Esther 9:1-10:3
From Sorrow to Joy
Woodlawn Baptist Church
October 3, 2004
Introduction
There is a holiday that is celebrated in our world today that is characterized by great joy and celebration, a festival rich with spiritual meaning, rest from work, feasting, exchanging gifts, and giving to the poor. What holiday am I talking about? Most of you are thinking about Christmas, but the one I’m describing for you is the Feast of Purim that is introduced to us in our text this morning, initiated by Esther and Mordecai, allowed by God, thought to have been celebrated by Christ , and still celebrated by Jews around the world today.
You should remember that in Esther 8, King Ahasuerus allowed Mordecai and Esther to counter Haman’s wicked decree throughout the land. Haman had put into an irreversible law that the Persians would be permitted to kill the Jews on the 13th day of the month Adar. Since Haman’s decree could not be reversed, Mordecai was allowed to write a “counter-law” if you will. According to the new decree, the Jews would be able to defend themselves on that same day. In fact, in chapter 9, we are told that the Jews armed themselves, and rather than waiting on the enemy Persians to attack, they went on the offensive and decided to attack their enemies first. The Bible says that the Jews killed 500 people in the palace city of Shushan, and another 75,000 people throughout the 127 provinces of the kingdom. At the end of the day, Esther even asked the king for an extension of time, so the Jews in Shushan continued the fighting throughout the second day as well.
Since the extra day of fighting could not be communicated throughout the provinces, everyone outside the palace city rested and celebrated their great victory on the 14th day of Adar, but the people inside the city were still fighting. They did not rest and celebrate until the 15th day. Rather than try to get everyone to recognize one day or the other as a day of celebration, Mordecai and Esther decided to allow both days to be days of celebration, and as we are about to read, those two days became what we know to be the Feast of Purim.
“And Mordecai wrote these things, and sent letters unto all the Jews that were in all the provinces of the king Ahasuerus, both nigh and far, to stablish this among them, that they should keep the fourteenth day of the month Adar, and the fifteenth day of the same, yearly, as the days wherein the Jews rested from their enemies, and the month which was turned unto them from sorrow to joy, and from mourning into a good day: that they should make them days of feasting and joy, and of sending portions one to another, and gifts to the poor. And the Jews undertook to do as they had begun, and as Mordecai had written unto them; Because Haman the son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, the enemy of all the Jews, had devised against the Jews to destroy them, and had cast Pur, that is, the lot, to consume them, and to destroy them; But when Esther came before the king, he commanded by letters that his wicked device, which he devised against the Jews, should return upon his own head, and that he and his sons should be hanged on the gallows. Wherefore they called these days Purim after the name of Pur. Therefore for all the words of this letter, and of that which they had seen concerning this matter, and which had come unto them, The Jews ordained, and took upon them, and upon their seed, and upon all such as joined themselves unto them, so as it should not fail, that they would keep these two days according to their writing, and according to their appointed time every year; and that these days should be remembered and kept throughout every generation, every family, every province, and every city; and that these days of Purim should not fail from among the Jews, nor the memorial of them perish from their seed.”
Of the various feasts that the Jews observed and are mentioned in the Old Testament, the Feast of Purim is one that was not instituted by God. It was however initiated by His people and appears to have been blessed by God. While you and I don’t celebrate it, the Feast of Purim is an annual reminder to the Jews of several lessons they learned about God during their time of great sorrow and grief. It is these lessons that I want to share with you today, because as you will see, although we are not part of the Jewish nation, we as God’s people share a special relationship to Him, and because of this special relationship, we enjoy many blessings that are common to all who call on the name of the Lord.
What are the lessons we can learn? What is it that God wants us to remember each time we read the book of Esther or encounter its story? You see – the story we find is the same story that is being told over and over again throughout history. It is the story of your life, the story of our church, the story of your family, being told over and over again; and I believe that unless we realize that we are caught up in this story and learn the lessons God has for us, we are destined to lives of sorrow and grief – not because your circumstances will be any different than any one else’s, but because your eyes have not yet been opened to the reality of sin and evil being played out in the story of your life. Consider these lessons with me:
God’s people will always have an enemy in this world
I know you know this, but it bears mentioning over and over. From the opening pages of Genesis to the closing pages of Revelation, God’s people withstood enemies both great and small. There were the Amalekites, the Jebusites, and all other sorts of Canaanites. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Iraq, Hitler, Hussein, and on and on the list has gone. The early Christians were opposed by Rome, then by the Catholic Church, by Muslims, by pagans – and again, the list goes on. In countries all around the world today God’s people labor and serve in the midst of their enemies, many of them giving their lives as a result. In our own country we stand in opposition as more and more efforts are made to silence our voice, or at the very least to neutralize it.
I really don’t know why we are so naïve about this. We Baptists may make fun of those who see the devil in everything and evil spirits lurking around every corner, but I think they are more right than we who so blindly refuse to see the devil at work at all. As Adam and Eve walked with God in perfection in His garden of delight, Satan tempted them, not with pitchfork and horns, but with a desire for something more than what God had given them. When man was at his greatest, Satan came and took him down.
Is he any less at work in your life today? Sure Jesus has come to give you life and life more abundant, but the “thief has come only to steal and to kill and to destroy.” When you are at your greatest, when you are in tune with the Lord and things seem to be going your way, don’t think it odd that in those moments you come under attack. Satan knows exactly what buttons to push in your life, what gets you off, what distracts you or takes you out of the battle.
Someone has said that Satan’s three most powerful tools are hurry, noise and crowds. If he can keep those three things constant in your life he has most likely taken you out. However, he may come at you with some other thing. Regardless of the tool he uses, the fact remains that so long as we are in this world, our enemy is at work. Identify it as you like: Haman, Hitler, our judicial system, false religion, the antichrist, or some other thing, the fact remains that behind it all is our great adversary, that wicked one: Satan.
Thankfully, God has not left us in this world to face our enemy alone, because you see,
God will always have a way of deliverance for His people
While the Jews were in despair down in Egypt, God was raising up a Moses. When they couldn’t get in to the Promised Land, He was preparing a Joshua. The giant Goliath taunted the people of Israel and there seemed to be no hope, but a young man with a great faith was on his way. No matter what the age, no matter what you face, God always has a means of deliverance, and that way may be through you. You see, so many of those that God has chosen through the years were reluctant to rise to God’s call, but we need to remember what Mordecai told Esther. He said, “God can go get someone else if you won’t do it.” The point is simply this – God is going to bring deliverance to His people whether we choose to be a part of it or not.
Sometimes it is spiritual deliverance, other times it may be physical or emotional, but you can count on this one thing – the Lord Jesus Christ cares for you and has made a way of deliverance for you. Why did Jesus come in the first place? He said in Luke 4,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.”
Whether we fully understand how the Lord works in our lives or not, the fact is that He said that He had come for the express purpose of deliverance – He wants to free you from bondage! Most of us will never know the terrors of physical bondage or the kinds of fear that the Jews experienced under the death wish of Haman, but you live with fear and worry and anxiety every day of some sort. God wants to deliver you from all of it. I like what the apostle Paul said in 2 Corinthians 1. As he wrote to the Corinthian church, he began praising God for His goodness and gave some reasons why the Lord was to be blessed. Then he said of God…
“Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ. And whether we be afflicted, it is for your consolaton and salvation, which is effectual in the enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer: or whether we be comforted, it is for your consolation and salvation. And our hope of you is stedfast, knowing, that as ye are partakers of the sufferings, so shall ye be also of the consolation. For we would not, brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that we were pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life: But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead: who delivered us from so great a death, and doth deliver: in whom we trust that he will yet deliver us…”
Paul’s confidence was that God would deliver him, not because he was special or that God couldn’t do without him, but because he trusted in the goodness and faithfulness of God. We may not always understand why God works the way He does, and the good news is that we don’t have to. Instead, we need to remember that God knows what is best for us, that He is always working behind the scenes of our lives doing things that we’ll never know about in our best interests, and that the best thing we can do is to simply trust Him along the way. In the same letter, in chapter 4, Paul goes on to say…
“We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. For we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in us, but life in you. We having the same spirit of faith, according as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe, and therefore speak; knowing that he which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus, and shall present us with you. For all things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might through the thanksgiving of many redound to the glory of God. For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man in renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
We are talking about trusting God for deliverance in our times of trouble, and if you learn anything from what Paul has just said it is that there are going to be times when you are going to have to look further down the road. Take heart! And maintain hope, for what you are going through is only temporal. The work God is doing in you is eternal!
There are going to be times in your life, and may be right now, when God gives you a tremendous, riveting pain to fasten our attention on something that we think could never be His plan for us. We wonder for a brief moment whether we are even in God’s will or we question the goodness of God as we suffer along, but listen, in those moments you have got to look beyond your circumstances to what God might be doing in your life to transform you into His likeness. What you are going through or what you will go through may have to do with God making you broken bread and poured-out wine. God can never make us into wine if we object to the fingers He chooses to use to crush us.
When God uses someone we dislike, or some set of circumstances to which we said we would never submit, to crush us, then we object. We must never try to choose the place of our own martyrdom. If we are ever going to be made into wine, we will have to be crushed—you cannot drink grapes. Grapes become wine only when they have been squeezed.
I wonder what finger and thumb God has been using to squeeze you? Deliverance does not come from God releasing His grip on your life or from removing you from your difficulties. Instead, deliverance comes when you realize what is happening in your life, when you realize that you have an enemy at work in your life opposing you, when you stop struggling and wrestling against the One who is delivering you and you fiercely cling to Him!
Conclusion
There are two more lessons that we are simply not going to have time today to deal with, but I will give them to you just in passing. The third lesson mentioned in your outline is that God’s people have been called to lives of warfare. Do you see what happened in Esther 9? God’s people didn’t wait for their enemy to come to them and slaughter them. The Bible says that the Jews were ready, and in fact went on the offensive attack. Folks, when you are walking in the Spirit, surrendered to the will of God, wrapped in the divine protection found in the Christian’s armor, you can do great battle armed with the Sword of the Spirit, the Word of God. We are living in a day when God’s people must arise and fight back! While we sit idly by on our “blessed assurance,” we’re losing the war for the hearts and souls of people all around us. While we are consumed with hurry and noise and busyness, Satan is slaughtering our youth, our families, our marriages, our churches, and our nation. We must wake up and fight back in the Lord!
The last lesson was that God promises ultimate victory to all who call on His name. That’s my favorite part! When we get down and discouraged and feel like giving up, let us never forget that we already know the end of the story! Christ wins, our enemy looses, and we go into eternity the victors! Remember, until Christ returns, the story will always be the same, but in Christ we are guaranteed the victory.
The Jews in our story fought for their lives, but when it was over there was time for celebration, time for rest, time for feasting, and time for remembering and honoring their deliverers. For us it will be no different. There is coming a day when the battles will be over, and in that day we will celebrate, we will rest, we will feast at the table God has prepared for us, and most importantly we will remember and honor the One who came and died to deliver us from sin, death and hell.
Today if you have never trusted Christ as your Savior, you do not have that promise. In fact, the Bible says that you are condemned to die and spend eternity in hell, but you don’t have to. You can experience the wonderful blessings of being a child of God today if you will but repent of your sin and place your faith in Christ and Christ alone for salvation. Will you come to Him today? Will you be saved?
Works Cited:
Alfred Edersheim in his book The Temple states that the Messiah attended this Feast of Purim (www.plim.org/PURIM.htm)
Illustration of grapes being crushed in God’s hands comes from Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, September 30, The Assigning of the Call.
