Episode 14 – Esther Part 2
Welcome to the Proverbs 9:10 podcast, No Trash, Just Truth! We’re your hosts and co-founders of Proverbs 9:10 Ministries, Rose Spiller and Chris Paxson. In the last episode, we began a series called Women in Scripture. We began by looking at the first 2 chapters in the book of Esther. In this episode, we continue with chapters three and four. Rose, why don’t you get us started.
I will! So, right at the beginning of Chapter 3, we’re introduced to someone new, Haman the Agagite, who King Xerxes promotes to a position above all of his other officials.
Right. And like you mentioned in part 1, if you don’t know the backstory of Haman’s relatives and the Jews, Mordecai’s relatives, you miss out on some important issues going on.
You do. And to fill in that backstory, Haman, the man who we’re talking about in the narrative of Esther, is a distant relative of the Amalekites – a people group who attacked the Israelites when Moses was leading them out of Egypt toward the Promised Land.
This was long before Haman’s time, but what his ancestors did was totally unjust!
It was! The assault on the Israelites was completely unprovoked! They attacked them from the rear cutting off “those who were lagging behind” when they were “weary and worn out “according to Deuteronomy 25:18. They basically killed the weakest, most tired, and the sickest of the Jews.
And because the Amalekites did that, God was angry and decided to punish the Amelekites. He told His people “when the LORD your God has given you rest from all your surrounding enemies, (meaning after He’d settled the Israelites in the Promised Land) you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you must not forget.”
Fast forward to the time of King Saul, Israel’s first king. King Saul is the one God commands to be his agent to punish the Amalekites. He commands King Saul to wipe the Amalekites out. In 1 Samuel 15:3, the Lord says to Saul through the prophet Samuel “Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destructionall that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”
Those are tough words to hear, no doubt, and even tougher to obey, but we need to understand that this is God’s judgement on a wicked, pagan people. He would not, and could not overlook their sin, especially since it was against His people.
Chris, as tough as this passage is to read, this is a foreshadowing of what will happen when Jesus comes back. Jesus is going to separate His people from everyone else.
Matthew chapter 25 shows us this. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. 34 Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
Chris, the story of the Amalekites and these verses in Matthew are hard verses, but this is what we all deserve! And for those of us who have been saved by Christ, this should bring us to our knees in gratitude.
I agree! If you read the passage in 1 Samuel, you’ll see that King Saul didn’t have a problem with this directive from God. He understood that it was God’s judgement on the Amalekites and that as the sovereign creator, God had every right to punish them.
So the problem isn’t that Saul had a moral issue with obeying God, but there is a problem.
There is. Saul’s problem is that he’s greedy. Saul doesn’t fully obey God. Instead, he lets some of the Amalekites escape (which we find out later in Israel’s history), and he brings back to camp alive King Agag and the best of the animals and other things that had value. He doesn’t spare people and animals because he feels sorry for them. That obvious, because he does kill most of the people, and he only brings back the best of the goods! He spares them because he wants to own them! When he is confronted by the prophet Samuel about his disobedience, King Saul gives a bogus reason for doing it.
Yeah. He tries to defend himself by claiming that he followed the Lord’s command to destroy everything, but his troops didn’t listen because they wanted to bring some of the best things back in order to devote them or “to sacrifice them to the LORD.”
What a great commander! He blames the troops he’s in charge of, and then tries to justify their actions by saying they were “doing it for the Lord”!
It’s easy to roll our eyes at King Saul and the Israelites and think they are a disgrace. They can’t even obey a very clear command from God. But, you know, Chris, we can find ourselves doing this same type of thing sometimes! We can be doing something we know we shouldn’t be, something that we know is disobedient to what God’s Word says. We then “try to make up for it” by doing extra work for the church, giving extra money, or maybe having a super pious attitude to cover up for the fact that we have sinned. But trying to “make up” for our sin by doing extra credit is never pleasing to God.
No, it’s not! And If we find ourselves thinking that way, we should heed the answer King Saul gets – that it’s better to obey than to sacrifice! King Saul had only partially destroyed the Amalekites and their stuff. The sacrifices of the spared animals wouldn’t make up for it!
Partial obedience isn’t obedience!
No, it isn’t. And getting back to the book of Esther, we see that Saul’s sin is still bringing consequences on the Jews. This is the tension we see between Hamman the Agagite, descendant of the Amalekites, and Mordecai the Jew.
Yes. At the end of Esther Chapter 2, Mordecai the Jew finds out about a plot to take the king’s life and he warns the King in time, but is never rewarded for it.
And like we said last time, not getting rewarded for saving the king’s life would have been unusual in that time, or probably in any time!
And, as God often does, something opposite of what we think should happen happens – Haman get promoted by the king to the top of the food chain! Just under the king.
You know there’s something interesting in this part of the narrative.
What’s that?
Esther 3:2 says, “And all the king's servants who were at the king's gate bowed down and paid homage to Haman, for the king had so commanded concerning him. It would have been a given that you bowed down to the second highest man in the kingdom, yet the king has to command the people to do so. That shows you that Haman must not have not been very likable and even the king knew this, so he commands the people to show Haman respect.
I’m wondering if he hadn’t commanded it, if a lot of people would have refused to bow down to him.
I wonder that too, but since the king does command it, everyone bows to Haman. Well, everyone except one.
And then the problems start!
They sure do! Now, Haman has all the king’s servants bowing down to him, because the king commanded them to! But, Mordecai defies the King’s command and refuses to bow to Haman.
There’re some differing opinions as to whether Mordecai is right in not obeying the King’s command. And we’re not told specifically why he refused to. But if Mordecai had bowed down, the whole story would have been different.
And do you know what I think is kind of funny about this whole ‘bowing down’ thing – Haman, as prideful as he is, doesn’t even realize it himself that Mordecai isn’t bowing! He has to be told by others, who also tell him that Mordecai is a Jew.
And when he is told, he’s angry!
And not just at Mordecai – at all the Jews! He wants them all dead. So he goes to the king and proposes the idea that all of the Jews throughout the land be destroyed. He even offers to pay the king to let him do it!
He basically lies to the king to get this done. He tells the king that this group of people is scattered all throughout the kingdom, and that the don’t keep the king’s laws; however, it’s only Mordecai that we’re told isn’t keeping the king’s law in this instance.
And he also tells the king that it would be “to his profit” to obliterate them. That was probably far from the truth when it came to the large number of people the king would lose in taxation!
What Haman doesn’t realize, though, is that Queen Esther is a Jew. And the King doesn’t know that either, and he gives Haman the right to do whatever seems best with the Jews of the land. Haman sends a copy of the of the decree to tell all the peoples of the land to be ready for that day, “to kill, and to annihilate all Jews, young and old, women and children, in one day, the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is the month of Adar, and to plunder their goods” according to Esther 3:13-14.
This isn’t scheduled to happen right away. It’s probably about 11 months later. And the people in the city of Susa were perplexed by the order!
The Jewish people had been living amongst them for a long time. And although there were more enemies in the land than just Haman and his family (as we see later), not everyone in the land hated the Jews. Can you imagine being told that there is a day set eleven months from now that you (and others) are supposed to kill a group of people who have been your neighbors and friends, or at the very least, familiar faces in your town for your whole life?
It reminds me of German citizens who hid or helped their fellow citizens who were Jews during the Holocaust. Some of them must have been perplexed by what was happening.
Of course, Mordecai learns about this edict, probably pretty quickly, and the Bible says he “put on sackcloth and ashes” which were signs of mourning and went to the king’s gate to cry out. He couldn’t enter dressed that way, but he got the attention of the people who would get word to Queen Esther.
And Esther doesn’t try to find out what’s wrong at first – she just tries to make everything seem “okay” or “normal” by sending her cousin clothes to put on!
Right! We do the same thing sometimes – try to ignore what’s really happening to make everything seem like it’s fine!
But eventually she sees that’s not working and sends her eunuch, Hathach, to find out what’s wrong with Mordecai. The eunuchs were men who survived the very horrible and excruciating procedure of castration (and more than that), who afterward served in the king’s harems. Rose, I remember that when we taught Esther as a Bible study you described that procedure, but we won’t do that here.
No, we won’t. It was pretty brutal.
So, Hathach the eunuch goes to Mordecai, then back to Esther and tells her what’s going on. And not only that – Hathach says that her cousin Mordecai wants her to go to the king and beg and plead with him on behalf of her people.
This wasn’t a task to take lightly. Esther knew that unless the king summoned you to come before him that you were risking your life. If someone went before the king without being summoned, one of two things was going to happen; they were going to be killed, or the king was going to hold out his golden scepter toward them, which meant that he was sparing their life and they could approach him. The Jewish historian Josephus says “around this throne (of Xerxes) stood men with axes to kill those who came without being summoned.” And King Xerxes hadn’t called for Esther to come to him for thirty days.
I imagine she probably didn’t feel too confident. She might have felt that the king wasn’t that interested in her anymore. I would probably have thought, “Oh, great! This happens now, instead of two months ago when he wanted to see me!” But God’s timing often isn’t our timing.
No, it certainly isn’t! And Esther didn’t immediately say she would do it either! Christians, especially women, sometimes put Queen Esther on a pedestal, or tend to romanticize the story, but she basically tells her cousin she doesn’t want to because the king hasn’t called her. She’s fully in self-preservation mode!
Right. And Mordecai’s basically scolds her. He says, “Don’t think that just because you’re in the king’s palace you’re any safer than the rest of us! If you won’t help, deliverance for the Jews will come from another place, but you and your family will perish.” And then he says what’s probably the most famous line from the book of Esther, “And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”
Mordecai knows that God will deliver his covenant people...either through Esther, or through someone or something else. He sees the necessity of God intervening to save them, so he’s confident that it will happen. But his statement “And who knows, maybe you are here for such a time as this” shows that Mordecai does not know how those plans are going to unfold. Mordecai is just explaining to Esther that maybe God has providentially ordered the events of her life to put her in position to act on behalf of the Jews. Therefore, he encouraged her to act with courage and faith.
We don’t know the steps we’re to take in advance...it’s only looking back that we see how the plans unfolded. We do not know what God has decreed for the future, which we call God’s decretive will. We don’t know how He is providentially working with His creation to have those plans unfold either. But the Bible is clear that God ordains (meaning He orders, decrees, and destines) the means to the ends, as well as the ends of human events without violating human freedom and responsibility. So, Esther has a choice to make.
She sure does. And her cousin has just reminded her of the position she holds, and that she might have been “put here” for this very purpose. There’s no guarantee here. Esther doesn’t have a magic 8 ball that gives Divine answers. She has no way of knowing God’s decretive will for her life any more than anybody else on the planet does. Because we can’t know that.
You’re right – there’s no magic 8 ball. And what we see from the text is that Esther doesn’t fret and worry about what God’s will is for her future, and she doesn’t’ ask for a sign or a signal. She makes up her mind to do the godly thing and try to save her people, and she commits herself and others to fasting (which you said before included prayer for the Jews) and she does all this before she goes to the king.
Right! Esther has resigned herself that it is better to be obedient than disobedient; better to trust that God may work through her than to sit back and do nothing. She knows Whose hands her life is truly resting in. So, she steps out in faith.
What her cousin Mordecai said to her was good advice for all of us. Just like Esther, we are also where we are, have what we have, live where we live, work where we work, etc., because God placed us here. Acts 17:26 says, “he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,” There is no more ideal place for you to serve right now than the place where He has already put you.
That’s what Mordecai was basically telling her – “God put you here, maybe for this purpose”. Ephesians 2:10 says, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Esther could have been walking straight into her death! Like I said before, there were no guarantees. Just because we make a choice that morally right, godly, or biblical doesn’t guarantee that we’ll be safe, that our efforts will be used by God in the ways that we hope they will, nor does it guarantee that nothing bad (from our earthly perspective) will happen to us.
Just to clarify, you’re saying that just because we do something good, even something that would be God-glorifying, and we do it (as much as our sinful hearts can) for His glory alone doesn’t guarantee success, or even safety.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. But we step out in faith and we do these things anyway.
That leads us right into the end of the fourth chapter of Esther. After asking her cousin to gather all the Jews in the city of Susa for three nights of prayer and fasting, Esther’s last statement is “Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.” She doesn’t ask for a sign, she doesn’t ‘put out a fleece’, she doesn’t fret and worry. She commits herself to fasting (which we know from other places in the Bible involves prayer) for three days, asks other people to fast during that time too, and sets her face forward toward the task, knowing Who’s in charge of all that happens and trusting Him to do with her efforts whatever He does.
That reminds me of Luke 9:62 where Jesus says, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Jesus said a lot about not having divided interests, in other words, not serving two masters – God and yourself! There is a cost to following Jesus.
There is. But He’s worth it! Rose, I think that just about wraps up chapters 3 and 4 and our time for today!
It does! Join us next week for part 3 to find out what happens to Queen Esther, Mordecai, and Haman! We hope you’re enjoying our series Women in Scripture so far and this teaching from the book of Esther! If you like what you heard, please rate and review us on Apple, on through whatever platform you are listening. And please feel free to leave and questions, comments and feedback you may have.
We’d love to hear from you! Have a blessed day!