God’s Preservation among the Nations

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Esther chapter 4. This is our fourth installment in this series, and hopefully I’ll finish it up next week. This series on God’s sovereignty and trying to make sense out of a chaotic world that doesn’t make sense a whole lot of times, especially with problems about why if God is completely good and God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why is there evil in the world?

And philosophers and theologians have argued about this for centuries. And not that I think I’m smarter than them, but I can give a real simple answer because we’re here. There’s evil in the world because we’re here, because God created us with a free will, and sometimes we just mess things up.

And as a result of sin in the world, sometimes things get messed up even if we didn’t directly cause it to happen. But there’s a lot of evil that goes on in the world. And we’ve been talking about how to make sense of some of the chaos and look for God at work.

And we’ve talked about how we can see God at work to achieve His own glory, and how we can see God at work to accomplish the redemption of His people, and last week the chastisement of His people. And today I want to talk about the preservation of His people. Say, okay, how does that differ from redemption?

Because redemption, if you’ll remember, we talked about Joseph and the story of his brothers and him rescuing them from the famine because God had arranged it where they would be able to come there. He’d arranged it decades in advance that they’d be able to come there when there was a famine. Well, in that case, it really wasn’t, not the famine, but it was a problem of their own making that they had sent their brother off, and they were, all of these things had happened to them, and if you remember the passage, they even admit, we don’t deserve your mercy, Joseph.

We’ve done all of these horrible things, okay? And so, God needs to step in and redeem us and rescue us from trouble of our own making in redemption. Sometimes that’s the result of our own sin.

Sometimes that’s the result of just stupid things we do, which often overlap with sin. But God has to step in and rescue us from trouble of our own making. And then there’s sometimes that we’ve not done anything wrong, and it’s because the world around us is evil and fallen that we’re in trouble, and God has to step in and rescue us.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, the preservation of His people. And God, I don’t think, he doesn’t say this in his word, but I don’t think God gets a fair shake in our society today, do you? Now, God doesn’t complain and say, oh, y’all aren’t fair to me.

He’s God. He could deal with it like that if he chose to and just wipe out all the unfair people, but he doesn’t. But if you think about it, all the great things that happen in our society, even in our own lives, we think, man, I did this.

We look at our economy when it’s strong, and we think, wow, look at what we’ve done. We’re a great country, and we are a great country, but we think it’s because we’ve accomplished this. We look at our strength on the battlefield.

We look at our strength in other areas, and we say, man, look at what we did. Aren’t we incredible? Aren’t we great people?

And something bad happens, and who gets the blame? It’s God. Everybody on every cable news channel has Jerry Falwell.

Well, not Jerry Falwell anymore. He doesn’t do much cable news since he died, but he was on there a lot before then. Anyway, sorry.

They’d have Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson or, oh, heaven forbid, Joel Osteen. They’ll have them on TV, and they’ll ask them, you know, where was God when this happened? Why would God allow this to happen?

Why would God allow Hurricane Katrina? Why would God allow 9-11? Why would, okay, or some cases, why did God do this?

And we’re just assuming a lot about God’s motives and what He’s done. And I listened to people at home last week arguing over 9-11 and even a preacher friend of mine just raking somebody over the coals because God could not have possibly been behind 9-11. And I’ve told you, I think, every week that was God behind it?

I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. He didn’t say that in his work.

He could have caused it, or he could have allowed it. I tend to lean toward he allowed it instead of causing it. But he doesn’t say in his word.

but this preacher friend of mine was just angry at the suggestion, and I think, look at everything that happened to the Israelites, and some of the things we’ve talked about, is it really out of the realm of possibility? But God doesn’t get a fair shake in our society. Anything good that happens is by our own design, or our leaders, or just we take credit for it in some way, and then something negative happens, and where’s God?

Why did He allow this to happen? Why did He do this to us? We don’t realize that God a lot of times rescues us from trouble we don’t even realize.

God rescues us from things we may never even know that He stopped that from happening. Just the fact that any of us are alive today is testament to God’s hand of protection on us. As I said, I think it was last week with the Israelites and talking about God’s chastisement of them through the Babylonians, He didn’t even have to give the Babylonians the idea to go in there and conquer and invade and slaughter Israel in order to chastise Israel.

That idea was already in their minds. God had been holding the Babylonians and all these other tribes and nations back for centuries. God didn’t have to raise them up and send them in.

All God had to do was take his hand off of Israel, and they were toast. Same thing with us as a nation. Same thing with us as a church or us as families or us as individuals. God doesn’t have to destroy us.

The world will do a good enough job of that on its own. All God has to do is say, I’m going to take my hand off of you for a little bit. But the fact any of us are here alive, the fact that any of us are healthy, the fact that any of us have anything good going on in our lives at all is a testament to the fact that God is at work protecting and preserving us.

And he protects and he preserves his people. I can think of just a few examples, and they’re not huge examples. They’re kind of huge to me, but we’ve been in the process of buying this house.

It makes me think back to when we were about this time last year buying a house in Norman, Oklahoma, and we had put an offer in on a house, and oh, I loved it. It was gorgeous, and it was move-in ready and not far from the campus, and it was just a great house. And Christian loved it even more than I did, so that was good.

And we put an offer in, and we waited, and we waited, and we waited, and then they took it off the market, and we were devastated. We had already fallen in love with that house. They took it off the market from us, and we were upset.

Come to find out they were moving out of state. Their mortgage out of state fell through so they couldn’t sell their house. But we just thought, what luck.

We hated that because we were ready to buy that house. Come to find out a couple months later that that was a high crime neighborhood that we didn’t know about. And there had been people attacked.

Okay, God, thank you for allowing us to avoid that. I can think of examples where sometimes people in traffic aren’t really nice, are they? And driving down the street in Oklahoma City, and this car keeps cutting me off, and so finally I get in another lane, and I think, okay, I’m never going to be able to get back in that lane, and I’m going to have to go out of my way and turn all this way and that way to get back to where I’m going.

And then this car in the lane where I was, after they cut me off, they weren’t paying attention, and they slam at 45 miles an hour into a stalled car in that lane. And I probably would have done the same thing if I’d been in that lane because I was upset about what they’d been doing. And I think, I’m sorry it happened to them, but thank you, God, for protecting me from that.

Or even job situations where I finally said, God, I’ll do what you want me to do. I’ve told you before, when he first called me to go on staff at the first church I pastored, and I had argued with God for a while and said no, because I’d been to that church filling in. And there are a lot of good people there, but people that have filled in before me said, if you go to that church, you better take Jesus with you, because he isn’t there.

I thought, this is not a situation I want to go into. And God, I must be hearing you wrong. And so, I got stuck at another job that I was miserable at, even though it was a good job.

And finally, I said, okay, God, I’ll go where you want me to go. And he made me wait a little while. And he finally opened that door just in time.

And I went on staff there. And a few weeks later found out that there were layoffs at the job where I was. And I would have been one of the ones cut.

And we’d have been in big trouble. So even in little things, God works to preserve his people. Now, that doesn’t mean I’ve never had any trouble.

Oh, my goodness, I wish that meant I’d never had any trouble. Somebody else has problems. That doesn’t mean I’ve never had any trouble, but that means there have been times where God has been there to rescue me from trouble that I couldn’t deal with. On a practical level in believers’ lives, He takes care of us.

He provides for our needs just in time. On a spiritual level, He preserves us from day to day. But God is always at work preserving His people.

I want to walk you through the story of Esther really quick. We’re going to pick up in chapter 4. I’m not going to read all four chapters leading up to this point to you.

I’ll tell you the story if you’re not familiar with it. Hopefully you are, but if you’re not, even if you are, go back and look at it again because we always seem to see new things in familiar texts when we go back and look at it and make sure I’m not leading you astray. Always check your Bible against what the preacher says whether it’s me or anybody else.

There was a little bit after the time we talked about last week, where the Babylonians had conquered Israel and carried them into captivity. Lo and behold, as I told you, God told Habakkuk that the Babylonians were going to get theirs before too long. One night the Persians came in and conquered Babylon and killed their rulers and took over.

God knew what he was talking about. And so, we see here the Persian king Ahasuerus, which I think is the same person as Xerxes, that there’s some disagreement over that. The Hebrew name was Ahasuerus.

And he was there, and he had come back from war or something. He was having a huge feast, and he summoned his queen to come. And something about the way he summoned her would have been a dishonor to her if she had come.

And so, she refused. And the king was angered at this because she had not done what he had told her to do. And the king, the Shah of Persia, was all-powerful in his realm.

He made the rules, and everybody had to follow and they had nothing to say about it. So, he was angered over this, and he asked his advisors, what should I do? And they said, you’ve got to make an example of her.

Otherwise, all the women of the kingdom are going to hear that Vashti ignored her husband’s command, and all the wives are going to ignore all their husbands and it’s just going to be chaos in the land. I’m not saying they were right or wrong. I’m just telling you that’s what it says.

But he said, you’ve got to make an example out of this woman. And so, he deposes her as queen. Says, you’re out of here.

You’re gone. You’re done. It was written into law.

And he sends her away. And they decide it’s time he has another wife. Because it just didn’t do for the Shah of Persia to be without a wife.

At least a principal wife. Because they had harems back in that time. And so, they had what I basically refer to as the Miss Persia pageant.

And they had all the young women come from all the corners of the realm. And basically, they picked the fairest in the land to go before the king, and he was going to pick the one that he wanted to be his wife. And one of the women that was caught up in this dragnet was Hadassah, the Hebrew name, or Esther.

A young Hebrew woman, the cousin of Mordecai, who was descended from some of the Jewish exiles. And people said there’s a problem here in the timeline that Esther couldn’t possibly be true. If you looked at my, I don’t know if any of you look at my website occasionally, I know Brother Phil does, but I wrote some things on there this week because as I was studying the story of Esther, I got tired of hearing people say, it’s just a fairy tale, it wasn’t historical. So I started looking at some reasons why we could trust it, what they say, why we can’t, and what the real answer was.

One of the reasons they object is that in chapter 2 it talks about Mordecai, the son of Jair, the son of someone else, the son of Kish, the Benjamite, who came in the exile. And if that was true, what they’re saying, that Mordecai came in the exile, then he would have been over 100 years old. And how is he first cousin to this young girl?

Because she’d have had to been over 75 and not really involved in the Miss Persia pageant. Well, if you look at it the way it’s written, it could also mean that Kish, his great-grandfather, came in the exile. And that’s what I lean toward because there’s no timeline problem there.

And the Bible is still true the way it’s written. And so I think that’s a good explanation for that. Anyway, she was a descendant of some of these people who had been brought over by the Babylonians.

And she got caught up in this, and she was taken to the palace, and she went through all the rituals that you can read about in chapters 1, 2, and 3 that they did to get ready for the king. And finally, she goes into the king to visit with him, and he decides that he loves Esther, loves Hadassah, and he picks her to be the queen. And all the while, her cousin Mordecai is a high official in the court.

And by the way, another reason we can believe that Esther is a historical document, people say, oh, there’s no proof of Mordecai. There have been, I don’t know if they’re scrolls or clay tablets or what they are, but there is evidence of an accountant in Xerxes’ court named Mordecai. No reason why it couldn’t be the same Mordecai.

Anyway, Mordecai was a high government official in Ahasuerus’ court, And everyone in Persia was required to bow down to one of the king’s ministers, a man named Haman, the Agagite. And Mordecai, being a devout Jew, said, I will not bow before Haman, I will not worship Haman. And because of this, Haman hated Mordecai and all of the Jews.

And Haman had hatched a plot to wipe out the Jewish people. Mordecai caught wind of this, Esther caught wind of it through Mordecai, and we’ll pick up in chapter 4 as we see God’s plan to preserve his people from Haman’s plot. Chapter 4, verse 1, When Mordecai perceived all that was done, Mordecai rent his clothes and put on sackcloth and ashes and went out into the midst of the city and cried with a loud and bitter cry.

And came even before the king’s gate, for none might enter into the king’s gate clothed with sackcloth. And in every province, whithersoever the king’s commandment and his decree came, there was a great mourning among the Jews and fasting and weeping and wailing. So Esther’s maids and her chamberlains came and told it to her.

And then was the queen exceedingly grieved, and she sent Raymond to clothe Mordecai and to take away his sackcloth from him, but he received it not. And at this point, it’s important to point out that Esther has not yet told anyone that she’s a Jew. She’s kept that information to herself, and here she is, the queen of Persia.

And Haman has tricked the king of Persia into allowing him to plot to murder the Jews. And unbeknownst to him and unbeknownst to the king, on the throne, as the queen, sits a Jewish girl named Hadassah. Esther is her Persian name.

Mordecai is upset, more than upset. He is completely overcome at the news of what’s going on. So much so, he tears his clothes.

He puts on sackcloth like a burlap potato sack, basically. Itchy, uncomfortable. He wears clothes made out of that, puts ashes on his head, and he cries and screams in the street.

We think that’s bizarre. But if you’ve ever seen videos of the battles that go on between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and they fight back and forth, and you’ll see news reports where so many Palestinians were killed, and what they don’t tell you a lot of times is so many Israelis were killed right before that. But so many Palestinians were killed, and you’ll see people mourning in the streets, and they will cry and scream and wail in the streets in a way that we don’t necessarily do over here.

They’re very expressive, and I think that’s the same kind of culture. The Hebrew and Arab cultures share a lot of similarities. And so he goes and cries and screams and wails in the streets and lays in sackcloth and ashes.

And Esther hears about this, and she sends him clothes to replace his sackcloth, but he’s so overcome, so overwhelmed that he won’t take it. It says he receives them not. Then Esther called, verse 5, Then called Esther for Hatach, one of the king’s chamberlains, whom he had appointed to attend upon her, and gave him a commandment to Mordecai to know what it was and why it was.

So she calls in one of the king’s servants that had been charged with the task of watching over her, and says, go to Mordecai and find out what’s going on and why. And so Hathak sent forth to Mordecai, and by the way, I don’t know if I’m pronouncing his name right, but he wouldn’t be able to pronounce mine either. So Hathak went forth to Mordecai unto the street of the city, which was before the king’s gate, and Mordecai told him of all that had happened unto him and the sum of money that Haman had promised to pay the king’s treasuries for the Jews to destroy them.

He had not only tricked the king, he had bribed him, paid him blood money for the right to go out and kill the Jews. Also he gave him the copy of the writing of the decree that was given to them at Shushan to destroy them, to show it to Esther and to declare it unto her and to charge her that she should go in unto the king to make supplication unto him and to make requests before him for her people. And Hathak came and told Esther the words of Mordecai.

So when he goes to find out what’s going on, Mordecai tells him of the whole plot that Haman has to wipe out the Jews because they won’t bow down and worship him, and gives him a copy of the decree to take back to Esther to show her what’s going on. Because even though she’s the queen of Persia, women at this time had almost no control over what was going on. And she was there in the royal household and still had no idea what was going on in the king’s court.

She had to be smuggled this copy of this document, this order. And he tells Hatach to tell her to go in and make a request of the king. And again Esther spake unto Hatach and gave him commandment unto Mordecai.

All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s provinces do know that whosoever, whether man or woman, shall come unto the king into the inner court who is not called, there is one law of his to put him to death, except such to whom the king shall hold out the golden scepter that he may live. but I have not been called to come in unto the king these thirty days. And they told to Mordecai Esther’s words.

So Mordecai has told her, go in and make a request of the king. Go in and try to secure pardon for the Jewish people. Tell him what is really going on.

Tell him who you are. Excuse me. And she says, you know the rules.

You know the law that if anybody goes into the king’s court that has not been summoned, They are to be put to death unless the king extends his scepter to show that he’s willing to receive them. And she says, and the king has not called for me for 30 days. Things were kind of strained in the relationship at that point between her and King Ahasuerus.

She had no guarantee that he was going to extend the scepter to her. She was afraid, I believe, and rightfully so. And they told Mordecai Esther’s words.

Then Mordecai commanded to answer Esther. He tells Hathak to go back to her. Think not with thyself that thou shalt escape in the king’s house more than all the Jews.

He tells her, if the Jews are wiped out by the king’s decree because of the Haman’s plot, don’t think that you will escape just because you’re part of the king’s household. So he reminds her, you’re one of God’s people too, and you’re in this with us, and don’t think you’ll get away. For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall their enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place, but thou and thy father’s house shall be destroyed, and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this.

And some of the things I read as I was studying for this, there was a website where the author, I don’t know, I guess picks through the Bible for the parts she doesn’t like and critiques them. And she, no surprise, she says on one side of it that she bills herself as an atheist and militant feminist. I wasn’t surprised. She rakes Mordecai over the coals over this.

I mean, she tears him to pieces, says, how dare he threaten this young woman that, you know, they were going to kill her if she didn’t do what he wanted. And I thought, well, that is kind of problematic, isn’t it? Because here’s Mordecai, supposed to be a good guy.

And the more I thought about it, where did she get that, that Mordecai threatened her? Mordecai didn’t say he was going to do anything to her. As a matter of fact, it sounds like Mordecai is part of her household.

I mean, did we forget the fact that he’s the cousin who raised her? No, he wasn’t threatening her and saying, I’m going to kill you if you don’t do this. He’s saying there will be consequences of not following through with what God has put you here to do.

He doesn’t say it in those exact words. Esther is the only book of the Bible where God is not mentioned by name, but we see him all through it. Because he says, who knows that you may have come to the kingdom for such a time as this.

Come how? By who? Brought by whom?

He says deliverance and enlargement will come from some other place. Where? All the powers that be are stacked against them.

But as a devout Jew, somebody that wouldn’t bow before Haman because he only bowed before God, there’s one person he’s worshiping and one person that he’s looking to, and that’s God Almighty. So God is not mentioned by name in the book of Esther, but just even in these two parts, he’s seen and he’s seen all throughout the book. God at work, even if he’s not mentioned by name.

Same thing is in our country a lot of times, right? God’s to be seen and God’s at work, even if we as a country don’t call on him by name. He’s still at work, and he’s still God.

But he tells her, he’s not threatening her, he’s saying there are going to be consequences. Don’t think that you’re going to survive and get away with this if you don’t risk it now. There are going to be consequences, and you’re going down with everybody else.

For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place, but thou and thy father’s house shall be destroyed. And who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this? He said, if you keep quiet, I’m confident that we will be rescued by some other means.

But who knows, Esther? Who knows? Perhaps you were put where you are for just this occasion.

Because if you think about it, it’s kind of a crazy story. That this young Jewish girl brought in with the exiles, I’m sorry, not brought in with the exiles, but descended from the exiles. The people that were carried away basically as slaves, they didn’t have any rights, they didn’t have any say in what went on.

The descendant of these people, through a contest, captures the eye of the king and is put on the throne of Persia as the wife of the most powerful man in the known world. It sounds like something right out of Hollywood, and yet it really happened. It says, who knows, maybe this incident right here is the purpose for all of this that’s gone on.

All these unbelievable things that have happened to you, Esther, maybe they are for this moment right here. Then Esther bade them return Mordecai this answer. Go gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, that’s around the palace, and fast ye for me, neither eat nor drink three days, night or day.

I also and my maidens will fast likewise, and so will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law. And if I perish, I perish. So Mordecai went his way and did according to all that Esther had commanded him.

She evidently is convicted by what Mordecai tells her, and she sends word back to him and says, All of the people, all of the Jews there at Shushan, you get them together, and all of you fast and pray for me for three days. No food or drink, but three days and nights, you just pray for me. And all of the ladies around me will do the same thing.

She said, I’ll go into the king, I’ll break the law, and if I die, I die. Well, the rest of the story, as most of you know, is that Esther goes into the king, and with what I assume was a tense moment there, the king finally decides to extend his scepter. He sends grace to her and says, you can come.

And he says, whatever you want, I will give unto you up to half of the kingdom. I don’t know. It kind of sounded, kind of sometimes sounds to me like a divorce thing going on because they hadn’t spoken for 30 days and he’s offering her half of his stuff.

And I’m not saying that to be trying to be funny. I don’t know if that’s what he had in mind or what. But he says, I’ll give you anything you want up to half the kingdom.

And she said, I want you to come to dinner tomorrow night. Or it may have been that night, I don’t recall. I want you to come to dinner.

And so he comes to dinner and he says, okay, what was your request? And she says, my request. And I assume she’s trying to work up the nerve to talk to him about this. He says, okay, I’m here at dinner.

What’s your request? She said, my request is that you come back for dinner again tomorrow. And when he does, he grants her what she requests.

He comes back the next night and she tells him of Haman’s plot and that she’s a Jew as well. And throughout the story, they find out that the king realizes says Mordecai had rescued him from an assassination plot, and he had never honored him for that. And he asks Haman, his advisor, what should I do for the man that I wish to honor?

He said, put a crown on him, parade him through the streets on a horse, and have somebody go before him and say, this is the man that the king delights to honor, because Haman thought he meant him. When he finds out it’s Mordecai, he’s enraged. And he’s built this gallows in advance that he’s going to hang Mordecai from.

And when he finds out about Haman’s plot to kill Mordecai and to kill his queen and to kill all of the Jewish people along with them, the king is enraged. He has Haman put to death. He gives the Jewish people the right to defend themselves.

He said they could go. He tells the Jewish people they could go and wipe out those that plan to kill them because it was set in stone in the law. They couldn’t change it that on a certain day the Jews were to be killed.

People were to go out and kill the Jews. Well, he adds a new law to this, and he says on that same day, The Jews are lawfully able to take up weapons, to defend themselves against any that try to kill them, and not only that, to go out and slaughter their wives and their children and to take all the plunder that they want. And this same website author talks about how bloodthirsty Esther was for working this out.

The Jews defended themselves, but in an amazing show of restraint, they did not go after the women and children of those that tried to kill them. They simply defended themselves. They didn’t take any plunder.

They simply defended themselves. But the important thing to note here is that none of this would have happened if God had not intervened to place Esther where she was. They would not have been spared.

I shouldn’t say Esther. None of them would have been spared. None of this would have happened if God had not intervened.

And he chose Esther to be his means of intervention. See, God, even when we don’t understand why or how the things are happening around us, God is at work to preserve his people. He’s at work to preserve his people.

We can see it all through the Old Testament. God was always stepping in. Sometimes He was stepping in, redeeming the Jews.

He was rescuing them from their own sin and their own wickedness and the problems of their own making. And sometimes He was preserving them from the wickedness around them and rescuing them from troubles that they had no part in starting. So we see it with Israel that God was always at work to preserve His people.

Folks, today, we as children of God, if you’ve trusted in Christ as your Savior, if you’ve been born again, you’re a child of God. You’re one of His people, and He’s at work to preserve His people. Now, there’s some principles that we can take from this, four that I want to look at, briefly this morning, before we close, about God’s preservation of His people.

So we see, why would God allow Esther to go with them? Why would God allow Esther to be picked up and taken against her will? I mean, it sounds nice.

You get to go live in the palace and all these jewels and all this. But she was taken away from her family, taken away from her life, shut away with all these women for two years. Doesn’t sound so great to me to be forcibly taken away from your family, forced into marriage.

It doesn’t sound so great to me. Why did God put Esther through all these things? It was the preservation of his people.

And even today, we can see in circumstances, why did this happen? Why did that happen? God, why did you do this?

God, why did you allow that? One of the reasons is that he’s at work for the preservation of his people. I want us to realize that God’s preservation of his people does not guarantee every person an escape from e

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