How Delilah-ish Are You?

We women, all have a little Delilah in us…and that is not a compliment. I’m not sure how well you remember the story – but in short, Delilah won the heart of Samson (Israel’s judge at the time), and she tricked him into confessing the secret to his great strength, which inevitably led to his demise.

Now, it’s not our everyday experience to conspire against the man who loves us (I hope!), but the manner in which Delilah wore Samson down is worth our attention.

Judges 16:6 says, 

And when she pressed him hard with her words day after day, and urged him, his soul was vexed to death.

In other words, Delilah knew what she wanted (some bad guys were paying her to figure out the secret to Samson’s great strength), and she knew how to get it. She was a smart woman and she used her influence and persistent words to eventually wear Samson down. 

The legitimate question then becomes: How do WE use the influence we have in our husband’s life?

I know we think we don’t have much power over our husband, but we usually underestimate the effect we truly have. You better believe your husband would be willing to do something to make you happy rather than be married to a nagging grump. If pleasing you was simple, he would gladly do it! If he could get you to smile and make you want to hug him, I bet he’d like to try. Unless we’ve convinced our husbands that they can never please us, most of them want to make us happy.

So again, we must ask, how do we utilize this power? Do we find ourselves repeating our desires again and again? Do we nag? Manipulate with our silence? Do we push with our emotions? Or argue in order to make everything go our way?  If we detect these tendencies, even in the slightest bit, we are a lot more like Delilah than we ought to be.

On top of that, our “quarrelsomeness” makes us a lot like the unattractive, ungodly, fretful woman that the Proverbs talk about. Proverbs 21:9 says,  ^“It is better to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house shared with a quarrelsome wife.”  Similarly,  Proverbs 21:19 says,  ^“It is better to live in a desert land than with a quarrelsome and fretful woman.”  In other words, we are making our husbands miserable if we continue along these lines.

If we sense any quarrelsome proclivities, any traits that remind us of Delilah, let us realize we are in sin, and repent. Today.  There are appropriate ways to influence our husband when we ought to, but that is another topic. For now let’s drop the nagging, manipulating, pressuring, or whatever special power we utilize to wear our husbands down.  It would be (really) good if we didn’t fall into the category of being highly avoidable to the extent that a rooftop and desert land sounds better than our company!