The Death of Death (Esther 7) — Esther: The Invisible Hand of Providence

There's a moment in every good story where everything turns, right?

The plot twist where the villain who seemed untouchable is suddenly exposed, where the people who were marked for destruction walk out free, where the one who dug the pit falls into it himself.

We love those moments because we were made for them because God is a God who specializes in reversals and he's woven them throughout redemptive history.

Esther chapter seven is one of those moments. Haman, as we've known these past several weeks and months, even walking through this great book,

Haman is the most powerful man in Persia next to the king. And he walks into these banquets with the king and the queen hoping for a favor.

And yet he walks out here in chapter seven, as we'll see, carried to his own execution.

The gallows that he built for Mordecai become his own end and the people that he sought to destroy are saved.

But here's what I want you to see this Easter, in particular, as we look at Esther chapter seven, is that this is not just a great story, right?

This isn't just good storytelling by God. It is a picture, a preview of the greatest reversal in the history of the cosmos, that being the cross of Jesus Christ and his resurrection three days later.

This is what we call a type, right? It's a foreshadowing of what is to come and what do we see ultimately in Jesus Christ.

And so again, open your Bibles today to Esther chapter seven and let us read what

God has written. So the king and Haman came to banquet with Esther, the queen, and the king said again unto

Esther on the second day at the banquet of wine, what is thy petition, Queen Esther? And it shall be granted thee.

And what is thy request? And it shall be performed. Even to the half of the kingdom. Then Esther, the queen answered and said, if I have found favor in thy sight,

O king, and if it pleased the king, let my life be given me at my petition and my people at my request.

For we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain and to perish.

But if we had been sold for bondmen and bondwomen, I had held my tongue, although the enemy could not countervail the king's damage.

Then the king Ahasuerus answered and said unto Esther, the queen, who is he and where is he?

Let us presume in his heart to do so. And Esther said, the adversary and enemy is this wicked

Haman. And then Haman was afraid before the king and the queen and the king arising from the banquet of wine and his wrath went into the palace garden and Haman stood up to make requests for his life to Esther, the queen, for he saw that there was evil determined against him by the king.

Then the king returned out of the palace garden into the place of the banquet of wine and Haman was fallen upon the bed whereon

Esther was. Then said the king, will he force the queen also before me in the house?

As the word went out of the king's mouth, they covered Haman's face. And Harbano, one of the chamberlains, said before the king, behold also the gallows 50 cubits high, which

Haman had made for Mordecai, who had spoken good for the king, standeth in the house of Haman. Then the king said, hang him there on.

So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then was the king's wrath pacified.

Thus ends the reading of God's holy word. May he write it on our hearts by faith. Thank you, God. Let's pray.

Father, again, we thank you for your word and we ask your help now as we consider this passage, this chapter in the great book of Esther and interpret its meaning, understand its meaning.

Lord, we ask your help and your grace to us, that your spirit would minister to us and help us to grow, be conformed into the image of the

Lord Jesus Christ, even by just the preaching of this word today. We ask your help in Jesus' name and amen.

Amen. In Esther chapter five and verse 14, Haman's wife and friends, if you remember, suggested that he build the gallows 50 cubits high to hang

Mordecai on. And then by chapter four of verse six, just a few verses later,

Haman had already come to the king's court to request permission to use it. The gallows was built for one person to be a sign of the end of God's people, to silence

Mordecai, to remove the threat, to make sure that those aligned with the God of Israel would be dealt with finally and permanently.

And this is what death always intends, right? Death is not neutral. It is an enemy. And it's the last enemy, even

Paul calls it. And it always has an agenda. From the garden forward, the serpent strategy has been elimination.

Get rid of the seed, cut off the line, hang them on the tree and let it be finished.

And yet there is a text that stands behind the whole of redemptive history and casts a very long shadow over it all.

And it certainly comes to bear here in the book of Esther. And that is Genesis chapter 50 and verse 20.

When Joseph speaking to the brothers who had sold him into slavery says this, that you meant it for evil, right?

You meant what you did to me for evil, but God meant it for good. Now it's easy to use this verse when we're in difficult seasons as a consolation, right?

And that's fine, we should do that, right? But we also need to be sure to embrace a verse like this for how much depth is actually there in it.

This is the declaration by God through Joseph that there is no evil scheme in human history that God has not already factored into his purposes and turned on its head.

There is not a single thing, single evil scheme that could happen in the history of the world that God has not already considered and determined how he will reverse it for the good of his people and for his glory.

What men mean for destruction, God means for salvation. This was true for Joseph. It was true for Esther in Mordecai.

It was true for Jesus. And it's true for us here today and everyone in between and everyone who will come after us.

And this is precisely what Peter preaches on Pentecost in Acts 2, verses 23 and 24.

Jesus of Nazareth, he says, was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.

And yet lawless men crucified and killed him. Both things are true, right? The cross was the cruelest human intention and yet it was the divine plan.

It was the eternal divine plan. And God raised him up, raised up Jesus, loosing the pangs of death because it was not possible for him to be held by it.

In the same way, Haman's gallows was meant to be the end of God's people, but God meant it for their salvation.

And so as you look at Haman, right? When the king orders his execution, he is hanged on the very gallows that he built for Mordecai.

And there's a justice here that's almost too good to be accidental, right? It's not accidental.

We know because nothing is accidental with the purposes of God, but it's almost too, what they call a divine justice or a perfect justice for Haman, right?

He builds the gallows for Mordecai and that's where he ends up dying. He's hung on them instead. But there's something else happening here that we can't miss.

That when Haman is hanged on that tree, he dies under a declaration that every

Jewish reader and every Jewish seer of this, when he's hanging there, would appreciate.

They would recognize what it means immediately. In Deuteronomy chapter 21, verses 22 and 23, it's very unambiguously declared that cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.

Haman dies the death of the cursed. He's not just executed, right?

But rather God in his providence had Haman build a gallows, right?

So that he would die a cursed man's death. He is marked by the providence of God for damnation.

He is condemned. He's cast out. The curse of the law falls on him and he bears it to his end.

This, it turns for us a little bit here when we sit and ponder these things and the weight of them, especially again on Easter and Holy Week in particular, because we have to ask ourselves, who is

Haman in this story? Esther being a great book of types and shadows. Again, who is Haman here in this story?

He's the enemy, surely, right? He is the schemer. He is the one who plotted destruction, who carried hatred in his chest like a furnace, who built a gallows for an innocent man, right?

He is the villain. He is in every moral sense of the word, the guilty party.

When he hangs on that tree, he hangs there because he deserves it. It doesn't offend us that he hangs there and dies there.

And it shouldn't. The curse lands on Haman because Haman earned it. But we also need to look at ourselves, not at your neighbor, not at your brother.

Look at yourself. You have schemed, you've harbored hatred, you've built gallows in your heart for people who wronged you.

You've lived for your own glory, your own comfort, your own kingdom. And in the honest reckoning of the law, the same law that declares cursed as everyone who hangs on a tree, it lands on you with the same verdict that it landed on Haman with, guilty, condemned, and cursed.

But this is the beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that in your sin, you were a

Haman and you deserve Haman's death. But instead of you receiving Haman's cursed death,

Jesus Christ became Haman for you. The sinless son of God in whom there was no plot, no hatred, no self -seeking, no guilt of any kind.

He took the place of the villain, right? We like types and shadows when they're easy and it's a good and righteous character.

We say, yeah, that points us to Jesus. We were talking about this at the breakfast table this morning at our home, how hard it is for our minds to grasp that Haman is a type of Jesus Christ to us in the book of Esther in his death.

He didn't come to stand, Jesus didn't come to stand next to us in our innocence. He came to stand in our place for our guilt.

He was numbered with the transgressors. He was treated as the schemer. He was treated as Haman, as the enemy, the one who deserved the gallows so that you and Mordecai and Esther and all the saints throughout history, the ones who actually deserved it, could walk out of the story free.

And Paul makes this explicit in Galatians chapter three at verse 13. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.

For it is written, Paul says, curse is everyone who hangs on a tree. He quotes Deuteronomy directly. The curse that Haman bore in his guilt,

Christ bore for us in our place in his innocence. This is the scandal of the gospel.

It's the great reversal that the gospel is in clear black and white. This is the thing that makes the angels lean over the battlements of heaven in astonishment at what

God is doing and what he did in Christ. This is why they rejoiced at his birth for they had a picture, a sense of what

God was doing, what he was bringing about in the life of this God -man, the Lord Jesus Christ. And it wasn't only the curse, right?

The New Testament piles the language high because the reality of it demands it. What Jesus did, the reality of it is so thick and dense with amazing fulfillment and work being done by Jesus in his death.

He became death itself. In Hebrews chapter two at verses 14 and 15, it tells us that he partook of flesh and blood so that through death, he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

Jesus didn't skirt around death, he absorbed it. His righteousness credited to ours, right?

And our debt, our sinfulness put onto his account. The book's balanced not by ignoring the debt.

Jesus didn't just say, you know what? Forget it, it's all good. But by paying it, he paid it in full for us.

Jesus became the recipient of the wrath of God in Isaiah chapter 53. It's the most searching passage in all the

Old Testament. It was the Lord's will to crush him. It says, he was struck down for our transgressions.

The punishment that brought us peace was laid on him. Every drop of divine wrath that our sin deserved was poured out, not abandoned, not deferred, not diminished, but fully, finally, and exhaustively poured out on the son of God, so that there is now none left for those who are in him.

The book of Esther is astonishing to me at least, for it's the rich typology.

Again, I've mentioned it a few times even today. It just, it astonishes me at how beautiful the pictures, how clear the pictures are when we, the types and shadows are when we see them through the lens of Christ.

But perhaps most astonishing of all is that in his death, again, Haman becomes a type of Christ to us. He takes on the cursed death on a tree, right?

But because Jesus is sinless, Jesus isn't standing there as a guilty party in and of himself.

He is the perfect spotless lamb of God. But God makes him who knew no sin to become sin for us.

He makes him to become like a Haman so that he could put sin and death to death by the pouring out of his wrath against it in the only way that would save his people, by taking the punishment for us as a substitute.

And like Ahasuerus in verse 10, God's wrath was pacified by this. And in all of it,

Jesus' death like Haman's, again, it represents the great reversal in that his gallows, just like the cross, were meant to destroy the people of God, but rather were used as instruments to save them, right?

You think, why do Christians, why is the cross such a prominent symbol in the Christian faith?

That's when Jesus died, right? And the reason is it's the same reason for the

Jews at the time of Esther. The gallows had changed. God had reversed their meaning.

They no longer were a sign of their pending death and doom and destruction. They were a sign of their salvation.

That cross is a sign of our salvation. It's not a sign of death. It's a sign of life to God's people.

And so what does this mean, right? What does the cross actually do? First, of course, again, it is the payment for sin with the theologians called propitiation.

Romans 3 24 -26 tells us that God put Christ forward as a propitiation, a payment by his blood to demonstrate his righteousness, right?

Propitiation means the wrath is satisfied. He is propitiated. He is satisfied with that, just like we saw with Ahasuerus.

The fire has burned. There's nothing left to burn. For every person who is united to Christ by faith, the judgment is done.

God is not angry at you. He cannot be angry at you because every ground for his anger was consumed at Calvary by Jesus Christ for you.

Second, the cross cancels the record against us. Colossians 2 13 -14 is one of, again, those most visually striking passages in the

New Testament. We talked about it a few weeks back as well earlier in the book of Esther, but Paul says that God canceled the written code, the certificate of death that stood against us with its legal demands.

He set it aside. He nailed it to the cross. The indictment is not filed away somewhere.

It's not pending appeal. It is nailed to the cross and destroyed. Your sin has no legal standing before God.

Anyone who would accuse you of anything before God is wrong. They are dismissed.

The punishment has already been paid by the Lord Jesus Christ and his death. The record is gone.

And third and most incredibly, the cross is the death of death. John 11 25 -26,

Jesus says, "'I am the resurrection and the life. "'Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.

"'And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.'" John 3 16, we read it earlier, the verse that even small children should be able to memorize.

And it's not merely a soft comfort to us. That whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.

It is a declaration of war against mortality. God gave his son so that everyone who believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

Death is not the last word. Christ is the last word. But we must be precise here.

Christ did not defeat death merely by dying. If death were the end of the story, the gallows wins and the grave wins.

And a dead savior is no savior at all. The defeat of death required life.

Romans 6 9 -11, we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him.

1 Corinthians 15, yeah, 1 Corinthians 15 20 -22, Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.

The resurrection is not an epilogue to the cross. It is the vindication of it.

It is God the Father declaring publicly before heaven and earth, that the work of the son was sufficient, accepted, and final, just as we see in Psalm 2.

And the life that Jesus won is the life that he gives. Romans 8 -11, it's a spirit of him who raised

Jesus from the dead dwells in you. He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who dwells in you.

The same power that rolled the stone away is living in every believer. This is not a metaphor, right?

This is not just inspirational language for hard times. This is the actual operative present tense reality of what it means to be in Christ.

The curse has been reversed. Revelation 22 -3, no longer will there be any curse.

What began in a garden with a serpent in a tree ends in a city with a throne in a tree of life, that being

Jesus. And the curse is simply finally forever gone. Romans 8 -1 -2, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Not less condemnation, right? Not a diminishing condemnation as you continue in your works.

There is no more condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, none.

And so why Easter is not a sentimental add -on to Christianity, right? It is the declaration that Jesus did not merely make salvation possible, but that he finished it.

And he stepped out of the grave to prove it. If Christ is still in the tomb, then the gallows is not truly empty, right?

The curse is not truly reversed. And our faith is just wishful thinking.

But if Christ is risen, and he is, then everything must change from it. Easter means that the cross has worked, that the sacrifice of Christ was sufficient.

The wrath of God is satisfied. The record of debt against you is canceled. Death has been defanged.

And now the church does not gather each week to remember a tragedy. We're really sad that we lost our

Lord. We don't know what we'll do, but to celebrate a victory and to live in the power of a living

King who will raise his people just as surely as he raised his son. And so how do we live in light of this?

How do we live in light of Easter and resurrection, what that means not just today, but every day as a

Christian? We are surrounded by a culture that is saturated in death.

Death of babies, death of families, death of institutions, death of meaning. And the temptation always is to meet death with more death, right, to respond to darkness with more darkness, to fight the culture's despair with our own brand of despair dressed up in a more righteous language.

But the empty tomb will not allow Christians to live that way. The answer to a culture of death is not more death, it is life.

Resurrection life poured out by the spirit of the risen Christ into the daily obedience of his people.

Romans 6, 4 tells us that we are buried with him so that just as Christ was raised, we too might walk in newness of life.

Jesus himself said in John 10, 10, that he came that we might have life and have it abundantly. Right, this is not meant to be a passive reality or an idea, it's not theory.

This is to be a lived reality. We live in the life of Christ, his resurrected life.

This is a mandate for a Christian. We bring truth into a world of lies.

We bring beauty into a world of ugliness. We bring goodness into a world that has forgotten what goodness looks like.

We build families, we establish churches, we make music, we write books. We do our work with excellence.

We love our neighbors with patience. And we refuse, absolutely refuse to let the culture of death have the last word in any square inch of territory that Jesus Christ has claimed.

And again, God says in Psalm 2, that everything will be given to him. And so we do not let lies and death reign in any of these places.

We speak truth and goodness and beauty in all of it. And we do this not grinding our teeth with an anxious striving, right?

Hoping that this is gonna work. We don't really know, we actually don't know that, we actually think that God's not gonna make this work.

No, we don't do it that way. We do it in confidence. We work in confidence with faith, literally.

And we do it with joy because the outcome is not in question, right? How God, what

God is doing is not a doubt in the mind of a Christian. He is redeeming and restoring, reconciling all of the world unto himself.

And he's using us to do it. Victory is certain, right? How it's gonna work out for us in everything that we do.

Is everything gonna work exactly how we hope? No. But we know that as we continue and persevere, the

Lord is good and kind and he means to bless his people. And he will ultimately see all of these things, all of his promises come to pass in Jesus Christ.

The curse has been reversed, right? What Haman's gallows could not accomplish, what death itself could not hold, has been dealt with decisively, permanently and irreversibly at the cross in the empty tomb of Jesus Christ.

Starting from that empty tomb, the church of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit has been carrying life into the world for 2000 years.

Our empires have risen and fallen. Enemies of the gospel have built their gallows. And yet the church is still here, still preaching, still growing, still bringing life because the one who sent us is alive.

The one who leads us is alive. And there's a long way to go yet, of course.

But from the household of God to the ends of the earth, there is ground to take and life to bring. And we go not as those who might lose, we go as those who have already won in Christ through the cross by the power of his resurrection, we have already won.

The gallows were a sign of the destruction of the people of God until God put Haman there instead and he made it to them a sign of their salvation.

That wooden cross was meant to be a sign of the cursing of the son of God, right? Satan thought that he had won and his death, that apparent victory for Satan was actually

God's work of freeing all of his people for all time from the power of sin and death.

Again, on Easter, we know that we are free. We know all these things to be true because our God lives.

The tomb is empty, the death has nowhere left to go. It has no sting, no power over us anymore.

And so may we follow in the train of the son of God for he is risen and he is risen indeed, amen?