TLN- Esther 1

Welcome to Truth and Love Network. Thank you for joining us. We're excited to spend time with you and looking at God's word, talking about Jesus, exalt Him, lifting Him up and doing it together. If we can pray for you, just let us know.

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But we'll even talk about that and why not to baptize. I mean, while we should hold the baptistic view of baptism. Or something like that. That'd be a good discussion. That'd be a good discussion. Because it is a difference.

And there's different ways to interpret scripture that we, I mean, obviously for years. And you're coming from a Presbyterian viewpoint. And I've been coming from a Baptist viewpoint. So if there's anything controversial like that that you'd love for us to talk about, we'd love to do that.

Ask us a Bible question. We'd love to try to do that as well. We are going to start with the book of Esther tonight. There's several reasons why we went this direction. There was a request. And I love it when we can honor requests.

And also, when we were looking at Ezekiel, we were talking about the big hub of, which happens ever so often when things go haywire in the world. Russia is involved in this war with Ukraine. And so every, there's not every, I hate to use blanket statements.

There's so many people that like to throw Russia into prophetic history. And we want to talk about, does the Bible talk about Russia in prophetic history? And if you want to hear more about that, go back to our last video, where we look at Ezekiel 38 and 39, where people try to place Russia and say that they are the Magog and Magog prophecy.

But what we actually saw, if you look at Ezekiel 38 and 39, if you continue to read in chapter 39, you'll see a name, a familiar name, and that name is Haman. And where else do you see the name Haman in scripture?

And that's why we were drawn to Esther. For me personally, that's why I was drawn to Esther is because I think sometimes we can over-devotionalize books of the Bible, passages of the Bible. I think Esther has been used a lot for women's devotions, for women's Bible studies, and sometimes over-devotionalized.

Even though it's a great story where God did use a woman who became a queen in a foreign country, and God used her to save and preserve her people. And it's a wonderful story, and it made for a good movie that I enjoyed watching.

But what I really wanna know, Dan, is why this book, why God included this book in the Old Testament, and does it, and how does it have ties with the other books of the Old Testament? And so when I see the word Haman in Ezekiel, and I know that there's a Haman in the VeggieTales movie.

So when I know Haman is in the book of Esther, you know, I wanna make those connections. I wanna see what's going on.

What say you? Oh man, we could have a whole nother video on how Esther fits into the whole scheme of the Bible. I actually preached a sermon on that came from Esther three or four, maybe five, five, maybe five, I don't know.

But one of the really cool things about this is that what you see in this book is Haman's plot to wipe out the Jews. He's trying to exterminate every single man, woman, and child who is of the Hebrew lineage.

Every single descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is gone. What happens if every single descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is gone? I'll let him, because he'll get started. Here we go. Think back to the garden.

The garden of Eden, we sin, our first parents sin, they disobey God, they fall into sin. God tells them that they're sinful wretches. They're, the woman's cursed, the man's cursed, the ground, which is interesting, because the word, nevermind, I'll get into that later.

Satan is cursed, and the promise comes that the seed of the woman will destroy the seed of the serpent. You move on a little bit further in the time of Noah, and the prophecy, or not prophecy, the covenant's renewed again, as you see, God promised Noah that he will preserve him alive and his family inside the ark, and he does so.

We know from Peter that that is a picture of, a picture of our baptism, which points to salvation. We also see a little bit later on from Noah, the call of Abraham, where he said, through you, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.

We learn a little bit more from Moses as he calls the people to himself, promises them that a prophet, one of their own kind would come, that he would tell them about salvation. He promises David that that person would be through his lineage, and then eventually we see Jesus Christ come, who was the fulfillment of those prophecies, and he took upon sin and death upon himself, would nail it to the cross, took it to the grave, arose victorious, so what happens if we're back in the book of Esther, and Haman is successful to wipe out every man, woman, and child from the Jewish lineage?

The promises of God fail, and God made a liar, and we can never trust him, so it's incredibly important that we see Esther in the way that it does. So it is included in the Bible, so that way we can see God's faithfulness to preserve his people alive throughout all of history, and I just think that is absolutely fantastic and wonderful.

Oh, it is fantastic, and I think we'll be able to see more about Haman and his connection with Ezekiel 38, 39, Gog and Magog, as we go through Esther. Yeah. Okay, so we wanted to make that connection, and just share that Esther is more than just a book that we can make a devotional workbook out of.

Right, right, it's very important.

Very important, and it's very important, and we need to look at the ties. I got stumbled.

Oh, you're laughing at me. Yeah, my mom's watching, hey, mom. So be super impressive.

But yeah, the importance of Esther, and the fact that God just keeps his promises, but also learning about how it connects with the rest of scripture, the other books of the Old Testament, instead of just isogeeting scripture, just having, this is how I see, uh-oh, I need to plug up my camera.

One second, wow. Well, while he's off camera.

Yeah. I forget where he was going with that. It's not awkward at all sitting here, talking to you guys, there he is, all right. But we've lost your audio. Still lost your audio.

I was like, can you hear me now? There you go. Okay, wow, that's the first time that's happened. Where, so where was I? You're not super impressive with stalling. Sorry, mom. All right, my producers, my many, many producers I have working for me are failing on the job.

Um, so the ties that we see in Esther with the other books of the Bible and how it all fits together in the grand story of things. Oh, I remember, I remember what I was saying. When we look at eschatology or other theological positions that we have, we're tempted sometimes to have that theological position and then pick and choose verses that fit here and fit there like a puzzle piece.

And sometimes, sometimes I think that happens with eschatology, Ezekiel 38 and 39. And that's why it's so intriguing to, when you see those people and their names used in multiple books to make those connections and see what's really going on, to understand the history and what God's doing, what he's saying.

So all those things are important. All right, so what we can see in Esther is Dan brought up these four different things here. The prophetic, which we kind of hit on a little bit, a moral aspect to Esther, cultural aspect to Esther, and a historical context of Esther.

So just briefly point on those four things and what we can look forward to in the rest of Esther. Sure.

Well, obviously the prophetic would deal with this, our belief that this is a historical record of the fulfillment of the prophecy coming from Ezekiel 38 and 39. So that's fairly straightforward. There's a historical aspect in that it actually happened, happened in a real place, a real time, these are real events that happened in a context with real people.

That matters. It's not just a story that just dropped out of nowhere. And I actually think that that's how we're able to relate to it. If God worked in a certain way before, he worked in this sort of way, these people were absolute wretches at some point.

And since I mimic that sometimes in my life, I know that I can trust and rely upon the grace of Christ and he can use me if I am, well, he will use me anyway, but I need to be faithful to trust in him and stand up when I'm called to stand up.

Oh, there's a strong moral aspect that flows throughout Esther. Different things, people standing up when they should, people doing evil things, lies. It's, that transcends culture. It's just everywhere.

Then there is a cultural aspect because there's marriage, banquets, feast, festival, certain customs and laws and different aspects of government. And there's hatred between people groups and there's all sorts of stuff like that.

Some of that is specific to that time, but that doesn't mean that these things can't relate to us. There are marriages in every culture. So when we understand it in their culture, excuse me, we can see what the issue really was and we can try to apply that to our culture or see what similar situations should we watch out for.

If it was wicked in that day, but they all thought it was normal, are we doing something similar in this day that we just think is normal? Maybe it's not, maybe it's something that we should stop doing, but there's at least those four aspects.

Those are probably not the best names for them, but that's what I came up with. So if we need to change later, I guess we'll do that. It works for me.

And it reminds me of the passage in the Song of Solomon. There's nothing new under the sun. So though the exact circumstances may be different, men are still deceitful. Men are still prideful. Men are still boastful.

Men will still use and abuse to get what they want. So there's still power, greed going on. And so there's nothing new under the sun and there's circumstances that flow out of those sinful behaviors that we have to deal with.

And we can learn from these principles.

Right. There's still one who's running around like a lion seeking whom he may devour. Yeah.

So there's, before we jump into the chapter one and work our way through chapter one, there's four things that I wanted to look at or four things that I see in Esther. The sovereignty of God, his providence, his promises, and his provision.

And I kind of jotted this down as we got started. Just to piggyback on the comment that I made about over-devotionalizing Esther to one degree, we don't necessarily read ourselves into the characters, which, you know, that's a big thing today.

Learning how to get away from that type of teaching because there's many pastors out there, popular pastors that write books and make money off of making you the main character of the story. You are David.

Yeah. You are David finding Goliath and your problems are Goliath. So that you're reading yourself into the story. And we don't necessarily want to read ourselves into the story, into the characters and make ourselves Esther or whoever that is Mordecai in the story.

What we should look for is God's sovereignty to keep his promises through providence and provision to preserve a people. And this part, you have to listen carefully. To preserve a people for the Messiah so that he may preserve a people for his glory.

So it shows God's sovereignty to keep his promises through providence and provision to preserve a people for the Messiah. So the Messiah, these people needed to be preserved so the Messiah could come, the promises could be fulfilled that the Messiah would come out of these people.

And the Messiah had to come so that he may preserve his people, the church throughout all time for his glory. Now, as Dan pointed out, as we were talking before the program, what we can see in Esther though, is that she was on a path of multiple sketchy circumstances and sketchy situations.

But that path led her to be in circumstances that were beyond her control, part of the sovereignty of God. But when she found herself in those situations, we found that Esther makes faithful decisions so that God's people are preserved for that.

She was called onto for such a time as this so that the people of God could carry on to fulfill their part in God's promise. So if that makes sense, and I hope that's helpful as we begin looking at the book of Esther.

Any other thoughts before we dive into the text? No, let's do it. Okay. Esther, let's see, I can pull it up on our little screen here. Let me get my mouse going. All right. So Esther chapter one, we're gonna look through verses one through nine first.

Now, it took place in the days of Asherus, the Asherus who reigned from India to Ethiopia, over 127 provinces. In those days, as King Asherus sat on his royal throne, which was at the citadel of Susa.

In the third year of his reign, he gave a banquet for all his princes and attendants, the army officers of Persia and Medea, the nobles and the princes of his provinces being in his presence. And he displayed the riches of his royal glory and the splendor of his great majesty for many days, 180 days.

When these days were completed, the king gave a banquet lasting seven days for all the people who were present at the citadel in Susa. From the greatest to the least, in the court of the garden of the king's palace.

There were hangings of fine white and violet linens held by cords of fine purple linen on silver rings and marble columns and couches of gold and silver on a mosaic pavement of porphyry, marble, mother of pearl and precious stones.

Drinks were served in golden vessels of various kinds and the royal wine was plentiful according to the king's bounty. The drinking was done according to the law. There was no compulsion. For so the king had given orders to each official of his household that he should do according to the desire of each person.

And Queen Basti also gave a banquet for the women in the palace, which belonged to King Asuerus.

All right, so King Asuerus.

Have we heard that? Do we know this guy from other texts? Do we know him from another name? It's Xerxes. Xerxes. Yep, much easier to pronounce. And I don't even know if I was saying it right or not,.

But yeah. There wasn't an S that close to the front of it, but well, we're gonna let it go. Oh, thank you.

Ahasuerus, is that how you say it? How would you say it? I was just not pronouncing it. I was gonna say Xerxes the whole time. So King Xerxes, that's who we've got here. Yeah, I knew I was gonna butcher it.

And he was king of Persia. Right. And this was a pretty large kingdom. Huge.

Yeah, it was absolutely massive. They were in obviously the Middle East area, around the Baghdad, Iran, Israel, went down in through Egypt and down to Ethiopia. Also extended all the way across near, all the way across to, right?

No, that way. To, I don't know which way I'm pointing. All the way to India. Over whichever way that was on your map. Yeah, it was massive. It was a huge area. It was a hundred. At one point it was stated there was 120 provinces.

His wife wouldn't make him a sandwich. It was a little bit more involved than that, but we'll get to that. It had increased by the time of Esther to 127. They were going out and they were getting it done.

By the time he became king, he was very impressed with himself. I don't know if you caught this. This is how I heard it. For 180 days, he said, hey, look at me. I am very impressive. And then for seven more days, he had everybody sit around and he said, drink as much as you want and look at my stuff.

My stuff is very impressive. And then day seven, he said, hey, look at my wife. My wife is very impressive. We'll get there in a second. But what he's doing is he's consumed by several things. One, greed.

Another, his own power. He's also consumed by status, his ego, pride. And I mean, when you think about it, if you don't have a strong moral compass to begin with, if you don't have a solid backbone in actual morality and righteousness, it'd be easy to do.

I mean, he's probably not terribly old. I mean, you look around at people his age and like, they're not king. No, he's top dog. No, look how cool I am. It'd be like driving a big truck and flashy stuff everywhere and hooting your own horn and talking about how great you are all the time.

I can see where he would do that. And he doesn't seem to be the most moral person. I mean, just from this, there's some character flaws that lead to that type of grandstanding, which we do see nowadays in different military parades or when people just stand up and lie to our country.

State of the Union Address is, and I'm looking at both parties on that. Yeah, it's not too far fetched from where we are today.

Well, when I look at his behavior, I don't wanna say that, sorry for the dead air. There's the greed and the power and the vanity of it all, but I'm thinking about how I worship God, the true king, the true king of the universe.

And I'm like, this is how I wanna worship him. Right. I mean, I want to be merry and joyful and spend all these days just basking in his creativity, in his power, in what he's done, what he's created, and everything about him and how everything that he's made reflects his personality, his character, and everything that he's done.

And I can even see us giving honor to a good earthly king. We're supposed to. Yeah. But here, this really puts me in a mind frame of worship and how I would want to worship the true and living God.

Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. It seems like he's setting himself up as the opposite of what a good sovereign ruler should be. So he would be sovereign over his kingdom. That's where we get the role.

He has rule over his kingdom, but instead of a providence, promise, and provision, it looks like he's power and prestige and pleasure. Or his three Ps. I don't know, maybe a purse for greed. Wanting that, but what's four?

That was good Baptist alliteration there.

A president of Joel Beaky, listen to him. So you ready to go on through? Any last thoughts on that passage? Yeah, it's just important to recognize where we're at. We're in a time where the mindset is one of puffing up the king, making him look great and grand, and everyone should be seeking pleasure through drink.

So when you put yourself in the event of the next few verses, think of merriment, state worship, and a drunken party. You're thinking there was one for the men and one for the women. So the men were over there just drinking, having a good old time, and when men get drinking too much, they get to thinking about things they shouldn't.

So that's gonna be important when we look at this next section, the mindset of the people who are about to engage in these activities.

Well, and just before we move any further on, just a little bit of historical context as well. We're familiar, most people should be familiar with the exile of Israel and Judah, popularly known as the Babylonian exile, where the Babylonians took them out of their land, and they were exiles in a foreign land.

And Xerxes here is the Persian king. What happened? Well, Persia took over Babylon. They defeated the Babylonians, and now it's the Persian empire. And so now we have the Persian king, and what other historical information can you let us know as far as timeline?

This is before, I believe this is before they start sending the exiles back to rebuild the temple and the wall. Now, I would put it not much before, but before Ezra and Nehemiah.

Okay. Now, is it Xerxes who allows them to go back and rebuild the temple?

I'm fuzzy, I wasn't prepared for that one, but we have, we're only a couple of pages away. Let's see. Nehemiah was with Artaxerxes.

Artaxerxes, and that was his son.

Yeah, I believe he was after. Ezra dealt with King Cyrus.

And I think Artaxerxes was actually Vashti's son, if I'm not mistaken.

All right, I don't know. I should have probably looked that up. We're not gonna know it all. Come on now. Let's see, Xerxes, where are we at? Go back to, Ezra was Cyrus. Cyrus was first. So they had started some of their stuff.

And then Xerxes, and then Artaxerxes later on. But if you remember from the stories, it was starting and stopping of the rebuilding of all of the Jewish things, which is actually prophesied in Daniel.

We went over that. They would start and stop and rebuild in times of distress.

All right, so let's take a look at this next section. Starting in verse number 10. On the seventh day, when the heart of the king was merry with wine, he commanded Mechumen, Vista, Arbonna, Victa, Abicta, Zethar, and Carcas, the seven eunuchs who served the presence of, now I can't even say it. Aheres, Xerxes, to bring Queen Vashti before the king with her royal crown in order to display her beauty to the people and the princes, for she was beautiful.

But Queen Vashti refused to come at the king's command delivered by the eunuchs. Then the king became very angry, and his wrath burned with him. So yeah, this is That was a messed up thing to do. Right, I know.

So we've got the 180 days feast, and then we've got this other seven, and then what, at the end of the seven, he's got this bright idea to call his queen into his presence?

Into the presence of many, many drunk men who have not been around a woman for a while. Right. Like, why would you put your wife in that situation? Yeah. And here's the thing. It says for her to come with her royal, before the king, with her royal crown in order to show the peoples and the prince of her beauty, which she was lovely to look at.

We don't know exactly what this meant. It could have meant something on a spectrum of things. One thing we do know, she's gonna bring her crown. Her crown would have been a kind of a pointy turban that kind of went up.

We do know that a lot of the times, the queen in the Persian Empire would come with a veiled face. He was trying not to have her veiled. He was trying to show off her beauty. So she, at the very least, was going to have her face exposed.

It's also possible that he was going to have her paraded naked in front of all these people. We don't know that for sure. Some commentators make a fairly solid case for it, but we can't say for certain that it was the case that she was supposed to go naked.

But what she was supposed to do was to go before the people at that time in less clothes than what she normally would according to Persian custom. So he was trying to show off her beauty. No, put on a pretty dress and turn around for my boys here.

He was trying to show, and that's just rude. The Book of Proverbs talks about drinking from your own cistern, finding satisfaction in the life of your youth, not going after the woman who's over there looking beautiful.

So why would you take what is yours and parade it in front of all sorts of other people, for them to gawk at and want and lust after? It's ridiculous, especially those who are under the influence of lots of alcohol.

So at the very least, he was being a scumbag. And at the very most, he was just being downright ridiculous, I mean, just horribly wretched. So it's not a good look for him. So when you think about that, why would she not, would she say no?

Either she would say no, because she said, I've got more dignity than that. Or she said no, because she said, this thing that he's asking me to do is just wrong. And not only is that wrong, it's dangerous.

And I'm not going to do that. So she stood up on principle, either for, I'm not going to be paraded in front of a bunch of drunken men, or I'm not going to disrobe for a whole bunch of men. Either way, it doesn't matter.

You can understand where she's coming from. It wasn't as simple as, you know, wife, come over here and let people look at you. Just smile pretty for the camera. We pulled her away from her party, or tried to pull her away from her party in order to show off her body, because he thought that she was beautiful.

And she said, no. And he got ticked. And I can understand his anger, not because he was right in any sort of way, but because he was then at that moment put in a very awkward situation that's brought up in the next bit.

But he brought it upon himself. So think about what we have here. We've got a guy who's trying to do something that he thinks is good, but his compass is thinking that what's good is what is pleasurable, what is self-seeking, what is huffing himself up, and not what is actually righteous.

So when he's trying to do something good, he ends up doing, in his own eyes, he ends up doing something that is completely, it's bad. And it leaves him in a bad situation. Like, he doesn't just look, like, it's not just a whole bunch of guys standing there going, oh, the girl won't come for him.

He now has the queen saying that the king does not control her. So it slaps at him for being a king. He loses some face in the sight of people. It's not just a man-to-man type of thing anymore. You as a king have been, your power that you've just been celebrating for a half a year, your power, you've just sucked your own power away from you.

And not only that, he's showing the way that his kingdom's going to be run. And his kingdom is gonna be run in a way where your wife can just speak to you any old sort of way. And he's like, and what's gonna end up happening is he's going to inadvertently, by making a fool out of him, by being a bad husband, he's going to end up, he's going to end up undermining the authority of men in house and homes everywhere.

And so what he's done is he's not only stripped himself of power by making himself look like a fool, he's also undergirded the structural core, the nuclear family in his entire kingdom. I mean, just absolutely foolish.

And he's ticked about it. And I understand why he's ticked, but he definitely brought it on himself. Yeah.

But you just, you basically just looked at the facts of the situation without isogeny, without shoving too much into the text that we just don't know. He was, he spent all this time, 180 days plus this seven day week showing off how wonderful he is, how powerful he is, how beautiful his stuff is.

And then I guess the last thing that he's yet to show off is Vashti, his wife, his queen. And I'm just thinking about the abuse of it, the inappropriateness of it, he's taking advantage of her. And we can make tons and tons of assumptions and we can try to look at the culture and maybe glean what he was trying to do here.

But we do know from the text that he wanted, just like with the rest of his stuff, he wanted to show off her beauty that was in his possession. This is mine. I want to continue to show off my possessions and here look at Vashti and how beautiful she is.

And Vashti's response goes back to, I think something you were talking about earlier, a place where we can look at principle and see how it applies or how we can apply it to our lives. And I was curious why nobody ever talked to Vashti about Romans 13, how we're supposed to obey the government, right?

Oh, man. Well, number one, Paul hadn't written it yet. But number two, the Proverbs were compiled at that time. And there's actually something that speaks, I think, more closely to this. What the king was trying to do was he was trying to show the beauty of the queen.

Mm-hmm. I mean, it's not necessarily, from a very shallow point of view, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Let me explain, because it was a bad thing. So don't get me wrong on that. But if you think about it wrongly, if you think about it wickedly, what he was trying to do was something that was, it was self-seeking because he was trying to show off something that was his.

But at the same time, he knew how much his wife, all women, prized their beauty. I mean, it's something that they, women are beautiful. They prize their beauty. So he was probably thinking to himself, wrongly, of course, well, this situation, this is an awesome situation.

I'm gonna do something wonderful and sweet for my wife. I'm gonna give her an opportunity to show herself off. And I'm gonna have all these guys over here telling me how lucky I am that she's my wife.

Book of Proverbs says this, whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast. So if you're a righteous person, you have, you take thought about the animals that you care for, even though they don't have souls, they're lesser than us, you still care for them.

But the mercy of the wicked is cruel. Or as another version says, the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel. He and his wickedness was being cruel to his wife. And she, I don't know what that means. I don't know.

I'm gonna have to get some context on that later for my wonderful, wonderful wife, who will not have dancing in front of strangers. I forget where I was. Where was I? Oh yeah, it was cruel. So, yeah, I don't know, go ahead.

Well, it's hard to really say. It's hard to really say. I mean, we want some, I think we can kind of go in one direction because we know that there was, I mean, it's pretty vain for him to say or for him to extend this party for so long.

Just to celebrate himself. Oh, oh, I remember what you were saying now. And do you want to finish? Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I get what she's saying now. You're saying we're gonna take her mask off and maybe her shirt too.

Anyway, you're talking about, didn't anybody tell her about Romans 13? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, even, it's crazy. The book of Romans chapter one talks about how we as human beings have a conscience in ourselves because of nature and the things around us that tell us what is righteous.

And that we suppress that truth with our unrighteousness. I think this is one of those cases of common grace where it may have been something where she actually knew some Jews and she was a God-fearing woman.

We don't know. This is one of those cases where she was trying to do something right. She understood that her modesty was not something to be paraded around in front of other people. It didn't matter if those men were going to look at her in lust or not.

That was beside the point. Her modesty wasn't something to be given away. She wasn't going to do it. And it didn't matter to her if she was gonna have to give up her place in the kingdom or even die. She wasn't going to do it.

I don't think it was a power play. I don't think she was sitting there with a girl saying, oh, watch this, I'm gonna get him. I think she was saying, no, I'm not gonna do that. And I'm not gonna do that because it would be wrong.

Like, I'm not doing it. And I don't think she's wrong for that. There's a lot here that we don't know for, but just with the facts presented,.

I don't blame her at all. Yeah, well, we do know one thing that she knew and that there would be consequences. Sure. Oh yeah, she knew that. Yep. You know, there had to be a significant reason for her to say no.

Yep. And like I was saying just a few minutes ago, the lead up to this kind of puts us in a position where we want to say that Xerxes was doing something bad and Vashti was probably more in the righteous position, but it's not 100 clear.

Like you were somewhat saying a few minutes ago, you know, he may have had good intentions where he wanted to show off her beauty and brag on his wife. Maybe. That's not where the text leads us, but you know.

And it's not what he actually did. Right. Yeah.

May have had his intentions. It's not what he actually did. Right, right. And then, you know, Vashti, you know, she could have, like you said, didn't want to do that. She was just choosing not to do that.

But the text does kind of lean where you were taking us with Xerxes going in the wrong direction on this and Vashti taking more or righteous stand. And the principle that we wanted to look at that we can glean from this is, you know, there's gonna be circumstances where we can take a righteous stand in the face of an unrighteous judgment, rule, policy, command or demand on us, even knowing the consequences.

Yeah. And You said you had a much in this story. Yeah, absolutely. And like you said, we don't know where she stood religiously, but for us, we can trust in the sovereignty of God, even in the story of Vashti, because God uses the, you know, the all people for his purposes and plans.