The Gospel According to Esther, Part 1

Ladies and gentlemen, mankind, frankly, is busy enterprising and entertaining and playing and marrying and eating and parenting and educating and working and investing. And for the unbeliever, all of it is an attempt to drown out the edict of the inevitable. That one journal article I read just this week, very frankly, admitted that the health industry is passionate about one thing and it wasn't to help us live healthier lives. It's an all-out attempt to help us avoid death.

No matter who you are or how you've lived your life, everyone dies. The important question of life is what's going to happen after you die. The Gospel is the central theme of Scripture in both the Old and New Testaments. So what role does the Gospel play in Esther's story? What does the book of Esther tell us about God's character and divine plan, His justice and mercy? We're looking at all this today here on Wisdom for the Heart.

Stephen Davy is in his final lesson from the series called Esther with this message, The Gospel According to Esther. My wife and I took a quick trip this past summer to Kitty Hawk, a monument stand celebrating mankind's first flight in what would become known as an airplane. Two sons, brothers of a Protestant pastor, had solved the riddle of flight. They had figured out a thing called wing warping, a system that manipulated the edges of the wings, thereby allowing and using the wind to rise or descend, to turn or fly straight.

The record recorded that on December 17th, 1903, Orville Wright won the toss of the coin over his brother Wilbur, climbed aboard their homemade craft which had been created back in their bicycle shop back home. The airplane then coasted down the sandbar on a wooden rail and then rose into the air for all of 12 seconds. It traveled 120 feet, 120 feet, and it made history. The next time you go to the Raleigh-Durham International Airport, you'll see outside the parking deck there on the grass what looks like just modern art. It's actually a dedication to this flight. The lighted portion of the sculpture represents the distance of that first flight, which took place of course in North Carolina, which we can now claim with all humility, as if we had something to do with it.

While Marcia and I were there at this historic event, I picked up the 500-page biography of these two boys, simply entitled The Bishop's Boys. It catalogs the invention of these very creative engineers and the way they tackled the mysteries and unraveled them. And in the years they spent in court fighting for their patents as people tried to take them away. One of the things that intrigued me as I read their biography was the fact that their father was originally the one who had said to them, God never intended man to fly. He really never supported their efforts all that much.

They thought they were dabbling in something that really wouldn't make any money or make much of a difference. But six years later, after that first flight at Kitty Hawk, father climbed on board. Orville was at the controls. They would circle a field, staying aloft for seven minutes and a few odd seconds. The boys had been concerned about their father's reception of their invention firsthand.

Never really said much about it, even though by now the boys were famous and their invention world renowned. I love the fact though that even though he never asked to fly, he did on this occasion. And at one point during the flight, their 81-year-old father leaned close to his son's ear and shouted above the combined roar of the engine and propellers these words, hire Orville, hire. Isn't that great? I love it. Thank you, dad. You redeemed yourself. Let's go higher.

So great. Now on a 90-foot hill stands a 60-foot high monument to the memory of these boys and their invention which in many ways did change our world forever. I think monuments are a great idea. I think memorials are wonderful. It's good to set aside seasons, dates, establish some structures that cause us to remember. Like Thanksgiving, a time originally set aside by the governor of Massachusetts to thank God for his providence.

Would the governors today would call their states to thank God for his providence. And we've added to that day other days. In fact, our country's dotted with memorials and calendar events dedicated to moments long ago, not all of them wonderful days to remember but important to remember. The Holocaust Memorial that perhaps you've been through, the sacrifice of our veterans, the efforts of past presidents like Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln are worth remembering. These are our special days and beautiful monuments. In fact, I'm under the strong conviction that they tend to give our past due significance and they give our present needed perspective.

There are moments worth remembering. The last few paragraphs of what the Jews refer to as the scroll of Esther are nothing more or less than the establishment of a Jewish Thanksgiving day. Esther and Mordecai are not about to allow the Jews to forget what God has done and future generations that may, because we tend to forget, overlook the providence of God. And I want you to know that what they established 500 years before the birth of Christ is still being celebrated to this day. It's called the Feast of Purim.

Now if you'll turn back to Esther chapter 9, I'll hop and skip around a bit with the text that we have left, the last few paragraphs. You'll notice that the memorial began really as a spontaneous celebration. In fact, verse 17 of chapter 9 tells us that after all the fighting stopped, the Jews defended their lives against those who hated them. Rescued from certain death, the feasting begins. The war was over.

The latter part of verse 17, note there, Ezra, who is the writer, comments that it's just feasting and rejoicing. And basically what happens is it spontaneously broke out all around the kingdom. The war was over. Lives were spared. It was literally bedlam combined with celebration, like the celebration that spilled out onto the streets that I read about and seen pictures after the news hit the airwaves that World War II was over. It just ended. People spilled out into the streets, dancing and laughing and hugging each other, total strangers.

Perhaps you've seen that classic photograph of the crowd that spilled into Times Square just after the news was delivered. In all the hubbub, a sailor dressed in his uniform and his hat grabbed a young nurse in his arms who'd just come from the hospital and planted a big one on her. And that was all right.

Total strangers. It was all right for two reasons. One, because the war was over and two, because she wasn't my daughter.

It was okay. We frankly can't imagine the euphoria, maybe you've lived through it, of a war that was now over and you've survived. Mordecai defines what will become a holiday tradition. Look at verse 21. He's obliging them in one of several letters that he and Esther will be involved in writing, but he's obliging them to celebrate the 14th day of the month, Adar, which corresponds to our month of March, the 15th day of the same month annually.

Why? Why do we want to celebrate? Because on those days, the Jews rid themselves of their enemies and it was a month which was turned for them from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday that they should make them days of feasting and rejoicing and sending portions, gifts of food to one another and gifts to the poor. It was actually two days of celebration. Out around the perimeter of the kingdom, it would be on March 14th. Inside the walled cities, including Jerusalem, it would be the 15th because you remember they had that one extra day of fighting which took place as the Jews defended themselves against their enemies.

So what you've got here, what you have here is Thanksgiving and Christmas all rolled into one celebration. This is their day of deliverance and the scroll of Esther thus becomes a national monument as it were to Jewish deliverance and the Feast of Purim becomes a national holiday. In fact, I found it interesting in my study that during World War II, the Nazis absolutely hated any mention of the Book of Esther for obvious reasons. In fact, one historian recorded this little side note that if a Jew arrived at one of the concentration camps in the possession of any fragment or the entire Book of Esther, that Jew was immediately put to death.

They wanted no message of hope to come in here. They didn't want any hint of deliverance whispered among those who were marked for death inside these death camps and still I discovered that many of the inmates of Auschwitz and Dachau and Treblinka produced written copies of the Book of Esther from memory and then huddled together reading it quietly in secret during the feast days of Purim. So convicting to me to think that the backdrop would be a concentration camp and that would be the context for remembering, clinging to hope, tenacious hope in an invisible God. Well as I've studied this book with you over these last few months, I have found in the Book of Esther wonderful analogies and illustrations of the gospel and without torturing the text, I want to spell out for you today what I'm going to simply call the gospel according to Esther. Sort of recap and refresh on this, our last day of exposition from this book.

It's a gospel which leads ultimately to helping us remember our deliverance from eternal death and life, this eternal reversal. So let me give you five, six, seven, I don't know, we might have gotten up to eight or ten in the last hour. We don't have any reason to stop this hour.

Lunch is overrated, don't you think? Number one, a commoner becomes a queen. I love this truth that struck me at the very outset of chapter one and into chapter two, the fact that a commoner could become a queen. For the first time in Persian history, from what we know, the king reverses centuries of tradition and allows the crown to rest on the head of a common peasant, an orphan, a foreigner, the child of exiles becomes the bride of the king.

Is that great or what? We fallen sons of Adam and fallen daughters of Eve, as C.S. Lewis so poetically described us, given full rights and privileges as if we were of the same biological family, adopted to sonship, Paul wrote, through Jesus Christ to himself according to the kind intention of his will, Ephesians chapter one verse five. And then if you can imagine it, that's not the ending of it, it is a future for us of elevation and promotion and the crowning of us as the bride of Christ.

Our future destiny is to reign with him throughout a literal thousand year millennial kingdom, 2 Timothy chapter two verse 12, and then beyond that to reign with him throughout the eternal state of the new heavens and the new earth, Revelation chapter 22 verse five. See, I needed to remind myself today and I did in preparation for today that I wasn't going to be preaching to commoners. I would be preaching to royalty.

I'm not preaching to peasants. I'm preaching to princes and princesses who are destined to become kings and queens, co-reigning with Christ. What happened to Esther effectively will happen to you and to me.

There's a coming day of final and ultimate reversal, isn't it? One day you're going to lay aside the common clothes of mortality and put on the clothing of immortality. One day you're going to move out of houses made with bricks and sticks and plaster and plastic and metal into homes made out of jewels set upon shimmering gold. One day you're going to lay down your burdens of failure and imperfections for the last time and pick up a glorified body perfected in holiness forever. One day you're going to put aside and away sorrow and sadness and enter his courts with thanksgiving fully, perfectly, totally. A day is coming, ladies and gentlemen, when you'll put off fear and uncertainty as you speak to your invisible king. To that day when you look directly without hesitation or cowardice or insecurity and with perfect love, communicate to that one who is your betrothed king. That gets me excited.

It's pretty good, but you need to practice that for next Sunday because the time is coming. I'll tell you about it in a moment. You've been chosen. We altogether commoners, common people, to be wedded to the king. The second analogy that strikes me from this gospel of Esther is bound up in this edict of death. The king, as you know, has allowed wicked Haman to publish a decree of death. It is an irrevocable edict of death. So likewise it strikes me that all of humanity is under an irrevocable edict of death. The Bible says it is appointed unto man once to what?

Die, and after that the what? Judgment, Hebrews chapter 9 verse 27. It's appointed unto man once to die and then you're going to face God. I'm also struck by the fact that the Jewish people during the days of Esther were not condemned to die, follow this carefully, because of what they'd done. They were condemned to die because of who they were. They were Jews.

Simple as that. That alone carried the death penalty in the kingdom of Persia. They didn't have to commit some long list of crimes against the crown to come underneath this edict.

They simply had to belong to the Jewish race. So today all of humanity is under the edict of death. You don't have to do bad things, you know, the dirty dozen, the bad nine, whatever, to get underneath the edict. The truth is the moral man and the murderer will experience the same thing, death. The good man and the bad man stand shoulder to shoulder in this experience.

The educated and the wealthy don't have a leg up over and against the poor and the illiterate. The graveyards around this city, state, country and world are silent testimonies to the impartiality of this edict. It touches us all. God signed into law the edict, going all the way back to Adam and Eve in that original fall to the New Testament era when Paul delivered again, restating the truth in Romans chapter 6 verse 23, the wages of sin is what? Death. The paycheck for simply belonging to a fallen sinful human race is death. The statistics are staggering. It is one out of every one who dies. So also the edict of death has been delivered to our world.

It is written on the heart of every human being and the older they get, like me, the more they contemplate that unalterable fact, I am going to die. And I read recently of Oliver Winchester and his wife, Sarah, who lived in New Haven, Connecticut. Oliver Winchester was the inventor of the rifle named after himself, the first truly repeating rifle.

It was put to great use by the Union Army during the Civil War. Government and private contracts made this man and his wife wealthy almost beyond belief. Four years after they were married, they gave birth to a little girl they named Annie. The baby died, went about two weeks old. Sarah was so shattered she withdrew into herself and nearly lost her mind, hardly able to recuperate from that. However, her husband contracted tuberculosis and died. Sarah became heir to this vast fortune, but no amount of money could lessen her grief. At a friend's suggestion, and it was an unfortunate suggestion, Sarah sought to contact her deceased husband through a spiritist medium. During the session, the medium informed her that her husband was in the room to deliver through her a message to Sarah. The message was simply this, the family was cursed because of the invention of the rifle and the spirits were seeking vengeance. The message also said that she needed to move to a remote location and build a house for the spirits that had fallen before this weapon. He also told her through this medium that if she never stopped building the house, she would live, and if she stopped, she would die. Sarah immediately sold her home in New Haven, Connecticut, moved west with her fortune, bought a home that was under construction sitting on 162 acres of land, and immediately threw away the building plans. And for 36 years, the construction crew built and rebuilt, altered, changed, constructed one section of the house after another. The sound of hammers and saws never ceased. Railway cars brought in fresh supplies, and every morning Sarah would meet with the foreman to sketch out some new addition. Rooms would be added to rooms, I have read. Wings added to wings, levels turned into towers and peaks, staircases that led to nowhere, doors opening to nothing, closets opened to blank walls, hallways even doubled back upon themselves as the house became a vast, expensive maze designed to both, she said, house and confuse the evil spirits that tormented her mind. Sarah Winchester depleted her fortune building in this vast, confusing, sprawling mansion, and then on the night of September 4, 1922, after yet another conference with a medium in her seance room, she climbed into bed and died in her sleep at the age of 83. She had believed that as long as she continued building, she would stay alive.

And she was wrong. Ladies and gentlemen, mankind, frankly, is busy. We're busy with hammers and saws and enterprising and entertaining and playing and marrying and eating and parenting and educating and working and investing. And for the unbeliever, all of it is an attempt to drown out the edict of the inevitable.

I don't want to think about it. In fact, one journal article I read just this week, very frankly, admitted that the health industry is passionate about one thing, and it wasn't to help us live healthier lives. It was interesting in the headlines, it said, it's an all out attempt to help us avoid death. And it's not going to work.

I'm all for being healthy, to a point. Mankind is racing around, but it is merely racing to keep its appointment with death because this is the king's edict, the Bible says. But then comes a ray of hope. There is another analogy in the Gospel of Esther. It is what we'll simply call the intercession of Esther. After three days of solitude, Esther suddenly appears without any introduction. She's suddenly standing in the presence of the king. She intercedes on behalf of her people.

She willingly risks her life to save the life of her own people. And if I die, well, then I die. I discovered that many Jewish rabbis and scholars have believed that the three days of solitude experienced by Esther are mysteriously linked to the three days of Jonah inside the whale. And for those of us who believe the Gospel of Christ, we know that is the sign of the three days and nights in the tomb, followed by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In fact, Martin Luther, the reformer, wrote of this same Gospel analogy, and I quote him, translated from German to read in English, on the third day after judgment transpired on the cross, Jesus Christ arose, guaranteeing safety to enter God's presence to all who reach out in faith to touch the scepter of the king, which is in the shape of a cross. The good news of the Gospel is what unites us as brothers and sisters in Christ. Stephen's message today is called The Gospel According to Esther. There's actually more to this message, but because of time, we're going to stop right here and resume this lesson next time. You've been listening to Stephen Davey here on Wisdom for the Heart.

Stephen's been working his way through the book of Esther, and this is the last lesson in that series. We have a gift we'd like to send you if you haven't already seen it. Our ministry publishes a monthly magazine called Heart to Heart. Each month, you'll be blessed by the articles that explore important aspects of the Christian faith. We also want to help you spend time with God personally each day, so we have a devotional that you can use. We send Heart to Heart each month as our gift to all of our Wisdom partners. If you're not one of our partners, we'd like to send you the next three issues so that you can see this resource for yourself. You can sign up online at wisdomonline.org. You can sign up by email if you write to info at wisdomonline.org, and be sure and give us your full mailing address so that the magazine gets to you. And of course, you can call us at 866-48-Bible or 866-482-4253. That's all for today, but join us next time for more wisdom for the heart.