Many of us know the story of Esther. The book that shares her name in the Old Testament is the only book in Scripture that does not explicitly mention God, but that doesn’t mean that God is not present in Esther’s story. In fact, you cannot read the ten chapters that compose this book and not see both God’s sovereignty and His providence writ large. His guiding and protecting hand is constantly at work in the lives of all the characters of the story, whether it is putting Esther in just the right spot at just the right time or it is giving her favor in the eyes of the king. In fact, we can even see God moving Haman, the enemy of the Jews in Persia, exactly where he needs to be in order to face God’s judgment (but not before he is humbled by God). The events that we read about in Esther are incredibly encouraging for us today.
One aspect of Esther that is usually highlighted is Mordecai’s statement to her at the moment when things seemed the darkest for the Jews: “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 4:14). In Mordecai’s statement, we find the balance that exists between God’s sovereignty and the choices we have. Esther had the choice to be obedient to the course that God had set before her, just as we do today. After all, she could have thought that she’d be perfectly safe in the palace; after all, she was now queen. The king surely wouldn’t subject her to the death sentence that the others would face, would he? In fact, she could have thought that she’d be safer by not saying anything on behalf of her fellow Jews. Yet we see God’s sovereignty on display as well: if Esther refuses to be obedient to God, He’ll find someone else who will be. God’s will cannot be thwarted by humans, no matter how hard we may try. Sometimes, this seeming discontinuity between God’s sovereignty and our choice causes people to scratch their heads, wondering how both can be true. The reality is that there are some things about how God works in His creation that are beyond the grasp of our finite minds. In these moments, it is good to meditate on the words of David in Psalm 139: “You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it” (v. 5-6).
In Esther 3, there is something that I think speaks to what we have been studying in Daniel about being strangers in a strange land. When Haman was accusing the Jews to King Ahasuerus, he said, ““There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom. Their laws are different from those of every other people, and they do not keep the king’s laws, so that it is not to the king’s profit to tolerate them” (v. 8, emphasis mine). The Law that God gave to the Hebrews had several purposes, but one of the major purposes was so that Israel could be a holy nation; that is, they were to be separate from the peoples and nations who surrounded them. Haman, then, was not lying to the king – the laws that the Jews followed were different from the laws of any other people! But we should notice that when Haman highlighted these differences, it was not to commend the Jewish people, but to condemn them. I wonder if our enemies, when describing us to others, would say something similar to what Haman did. Would they say that we are a peculiar people, or do we look like and act like the world so much that they can’t tell the difference? We sometimes don’t know the reasons why God may have us in the places He does, but we can be sure it is in order that we might “proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9). Just something to think about…
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