Judg 14:4, However, his father and mother did not know that it was of the Lord, for He was seeking an occasion against the Philistines. Now at that time the Philistines were ruling over Israel. 
    	We have before us the manner in which the Lord rules and overrules according to His plan and His purpose. The fact is that we do not have the means to read the mind of God in any terms of what He is planning and how He is working to accomplish His will on this earth. That is why it is most necessary that we are very apprehensive of becoming involved in those areas in which the Lord is at work. We must offer the Lord the free reign to move the hearts and minds of those in whom He is bringing forth His plan and His purpose. 
	Here we have the account of the parents of Samson who were pleading with him about his choice of a Philistine woman as his wife. They were trying to persuade him to choose a Jewess for a bride. However his mind was set on this pagan woman in who were his desires and yearning. 
All of this would, through the intervention of the Lord, play out in the destruction of some of those Philistines who were enslaving the Children of God at that time. The parents were holding true to their thoughts and their ideas of what should happen. At the same time, the Lord was creating the situation which would be leading to the destruction of so many of those who were set against His people. As our text states …his father and mother did not know that it was of the Lord, for He was seeking an occasion against the Philistines.
	Before we go on, I would take this opportunity to give a couple of contemporary examples which serve to highlight this manifest and marvelous working of God. These are only a sampleing of the so so many ways that the Lord works to rule and overrule by His Sovereign Hand in action. These instances are not by any measure a definitive conclusion to God’s working power and grace. They are simply ones which show how God proves Himself through the means of overruling what even godly people may think is best. This is in order to establish Himself and His ways in the lives of those whom He has called unto Himself. 
The first is from my dad’s experience in the ministry. It concerns the parent’s of a teen age boy whom they loved very dearly. The son was continually held in prayer for the Lord to bring about His work of salvation in this young man’s life. To the point of this account, they had been so earnestly lifting up their beloved child in prayer, talking to him about the Lord, sharing their concerns for his eternal salvation as opposed to his everlasting damnation. This is what every loving parent in Christ holds forth for their children. 
The young man developed a friendship with another teenage boy that greatly concerned those parents. This new friend had the long hair, and the shaggy beard of the day. He wore tattered clothing and encouraged their son to engage in going to concerts and parties and other contemporary activities which brought the parents further to their knees in prayer and utmost concern. 
They earnestly asked the Lord to get rid of this new acquaintance, to remove him from their son’s life. They tried to cajole their son to turn his back on this friend and to look for someone else with whom to spend his time. They prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed in every effort to dissuade this relationship. 
Then, one morning, there was a change in their son. The night before, he had gone with this friend to a concert which featured Christian music and the preaching of the Gospel message. The friend had encouraged that both boys should turn their lives to Jesus, and so they had done. They were both born again. 
The parents were flabbergasted. Here, the boy that they had prayed so earnestly against was the very means of the Lord to bring their beloved son into God’s glorious salvation. The one they had seen as sinister and vile, who would be dragging their son away, was the very person by whom the Lord answered their most fervent and earnest prayer for their son’s eternal salvation.
The second account that I will share is a most personal one in our lives. I bring this forth in the knowledge that God is still at work and is still covering all who are involved. 
After her first marriage disintegrated, we had seen a drastic change in our daughter. It was something that brought us to our knees all through the day and night. She had developed hardness to the Lord and did not want anything to do with Him. Then she declared that she was moving to Oregon, to get away from California and everything here, including us. She wanted a fresh start in a new arena in which to develop new friends. 
Everything within me, as her father, was devastated. I saw this whole thing as simply running away from her problems. Laura knew it was necessary for her, but I cried out to the Lord against this move. I prayed and I tried to talk her out of it. I did everything within my power to hinder the process, at least in my heart and my attitude. I was dead set against it and I knew that the Lord would stop it at some point. But that point never came! 
I still remember the day that she drove off and I cried and I cried and I cried. I cried out to the Lord. I cried in my self-pity. I cried in my lack of trust and faith in the Hand of God upon her. I cried because the Lord did not stop her. I cried because I was angry and frustrated and oh so sad. 
If she were still here, I argued with God, I could spend more time with her. I could so greatly encourage her. I could share more scripture with her. I could pray more fervently with her. I could bring her to worship. I could gently hold her and humbly comfort her. If only she were still here, which she wasn’t! She was gone! All my ideas and plans and schemes were but dust blown away by my self-pity and loss as her father.
However, the Lord had a much greater plan than the one that I put forth. He had her meet and then marry a man who was older and who had two children from a former marriage. God had her fall in love with someone who loved the Lord and who encouraged her to return to church and to worship and to prayer and to reading the Word of God. He had her marry a man who wants her to blossom into a woman of God and who desires to be a godly husband to the wife whom he cherishes. 
The hard work of marriage is at hand in their relationship. She is now calling and texting to get advice and encouragement concerning the parenting of a child with special needs. She is praying together with us as we discuss the course of her new life. Her heart is now to the point that she is cherishing the prayers of the saints, especially those on her behalf through the issues of being a wife, of being a step-mother, of having been sick with the Covid virus, of every day to day challenge of her job. She and her husband are now leading Life Group ministries with their church members. They are both growing in the richness of Jesus Christ!
God had a plan which brought forth so much more than I could ever have hoped for. It was all because, despite my thoughts and my concerns and my being against her move to Oregon, He manifested His will and His glory into the heart and life of our beloved daughter. I was in the exact same place as described by this morning’s passage …his father and mother did not know that it was of the Lord.
We now want to see this reality opened through the power of the Holy Spirit as detailed in the Word of God. We will not be able to do this in a comprehensive manner as the way in which God has manifested His Omniscience and His Omnipotence in the course of bringing forth His plan and His purpose in Jesus Christ will take all of eternity. Every book of the Bible is filled with the defined power of God to work despite all the thoughts and schemes and manipulations of humanity. God has always and will forever bring forth His perfect will in the light of His love in the giving of His Only Begotten Son. 
We will pick up our scriptural study of the way in which the Lord rules and overrules according to His Sovereign purposes with the account of Joseph as he was dealing with the fears and the anxieties of his brothers. They had so vilely mistreated him because he was their father’s favorite son. They had planned to kill him, but then rather sold him into slavery in Egypt. 
There, by the Omnipotence of God, Alone, Joseph had risen to be one of the most powerful men in the whole country, second only to Pharaoh. In that place of power and honor, Joseph had been able to save not only Egypt, but his entire family from death and starvation. 
After the death of their father, his brothers were afraid. They thought Joseph would exact his revenge upon them for the vile manner in which he had been so mistreated. We want to read about the oh so encouraging reality of the Sovereignty of God over and against and despite all the scheming and evil manipulations of mankind. This is gloriously outlined in Gen 50:16-21.
Gen 50:16-21, So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, "Your father charged before he died, saying, 'Thus you shall say to Joseph, "Please forgive, I beg you, the transgression of your brothers and their sin, for they did you wrong."' And now, please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father. "And Joseph wept when they spoke to him. Then his brothers also came and fell down before him and said, "Behold, we are your servants." But Joseph said to them, "Do not be afraid, for am I in God's place?  "And as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive. So therefore, do not be afraid; I will provide for you and your little ones." So he comforted them and spoke kindly to them. 
      	His brothers had tried to rid themselves of this pesky brother whom they thought had taken away their father’s attention and consideration. They believed that their problems were over when they callously sold Joseph into slavery. They thought that they would never have to deal with him again. The troublesome goody two-shoes brother was gone and they would now have the heart of their father returned to them. They would also no longer be constantly pestered with his detailed dreams about them bowing down to him. 
	Little could they have ever imagined that they would, in fact, have to bow down to Joseph. He would hold their very lives in his hand as he would rule over them for their own well-being and safe keeping. He would be the means by which the children of Israel would be saved from starvation and extinction.
As a direct result, their succeeding generations would ultimately become a nation, the nation of the Lord from which the Messiah would be born as the Savior of all who would call upon His name. … And as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.
	 Our next Biblical consideration is contained in Deut 8:2-18, if you would please turn to it. Therein is outlined the manner in which the Lord made tremendous use of the wilderness experience of the Israelites. Humanity would never conceive of this means of bringing into being a nation. 
First of all, they were slaves to the power of Pharaoh in Egypt. Then, after the 10 plagues, they were lead into the wilderness. There they traveled as a people to become hardened to the elements and tested as to their relationship with God. He trained them, through all that they endured and suffered, to count on Him as the Provider of all their needs.
	Deut 8:2-18, And you shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness these forty years, that He might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. And He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord. Your clothing did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these forty years. Thus you are to know in your heart that the Lord your God was disciplining you just as a man disciplines his son. Therefore, you shall keep the commandments of the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to fear Him. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills; a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive oil and honey; a land where you shall eat food without scarcity, in which you shall not lack anything; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. When you have eaten and are satisfied, you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land which He has given you. "Beware lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping His commandments and His ordinances and His statutes which I am commanding you today; lest, when you have eaten and are satisfied, and have built good houses and lived in them, and when your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and gold multiply, and all that you have multiplies, then your heart becomes proud, and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. He led you through the great and terrible wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water; He brought water for you out of the rock of flint. In the wilderness He fed you manna which your fathers did not know, that He might humble you and that He might test you, to do good for you in the end. Otherwise, you may say in your heart, 'My power and the strength of my hand made me this wealth.' "But you shall remember the Lord your God, for it is He who is giving you power to make wealth, that He may confirm His covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day. 
	This was the manner in which the Lord brought forth, from that wilderness, a nation of people who were prepared to inhabit the Promised Land. These were hardened warriors in the terms of this world. They had been through all that would otherwise destroy a wandering people at the mercy of the harshest elements of nature. The heat and the starvation and the lack of water were all the means of God to establish a nation that would honor and obey and trust Him. 
As Moses declared so vibrantly …And He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord. Your clothing did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these forty years. Thus you are to know in your heart that the Lord your God was disciplining you just as a man disciplines his son. 
This was not for their undoing or to eliminate them from the face of the earth. This was how God was establishing a relationship with this, His people. That relationship of complete dependence upon Yahweh would see them through to the completion of the habitation of the land of God’s promise to Abraham, and to Isaac, and to Israel. 
…In the wilderness He fed you manna which your fathers did not know, that He might humble you and that He might test you, to do good for you in the end. Otherwise, you may say in your heart, 'My power and the strength of my hand made me this wealth.' "But you shall remember the Lord your God, for it is He who is giving you power to make wealth, that He may confirm His covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day. 
Lord willing we will continue with this discussion next week. Please let us willingly offer to the Lord the complete freedom to use whatever means and people He deems necessary in order to build us up into His plan and His purpose for His Church on this earth. So be it!
However, his father and mother did not know that it was of the Lord, for He was seeking an occasion against the Philistines. Now at that time the Philistines were ruling over Israel. Amen.

This morning’s benediction is Phil 3:13+14. Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. Amen.