Esther #6 Macrocodes in Esther Part 2 — Chuck Missler

The Hidden Hand of God in Esther

Well, we are in our final session on our study of the book of Esther. And the book of Esther, we really sort of covered in four sessions, but we've added two extra, as you've probably noticed. Very, very interesting book for many reasons.

The name Esther actually means, according to Cassinius, something hidden. And of course, there's much hidden there. One of the primary things that's hidden in the book of Esther, of course, is the hand of God.

Because one of the main discoveries, as you study the book, is to realize that God's hand is on every detail. We've had a lot of fun with the book, and I feel sorry for some of you in the audience who are joining us for the first evening, because this evening is going to be kind of confusing to you, because I'm going to have to sort of presume, you know, you've been through the book of Esther.

I thought about trying to review it first and so forth, but we won't use our time effectively if I try to go through the book even in summary form. But we do have a book here that was very controversial, because the name of God does not appear in the book.

Martin Luther was among those that championed the idea of removing it from the Bible. But it was in the sacred scriptures, the Old Testament, as we would call it, the Hebrew scriptures, considered it the word of God, in Christ's day, and he authenticated it.

So that's enough for Christians right there. But it also turns out, as you study the book, it turns out Martin Luther was wrong. The name of God is all through the book. But you have to know how to look for it.

I tend to overwork the phrase that I picked up from a Jewish writer, that coincidence is not a kosher word, okay? That there are no accidents in God's kingdom is sort of the Christian version of it. Another way of expressing coincidences are when God is working undercover, you see.

One of the other things that fascinates me about the book is that it hasn't been made into a movie, to my knowledge. There is one of the most dramatic stories, just for dramatic quality, in the scripture.

How this gal gets brought to the throne, queen of the Persian empire, at its peak. This wasn't, you know, some backwaters, second-rate outfit. This was the ruler of the world at the time, the Persian empire.

And she ends up as queen for some very, very strategic reasons, it turns out. And we have villains, we have Haman, and we have this sort of unseen hero, Mordecai. And we see the incredible ironies throughout the book.

So just in its dramatic quality, it's a fun book to get into. Because I don't think you can sit down and read just a chapter a day. You can't put it down. You want to find out and be sensitive to all the twists and ironies in the book.

But we went through the book in four sessions, but we added one last time because I felt it would be useful to go into what would be called microcodes. Now we're going to do something sort of related to that tonight, so let me back up a little bit.

Microcodes, Bible Codes, and Hidden Writing

One of the great controversies in the biblical world today are these issues of what they call Bible codes. And when you hear those controversies, they usually, what they're primarily focusing on, are a specific kind of code called an equidistant letter sequence.

We talked about those last time, I won't take you through all that again. But the main point I want to make, those are but one kind of hidden writing, attempts to include a message in some otherwise innocuous text.

There are things called codes, there are things called ciphers, they're not the same thing. But of ciphers, which is what most people mean when they think of secret codes, there are transpositions and substitutions, and there are many, many different kinds.

And we took two of them last time, acrostics and equidistant letter sequences, and showed you how the name of God appears no less than eight times in the book of Esther in rather dramatic terms. And the acrostics, of course, are well known to the ancient rabbinical literature.

I didn't invent them, I just happened to come across them, I collect those things. But it turns out it's well known among the Talmudic scholars. Of more recent discovery are the equidistant letter sequences, which have much the same effect.

But the point is, all those are microcodes, codes that hang up on the letters themselves, if you will. They're microscopic, they look at the details. And it's fascinating that the Bible is full of microcodes.

And by the way, to me, the least interesting are the ELSs, the equidistant letter sequences, that create all the controversy. Let's set those controversies aside with neither a yay or a nay, and look at the rest.

They're all kinds. I've written a 515-page book that I thought I would go through very carefully with you this evening, but I suspect your enthusiasm would wane very quickly. There are another whole class of codes, called macrocodes.

Think of microcodes as manipulating letters or fractions thereof, you see. That would be a microcode. And Jesus hinted that there were microcodes there. He says, think not that I come to destroy the Torah or the prophets, I come not to destroy but to fulfill.

Verily I say unto you, that was His way of putting an underline, verily I say unto you, not one yawt or one tittle shall pass from the law till all be fulfilled. Now, a yawt or a tittle are... a yawt's like an apostrophe.

A tittle is a little decorative hook on one of the letters. So right then you begin to realize that there's more there, and by the way, you'd expect that if it was the Word of God. You know, I'm very annoyed that some very good Christian authors are attacking the concept of Bible codes in general, by saying that God doesn't put things in His Word that the common man cannot understand.

That's nonsense. It is true that His central truths and His plan of redemption are absolutely impossible to miss, unless you're blinded. Of course, most people without the Spirit of God are blinded, but I don't want to get into that whole theological debate.

The point is, yes, indeed, the central truths are understandable to babes and so forth. Jesus even says... mentions that. But it would surprise me if an infinite God gave us His Word, and that it was totally fathomable by a finite man.

It doesn't surprise me to discover that no matter how much you study it, you continually find further secrets hidden behind the rest. Or is it Proverbs 25 too, that it's God's role to hide things, it's the privilege of kings to search them out.

So there are hidden things in there, and I say, gee, they're not secret codes in the Bible. Gee, that's funny. I thought that's what Daniel did on the handwriting on the wall. Didn't he decipher a code that no one else could?

It's right there. There's a secret code. And if you're a study of cryptography, you study the history of cryptography, and any of the authoritative texts, typically David Kahn, the Code Breaker is probably one of the most common ones, it points out that there are forms of encryption in the Scripture, and to a student of cryptography, they're just historical oddities.

But to someone who recognizes the supernatural origin of the Bible, these things are staggering in their application because they're signposts. If those are there, then there are others. So the point is there are microcodes, but I set all that to change the subject to macrocodes.

Macrocodes as Biblical Models and Foreshadowing

Now what do I mean by a macrocode? And for that, let me ask you a couple of questions. How many of you in this audience have used a computer? Okay, good. How many of you have used a word processor? Most people today that use a computer have used a word processor, and you know that you can type things, and you can also, in addition to just putting the text together, your word processor will determine what font, whether it should be italics, where the margins are, what your tabs, all that kind of stuff, right?

It turns out that most sophisticated, some of the more advanced word processors, most commonly used ones, also indulge in what are called macrocodes. For example, if you're going to sit down and send somebody a letter, there's a code you can indicate that will format it for you.

If you say, no, no, no, I'm going to send a fax, it'll set up the fax for you, and so forth. In other words, many of them are built in, the standard ones, but you also, and most of them, have the ability to define your own.

If you're in a company and you do a certain thing a certain way all the time, you can put together some codes that are called by a macrocode that will do all that for you. The point is, a macrocode is a term used by computer programmers for a collection of codes, let me say a collection of microcodes, perhaps, that perform some larger task.

Some of the things that macrocodes do are outside time. For example, if you tell your computer you're going to send a fax, it already sets up the margin, sets that all up. You haven't said anything in your fax yet, but it's set that up in advance, do you follow me?

Those are macrocodes. Now, it may surprise you to discover that there are macrocodes in the Bible. And to me, they are the most provocative, and by the way, you don't need a computer for them. I'm just using the computer as a way to get the idea across.

And what we're going to get into tonight is certainly not the most obvious of them. In fact, it's maybe quite conjectural, we'll get to that. But if we talk about macrocodes, one of the things they include is what biblical authors typically call a type.

That's a term you won't be comfortable with unless you do a lot of biblical scholastic reading. The term that we use in our vocabulary more often is a model. If you build a house and it has complicated levels, a split level or something, the architect may actually build a model so you can visualize how the spaces interact.

You build a model to represent certain aspects of that house. If you're going to build an aircraft wing, you on a computer can build a mathematical model of that wing that'll test its structure and its resonance and other things.

Models that we deal with mathematical models all the time, we deal with physical models all the time. So a type is like a model, and there are certain stories in the Bible that are models of something forthcoming.

Now, perhaps the classic example, there are hundreds of them, and they're actually books published of just lists of the different types and models in scripture. But the classic one, of course, is what the Hebrews call the Akedah, Abraham's offering of Isaac.

Now, Abraham really offered Isaac. That story in Genesis 22 isn't contrived, it actually happened. And yet, when you study that story carefully, it starts to raise all kinds of provocative questions that it also answers, in effect.

Because here Abraham's told to offer his son Isaac. You mean the Bible endorses child sacrifice? Heaven forbid, no. Well, what's going on there? We discover he's designated as the only son of Abraham.

Abraham already had Ishmael, he had two sons, at least as far as Abraham's concerned, not as far as God's concerned, for that purpose. And as we study that, first of all, Abraham gets that commandment, and the next day he takes off to fulfill it, to offer his son as an offering.

By the time you get to chapter 22, Abraham's learned his lessons, he's pretty sharp. He has a lot of stumbles earlier in the book, but by 22 he's got it together, when God says it, he's going to do it.

They travel three days, turns out to be a very significant period of time. They get to the hill that God led them to, and leave the two young men and the donkey in the basin. They go up the hill, Isaac's carrying the wood on his back, and says, Abraham, where's the land for the offering?

Abraham says, God's going to provide himself a land for the offering. You read that first time through, you figure, he's just stalling the kid, right? Until you read it carefully, God's going to provide who?

Himself. Ooh, that's interesting. By the way, he tells the two young men, we're going to come back to you. Just wait down here, I and the lad will come back to you. So is he giving a cover story, or did he know that Isaac would have to be resurrected?

He knew that Isaac would have to be resurrected, because God had promised that Isaac would have many children. God, do you want me to kill him? You've got a problem. I don't. You have to, it helps to think Jewish, you know?

And of course, they get up there, and you know the story where just at the last minute, an angel stops, intervenes, and they set to the ram, and so forth. When did Isaac die, as far as Abraham's concerned?

When the commandment came, Hebrews 11, 19 tells us. When was Isaac restored to him? Three days later. Ooh, that's interesting. Is that what Paul means when he says, the gospel is that how Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, and He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures?

The third day thing was predicted several places. But the real point is, when you really study that narrative, you discover that another father did offer his son on that very spot 2 ,000 years later, and Abraham knew it.

How did he know it? How do I know he knew it? Because he names the spot in the Mount of the Lord, it shall be seen. He knew it was prophetic, and it is prophetic. What does it tell you? Well, first of all, it tells you that God had laid out His plan long in advance, and that Jesus fulfilled all kinds of details.

You can find those details in the Torah, but you can also find these details in all the requirements for the kind of sacrifice that was being made. It's an incredible study. But the point, I'm going to get back to the Akedah, the narrative there, is what could be called a macrocode.

It is a foreshadowing, a format, if you will, of what's coming. And there are many, many of those in the Scripture. The book of Ruth is the other classic example, where you have this interesting story, where the hero of the story is a Goel, a kinsman redeemer, who ends up taking a Gentile bride to wife and restoring the land to Naomi.

And we go through every detail, a little four-chapter book, but you cannot go through that book and exhaust it. I've taught that book many times, and every time I go through it, we find another little something that's a surprise.

How Boaz is a type of our kinsman redeemer, Jesus Christ, and how he takes to wife a Gentile bride, and in that same act of redemption, restores Naomi, a type of Israel, to the land. And this all occurs in Bethlehem, and it's the reason that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

Many people don't realize that. And when the shepherds at Christmas see the angels singing, they're in the fields of Boaz and Ruth. And it turns out there's a prophecy that David would be king, and this book was in the time of the judges.

Many people say, God gave Israel a king as an afterthought. No, he had a king designated David. They were just impatient. So he said, you want to find out what a king's like, I'll give you Saul, and they saw what it was like.

The point is, David was ordained in the book of Ruth. But the point is, Ruth is a model foreshadowing God's plan. It's a macro code. See, just like if I see your codes for some facts or something, the early codes will tell me its format.

I may not know its full content yet, but I got a glimpse of what's coming. Why are they significant? Because they have to originate outside time. Moses in the Torah couldn't have written that as a foreshadowing of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ thousands of years beforehand.

He put it there because the Lord knew that. He thought it's proof that it's inspired. That's why macro codes to me are far more interesting than micro codes are interesting for their own sake, perhaps, but macro codes are fascinating because they demonstrate that these 66 books penned by more than 40 different guys over thousands of years are an integrated message from outside time.

Why? Because the formats, the layout of the contents are described thousands of years in advance. And there are many of those, on and on and on. I don't want to take too much time in the generics here, I want to jump in, but as we jump in, I want to also preface this.

In all our Bible studies, we always say Acts 1711 should be at the top of your notepad. This one especially. Because by putting myself under that banner, Acts 1711 is where Luke warns you not to believe anything Chuck Misler tells you, but to search the Scriptures daily to prove whether those things be so.

I'm going to suggest, very tentatively, as a conjecture, that the book of Esther may also be a macro code, meaning that in addition to the actual narrative, which happened as it's recorded, there may be some deeper issues there for our instruction.

And the reason I want to get... I left this for last because we're really out in the fringe, and if we get through the next half hour and you don't buy it, no problem, take that page out of your notebook, burn it and forget it, go on to more constructive things.

On the other hand, I want to suggest tentatively the possibility that you, you are a walking book of Esther. That Esther just might be a foreshadowing of the book of Romans. Now, I should start by pointing out that Paul, for example, makes it clear in several of his letters that historic incidents that actually happened to Israel are in... they're recorded there with the intention of teaching us and instructing us.

First Corinthians 10, verse 11, says,. Now all these things happened to them, to Israel, for a warning, and they are written down for our instruction. Now he's alluding there to past history of Israel.

What's it got to do with us? Everything. I mean, just because it set the stage for a lot of other events? Yes, but even more than that. They're there to teach us certain principles, certain things. Another example, Paul says in Romans chapter 15, verse 4,.

For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through the patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope. Whatsoever things. I could argue from this verse that everything back there has a specific instructional meaning.

It's sometimes three or four levels deep. What are some examples? Well, I'll start with Jesus' parables. They're obviously laid out for our instruction. Let's take another more controversial one, the days of Noah.

We all know about the flood. We read about the flood in chapters 7, 8, and 9, but chapter 6 we sort of gloss over. That's the reason the flood came. Why is that important? To understand the flood, yes, but there's an even more important reason.

Jesus said, when he gave his confidential briefing to his disciples on a second coming, he said, As the days of Noah were, so shall the days of the coming of the Son of Man be. Which means there's a prophetic implication of the days of Noah, and so we explore that for that reason.

Of course, Abram's offering, Isaac I've mentioned. Jonah. Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a big fish, or whale, whatever. The point is, is that significant? You bet. For more than just the narrative that had to do with the ministry of Nineveh.

Because Jesus alludes to that as a foreshadowing of his own death, burial, and resurrection. As Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of the big fish, so shall the Son of Man spend three days and three nights in the belly of the earth.

Significant? That gets particularly significant when you study carefully the passage of Jonah. Many scholars believe what that passage teaches, plus some allusions in the Psalms, that Jonah died. Most of us, when we read that story, don't go that far.

But there are scholars that defend from the scripture the notion that he actually passed through death. And though it may be a far deeper type than many people suspect, but in any case, the Bible, of course, has two objectives at least.

One is, of course, to know God. But the other is to know ourselves. One of the reasons I believe that my wife's books are so profound is because they give us insights from the scripture to our internal software architecture.

Around that derives not just some interesting theory and theological issues, but some very practical day-to-day issues. And if what I'm about to get into here, which is way out in the fringe, so bear with me, if it doesn't have a positive impact on your walk in Christ, scratch it, dump it.

If it does, well, praise God, and that's not Chuck Bishop, that's the Holy Spirit, okay? So let's go cautiously. Now, one of the things that you might want to look at, this one I want you to look with me so we get a little unsounder ground.

Israel's Rejection, Restoration, and Esther's Hidden Providence

Turn to Deuteronomy 31. This is a core passage before you jump in the book of Esther, but let's, Deuteronomy 31, starting about verse 16, just a couple of verses here. And the Lord said unto Moses, Behold, thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, thy people will rise up and play the harlot after the strange gods of the land to which they go to be among them and will forsake me and will break my covenant which I have made with them.

Here's a prophecy that Israel's going to blow it. Then my anger shall be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and I will hide my face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall befall them, so that they will say in that day, Are not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?

Verse 18, And I will surely hide my face in that day for all the evils which they have wrought in that they are turned unto other gods. Now you say, wow, that's pretty heavy. The book of Hosea portrays quite clearly that there is going to come a time that God will set Israel aside.

He told him to name his child Lo-Ami, not my people. The good news in Hosea is the day will come when he'll once again take them up as his people. That's the big mistake that many churches make. They dwell on the fact Israel is set aside.

They fail to perceive that Israel has a destiny prophetically. God has yet to fill many promises there. And Paul, among others, spends three chapters in his definition of theology called the book of Romans.

Chapters 9, 10, and 11, he hammers away that God's not through with Israel yet. They've got an incredible time ahead of them. But the book of Esther occurs at a time when they are technically set aside, and yet, is God turned his back on them totally?

No. He's invisible behind the scenes, still watching over his people. That should be comforting. That should be comforting. When you think that God isn't paying attention to you, you're wrong. And one of the things, one of the messages of the book of Esther is even when his people were not walking in faith, God was behind the scenes in a fascinating, with incredible detail, making sure that they would not be wiped out.

And that's the real, one of the main messages. Anyway, when we jump into chapter 1 of Esther, we quickly discover King Azarias, which is not a name. It's a title, by the way. So we don't know his name.

Most scholars believe he was King Xerxes, but the exact identity of the king isn't important in the narrative. So we see him in there only by his title. In the same sense that Caesar or Kaiser or Tsar are titles, not names.

The word actually means venerable father, is sort of the flavor of it. Now, we're going to encounter this whole narrative. The first thing that we sort of wonder, what does the king represent? It's interesting.

You might turn with me to Psalm 8. There's some identities here that I want to work up slowly with you, but let's turn to Psalm 8. Great Psalm. Verse 4, you recall this from the Psalms, and so forth. What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him?

For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou hast made him to have dominion over the works of thy hands, and hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and yea, the beasts of the field, so are the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passes through the paths of the sea.

Now, in the ultimate sense, this of course refers to Christ, but in the denotative sense, it refers to man himself. You might say, gee, Jack, you're exaggerating. No, no. Turn to Genesis chapter 1, verse 26.

When man was created, God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them, Mr. and Mrs. Man, have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

So one of the first tentative suggestions is that I'm going to suggest you and I are probably in the shoes of that king. You and I are intended to have authority over some domain. This gets into, to really develop this, we should talk a little bit more how we're put together.

We have faculties of consciousness, and this gets into the whole model of hardware and software. I'm talking software architecture here. I'm not talking about our physical body. That's simply the residence we dwell in.

But within that, we have a consciousness, we have a will, we have choices to make, we have a volition. So it's through those instruments that we exercise dominion over ourselves. We'll develop this a little further as we go, but there's something else that we lack.

We're designed to lack it, actually. We have a need for communion, and there is a function behind our conscious life. I'm going to suggest to you that's going to be pictured here by Esther, the queen, a source of comfort and counsel, private, intimate fellowship.

And when a king without a queen dies, that's the end of the dynasty. So the queen suggests immortality, in effect, to the dynasty. Now, if we assume that the king may be alluding to the soul of man, his mind, his emotions and his will, in the text of Esther, then the capital is his, let's say, his body, his immediate sphere of influence in which the decisions are initially carried out.

The empire itself would be that influence extended. If you look at this as concentric circles, it may get the idea across. And the queen is our guiding spirit, the source of fellowship, refreshment, and communion.

Mordecai, Haman, and the Conflict Between Spirit and Flesh

Now, as we get into the story, we learn there's going to be two characters that are the key characters, in a sense. One is Mordecai. Mordecai is the descendant of David's grace. Remember that story where the guy was cursing and stoning David, the men wanted to kill him.

He says, no, God has appointed him to curse me, let him curse me. And he was spared by David's gesture of grace. This guy was a son of Kish, from whom Mordecai descended. So Mordecai, strangely enough, is a descendant of Saul, his family.

Kish was the same family from which King Saul came from. Now, we then run into Haman. I want to talk a little more about Haman, but he, of course, is the sinister figure of the plot. And Mordecai and Haman are the two protagonists, in a sense, in the story.

Of course, in a sense, I'm going to suggest to you that Haman's mortal enemy is the Holy Spirit. And I'm going to suggest Mordecai may be in that, in some sense, that role. And one of the questions that's constantly going to be imposed upon us is who's in control?

Who's in control of the throne? Is it Haman or is it Mordecai? And the problem in Esther's, how do you get Haman's influence curtailed and Mordecai in control? And that's the plot. And we want to understand how that happens.

Now, Chapter 1 in the book of Esther, of course, deals with the fall of man, in effect, where he... How did man fall? By pride. First question. When did Adam actually fall? And I'm going to suggest he didn't fall when Eve ate the fruit he fell, when he chose to assert the supremacy of emotion, that is the love of his wife, over the revelation of his spirit, which God had given him.

The violation of the function of the spirit by asserting the supremacy of his soul is the basic fallacy of humanism. It's this reversal of man's nature that is trying to make his reason superior to revelation.

That's the hallmark of humanism ever since. Now, the king was not content to display the authority that was properly his, but lift up by pride. He foolishly sends for his queen to display her before the crowd.

In a sense, he's violating the private inmate communion that were available to him. Of course, she refused. And instead of facing his foolish pride, what does he do? He yields to the lies of his counselors, and he ends up placing himself under the unalterable laws.

Now, I think that's kind of interesting because there is a law of sin and death. When Adam chose the desire of his heart over fellowship with God, human spirit became dark and unresponsive, and man entered upon that lonely restlessness that has characterized man ever since.

He became a soulish being, governed only by his mind, his emotions, his own will, his own ego, sitting on the throne of his kingdom, brooking no opposition. The highest authority he knows is his self.

He obviously has lost the joy, the insights that were available before, and he's helpless to reverse this fact. He's helpless to reverse this fact on his own because he's blinded. This of course is the explanation for all the misery and helplessness and folly and evil and injustice, sin, and life as we know it today.

Now, chapter 2 then, in Esther, begins the story of redeeming grace. The king vainly searches for someone to fill the void of the missing queen, and Carl Jung, if you'll excuse this quote, he's an Austrian psychologist, he points out that man suffers from the neurosis of emptiness in his vocabulary.

When God goes, the goal goes. When the goal goes, purpose goes. When the purpose goes, meaning goes, and when meaning goes, life goes dead on our hands. That's their highest insight. Now, as he starts searching, we find the two big characters surface.

One is Mordecai the Jew. The fact that Mordecai is a Jew is significant. Remember John 4, the woman in the well? What did Jesus tell her? Salvation is of what? Salvation is of the Jews. And by the way, the word Mordecai means a little man.

It's a suggestion of humility right off the bat, and I'm going to suggest tentatively it's a possibility maybe he is in the role, here in some sense at least, of the Holy Spirit. His role would be to restore fellowship with God, as the Holy Spirit is, which has been lost.

And then we introduce Esther, who is Mordecai's cousin, and again I point out it means something hidden. And I suspect that she represents something hidden in our nature, and I don't mean our soul. Now, psychology is powerless to go beyond the soul level.

Psychology attempts to understand human behavior from the outside looking in, and you can't. And any software designer knows that. You can't reverse compilation, you can't imply intent. What determines the behavior of a computer is not the hardware, you can know everything about it, it doesn't do any good, you need to know the software, and you can't infer the architecture from its external behavior.

That's why you can buy software to store and use it all you like, but you can't compromise it in the sense of decompiling it. And so, that's one reason psychology is destined to frustration, because it can't go deeper than the soul level, and the scripture tells you that, Hebrews 4 .12.

Only the Word of God can discern between the soul and the spirit, the inner core. But I suggest that Esther may represent something hidden, something deeper. And of course she's adopted by Mordecai, and how interesting it is in Romans 8 .15, we are adopted by whom?

Oh, Romans 8 .15, let's get into it, turn to Romans chapter 8, and you might put a little mark there, because we may come back to this general area of Romans many, many times. But in Romans 8 .15, Paul says, For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but ye have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Daddy, Abba, Father.

The intimate form, the Father. Now, we have the search for the queen, and of course the king is not aware that Mordecai is moving. The king had no right to this girl, she was Jewish, not Persian, but he didn't know that.

In verse 19 of chapter 2, he's at the gate, Mordecai's at the gate, not the palace yet. He's a judge, but not yet in the place of control. And we have this strange plot occur, where the adversaries of the king are, it says hanged, but we know from the real text that it's impaled, nailed on a tree.

How interesting it is, Colossians chapter 2 talks about our sins being nailed to that cross. The handwriting of ordinances that was against us and all that. I'm running out of time, so I can't take these fun little detours, so we'll keep moving.

And all this, this whole incident in chapter 2, where Mordecai reveals his plot against the king, and these two assailants get killed, are recorded in a book, and we have a book like that ourselves. By the way, if Christianity was nothing more than becoming saved, and that we can go to heaven when we die, the book of Esther could end right there.