I don’t like sweets, this is one unfortunate handicap for a pastor. While visiting people, I found myself in a difficult position: somewhere between accepting that sweet treat, a piece of cake or sugary dink and force myself to swallow. Or to refuse and look like a health freek more interested in my well being than in being polite.
But they are some exceptions. For example the Pineapple upside-down cake. The upside-down cake was always one of my favorites. The soft-textured yellowy cake covered with round slices of pineapples swimming in rich caramel syrup with … cherries set in each center - delighted both my eyes & mouth. And I still fascinated by the mystery of it.
Upside-down cakes are one of life's mysteries. That which we normally expect to be on the top ends up on the bottom. And what is typically found on the bottom, rises to the top. I always wondered about that while eating the up-side down cake. This isn't the way it's supposed to be! I thought. But it sure looks good. And tastes great!
In the days of Queen Esther, the Medo-Persian Empire was like an upside-down cake. The enemies of God's people had hoped to over¬power and destroy them. Those enemies were like the batter of the up-side-down cake that submerged and threatened to eradicate the tasty fruit - God's people. But, by the end of the story the "baking" period ended and, like the cake, the empire was turned right side up to the enjoyment of all.
Esther is the story of how evil forces in the Medo-Persian Empire enacted a law to kill the Jews of the empire. READ Esther 3:12, 13.
The story is an amazing spinning of the wheel for all individuals involved in it, and also for the destiny of God chosen people [extrapolate…]..
One of the most exciting stings in all of literature is found in a true story that has been preserved for us in the Bible. It contains some romance and a lot of action and has a plot that contains more twists than a treacherous mountain road. If you’re looking for a good story to read this summer, I encourage you to pick up a copy of the Book of Esther.
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One of the most notable characteristics of the story of Esther is "reversal." Reversal comes when an action or a state of af¬fairs intended or expected to produce a certain result ironically leads to the exact opposite outcome. The book explicitly states the principle of reversal: "The tables were turned and the Jews got the upper hand"…
Furthermore, every major character in the story of Esther experienced some kind of unexpected reversal of fortune.
- Vashti was Ahasuerus's most beautiful queen, a woman of dignity, power, and moral virtue, but she ended as one of the king's untouchable concubines, never to see his face again (1:19).
- Esther was an insignificant orphan who became the celebrated queen of one of the world's most powerful empires (2:7,17).
- The two leading characters, Haman and Mordecai, also experienced reversal. Haman received the king's prestigious signet ring only to have it taken away (Esther 3:10; 8:2). He conspired to exterminate the Jews and wound up begging a Jew for his life (Esther 3:6; 7:7). After building a gallows to hang Mordecai on, he perished on it him¬self (Esther 5:14; 7:10).
At one point in the story we find Mordecai dressed in sackcloth and covered with ashes (Esther 4:1-3). Later he found himself in glorious royal robes of blue and white (Esther 6:10, 11; 8:15). The story begins with Mordecai sitting at the king's gate as a low-level official (Esther 2:19; 3:2), but ends with Mordecai as Medo-Persia's prime minister (Esther 10:3).
Something's Missing. So the people of God experienced an unexpected reversal of for¬tunes, a surprising turn of events. The cake turned right side up as the life-and-death crisis all worked out far better than anyone might have dared to imagine. But why? How? Where is God in all this?
Surprisingly, nowhere does the book of Esther explicitly say that the cake turned right side up because God intervened in behalf of His people. In fact, it appears that the meaning of the Hebrew words used to describe this unimaginable reversal is that the Jews "themselves" did it. (verse 22).
ILL. One of the most frustrating things in life involves looking for something you know you have but can't, find. One time I was working on a project at my computer at home, books and papers stacked all around me. At one point I was unable to find a thin little book I need it. Although I searched everywhere, I couldn't find it. Round and round my desk I went, looking on the floor, under papers, between stacks of hooks, from shelf to shelf in my library, in drawers, but to no avail. I even searched the living room and the kitchen area thinking I may have carried it there during a break. Still no book. So I reluctantly went back to work without it—frustrated, still wondering, Where in the world is that book? I just had it! A few moments later I picked up the Bible that lay open on the table next to me and, would you believe, there it was right in front of me. It had been there the whole time. Yet I had looked there—or so I thought.
Our frustration in searching in vain for something that is literally right under our nose is the same as that experienced by the reader of the book of Esther. Where is God hiding? Nowhere does the book mention God, or even hint at Him, in any of its 10 chapters. The nar¬rative mentions the Persian king 190 times in 167 verses, but God not once.
In fact, Esther is the only one of the 66 books of the Bible that does not explicitly name God. The book records no prayer offered in God's name. Not a single individual says, "God is here!" No one gives Him the credit for Haman's hanging, Esther's becoming queen, Mordecai's promotion, or the saving of the Jews from genocide.
Nor does God seem to say in any clear way throughout the book, "I am God. I am in charge. I'm working these things out. I've taken charge." God is absolutely invisible, apparently absent.
This lack of any explicit reference to God in the story of Esther seems to be deliberate. The disturbing shift from God to human ingenuity and power gives the impression that life's events and their results are ultimately under the control of resourceful human beings.
That we are the ones who shape and modify our lives and determine the course of history. It's our ingenuity, our intelligence, our power that turns the cake right side up. On the surface, Esther seems humanistic, projecting a kind of "do-it-yourself" approach to life.
Interestingly, that is exactly how many of the exiled Jews living in the time of Esther actually felt. "God has abandoned us," they said to themselves. "He is either unwilling or not able to act in our behalf. We have to go it alone." The destruction of their city and that glorious Temple by Nebuchadnezzar's armies, followed by decades of humiliating exile, threatened the very foundations of their religious convictions.
God seemed absent, detached, uninvolved. The horizontal perspective was all they could see. Most of the Jewish exiles living in the Persian Empire dwelled in the flatlands -with, as Ecclesiastes, would say a nothing-new-under-the-sun view of life and reality. "This is all there is to life and we're alone. All we have is ourselves and our resourcefulness. God is nowhere to be found."
Not surprisingly, after all that happened to the Jews during the Holocaust, the absence of God in Esther makes the book very much alive for contemporary secular Jews. "We know what that's like!" they say. As did their ancestors in Persian exile, contemporary Jews un¬derstand what it means to ask, "Where's God?" and find only silence.
Q. Are we today that much different? Don't we ex¬perience the confusing silence of God in our own lives more than we would ever like? Or perhaps, it seems, God has been silent in our life while active in others. How do we feel, then, when the going is tough and the chips are down?
When there's no way through the darkness? During such crises of belief, aren’t we tempted lo think that "we" have to do something for ourselves, or secure the support of others, or put on a good show if anything is going to happen at all? Doesn't so much of life look like "monumental good luck" or "monumental bad luck"?
Living Somewhere Between. If you're not sure where God is when you read the book of Esther, you may be asking yourself the same question about those who profess lo believe in God: Where is He in their lives? It comes as a surprise to the careful reader that neither Esther nor Mordecai—the principal characters in the book—gives any evidence of being particularly reli¬gious - at least early on in the story.
We find Mordecai, a Jew, encouraging his young cousin (adopted daughter) Esther to marry a pagan king, knowing full well that should she fail in her highly unlikely bid to become queen, she would become a mere concubine lost in the king's harem till the day she died (Esther 2:8-14).
Not only that, he commands her to hide, rather than reveal, her Jewish heritage and faith in God. "Don't tell anyone that you're a Jew. Don't tell anyone about your faith. Don't tell anyone about God." Esther dutifully obeys.
She spends a year bathing in oil, painting her face, learning what to wear, for that one night with the king, hoping that she will be the one picked up. Altogether, Esther hides her faith for nearly five years (Esther 2:16; 3:7).
For the masquerade to last that long, she must have eaten, dressed, and lived like a Persian. Perhaps she even worshiped like one with her husband on official occasions! Obviously very few knew who she really was. Only when her life was in danger did Esther come out of the closet.
CONTEXT. But wait a minute. So before any premature conclusion, we need some history. The crisis in depicted in the book of Esther resulted from the fact that God's people did not take advantage of the opportunity to leave Babylon and return to Jerusalem during more favorable times.
On two occasions God graciously opened the way for His people to go back to Jerusalem. In the time of Cyrus only 50,000 or so out of the one million captive Jews returned. The great majority of God's people chose to re¬main in the land of their exile rather than undergo the hardships of the return journey and the reestablishment of their desolated cities and homes. The same thing happened when Darius issued a second decree for the Jews in the Medo-Persian realm to return to the land of their fathers. During that opportunity the prophet Zechariah pleaded with the exiles to return, but to no avail:
" 'Ho there! Flee from the land of the north,' declares the Lord, 'for I have dispersed you as the four winds of the heavens,' declares the Lord. 'Ho, Zion! Escape, you who are living with the daughter of Babylon'" (Zech. 2:6, 7).
They just weren't interested. They had forgotten their calling to separateness and had chosen to compromise their heritage for the sake of personal advancement. The people of the Exile had only a halfhearted commitment to the God of heaven and His Law.
"The Jews who had failed of heeding the mes¬sage to flee were called upon to face a terrible crisis. Having refused to take advantage of the way of escape God had provided, now they were brought face to face with death." (PK 600)
Perhaps it explains Mordecai's and Esther's apparent willingness to compromise their relationship to the one true God. They, too, chose to live in exile away from the land of God's blessing. Mordecai, Esther, and the Jews of Susa were not only outside the Promised Land, but they didn't seem all that concerned about God's program centered in that land.
The story of Esther, then, is a narrative of marginal faith - or at best, floundering faith. It is a faith, perhaps, that is more a fact of birth than spiritual conviction. A faith evaded and hidden. The story of Esther points to the depth of the spiritual mess in which God's people had stumbled.
That’s why this book is so actual. Esther presents us a host of moral entanglements and seeming compromises that it’s so relevant for us today. Esther is not as straightforward as Daniel and his friends of an earlier generation of exiles.
You come away from the book with a lot of questions. What did Esther do or not do? Where is she an example of what God's people are lo do? Where does she illustrate what they must never do?
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God never appears in the entire book of Esther. But His actions and thoughts do. His plan does. In fact, His fingerprints are on every page. But His name never shows up.
The book of Esther asks again and again as you read it, "Can you see His fingerprints?" Can you see God working even though it seems that everything is mere coincidence, monumental luck, or the result of human beings standing up for themselves or getting help from some other human source? That's the challenge each reader confronts — looking for the tell¬tale fingerprints that affirm that God has been at work again.
About coincidence… When we take the coincidences and reversals in the book Esther seriously, it is almost inescapable to conclude that the author wants us to believe, without being explicit, that God is in control of the course of history and the events of our lives. When the cake turns right side up, we can be sure God is active and in control.
…God's exiled people struggled with His apparent silence in their troubled lives. They felt abandoned and powerless against daunting circumstances. Many must have felt that their future totally depended upon their own actions. For some, it was simply in the hand of fate.
With this in mind, the author of the book of Esther wanted to relieve the anxiety and loss of faith because of God's apparent continued silence in the midst of life's excruciating crises. He wanted to give them hope against the odds, assurance of di¬vine assistance to meet the threat. That while there seemed to be only divine silence, God cared and would provide power to overcome. They could take courage to face the issues facing them head-on.
As Michael Fox asserts, "when we scrutinize the text of Esther for traces of God's activity, we are doing what the author made us do. The author would have us probe the events we witness in our own lives in the same way." "Where's God?" we ask so often. He's there! If you look just right, you can see Him.
Many are surprised to learn that the story of Esther has an eschatological dimension - a future orientation. Its message speaks to every burning crisis God's people have met down through history, but will find its fullest expression in the end when the struggle between Christ and Satan heats up for one last conflict.
Esther features both a cosmic as well as a personal individual dimension. Note the application specifically for end-times issues:
'"The trying .experiences that came to God's people in the days of Esther were not peculiar to that age alone… The decree that will finally go forth against the remnant people of God will be very similar to that issued by Ahasuerus against the Jews. Today the enemies ol the true church see in the little company keeping the Sabbath commandment, a Mordecai at the gate." (PK 605)
Esther is a story for today. It has a message for God's end-time people and insight into the final crisis. When we come to this book that never mentions God, we can actually see Him all the more profoundly and eloquently portrayed throughout it. He's there in invisible ink. In life we never see skywriting that says, "I'm here. You can count on Me."
But by faith we detect Him and, inaudibly, we hear Him on a regular basis, reading Him written in the events of our lives - whether it be the crushing blows that drive us to our knees or the joyous triumphs that send our heart winging. When we pause long enough to look back, we can see His fingerprints.
Where is the God we watch for when the going gets rough? He is here working for our good even when we cannot see, or perhaps do not want to see, Him. He works providentially on behalf of His people despite their spiritual condition.
ILL. “When a person works an eight-hour day and receives a fair day’s pay for his time, that is a wage. When a person competes with an opponent and receives a trophy for his performance, that is a prize. When a person receives appropriate recognition for his long service or high achievements, that is an award.
But when a person is not capable of earning a wage, can win no prize, and deserves no award--yet receives such a gift anyway--that is a good picture of God’s unmerited favor. This is what we mean when we talk about the grace of God.”
He is an awesome God with incredible sovereign power.
He is absolutely invisible, yet always at work.
He is gracious toward His compromising people.
He cares for us.
What's more, He knows how to make great upside-down cake.
