heritage. Is it like Christ? Does it not rob us of Christ? How surely it does. It is the woman Jezebel and Thyatira, as we saw in considering Sham gar.
Rome, which is always elevating the crucifix, robs us of the cross. Rome, which exalts the Son of God, as it were, robs us practically of Him by putting her whom she calls the mother of God over Christ. Rome in that way by imputation robs us of the reality; and so, wherever in spirit Rome is allowed—and there is much of Rome that has not the name of it, for there is much in Protestantism that savors of it,—wherever you have this system of things, it makes use of the world, of the flesh, yea, of the devil himself, to further her unholy designs to get possession of the people of God. It is not Christ surely.
What is the remedy, what is the deliverance from the awful sway of the scarlet woman? Surely Christ alone. But Christ as He is presented to us in the very opposite of what Rome claims. Rome claims to sit a queen and to be no widow and to see no sorrow, and Christ we have presented as the Nazarite, the separate One, the One who has nothing here, who is separate from sinners, separate from the world, separate from the spirit that is in the world. Christ is the true Nazarite, of whom Samson, so far from being the type, was, alas, a contrast. It is the spirit of true Nazariteship, as we see it in Christ and as linked with Christ, which would deliver us from all the power of Philistinism, from that which deals in saint-worship and profession and superstition, and everything that would degrade the saints of God.
Thus you have Christ all the way through. If you will go over the history at your leisure, and take each of these deliverances and seek to put it in the place of the deliverer the apprehension of Christ, Christ Himself, the blessed power, the only power of true deliverance from all this, you will have surely, not the partial and incomplete deliverances that you have in Judges, but a real, true and lasting victory through Christ. "Thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”