For those who weren’t here last week or whose memories are like mine and you can’t remember what happened two days ago, let alone last week, let me recap.
King Xerxes, king of Persia, has banished his first queen and a search has been made throughout his kingdom for beautiful young girls from whom the king might find a new queen to take her place. Esther, a young Jewish girl has been chosen. She’s beautiful both on the outside and the inside. Her adoptive father, who’s also her cousin, Mordecai, has thwarted an assassination attempt on the king, though he wasn’t rewarded.
Instead the king has promoted a man named Haman who, we discover, is a natural enemy of Mordecai going back many generations. Haman is self important, self promoting and intoxicated by his success. He expects everyone to bow down to him, but Mordecai refuses. So Haman decides to take his revenge, not only on Mordecai, but on his entire race. He arranges for the king to sign an edict that sentences every Jew in the kingdom to be killed on a certain day at the end of the year.
Mordecai contacts Esther to ask her to intervene with the king and she reluctantly agrees. And that brings us to this week’s final instalment.
Haman thinks he’s the ant’s pants. He’s the most important person in the kingdom, apart from the king himself. He thinks nothing can get in his way. But as we well know, pride comes before a fall. And in God’s economy those who seek to destroy others, often end up destroying themselves. Listen to what Psalm 7:14-16 has to say about such people: "See how they conceive evil, and are pregnant with mischief, and bring forth lies. 15They make a pit, digging it out, and fall into the hole that they have made. 16Their mischief returns upon their own heads, and on their own heads their violence descends."
Haman’s pride means he underestimates both Mordecai and especially Esther and in the end he’s caught out by a set of forces that conspire to defeat him.
Esther takes a risk
Esther knows that to appear before the king without being summoned risks punishment by death. But this is a situation that warrants the risk. And she’s a woman of faith. So she dresses in her royal clothes and stands in the inner court where Xerxes can see her. Her faith and courage are rewarded. Xerxes sees her and holds out his golden sceptre as his invitation for her to enter. He offers to give her whatever she asks. But then an interesting thing happens. She doesn’t make her request. She simply invites him and Haman to come to dinner that night.
So why didn’t she tell the king her message straight off? Why delay any longer when she’s obviously won the favour of the king?
There are a number of possible reasons. One is that she’s thought this through and decided it wasn’t yet the right time. Haman was the king’s new favourite, so Xerxes may have thought she was just responding to a bit of Palace gossip and committing treason in the process accusing the Prime Minister of such a crime.
She may also have thought that this wasn’t the right place. To accuse the Prime Minister of a crime before all the court servants and other people present was to risk the king going into damage control mode and simply dismissing her complaint. Far better to do it with only Haman present. Catch him off guard and who knows what he might say or do that would confirm his guilt. And in fact that’s exactly what happens, isn’t it?
Divine Sovereignty
But there’s another reason why she puts it off, though she doesn’t realise it. That’s because God still had something to arrange before the time would be right. Esther seems to have done all the arranging, but God has something else to do as well.
In any event she invites the king and Haman to join her the same day for a banquet that she’s prepared for them. The king sends for Haman and he hurries to join them.
False confidence
Don’t you just love Haman? As a character in the story that is. He’s just so self-absorbed he doesn’t have a clue what’s about to happen to him. He leaves Esther’s first banquet in high spirits because he’s receiving this special attention from the king and queen. Then he sees Mordecai and his mood is ruined. He’s in such a rage he goes home and arranges to have a great gallows built to hang Mordecai from, never thinking that anything could go wrong. But his false confidence is about to let him down.
You see, not only does divine sovereignty play a part in his downfall, his own pride will play a part as well.
That night the King can’t sleep so he gets up and asks for a copy of the chronicles of his reign. Maybe he thought reading how great he was would calm him down so he could sleep. But as he reads he comes across the account of the time when Mordecai had foiled an assassination attempt against him. So he asks his attendants what reward had been given to Mordecai and is told that nothing had be done to honour him.
Well by now it’s morning and so he asks who there is in the court that he could ask for advice about this, and, surprise, surprise, Haman is waiting in the outer court for an opportunity to speak to the king about hanging Mordecai.
When the king asks Haman what should be done for the man the king delights to honour, Haman immediately thinks the king means him. I mean who else would the king want to honour?
If only Haman’s parents had taught him "it’s not just about you, Haman!" But no, he’s so self-centred he falls right into the trap God has set for him. So he comes up with what to him is the ideal answer. Except for one thing: it’s Mordecai who’s to receive this honour and it’s Haman who’ll be the one leading the horse around the city praising Mordecai. It’s hilarious isn’t it? Unless you’re Haman, of course.
Haman is totally humiliated and rushes home to tell his wife and friends what’s happened. At this news the light begins to dawn - for his wife at least. Mordecai is a Jew, a worshipper of the God of Israel. Haman is doomed. No-one can stand against someone like that. But it’s all too late. The king’s messenger arrives as they’re talking and hurries him off to the Queen’s banquet.
Notice how Haman thinks he’s in control of the situation, but all the time he’s being hurried along by Esther’s plans.
Malice
One of Haman’s great failings is the malice he bears towards Mordecai and the Jewish people. Malice is a deep seated hatred that feels delight when our enemy suffers and pain when our enemy succeeds. In 1 Cor 5:8 Paul likens malice to yeast. That is, it may start small, but it grows like a cancer, eventually permeating the whole of our being. And the end result is that it spoils our enjoyment of life. Haman complains that seeing Mordecai sitting at the king’s gate as he walks by has taken away all the pleasure he’s gained from being invited to this private banquet with Esther and the King.
But not only has it taken away his pleasure, it also may have affected his judgement. He builds a 25 metre high gallows never thinking that it could be used on him as well as on Mordecai. Nor does he wonder why Esther has invited just him to this banquet with the king.
Judgement
The king and Haman arrive at the banquet and are enjoying a glass of wine when the king asks, for the second time, what is Esther’s petition and request. So Esther replies, "Let my life be given me -- that is my petition -- and the lives of my people -- that is my request. 4For we have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated." Imagine how Haman is feeling at this moment. He knows he’s been found out. He hadn’t realised that Esther was one the Jews he’s sentenced to death. So he’s terrified.
The king is in a great rage, so much so that he walks out of the room into the garden to calm down before he decides what to do with Haman. And when he leaves, Haman sets the seal on his demise. He throws himself at Esther’s feet, begging her to spare his life. But just at that moment the king returns and finds him thrown across the couch where Esther is lying and that’s the last straw. He has him arrested and hung on Haman’s own gallows he’s just had built for Mordecai. And that’s the end of Haman.
Esther is rewarded with all of Haman’s possessions which she then hands over to Mordecai to look after. Mordecai is promoted to the position that Haman had held of Prime Minister.
But there’s still the problem of the king’s edict about the Jews. Esther pleads with the king to revoke it but he can’t. In Persia once a law is made it can’t be revoked. Instead he allows Mordecai to write a second law allowing the Jews to gather to defend themselves on the appointed day. When the day comes those who seek to attack them are killed, though the majority of the population takes their side. In Susa, Esther asks for permission for a second day of retribution for the Jews. Perhaps the anti-Jewish feeling was greater there in the major city than in the smaller towns and cities of the wider empire. And so the crisis ends and so is instituted the feast of Purim that’s been celebrated by the Jewish people ever since.
It’s sometimes asked why this story is in the Bible, particularly as God isn’t mentioned in the entire book. Is it just there to explain the feast of Purim. Or is there more to it than that?
We might also want to ask whether this is a story that continues to be relevant to us as Christians. Is this a Christian story or just an Old Testament moral tale? So lets ask ourselves, what are the similarities between Esther’s situation and ours? How might this story be relevant to us as Christians?
Esther lived in a world where God was not known and honoured. The world of Susa had no real understanding of a personal God, of a living God, of a God who cared for his people wherever they were. In that sense it was very similar to the world we live in.
She lived in a time when God’s people were waiting for redemption. There they were in a foreign land, a land where they didn’t belong, far from the land of Israel, waiting for God to come and take them home. Peter describes us as aliens and exiles, people with no real home in the place where we live, waiting for the day when God will take us to receive the inheritance we’re waiting for, the living hope we’ve been born into through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
Esther and Mordecai had to live by faith not by sight. There was no Temple to go to, to remind them of God’s grandeur and sovereignty. Israel was no longer a great nation reflecting God’s power and glory to the world. In fact Haman’s order to destroy them showed just how powerless they were. We too live by faith and not by sight. We wait for an inheritance that can’t be seen. It may be a sure and certain hope, but it’s a hope that we hold on to by faith. The power we rely on to live our lives in faithfulness is often a hidden power, given to us by the Holy Spirit as and when we need it, but rarely shown in overt acts of power.
Esther was faced by people who opposed the worship of the living God. Just as Haman and his friends were opposed to anyone who claimed to worship the living God, we too will find ourselves opposed by those who have no desire to acknowledge an authority greater than themselves. There’s no currency in today’s world for a belief in an absolute standard for anything, apart from the absolute belief that there are no absolutes, of course! But the suggestion that there might be standards of morality and ethics that God expects of humanity just doesn’t hold water. So we’ll find ourselves sidelined from time to time, if not strongly opposed.
You may have heard about the survey the Australian Democrats had on their Website recently, asking whether religious education should be part of the school curriculum. Well they got 4 times the responses they expected and the results were so opposed to what they were looking for (that is they were supportive of religious education in schools) that they decided not to publish their results. That’s the sort of world we live in. (That might also give you food for thought when it comes to voting next month.)
Finally notice that the solution to the Jews’ dilemma depended on individual initiative and action. God wasn’t going to intervene overtly. Sometimes you see people waiting around for God to work some miracle when what they should be doing is to get off their backsides or up off their knees even, and do something themselves. God has given us his Spirit to enable us to work for him. God has prepared in advance good works for us to do. If God shows you a problem then there’s every chance God has also given you the task of doing something about it. Just like Esther God may have put you where you are so you could find a solution to the problem you’ve discovered.
But never forget that even though God wasn’t working overtly, he was present, working in the background, bringing his plan of salvation to completion. To say that God wants us to act, never takes away the fact that he’s there with us, strengthening us, enabling us, setting things in motion that will enable us to complete what we’ve been called to. Esther and Mordecai had to act on their own initiative, but they did it knowing that God was at work as well.
God may have been forgotten by the majority of those we live among. God’s name may never be mentioned in our world except as a swear word, but he is present and active. And that action so often is carried out by those he’s called to follow him, that is, you and me. So take Esther’s example. Be ready to step out in faith, to use the wisdom God gives you to do what’s needed right where you are.
For more sermons from this source go to http://home.vicnet.net.au/~sttheos/
