I just finished studying the Book of Esther in my personal devotions. Esther is a strange book for a variety of reasons. For one thing, it is one of only two books in the Bible that do not use the word “God” – there is no mention of God at all, despite the fact that the very obvious theme of the book is the secret working of God to save and redeem his people[1]. The author seems to be making a subtle point: even when we can’t see God, we know that he is working for our good and for his glory.
One of the reasons that Esther continues to be a useful resource to this day is the way that it outlines a recurrent pattern in God’s providential dealings with his people.
1. In the Providence of God, solutions can appear before the problems that they address
The Book of Esther begins with a rather bizarre description of a rather lecherous and self indulgent Persian royal feast. The drunken king summons his poor wife Vashti to dance before his likewise drunken friends. The request is lewd to say the least:
10 On the seventh day, when the heart of the king was merry with wine, he commanded … the seven eunuchs who served in the presence of King Ahasuerus, 11 to bring Queen Vashti before the king with her royal crown, in order to show the peoples and the princes her beauty, for she was lovely to look at. (Esther 1:10–11 ESV)
The Hebrews is closer to “wearing her royal crown” and many commentators understand that to mean that she was to appear naked – wearing ONLY the royal crown. Of course, she refused. The king was angry and humiliated in front of his guest and orders Vashti to be deposed. When he sobers up he realizes what he has done and he regrets it. His advisors counsel him to hold a beauty pageant to select a new Queen and pretty girls from all over the empire are selected to participate. The girls endure months of cosmetic preparation before they would each spend one night with the king. If you look carefully at the dates you discover that the entire selection process took nearly 4 years to complete! What a sordid tale! For 4 years young girls were poked, prodded and prettied before having to spend a night with man they’d never even spoken to and to whom they likely felt no natural bond of affection. Why are we reading this? Because one of those girls would become the Savior of God’s people. God made Esther the prettiest girl in Persia. She stole the king’s heart and won his favour years before the deadly threat to the Jewish people emerged in the heart of wicked Haman.
Praise God that this story does not say: “When God saw the designs of Haman, he immediately put his favour upon a pretty Jewish girl named Esther”. God does not respond. God knows. That’s why, in the Providence of God, solutions can appear before problems. Effect can appear before cause. This is one of the great benefits of serving a Sovereign Eternal God.
2. In the Providence of God, we are who we are before we do what must be done
When we studied this story with our children for family devotions I remember saying: “God made Esther pretty for a reason. We are what we are because of what God intends us to do.” The Apostle Paul said something similar:
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10 ESV)
Who God has made us to be is a great indicator of what God intends us to do. God equips us for what he calls us to. You will never be asked to do something God hasn’t made you able, by his grace, to do. That doesn’t mean you can do everything, it just means that you can do what you will do according to his grace and purpose.
3. In the Providence of God, Sovereignty does not nullify responsibility
Sovereignty is not fatalism. To believe that God is in control does not mean that what we do does not matter. At one point in the story Mordecai, Esther’s adopted father, tells her that she must act to save her people; she must speak to the king and tell him about the evil plan of Haman. The problem is that if any person, even the queen, enters the kings presence uninvited she risks death. If Esther took this information to the king without being invited, she faced the very real possibility of death. That thought gave her pause but Mordecai, in rebuking her hesitation also expresses faith in God’s Sovereign design:
13 Do not think to yourself that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. 14 For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:13–14 ESV)
Divine Sovereignty and human responsibility are twin truths in the Bible and are never presented as being at odds with one another. God is Sovereign. He will save his people. You are responsible. You must do what you have been called to do or you will face judgment. Mordecai implies that even if Esther disobeys, God’s design will go forward even if through another agent. The knowledge that God will do something, does not excuse our laziness, fear or disobedience.
The danger of preaching on Sovereignty is that people immediately begin to give themselves all manner of excuses for disobedience. “If God is going to save people from every tribe, tongue and nation regardless of what I do, then why would I bother doing anything at all? I’ll just make my money, lie on the beach and retire and leave the outcome in the hands of a Sovereign God.” That’s not how it works. If you do that, then know this. In the words of Mordecai the Jew: “Deliverance will arrive for those people from another place and through another person but you and your house will perish.” Sovereignty does not nullify responsibility.
4. In the Providence of God, the evil we thought long banished is permitted to return and to prosper for a season
Haman is a very interesting character. We are told that he was an Agagite – meaning he was of the house and line of Agag. If you have forgotten the story of Agag you should go back and read 1 Samuel 15. Haman was an Amalakite – one of the ancient persecutors of God’s people. They haven’t made an appearance in the Biblical story for a very long time, but here, in this story, they are back. The Jewish population in Persia must have become very nervous when Haman became Prime Minister. It was an odd thing for a foreign person to become Prime Minister in Persia to begin with, the reason Haman achieved this exalted post seems to be that he was able to lend money to the crown in a time of financial crisis. Haman was extraordinarily wealthy. At one point in the story he offers to put 10,000 talents of silver into the royal coffers in exchange for free reign in the extermination of the Jews. That is an unfathomable sum of money. The Jews in this story faced an adversary they thought long dead and buried and this adversary, back from the grave as it were, came back with the resources necessary to buy royal favour and exterminate all God’s people.
Human beings have a long history of short memory. We are not the first generation to have believed that evil was banished from the earth. It has been strangely resurrected in our day, has it not? What manner of barbarism and dire threat we believed perished from the earth in the mid 20th century is back with a vengeance and with a payroll. In the Providence of God, old evils are reinstated. The chain of the devil is sometimes extended yet it is never removed. Evil agents remain tethered by the Sovereign will of God and that tether lengthens and retracts at God’s command.
5. In the Providence of God evil is permitted to target those whose loyalties aren’t for sale
Haman’s hatred and capacity for violence was aroused we are told by the refusal of Mordecai the Jew to bow and pay homage to him in the court of the King. Mordecai was a minor court official and Haman was Prime Minister – yet Mordecai refused to pay homage to a such an evil and despicable man, irrespective of his position. Haman was infuriated. Nothing irritates evil people more than their inability to intimidate or purchase human worship. It is in this way that they serve the purposes of God.
In the early days of Christianity Roman Emperors were accustomed to worship. In a polytheistic society with gods and goddesses beyond count or number it was not a huge stretch for the Emperor to be thought of and worshipped as a god. The Romans may have adopted this practice from the Egyptians. The Pharaoh’s believed that they were incarnations of the gods. The spirit of the gods had mingled with their flesh such that they were understood in that culture as semi-divine and therefore, as appropriate objects of worship. The Romans saw the obvious political advantages implied in this belief and adopted it enthusiastically. The early Christians of course, refused to play along. Their creed “Jesus is Lord” stood at odds with the required statement that “Caesar is Lord”. They knew that to believe the one disqualified the other and they therefore refused to bow the knee. They paid dearly for that decision. Nero would impale Christians on crosses and bathe them in pitch and naphtha and use them as human torches to light his garden parties. Many were fed to the lions in the Coliseum. Tyrannical leaders fear nothing more than a man or a woman with higher loyalties. We see this again and again and again. From Haman to Nero to Hitler, evil men fear and loath people whose loyalty and worship will not be bent or bought.
6. In the Providence of God, redemption comes after all hope has passed
It is often the way of God to rescue his people after all reasonable hope of salvation has passed away. In the story of Esther, the fate of the Jews seemed sure. The king had signed a royal edict – it was well known that no word of the king could be undone. That is the reason why the king, after discovering the plot, doesn’t simply revoke the edict, rather he tells people to join the Jews in defending themselves against any who would attack them – the second edit defeats the effect of the first, it does not withdraw it. Once the original edict was published, the fate of the Jews was sealed, or so it appeared. Esther 4:3 records:
And in every province, wherever the king’s command and his decree reached, there was great mourning among the Jews, with fasting and weeping and lamenting, and many of them lay in sackcloth and ashes. (Esther 4:3 ESV)
Once again it seemed that God had abandoned his people. Just like when the army of Pharaoh pinned them against the Red Sea, just like when the Assyrians encircled Jerusalem so now there appeared no hope of deliverance and no offer of redemption. No one could have known that a Jewess had infiltrated the palace. No one could have known that God had given birth to a solution long before the problem had been imagined. All seemed dark and all seemed hopeless. It appeared to all that God’s people had been defeated. Their body would lie in the streets, they thought, and all who hated them would rejoice. This moment has been often anticipated by the enemies of God’s people, but anticipation and realization are not the same. In the Providence of God, joy comes in the morning.
7. In the Providence of God the deliverance of his people calls the nations to repentance
Three in the closing chapters of this story we are told that the Persian people were deeply impacted by the supernatural rescue of the Jews.
And Haman told his wife Zeresh and all his friends everything that had happened to him. Then his wise men and his wife Zeresh said to him, “If Mordecai, before whom you have begun to fall, is of the Jewish people, you will not overcome him but will surely fall before him.” (Esther 6:13 ESV)
And in every province and in every city, wherever the king’s command and his edict reached, there was gladness and joy among the Jews, a feast and a holiday. And many from the peoples of the country declared themselves Jews, for fear of the Jews had fallen on them. (Esther 8:17 ESV)
26 Therefore, because of all that was written in this letter, and of what they had faced in this matter, and of what had happened to them, 27 the Jews firmly obligated themselves and their offspring and all who joined them, that without fail they would keep these two days according to what was written and at the time appointed every year, 28 that these days should be remembered and kept throughout every generation, in every clan, province, and city, and that these days of Purim should never fall into disuse among the Jews, nor should the commemoration of these days cease among their descendants. (Esther 9:26–28 ESV)
Many Persian people became worshippers of the One True God because they observed his supernatural rescue of his people. In his Providence God may allow his people to go through seasons of extraordinary pressure and persecution in order to maximize the impact of their eventual deliverance and salvation. We tend to think too much of our immediate and constant happiness; God has a longer and wider view.
8. In the Providence of God evil men are often cast into the very pits they dug for others
Justice moves slowly but it tends to arrive with a thud. In the story of Esther, Haman has devised a plot for the destruction of the entire Jewish race in response to a slight from a single Jewish court official. However, while his plot is cooking, Mordecai continues to irritate and infuriate. He still refuses to bow and scrape before Haman. Perhaps Haman imagined that once his plot went public Mordecai would come in sackcloth and ashes and beg for mercy while kissing and washing his feet. If he did, then he was disappointed:
And Haman went out that day joyful and glad of heart. But when Haman saw Mordecai in the king’s gate, that he neither rose nor trembled before him, he was filled with wrath against Mordecai. (Esther 5:9 ESV)
Haman consulted with his friends and they decided that Mordecai needed to die immediately. He orders a gallows to be built 50 cubits high (about 75 feet) and he stays up all night supervising the construction and anticipating the spectacle of Mordecai the Jew dangling from the rope. However, in the Providence of God, the king has also been enduring a sleepless night. He has been going over some old records and discovers that the man who uncovered a recent assassination attempt against his life had not been publicly honoured. Publicly honouring men who take political risks to defend the king was good business. After all, many kings in the Ancient Near East died at the hands of the servants. In point of fact, Ahaseurus, the king in this story, was murdered by his servants several years later, but that is not the point. The point is he makes immediate plans to rectify this oversight. He asks Haman for some ideas about how to honour a particularly valuable servant. Haman imagines of course that the king wishes to honour him and he makes some rather bizarre suggestions. It seems Haman liked to play dress up and to imagine that he was king so he suggested that the servant be given some of the kings clothes and that he be permitted to ride the kings horse and to prance up and down about town. The king thinks this is a wonderful idea and he commands Haman to so honour Mordecai. In the shadow of his newly constructed gallows, Haman leads his costumed enemy up and down the streets of the capital proclaiming the kings tribute. Everyone in town, including his own wife, knows his days are numbered. The tide has turned.
Shortly thereafter, once the plot was revealed to the king through Esther’s successful intervention, Haman falls into a complete panic. Evil men often handle turns of favour rather poorly. When they are on top of the world they are confident and bold. When they table tilts the other way they are often cowardly and remarkably undignified. So it is with Haman. While the king leaves the room to control his anger at being so deceived by his Prime Minister, Haman panics and casts himself upon the Queen’s lap in a desperate play for mercy. Unfortunately, or rather Providentially, the king walks back into the room at that exact moment. His jaw hangs open in shocked surprise. Men did not touch the king’s wives. In fact in Persian culture the wives of the king were attended by eunuchs. The only men who even spoke to the wives of the king were physically and surgically prevented from offering offence. Here now was Haman with his hands upon the Queen. The kings guards immediately seize Haman and cover his face with a cloth. He was a dead man.
9 Then Harbona, one of the eunuchs in attendance on the king, said, “Moreover, the gallows that Haman has prepared for Mordecai, whose word saved the king, is standing at Haman’s house, fifty cubits high.” 10 And the king said, “Hang him on that.” So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then the wrath of the king abated. (Esther 7:9–10 ESV)
As the Proverb says, the evil man falls into the pit that he digs for others. (Proverbs 26:27) Justice may be slow, but in the Providence of God, when it lands, it tends to land with a thud.
9. In the Providence of God, the Lord intends for his grace and mercy to inspire gratitude and generosity among his people
When the Jews were delivered from certain destruction, Mordecai gave instructions for how they should respond.
20 And Mordecai recorded these things and sent letters to all the Jews who were in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus, both near and far, 21 obliging them to keep the fourteenth day of the month Adar and also the fifteenth day of the same, year by year, 22 as the days on which the Jews got relief from their enemies, and as the month that had been turned for them from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday; that they should make them days of feasting and gladness, days for sending gifts of food to one another and gifts to the poor. (Esther 9:20–22 ESV)
The Lord allows his people to fall into seasons of distress and difficulty so that when they are delivered they find themselves freshly motivated to worship and to show mercy unto others. God is a master teacher. He enrolls his children in the school of affliction to sharpen their worship of Him and their love of one another. How very like God to manipulate kings, overthrow governments, unsettle cities and confound entire nations to instigate worship and inspire fellowship and charity among men. Great is His Name, and worthy to be praised!
SDG
Paul Carter
[1] Song of Solomon is the other.