Esther, Part 2: For Such A Time As This (Esther 4-10) Series

#39: Esther, Part 2: For Such a Time as This

Good morning! Please open your Bibles to Esther Chapter 4

Last week we began talking about the Book of Esther. It’s the only book in the Bible that never mentions God, or talks about faith, or prayer, or miracles—all the things we see in other books of the Bible. But we’ve been talking about how even though God isn’t mentioned by name, you can see his hand at work all through the book. We call this God’s Providence, which we defined as the supernatural God working through the natural world, or through natural processes.

But as we talked last week about how God is working through the events of history to achieve his purposes, you might be wondering, well, what do we do? If God is going to achieve his purposes with or without us, do we have to do anything at all?

• Does it matter whether Christians vote if God is the one who, according to Daniel 2:21) removes kings and sets up kings?

• Does it matter what school I go to, or who I marry, or any other decision I make, if God is sovereign and it’s all going to work the way He wants it to anyway?

• Does it really matter whether I ever share my faith, if it’s up to the Holy Spirit whether someone gets saved or not.

Now, the answer to all of these questions is yes! Part of the supernatural God working through the natural world is that He works through not just world events but also the choices we make.

And so we are going to finish the book of Esther this morning, and we are going to start by reading the most famous passage in the whole story. Let’s read together beginning in verse 10. Please stand if you are physically able:

[READ ESTHER 4:10-16

May God bless the reading of His Word. Let’s pray.

[Prayer]

Now, it’s been a while since we last got our bearings into where Esther fits into the whole story of the Bible. So let’s talk about where we’ve been. Remember that all of the prophets had basically the same message to Israel—God had seen their sin and their rebellion and their idolatry, and they needed to return to God or else they would experience God’s judgment. And God’s judgment came through two enemy nations—Assyria, which invaded Israel in 722 BC, and Babylonia, which invaded Judah and exiled most of the people to Babylon. Then in 586 they destroyed the temple.

Judah is in exile in Babylon for seventy years. And in that time, the Babylonian Empire was brought down and the Persian empire rose to take its place. Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, issued a decree that the exiles could return to Jerusalem. This begins to happen in 516 when Zerubbabel led the first wave back to rebuild the Temple, and that part of the story is told in Ezra 1-4.

This is where people get confused, because we tend to think, “Ok—exile is over, all the Jews went back to Jerusalem.” But the truth is that only about 5% of the Jews who were living throughout the Persian Empire actually resettled Israel. A million stayed in Persia.

So Esther is Queen of Persia at the same time as the events of Ezra.

After Zerubbabel builds the Temple, Ezra and a group of priests are sent to teach the people in Jerusalem God’s law. Then, Nehemiah returns to build the walls of Jerusalem.

And that is the last historical event we get in the Old Testament. Nothing more is recorded, and no more prophets speak. Biblical scholars refer to this as the 400 years of silence before the time of Christ. We will talk next week about why that’s a terrible label for this part of history.

But for now, that’s the 30,000 foot view of the our last couple of weeks in the Old Testament. Now let’s zoom in on Esther.

When we last left our story, Haman (the bad guy), had just been dissed by Esther’s cousin Mordecai, who refused to bow to him. And Haman decides its not enough to just kill Mordecai, he wants to kill every last Jew in the Persian Empire.

Clearly, Haman has anger issues. Esther 3:7 says he cast the Pur that is, he cast lots. Pur were these little clay cubes, about 1 x 1 x 1 inches, that had little dots on each side, 1-6. And if that sounds like dice to you, you’re exactly right. Here are some of the gaming dice that have been found around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, some of them dating all the way back to this time period. You can see they haven’t really changed that much in 2500 years!