Book of Esther - Part 13

We had come through chapter 4 and into chapter 5, and let me just review a little bit for our visitors.

We have a few visitors with us that hadn't been following along verse by verse, obviously, and it may have been a while since you went through this wonderful book, but it is a book on the destiny of God.

It's a book on how he orchestrates your life, and so you find it through and through this book.

It's a wonderful true story of true lives of God's people, but also an object lesson for all of us today, because we can look at all of the stories in the

Old Testament, and they're all object lessons to teach us spiritual truths about our walk with the

Lord. So what we have seen up until now is, first of all, God put Mordecai and Esther in the right place at the right time, but it happened through many things that we would have considered to be bad things.

For example, Esther's parents were killed probably in the war when Babylon came in and destroyed

Israel, and scattered them, took them as slaves, and scattered them all over the known world of the day.

That seems like a terrible thing, but through that it caused Mordecai to be the one who raised

Esther, and he happened to be placed in a little place where he lived.

I don't know what it looked like, but it was right at the gate of the king's palace. The most powerful king of the entire world, his name was

Artaxerxes, is how it's named in profane history, but he literally controlled the known world of that day.

Very powerful king, and Mordecai lived right there in the court.

Somehow, that's where God placed him because he had been taken captive many years earlier, and so he was raising

Esther, which I think Charlotte figured this out for me, that that ends up being his cousin, but he's so much older that she looks at him as her dad, and he did a magnificent job of child -rearing, and you find many points in the book of Esther on that that would help parents be better at raising children, and she was quite an obedient young lady.

For example, he told her, don't tell the king you're Jewish, so she didn't.

She was quiet on that issue, and it comes to be interesting, you see later, why that was important, but so you see that Mordecai and Esther were put just in the right place at the right time.

Did you know that many of the things that happened in their lives seemed to be bad at the time they were happening, but if those things had not happened, they would not have been in the right place at the right time, nor would they have been where they should have been as human beings either, so we have to realize that's true of all of us.

Everything that happens, and we call some things good, and we call some things bad, but God uses all of it to put us where we're supposed to be at the right place, the right time, and be who we're supposed to be at that time.

You don't grow when times are good. You grow when you're going through tribulation, and that's when you really, really grow, put the roots down, and then when

God brings you time of peace, again, you usually sprout up and get taller, but the real building is when the roots are going down.

You don't always see the tree growing during times like that, and so growth is not linear. Did you know that?

It's not linear. Your spiritual growth is like this. You have plateaus, and then it jumps up a little, and you go like this, and it jumps up a little, and that's how it is with nearly every living thing on the earth, so we see they're in the right place at the right time.

The second thing we have seen is this spiritual warfare taking place. Satan placed in the heart of Haman, this man named

Haman, to hate Mordecai and to hate the entire race of the Jews and to plot the destruction of an entire people, and he goes before the king, and he lies about him, and he makes them look just terrible.

He says, you know, they're scattered all over your kingdom, and he said, their laws are perverted. They don't have same laws as you do.

They have their own laws, and they're perverted, and it's not fitting that you should let suffer them to live.

You should destroy them because they're not going to be an asset to your kingdom, and he put that again and again and again in the mind of that king until finally he convinced the king to pass a proclamation, not only to have all the

Jews killed, but also to finance it and pay anyone who would kill a Jew to get paid money for it, so it was all in place, and it comes right down to the place where Mordecai, oh well we skipped the part about how the king had gotten angry at his wife earlier and just got rid of her, and he put a search out over the entire known world for all the most beautiful young virgin girls, usually around 14, 15 year old, around that age, and to bring them all in, and the king would choose one for his new wife.

We skipped that part, and so they knock on the door, and they, Mordecai opens the door, they said, we're taking her, and see that's how it was.

That's how governments have always been. United States, this freedom that we have is just an experiment in history.

It's never been this way, and yet we're so used to it, we think, well that never happened. Well, it was normal for things like this to happen, so they just knock on the door, and the king's men come and say, we're taking her, so that Mordecai said, okay take her, so they took her.

She was just one of thousands, and yet because he had raised her so well, her character was that much higher than all the other young girls.

Her speech, her ability to articulate with the king, and talk about things that interested him, and she was pretty.

That didn't hurt, and all of that happened, and she became the one he chose, so she finds herself as the queen, and now all this proclamation goes out to kill all the

Jews, and Mordecai sends a messenger in to talk to Esther, and say, look this is what's happening.

You may not even be aware of it, but if you don't go in and convince the king, he's going to kill all of our people, all of our family, and you, and me eventually, and she said, well

I can't do that, because the law of the Persian says that if I go before the king without him inviting me in, that's the death penalty, and he said, well you're going to die.

You're going to die. If you don't do it, they're going to find out you're a Jew, and they're going to kill you, and they're going to kill me, and he said, if you don't let

God use you as an instrument, he will raise up another instrument, and he's going to save the nation, but you will die, so he got her attention, and so she, he got her attention very rapidly, so he said, now she said, if you're going to ask me to do this, then

I want you to pass word to all of our Jewish family and the nation to fast and pray for me, or else he's going to kill me, and then she also told her young women that she was, that took care of her in the palace to also fast and pray, so there's a lot of fasting and praying going on, and then that brought us up just about to the place where we were last time.

We talked about her trepidation and fear and all of the imaginings that went on in her heart.

We've been there, haven't we? We always imagine the worst that can happen, don't we? And we think about that, and we think about it, it's almost like it's real, and it affects our health, it affects everything, and she just knew that if she went in there without him calling her in there, and he hadn't called her in there in 30 days.

She hadn't seen him in 30 days. She said, if I just walk in there, he's going to kill me, and so we're just about to,

I'm going to read that one verse again where it shows what he did when she walked in there is nothing like what she had imagined.

Totally, totally nothing like all the worries that she had. It was all for naught, but then

I want to show us a little bit where we're headed in this little study here, is there are a couple of theological concepts that have been debated through the years, not just in Christianity, not just in Judaism, but in all the world religions, and it's called the concept of whether God is a transcendent

God or an imminent God, and those are the theological terms used for that. Transcendent means that he is outside of everything, and he is not part of this because he's bigger than this.

He's holy, in other words, and he is not in time and in space and around sin.

He's separated from it, and there are quite a few religions that strictly view

God that way. Imminence means that he is a God that is present and involved with everything, and there's some cults and some false religions that take that too far, and the

Hinduism is one, for example. They literally believe God is in everything, like he's in this wood, he's in the cow, therefore we can't kill the cow.

He's in the bug, so we can't kill the bug, you know, things like that, and they just take that really far, and the truth is there's a balance in the middle, and that's who

God reveals himself to be. The Father, when we think of God as the Father, he is transcendent.

He is holy. Sin cannot come into his presence and will not. As a matter of fact, he's not in time. He's outside of time.

He's the I Am. If he came into time, he would destroy everything because he's always now, and we have to have sequential time for all this matter to exist, so if he came into it and everything became just now, it would all just destroy.

In fact, there's a scripture that says that if the Father came into this universe, it would flee from him.

Picture that. Picture all the molecules and atoms and everything just like that, you see, so he's transcendent, but Jesus Christ and the

Holy Spirit is a way that God becomes imminent. As a matter of fact, he's in this room with us today.

As a matter of fact, more than just being in the room, he's inside of you, so you are baptized into him. Now, the word baptized means immersed.

You're immersed in God, so he's imminent. He is all around us in this room today.

He's omnipresent, but he's also indwelling your heart and lives within you, so he is very imminent.

One thing we're going to see in the study of Esther as we get into these final chapters is the imminence of God becomes so amazingly obvious that God is not just a

God who created everything, spoke it all into existence, and then gets up into heaven and sits there like this and says, let's see how this thing will turn out.

That's not how God is. God is right here in the middle of all of it, controlling all of it, holding all of it together, making it all work, and that includes us as well.

Jesus said this. He said, without me, you can do nothing. That's imminence. So you can't just go out on your own.

We think we can, but you can't. There's nothing we can do without him. We can't even live without him. He is life.

He's our life. We can't have knowledge without him. He's our light. We can't do anything without him.

We're nothing but clay. We're just like elements without him. So he is very imminent, and you're going to see this again and again.

So let's go back to this place where she had built up this sphere, and she had everyone and all the

Jews praying for her and fasting for her and all of her attendants praying and fasting, and she finally goes into the presence of the king.

Now, the law was like this. If you go into his presence uninvited, it's the death penalty, but there is a way around that, and that is if he extends his scepter, then you can approach, and if he lets you touch it, then you get to live.

It means he's willing to see you, and so the law is abrogated at that point, and you get to live.

So here she goes in, and it says in chapter 5, and it was so when the king saw

Esther the queen standing in the court that she obtained favor in his sight, and the king held out to Esther the golden scepter that was in his hand.

So Esther drew near and touched the top of the scepter. Now look at this. Then said the king unto her, what wilt thou, queen

Esther, and what is thy request? It shall be given thee even to the half of my kingdom.

I mean, that's all he said. So she had him pictured as he was just going to annihilate her.

She walks in, and he's all bubbly and happy and in love with her and just says, okay, you came in here.

You must need something. Well, go ahead and ask. Whatever you ask, if even half of my everything I own in the world, which was the whole world, by the way, he owned the world.

He said you can have up to half of it. What do you want? Do you think she expected to hear that? She did not.

And here you see God orchestrating everything. He had placed that love in that man's heart.

He had placed her in the right place where his eye would see her, and he would fall in love with her, and she would become the queen, and she didn't really need to be worrying, did she?

Esther answered and said, if it seemed good unto the king, let the king and Haman come this day unto the banquet that I have prepared for him.

Now, Haman is this evil man who literally his lineage goes all the way back to Esau, who is a picture of the flesh in the bad sense of that word, and he wanted to kill every

Jew. Now, she had already put some thought into this, no doubt. She had put some thought.

Now, if he doesn't kill me and he asks me what I want, what am I going to say? So she already had a plan, and she said,

I'm going to have a banquet, and I'm going to invite the king, my husband, and his right -hand man,

Haman, just the two of them to come to the banquet. And she had plans for what was going to happen when they got there as well.

So the king extends the scepter, which opens the door for her to step through it with her plan.

So she says, well, here's what I want. I don't want half the kingdom. She said, I just want you and Haman to come to a banquet that I'm going to put together, a nice meal that I'm going to put together and prepare for you.

So then the king said, well, cause Haman to make haste that he may do as Esther has said.

So the king and Haman came to the banquet that Esther had prepared, and the king said unto Esther at the banquet of wine, what is thy petition?

Because he thinks she's still going to ask for something even bigger. And it shall be granted thee.

And what is thy request? Even to half the kingdom, it shall be performed. He tells her again.

And then Esther answered and said, my petition and my request is this. If I have found favor in your sight, if it pleased the king to grant my petition and to perform my request, let the king and Haman come to the banquet that I shall prepare for them.

And I will do tomorrow as the king has said. So she says, we're going to have another one. So I want you to come tomorrow and we're going to do the same thing.

Now I want you to look at Haman now as, as he begins to explain to people in his circle, what's happening.

Then went Haman forth that day, joyful and with a glad heart. But when

Haman saw Mordecai, the king's at the king's gate, that he stood not up and wouldn't worship him.

He was full of indignation against Mordecai. Nevertheless, Haman refrained himself. And when he came home, he sent and called for his friends and Zeresh, his wife.

So now you see this hatred for Mordecai is still there. And yet he's so joyful because he of all of the people of the entire known world was the one person chosen by the queen to come and have dinner with her.

He is so prideful. He just knows he is it. And he's going to go brag about it.

So it says in the next verse, Haman told them of the glory of his riches. He had all of his friends around and his wife, he started telling them how rich he was and pointing out all the stuff he had and the multitude of his children, how many children he had and was considered to be a blessing from the gods, you know, by Haman and all the things wherein the king had promoted him.

So now like I'm the right hand man in the whole kingdom and he's bragging about it and how he had advanced him above all the other princes and servants of the king.

And Haman said, moreover, yea, and even Esther the queen did let no man come in with the king to the banquet that she had prepared except myself.

She didn't invite anybody but me. He is puffed up. And he said, tomorrow

I'm invited to her also to another banquet with the king. Just me and the king. It's just me and the king and the queen.

And he is so puffed up. But now watch this.

His hatred is even greater than his joy. Look at this. Yet, see that word, even with all the bragging and all the joy he had in his heart, yet, all this availeth me nothing, he said, as long as I see

Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate. As long as he's alive, I don't care if I'm the only one invited to the banquet.

I am not happy. That's pretty serious hatred, isn't it? He wouldn't let it go.

And then said Zeresh his wife and all his friends to him, well, why don't you build some gallows and build them and make them 50 cubits high and tomorrow speak thou to the king.

When you go to the banquet, just talk to the king and say, well, let's kill Mordecai. We'll hang him. Let him be hanged their own.

Then you can go in merrily, happily with the king to the banquet. And the thing pleased

Haman and he caused the gallows to be built. See, he wasn't going to be able to even go to the second banquet and be happy unless Mordecai was killed.

So the wife gives him the way to do it. Now we go into chapter six. On that night could not the king sleep.

Now I want you to start thinking about the eminence of God. Sometimes we feel alone when we're going through trouble.

In fact, most of the time when you say that's how we feel. When we start entering into the time of trouble, our first thought is one of aloneness.

Our second thought is, well, God's with me, right? That's just natural. And the more natural we are and the less spiritual we are, the more predominant that thought of aloneness will be.

If we've been walking in the flesh, not walking with the Lord lately and then tribulation comes, which often is sent by his, it's always sent by his hand.

Perhaps even to bring us out of that period of fleshliness. But if we were already in that period, then the first thing we feel and experience is aloneness.

Well, I'm all alone and I'm going through trouble and I may just, it just may be the end of everything. That's how we feel. Just I'm going to lose everything.

It's just all over for me. And yet God is always there.

It's just when we're in the flesh, we push him away, so to speak, and we're not aware of his presence, but it has never changed.

And so here, Esther thought she was all alone in this trouble and yet the

Lord was there. And here we have Haman plotting and building the gallows and all of this money has gone out to kill all the

Jews. Everything looks as bad as it can look. And yet look what God is doing.

The king himself can't sleep. Why do you think he can't sleep? Who do you think it is that's keeping him awake?

It's the spirit of God. Spirit of God wouldn't let him sleep. So since he couldn't sleep, he commanded his men to bring what he calls the book of records of the chronicles and they were to read before the king.

So what the king would do when he couldn't sleep, he'd go get him to bring the log of everything that's happening in his kingdom.

Because I mean, think about it. If you were the president over the entire world today, that's how big this was. He doesn't know what's going on in the far reaches of his own kingdom.

So he has them bring when he can't sleep, they bring the book in and they read to him everything that's happened in the different districts of his nation so he can put it in there and know it.

This man was, you know, he was a time manager. If he couldn't sleep, he said, I'm just going to lay here. I'm going to work, bring the books in, tell me everything

I've missed lately that I need to know of. That's exactly what he did. So they bring them in and it was found written that Mordecai, the man who was raising

Esther, who Haman hated and had just built the gallows for to kill, they're reading from the book to the king and says, well, there was this man named

Mordecai who told us of big Thana and Teresh, who were two of the king's chamberlains, the keepers of the door who sought to lay hand on King Ahasuerus.

Now that's the Hebrew name for Artaxerxes, same king. And so there were two men that guarded the door going into the palace area that had plotted to assassinate the king.

And since the king walked in and out through there, they had access to him. They could have killed him. Well, Mordecai's little place of abode was right at that gate and he heard them whispering.

And earlier he had sent word in to Esther, this is what I, Esther, this is what I've heard. You might want to let the king know there's two men going to try to kill him.

And she did. And the king had them arrested and questioned, found out it was true and hung them. So they're already dead.

But the king never did know who it was that turned him in. He never knew why it was he was fortunate enough to have known about it before he was assassinated.

And here they are reading this and he finds out why. It says that, you know, that they began, these two men were keepers of the door and they sought to lay hand on you.

And the king said, so it was Mordecai that told us about this, huh? And look what he says, well, what honor and dignity has been done to Mordecai for this?

Surely you're my servants. You're supposed to be finding things to do that I would do. Can't watch it all.

What'd y 'all do for this man? They said nothing. We didn't really do anything for him. And I'm pretty much sure they were pretty fearful when they had to report that because they knew that the king was now angry.

So they said, well, then the king's servant that ministered to him said, well, there's nothing done for him. And the king said, and I want you to look at the irony of this.

The man who the gallows are being built for and the king couldn't sleep at night by accident, right?

You see the eminence of God. There's nothing, nothing happens by accident. They read the story, the story about how his life was saved by this man named

Mordecai. And they said, well, what'd you do for him? Nothing. So look what he does.

Now this is hilarious. So the king says, well, who's in my court right now? It's late at night. Is there any, are any of my counselors still hanging around the court?

And they said, well, there's only one. And he said, well, who's out there? And they said, Haman's out there. Oh, really?

Well, have him come in. I want to ask his advice. Haman's hanging around out there because he can't sleep either because he's plotting the murder of Mordecai and they're out there building, they're hammering and nailing, building some gallows.

So they, well, Haman is hanging around out there and in the king's house to speak to the king because he's going to, he was going to speak to him about hanging

Mordecai on the gallows that he had prepared. And the king's servant said unto him, behold,

Haman standeth in the court. And the king said, well, let him come in. So Haman comes in and the king says to him before, before Haman could even speak and say,

Hey, I'm building some gallows. I think we need to kill Mordecai. Before he could even say anything, the king spoke to him first and took up the conversation.

He just took control of the conversation. And so the king says to him, what shall be done to the man whom the king delighteth to honor?

Well, Haman immediately assumed that was himself, right? Because he's puffed up.

He says, well, this has got to be me. He's going to publicly honor me again. He's done it before.

He's going to do it again. So he begins to dream up what would I like to have done to me? And so he answers and Haman answers and says, for the man whom the king delighteth to honor, let's do this.

Let the royal apparel be brought, which the king used to wear. Let's take some of the king's old clothes he doesn't wear anymore and take the horse that the king rides on and the royal crown, which is set on the head and let this apparel and the horse be delivered to the hand of one of the king's most noble princes.

Well, of course that's him that they may array the man with all whom the king delighteth to honor and bring him on horseback through the street of the city and proclaim before him as he goes there.

They're screaming out in front of him as they go. Thus shall it be done to the man who the king delighteth in the honor.

So then the king said to Haman, make haste, take the apparel and the horse as thou has said, and do even so to Mordecai.

Now, how do you think he felt when that word came out? Do so to Mordecai, the

Jew that sitteth at the king's gate, let nothing fail of all that you spoke. And then took

Haman the apparel and the horse and arrayed Mordecai and brought him on horseback through the street of the city and proclaimed before him, thus shall it be done unto the man whom the king delighteth to honor.

And Mordecai came again to the king's gate, but Haman hasted to his house, mourning and having his head covered.

So he had to go out that day and do that all day, paraded him around the town and he had to holler out everywhere he went.

This is how the king treats men that he delights in. This is how the king treats men he delights in. Finally got it done.

He went home and he was upset. So he covers his head.

He's just ready to die. And he goes in and he's mourning and he tells his wife and all of his friends, everything that had befallen him.

He's not bragging now, is he? Look what his wife says. Not so much the encourager here.

Then said his wise men and Zeresh his wife unto him, if Mordecai be of the seed of the

Jews before whom thou hast begun to fall, they said, you're already falling.

You're already losing your position. Thou shalt not prevail against him, but shalt surely fall before him.

They told him that right there. And while they were yet talking with him, came the king's chamberlains and hasted to bring

Haman unto the banquet that Esther had prepared. So is

God transcendent and just not having anything to do with anything we do and just left us down here to see how it works out or is he orchestrating everything?

So we come back next time. We're going to go into this next chapter and we're going to see

Esther's plot of how she planned out this second banquet and see what happens.

But remember, none of this could have happened if the Lord hadn't kept the king from sleeping that night, could it?

So he's involved with everything in our lives. Let's stand and have prayer together. Lord, we thank you so much for your word today.

We thank you for how it encourages us to realize that you have taken us through tribulation and trial and hardships and joys and happiness and all the different things in our lives and brought us right exactly to where we are today.

And we're right where we're supposed to be. And you're going to continue that in our lives until we meet the

Lord Jesus face to face someday. So help us to remember that all of it is for our good.

It all works together for our good. It all works together to transform us into the image of Jesus Christ, which is good.

And help us when times of trouble come not to feel alone, not to feel as if you're transcendent and have nothing to do with us, but to realize the truth of the fact that you are, not only have already planned everything that would happen, the means of it, but you come into time and space yourself and you're right there with us through everything.

Help us to remember that we're all going to need that memory, that thought, that truth someday. And so Lord, we just ask you to go with us into our time of fellowship now.