The Multiplied Rewards of Fox-Catching

Judges 15:1-5 (CSB) Later on, during the wheat harvest, Samson took a young goat as a gift and visited his wife. “I want to go to my wife in her room,” he said. But her father would not let him enter. 2 “I was sure you hated her,” her father said, “so I gave her to one of the men who accompanied you. Isn’t her younger sister more beautiful than she is? Why not take her instead?” 3 Samson said to them, “This time I will be blameless when I harm the Philistines.” 4 So he went out and caught three hundred foxes. He took torches, turned the foxes tail-to-tail, and put a torch between each pair of tails. 5 Then he ignited the torches and released the foxes into the standing grain of the Philistines. He burned the piles of grain and the standing grain as well as the vineyards and olive groves.

During a short time of prayer, I asked the Lord, “Why have I not been able to come into Your Presence and drink deeply, as I once did?” He brought to mind a passage that one of my students had mentioned a day before. This young man had been interested in how Samson burned down a field by setting the tails of pairs of foxes on fire with torches.

The Holy Spirit then spoke to me: “Set the little foxes on fire, and you will destroy the field of the enemy.” The “little foxes,” I remembered, are found in Song of Solomon 2:15. Here’s the CSB:

Catch the foxes for us—the little foxes that ruin the vineyards—for our vineyards are in bloom. (CSB)

Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines, for our vines have tender grapes. (KJV)

I looked up the definitions of a few of the words in the two passages above and found them very helpful:

foxes (Strong’s 7776) - a jackal (as a burrower). From an unused root meaning “to hollow out.”

little (Strong’s 6996) - abbreviated; i.e. diminutive, literally (in quantity, size, or number), or figuratively (in age or importance).

spoil (Strong’s 2254, primitive root) -to wind tightly (as a rope); i.e. to bind; specifically by a pledge; figuratively, to pervert, destroy; also to writhe in pain (especially of parturition)”

So what are the little foxes and how do we catch them? The little foxes are the seemingly trivial distractions, things that creep into our lives and burrow there. They come into the hollows of our lives, into the areas that we don’t fill with useful activity, into areas of complacency and idleness, into areas we have not filled with the rhythms of our labors in the kingdom of God. They seize their opportunities and fill these hollows and then wind about us and bind us. When we should be thriving and producing mature fruit, these foxes suffocate the life and vitality and unhindered flow that the Lord would push into us and through us to others.

Jackals are small canines. They sleep in crevices between rocks and in the dens of other animals. They are nocturnal and opportunistic tricksters, prone to stealing. They can be tamed, but will retain their stealth. These little foxes crawl up into whatever hollows of our lives they can find, under cover of darkness, and burrow down into them, nesting there and reproducing there. They try to get down to our roots, our spiritual foundations, and cut off the new life God has given us. Again, these jackals, which are smaller that other canines such as wolves, coyotes, or hyenas, are the little things that steal their way in and ruin/corrupt the life of God in us. What are some examples? Well, some might be food addictions, aimless internet/social media searching, games and other minutia that we twiddle with on our phones—the list goes on and on.

Jackals live in the open country. Lamentations 5:18 brings attention to how opportunistic the little foxes are, particularly among Christians that are tired and weary from labor or trials:  "As for Mount Zion, which lies desolate, the jackals prowl over it!”

desolate (Strong’s 8074, primitive root) - to stun (or intransitive, grow numb), i.e. devastate or (figuratively) stupefy (both usually in a passive sense). (Vine’s) to be astonished, appalled, devastated, ravaged.

The enemy uses certain experiences, certain traumas to try and devastate us and thereby gain access by his temptations. Many of these are little foxes. We are to catch them, rooting them out of the hollows in our lives. There may be many of them (Samson caught three hundred), so we are to bind them (as Samson “tied their tails together”), put the fire and light of God between them (as Samson put “torches” between them) and they will go running into the field of the enemy and will destroy it. What does this mean? Well, we bind the enemy in Jesus’s Name and speak the Word of God in our circumstances. The enemy’s plan will backfire against his own holdings. Setting these foxes on fire is a radical, irreversible move to obey the Lord in ridding ourselves of these multiplied small hindrances. We are doing what we must to completely eradicate their presence in our lives. This will burn down the crops of anything the enemy has caused to sprout in our lives. All the things from the enemy that have both taken root in us and that have grown up will be destroyed, not only the standing grain, but the shocks—that is, things that are now growing and that have already been harvested. All will be destroyed.

We must respond to the Lord with radical obedience and be ruthless against our enemy, the devil, who would love to steal our intimacy with the Lord and therefore our effectiveness as His servants on the earth.

Lord, in Matthew 5:30 You said, “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.”

And the prophet Jonah tells us, “Those who worship worthless idols forfeit the mercy that could be theirs” (Jonah 2:8, NET).

What radical move do you need to make to eliminate long-standing hindrances to the presence and power of God in your life?