“For Such a Time as This” (Part 1 of 2)

In the book of Esther, God's name is never mentioned. In fact, he appears to be noticeably absent, but when we look a little closer, there is no doubt that his providential hand is at work behind the scenes.

Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg reminds us that God is always working, whether we see him or not. Our study begins in Esther chapter 4, verse 4. When Esther's young women and her eunuchs came and told her, the queen was deeply distressed.

She sent garments to clothe Mordecai so that he might take off his sackcloth, but he would not accept them. Then Esther called for Hatac, one of the king's eunuchs who'd been appointed to attend her, and ordered him to go to Mordecai to learn what this was and why it was. Hatac went out to Mordecai in the open square of the city in front of the king's gate, and Mordecai told him all that had happened, and the exact sum of money that Haman had promised to pay into the king's treasuries for the destruction of the Jews. Mordecai also gave him a copy of the written decree issued in Susa for their destruction, that he might show it to Esther and explain it to her and command her to go to the king to beg his favor and plead with him on behalf of her people. And Hatac went and told Esther what Mordecai had said. Then Esther spoke to Hatac and commanded him to go to Mordecai and say, all the king's servants and the people of the king's provinces know that if any man or woman goes to the king inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law to be put to death, except the one to whom the king holds out the golden scepter so that he may live.

As for me, I have not been called to come into the king these thirty days. And so they told Mordecai what Esther had said. Then Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, Do not think to yourself that in any king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place.

But you and your father's house will perish. But who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this? Then Esther told them to reply to Mordecai, Go gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day.

I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish.

Mordecai then went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him. Amen. Well, I think if anybody were to walk in off the street, they would regard it as incredibly strange to think that a group such as this, on the very forefront of things in America today, with largely all of your lives before you, would take any time at all to pay any attention at all to events that had taken place in Persia five centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ. And if we were to suggest to such individuals that these events that took place in Persia all this time ago, and the lessons in them, actually help us to live life in 21st century America. Overlying that conviction would be what Paul says when he writes to the church in Rome and makes reference to Old Testament events. And he referred to them as follows. He says, whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope.

And that is why we look as we do even today to this. Let me help you for your homework and just get you started a little bit. The story is a great story. If you've never really read it or read it with care, I commend it to you. King Ahasuerus or Xerxes, as he is referred to, depending on the translation, this particular king is not a nice person.

If you want to do your research, then read Herodotus or read Josephus, and you will discover just how bad a character he was. The book begins with him having a feast, enjoying his time with his friends. And when they had been drinking together for a little while, he decides it would be a nice thing for him to bring in his wife Vashti in order that he might parade her before his friends. So in other words, he was obviously proud of his wife, the way she looked and so on. So he doesn't say, why don't you come in and join us so we can have a conversation? He essentially says, why don't you come in so that all my friends can check you out? So she, as any sensible wife would, said, not in your life.

I'm not coming at all. And as a result of deciding not to show up when she's asked, she gets completely banished. She's out, she's off the throne, and she's gone. In a fit of pique, he banishes Vashti forever. And then he suddenly realizes that wasn't a smart thing to do.

And so he looks to some of his friends, and they say, well, you just need to get another one. And why don't we have a beauty pageant, and we'll get together as many good-looking girls as we can, and then you can just pick the cream of the crop, and that's exactly what they do. So they have essentially a Miss Persia competition, and they finally bring it around. And this girl, Esther, who's actually Jewish, but she doesn't tell anyone about it, she comes out top of the pops, as it were, and she is welcomed into not only the palace, but into the bed of the king. She has a cousin called Mordecai, who's also Jewish. Mordecai is older than her. She was an orphan. Mordecai decided to essentially adopt her, to look after her, and he'd been the one who had positioned her in order that she might present herself for this pageant.

And she eventually finds herself in the inside track. Now, the king, meanwhile, appoints another character who's a bad act called Haman, and Haman essentially becomes the prime minister. He likes to walk around—he's got a fat head and a fat mouth—and he likes to walk around making sure everybody is paying attention to him, giving him the due that he deserves or thinks he does. He has a problem, because this guy Mordecai decides he's not doing it. If you're supposed to stand up when Haman passes, Mordecai stays seated. If you're supposed to salute, Mordecai keeps his hands in his pockets. If you're supposed to bow in obeisance, Mordecai says, I'm doing none of it. Now, when you read for your homework, as I know you're going to do, you'll be able to fill in the background on the racial tensions and the tensions between those who oppose the people of God and the people of God themselves that is represented in this unwillingness on the part of Mordecai.

And what happens is that Mordecai really sets the cat among the pigeons. As you will discover when later in the day you're reading the book of Esther, hopefully not in your class when you're supposed to be studying the New Testament epistles. But anyway, that's enough for me to get you started, all right? You're loving it already, aren't you? You're all going, I can't wait to read Esther, I think I'll begin just now, right? That's good, that's good.

All right. Now, what you will discover when you begin to read it is that God doesn't show up, at least not ostensibly. His name is never mentioned in the entire book. The entire narrative is filled with what we might refer to as God-shaped holes, so that you come to places in the book where you would expect God's name to be present, you would expect God to be represented, and he's not there. The reason he's not there is because it is by that narrative style, that genre, that the author of this particular book is teaching us lessons about the way in which God is at work when his name is not forefront and when he is apparently unseen. Because the dramas of other parts of the Old Testament vis-à-vis the crossing of the Red Sea and all of these other things are dramatic. And yet, for most of us, we haven't had a crossing of the Red Sea.

And most of us have not seen a burning bush. Most of us are just going to class. Most of us are just phoning home.

Most of us are just sending emails. Most of us are just trying to stay alive. And in that humdrum activity of our lives, in those God-shaped vacuums, if you like, we are forced to do what the book of Esther asks us to do, and that is to consider what's going on in what's going on. So when you read it, you say to yourself, what's going on? And at the very heart of it is this notion that God is providentially at work in these ordinary things. In the words of the Catechism and the second question in the New City Catechism, at the end of the thing on the question, what is God, nothing happens except through him and by his will.

Now, I'll allow that just to settle in your mind for a moment. As you think about this morning's newspapers, as you think about the things that you've already considered on the internet, nothing happens except through him and by his will. Think about it in relationship to your personal life.

Think about it in relationship to sadnesses, to disappointments, to joys, and to encouragements. And then say to yourself, now, how does that fit in a contemporary perspective in our society today? And let me suggest to you that when you read contemporary philosophy, contemporary observations, you realize that this kind of core conviction is challenged not only in the things that are written but in the way that life is lived. In a book called Light of the World, written by Benedict XVI, there is a preface by a man called George Wiesel. And in his foreword, this is what he says. He says, we now live in a world that has lost its story, a world in which the progress promised by the humanisms of the past three centuries is now gravely threatened by our understandings of the human person that reduce our humanity to a conjuries of cosmic chemical accidents, a humanity with no internal origin, no noble destiny, and thus no path to take through history.

Go down in Cabrilla. Just engage someone in conversation, someone of your own vintage, and ask them about their origins. Are they going to tell you that they are the product of time plus matter plus chance, that they are a cosmic accident, that they are simply molecules held in suspension? Ask them about their destiny. Ask them if they have a path through history.

And then you may be able to tell them of the one who bisects history and who provides that path. David Myers refers to it as the American paradox, namely that—and incidentally, it's not just an American paradox. It is spreading.

It's spreading in parts of Asia, especially prosperous parts of Asia. The paradox is this, that we have never had so much, and yet we've never had so little. Therapists report that that paradox works itself out in the lives of people who come to see them. Some of you will know this firsthand, and particularly in the lives of young people. Young people who present themselves for help, whose story is repeated again and again.

It goes like this. We're not talking about people who are really at the bottom of a social pile or a mental capacity pile or financial pile, but these are young people from good homes who have not wanted for much in their lives, who have been able to attend college, have perhaps graduated from college, have gone on actually one of the few to get a job, and yet what they talk about is that they are baffled by the emptiness that they feel. David Wells commenting on it says, their self-esteem is high, but their self is empty. They grew up being told that they could be anything they wanted to be, but they don't know what they want to be. They are unhappy, but there seems to be no cause for their unhappiness. They are more connected to more people through the internet, and yet they have never felt more lonely.

They want to be accepted, and yet they often feel alienated. Never have we had so much. Never have we had so little. That all sounds very contemporary, doesn't it, and of course it is, but if you think about it, its manifestations may shift, but at the heart of the matter, you find it everywhere. You remember Hamlet when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrived, and he says to them, good lords, how do you both? And the first one replies, as the indifferent children of the earth. How about you, Guildenstern?

He says, happy in that we are not overhappy. How about you, Hamlet? I have of late, but wherefore I know not, Lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise, And indeed it lies so heavily with me That this goodly frame the earth Seems to me a sterile promontory. Now here at the very heart of your education, you really are at the fulcrum in relationship to a view of the world. Either you were personally created by a god who fashioned you in your mother's womb, or you have no real explanation for your origin. Either your life is sustained by his providential care, or you're a cork floating on the Pacific, or you're held in the grip of blind forces. And the Book of Esther, in its enigmatic narrative form, says to us, hey listen, consider this.

Consider the fact that in these god-shaped vacuums, you may find God at work in ways which upon first blush just seem as if they're amazing happenstances, peculiar coincidences. And yet when you look back, things seem so vastly different. Now I stepped away from the ball there and waggled the club for, I think, about seven minutes, okay? The ball being the text and the club just being me standing here.

In other words, you know, sometimes you waggle on the tee a little bit before you finally step up and hit it. So I've just been waggling a little, it's okay in terms of what's been going on. You say, did he lose his mind there and what happened in that last section, or where was that? What about Esther? We're back. Okay?

So I'm just going to hit the ball, it's not going to go very far, and it won't be very long either, it never is, but it hasn't stopped me from hoping. And so when you get back to the passage itself, you discover that this decree that Haman had created is a real problem. And what you discover is that here at the end of chapter three, you have the king and the madman.

And the king and the madman are having a glass together as a result of the issuing of this decree that called for the slaughter of the entire Jewish population. The genesis of it was that this Mordecai, the little Jew who sat at the king's gate, refused to bow down to Haman. Well, you know, all of us have been offended every so often in our lives, right, if someone didn't do what we expected them to do. But did you ever think of having a decree established like, let's say I say something to you as a Scotsman, and you don't like that. And so you're so annoyed that you decide, instead of just not speaking to me again, you will have a decree issued that calls for the entire annihilation of Scotland. Just everyone in Scotland, I'll just get rid of the whole stinking lot.

I mean, Begg is an illustration of it, get rid of him and everybody else. You see, that's enormous. That is a reaction of satanic proportions. That's exactly what it is.

That was his reaction. And chapter three concludes with the prospect of that. Mordecai, who is from a human perspective largely responsible for this Holocaust that is now impending, needs to get the information to his cousin, the queen, who isn't exactly out shopping at the mall on a daily basis. And so when you read chapter four, you discover that he dons the sackcloth and he goes and sits in the public square. And as a result of sitting in the public square, the people are out doing the shopping for the queen, go back and tell the queen, hey, Mordecai is down there. He's making an incredible hullabaloo, and he's got everybody in the same mess.

There's a lot of wailing and weeping and every kind of thing. And he's dressed in sackcloth. To let you know how out of touch Esther is by this point, she says, well, sackcloth's not good. He doesn't need to be wearing sackcloth. Here, send him some nice clothes.

Well, I'll fix him. Why don't we get him a new outfit? Now, that's not as strange as you think, because our shopping malls are filled with people who think that a new outfit will fix them, right? I think I'll buy a new purse. Not that I've ever felt that way, but I think I might buy a new pair of shoes. Maybe I'll get a new pair of sneakers, and that'll make me feel so much better.

No, you're now down $129, and you feel even worse than you felt before you bought them, because you can't fix your insides by your outsides. She says, well, just send him clothes. No, he sends back, he says, tell Esther that's not the issue.

She sends back, well, what is the issue? He says, well, let me tell you the issue, and remember, he sends Haytak back. And Haytak goes back with a copy of the decree.

And he says, tell Esther to go to the king, beg his favor, and plead with him on behalf of her people. Well, that's just not as easy as it sounds, because two guys at the end of chapter two had ended up dead for not doing what the king wanted. And if you think again that this is some kind of clever narrative, then you need to read Herodotus.

You need to read the ancient text. You discover that the king of Persia at this time, it didn't just have secret service. He didn't have guys with little things, you know, like hello over in number three, number three.

He didn't have that, no. He had, where he sat on his throne, he had a bunch of guys who stood with axes, axes. And if anybody came in that wasn't supposed to come in, whack, off with a head. So she sends word back to Mordecai, hey, easy for you to say Mordecai, you know, how about you going in to see the king?

If you go in to see the king and he doesn't ask you, you get your head chopped off. I don't like those odds. Furthermore, she says, I've gone down on his list. I haven't slept with him in 30 days. I think he's moved on to someone else in the here.

So I've got no leverage at all. So what are we going to do now? We pray. We're done.

Do your homework. This is Truth for Life. We'll hear more from Alistair Begg in part two of this message next week. Please keep listening. Alistair will close this program in prayer in just a minute. Now if you're a college student or you know someone who is, you're going to want to request our current book offer. It's titled Surviving Religion 101, Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College. And it's written by someone who knows firsthand just how confrontational a college campus can be. Michael Kruger is a seminary professor and author. But more importantly, he's a dad who writes to his own children and other Christian students to help them be prepared to stand up for what they believe in an environment that opposes those beliefs. Surviving Religion 101 will equip your son or daughter or grandchild with a deeper understanding of what the Bible teaches and a greater ability to stay committed to what they believe in an unbelieving world.

Request your copy when you give today. Simply click the image you see in the app or visit us online at truthforlife.org slash donate. Let me also encourage you to follow us on Instagram. Each day you'll see quotes from Alistair and new content from Truth for Life. It's a great way to reflect on God's word and share encouragement from the Bible.

Search for Truth for Life in the Instagram app. Now here is Alistair to close with prayer. Gracious God, Sovereign Lord, we bring our lives to you.

All the chances and changes, the ups, the downs, the joys and the sorrows. We remember Psalm 34, O make but trial of his love, experience will decide. How blessed are they and only they who in his truth confide. Be with us Lord in the hours of this day and in the days of this week, assure us of your fatherly care when we see it, when we don't so that we might rest in your providence for we ask it in your son's name, Amen. I'm Bob Lapine. I hope you enjoy your weekend as you worship with your local church family. Please join us again Monday to hear more of Esther's story as we consider how our own unique circumstances are being orchestrated by God. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.