Sermon: Esther (Part Five)

Conclusion: Purim and Preparing The Bride
#1366
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 04-Mar-17; 73 minutes

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Well, this year is 2017 (if you are not aware of that already), here it is, already March. But, here in this year, the Jews are going to be celebrating Purim on March 12th, which is not this Sunday, but Sunday next. And they always, as they do in celebrating Jewish things, they will start that the evening before, on Saturday evening, right after the Sabbath ends.

Now I will be calling it Purim for this first part of the sermon. But the Jews insist that it is really supposed to be Pur-eem. That is how it is pronounced in Hebrew. But, I am an American so I will just say Purim and those of you who like Pur-eem will just have to suffer, I guess.

Purim always falls on Adar the 14th. And that is what Esther 9:17-21 shows. So, if you will go to Esther 9, we are going to look into some of this that we have not looked into in the first four sermons on Esther.

Esther 9:16-21 The remainder of the Jews in the king's provinces gathered together and protected their lives, had rest from their enemies, and killed seventy-five thousand of their enemies; but they did not lay a hand on the plunder. This was on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar. And on the fourteenth day of the month they rested and made it a day of feasting and gladness. But the Jews who were at Shushan assembled together on the thirteenth day, as well as on the fourteenth; and on the fifteenth day of the month they rested, and made it a day of feasting and gladness. Therefore the Jews of the villages who dwelt in the unwalled towns celebrated the fourteenth day of the month of Adar with gladness and feasting, as a holiday, and for sending presents to one another. And Mordecai wrote these things and sent letters to all the Jews, near and far, who were in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus, to establish among them that they should celebrate yearly the fourteenth and fifteenth days of the month of Adar.

This brings up a little bit of a problem because I said it is always celebrated on the 14th and here Mordecai says it should be celebrated on the 14th and the 15th. Well, the clue there is about the unwalled towns versus Shushan, which would be a walled town or a city. And in Shushan, the king had given them permission to defend themselves on the 14th as well. So in Shushan, they fought for two days, the 13th and the 14th, so they did not get their rest and their celebration until the 15th. But the people in the unwalled cities, they only fought on the 13th, defended themselves, and then that was that, and so they celebrated on the 14th. So Mordecai said it should be celebrated on the 14th and the 15th. The difference being, if you were in a village, you celebrated on the 14th. If you were in a walled city, you celebrated it on the 15th.

Now, this has come down to a modern custom today that everybody celebrates it on the 14th, except those people who are in Jerusalem, which is a walled city. And so they celebrate it on the 15th.

If you know anything about the Hebrew calendar as well, you know that Adar is the last month of the year and sometimes there is a leap year where they add another month and it becomes Adar one month and then the next month is Adar two, the second Adar. And so when that happens, Purim is always kept in second Adar right before the beginning of the New Year.

To the Jews, Purim is both the most enjoyable of their holidays, even more than any of the holy days, which does not surprise me, and in some ways it is the most poignant of their holidays, especially to the Jews in the Diaspora, because they can identify with what is going on in the book of Esther.

Let me tell you a little bit about Purim celebrations. You probably do not know very much about them. We are mostly Anglo-Saxon Protestant types, some Catholics have entered the church, so we do not understand what goes on in these Jewish celebrations. But Purim contains a spirit of fun and revelry and even excess that the other holidays that they keep (or even the holy days) do not have. One Jewish website, puts it this way, "If there were ever a day to let loose and just be a Jew or just be Jewish, this is it."

This is a result of the facts that 1) it is not one of God's commanded festivals, which are holy convocations. And as it says in Psalm 81:3, "solemn feast days." God's feast days tend to be a lot more serious than Purim. And 2) that Purim is really a national or cultural celebration, just something for the Jews alone. In other words, it is not a deeply spiritual holiday in the least. It is an ethnic holiday. It is more like our Fourth of July or Memorial Day or something like that, rather than a religious holiday, although it does have a few overtones, especially those of God's providence and deliverance. But even that, from the Jewish perspective down through the centuries, it is purely on a physical level, that He saved them from death in Shushan.

Now, the more devout and many of the orthodox Jews, in order to make it a little bit more solemn and religious, they often fast on the day before Purim or like in this year when Purim occurs on a Sunday, they fast on the Thursday before Purim because you do not want to fast on the Preparation Day and you do not want to fast on the Sabbath, so they take it all the way back to Thursday. So they fast before Purim just as Esther and the Jews of Shushan fasted and prayed for God to save His people.

Esther 4:16 Then Esther told them to reply to Mordecai: "Go, gather all the Jews who are present in Shushan, and fast for me; neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. My maids and I will fast likewise. And so I will go to the king, which is against the law, and if I perish, I perish!"

So they take this as a basis for a fast before the day of Purim and they do this type of thing where they ask for God's deliverance from whatever they are going through at the time.

They also, these more devout Jews, and I would think most Jews who celebrate Purim do this as well, they read the entire book of Esther on the eve of Purim. (So that would be next Saturday night.) They would read the entire book of Esther and they do this as a congregation you would say in the synagogue.

Now you would think going to the synagogue and hearing the book of Esther would kind of be a solemn type of thing. Well, it is not at all. I think I have mentioned this before in this series that it is full of audience participation. So when they read the book of Esther, there are lots of hisses and boos and catcalls whenever Haman is mentioned. And then when Mordecai is mentioned, they do their noisemakers and say, "Yay Mordecai!" and make it just a real fun thing. They are getting into the spirit of the holiday as they see it.

Another Purim tradition is giving gifts. This derives from what is written in Esther 9:22.

Esther 9:22 As the days on which the Jews had rest from their enemies, as the month which was turned from sorrow to joy for them, and from mourning to a holiday; that they should make them days of feasting and joy, of sending presents to one another and gifts to the poor.

So they take this as a basis for what they should do. That the Jews of Shushan and of the Persian Empire followed this, that they would give gifts to one another and gifts to the poor. And so they do that.

Note here in verse 22 that the gift giving is separated into two categories: that they give gifts to one another and then they make sure they give certain gifts to the poor. Now, as the custom has descended to our time, it has evolved into sending two substantial gifts of food to at least one friend. So just depending on what it was (let me just pull something out of the air), they will get a turkey and all the fixings for that and maybe a roast and all the fixings for that and give that to a friend to eat on Purim. And then the other one is that they give gifts of money or food to at least two poor people. So they go out into the streets and find poor people in the neighborhood, and they lavish them with a monetary gift and/or a gift of food.

And the reason for that is that they want those people in the worst of situations, whether they are a homeless person or a widow or an orphan or what have you, or just a destitute family, to be able to celebrate Purim in as big a fashion as possible, just as they would. We would say that they would celebrate it in style with the best food that they can and even some pocket money to go out and buy something nice. And this recognizes what we saw there in verse 22, that Purim is a day of feasting and joy and that the Jews of Persia did not take any plunder. Remember we saw that in verses 15 and 16.

Esther 9:15-16 And the Jews who were in Shushan gathered together again on the fourteenth day of the month of Adar and killed three hundred men at Shushan; but they did not lay a hand on the plunder. . . but they did not lay a hand on the plunder.

This is very important to them, the fact that these Jews around the empire did not lay a hand on the plunder, that they kept their sticky paws away from all the gold and the loot that they could have had from all these people that they had killed while defending themselves. Now, why is this so important? Well, we have to go back to I Samuel 15 and we have to remember what this book has set up as a different approach to what Saul did when God told him to take care of the Amalekite problem.

Let us go back to I Samuel the 15th chapter. What we see in Esther is that Mordecai and the Jews of that time did what God wanted them to do in terms of the Amalekite problem which we see in Haman who was an Agagite. Back in I Samuel 15, we see that God told Saul through Samuel that he was to take care of the Amalekites, but he did not. Notice exactly what happened here.

I Samuel 15:7-9 Saul attacked the Amalekites from Havilah all the way to Shur, which is east of Egypt. He also took Agag king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep, the oxen, the fatlings, the lambs, and all that was good, and were unwilling to utterly destroy them. But everything despised and worthless, that they utterly destroyed.

Of course, Samuel calls Saul on this. And then in verse 15, Saul responds.

I Samuel 15:15 "They [the people] have brought them from the Amalekites; for the people spared the best of the sheep and the oxen to sacrifice to the Lord your God; and the rest we have utterly destroyed."

Then we get to the book of Esther and they have a similar command from God, you might say, that they are going to defend themselves against this persecution from the anti-Semites led by Haman, and they are going to do it right this time. So when they defend themselves, they kill those who attack them, which is part of the command that they utterly destroy. And they also do not lay a hand on the plunder. They made sure that they did what was right, what was part of the original command that they were to do. So in keeping Purim, they, the Jews of the Diaspora, turn this around. They go, let us say, an extra mile and not only do they not take anything but they turn it around and they give generously to those among them and in their communities to show that they are going above and beyond what God had said in terms of this command to remove the Amalekites.

So it is a day of feasting, a lot of eating and drinking takes place throughout the day, and this is also a reflection of what happens in Esther because there is at least six banquets or feasts found in the book there. As one rabbi put it about their celebration, "We make a daytime wine-fest on Purim and celebrate until, in the words of the Talmud, you do not know the difference between Blessed is Mordecai and cursed is Haman." So they could get really soused on the day of Purim.

It is kind of a day of abandon. Children dress up in costumes and many of the adults do too. They will dress up as Gandalf and Obi Wan and they will dress up like Minnie Mouse and you name it; just whatever comes to mind. And they will stay there the whole day in the costume. The sites that I went on to research this said kids and adults alike frolic about with near abandon. It is just one day that they can kind of just let loose. Rabbis justify this; of course they do. They call this divine happiness, and it is they are happy that they are God's people and they are alive and that they can give to the poor. That is their excuse.

Among the foods of the day, Jews eat meat-filled dumplings called kreplach. And if you are of Polish descent, you would know this as a pierogi or something like that. They are often served in soup and sometimes they are fried to be eaten as a side dish. But they are little pastries that are filled with meat. They are sometimes boiled or, like I said, sometimes fried. Per one Jewish source that I saw, they said that the meat in these signifies harshness of judgment. Whereas the dough, which is a form of bread, symbolizes compassion and mercy. And these are parallels to the Jews being under judgment, that is, under Haman's decree of judgment, which was very harsh. And God, however, seen in the bread, of course, He is the bread of life, showed them mercy by delivering them through Esther. So the actual thing there, the kreplach, is a symbol of what happened in the book of Esther.

A Purim treat is called hamentaschen. Some of you may have heard of hamentaschen. They are three cornered pastries and they are often filled with poppy seeds and sometimes they are filled with various jams. In college I sampled a few of these because my professor, Mark Kaplan, brought in a tray of them that his wife had made. It was right about this time of year and they were very tasty. I recall mine were filled with jelly or jam. I believe it was apricot and strawberry and they were very good. The reason why they are three cornered or triangular in shape comes from a legend that Haman wore a tri-cornered hat, just as his normal hat or normal head covering.

Also the Hebrew word haman can be translated as poppy seeds. That is why they are filled with poppy seeds. Hamentaschen can be translated as either Haman's ears, is way one way I heard it, or more correctly that they are just poppy seeds. They are also called oznei haman, meaning Haman's ears and that has led to the myth that Haman's ears were chopped off before he was executed. But actually, there is nothing to that. There is no basis in history for the myth. It was actually the pastry that created the myth rather than the other way around.

The story of Esther, read every year, is credited with helping the Jews of the Diaspora to identify with the Israelites of the Bible and to maintain their link to the Bible, as it is read every year. And it shows God delivering the people even though they are in a dispersed state. Esther herself is seen as a typical, pious, and faithful Jew of the Diaspora. A Jew who is willing to identify herself or himself as one of the Jewish people despite unfair treatment and persecution.

So the Esther is held up as a paragon of virtue and little girls are told, this is the way you should be. Even if we have trouble, you always maintain your Jewishness and go through life proud that you are of this blood. And the same for boys and Mordecai and all of that.

Jews, almost all of them treasure this book of Esther. They often think that it is one of the best in the whole Old Testament because it reassures them that the Jewish people will survive as a people against those who wish to destroy them, which happens a lot more frequently than they would like. That anti-Semitism is real. It is out there. It is frequent. And they need something like the book of Esther to keep them hopeful and buoyed up as they go through life.

So Esther stands as a very strong statement against anti-Semitism because it shows the unseen God protecting His people and destroying their persecutors even in the midst of a foreign land that is against them.

I read that during World War II the inmates of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belsen— individually, these are four different camps there during the Holocaust—they wrote out the book of Esther from memory in each one of these camps and they read it secretly on Purim during those years that they were interred there. So even during the Holocaust, at the height of the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were being killed in the furnaces and whatnot throughout Germany and Poland and the Soviet Union, the book of Esther gave them hope of God's deliverance; that He was still there even in the midst of one of their worst trials that that people has ever endured.

Today, we are going to continue this study of Esther and for the rest of the time, I want to consider the more theological aspects of the story, some of which we have already touched on. And I hope that by the time we are finished, that we have the same sense about Esther that the Jews do: that God is there even in a godless and hostile world. And that even though He may not seem to be present in our story, for one reason or another we cannot see Him at work in our lives, He is still there. He is working to bring us good and we need to recognize that and remember that, even in the worst of our persecutions.

Now, before moving forward, I want to go back a little bit to where we were in the last sermon and just go over the way the narrative structure of Esther is because I think this is a major point that we need to understand, not just in terms of the literary structure of the book, but in terms of a spiritual understanding of what is going on in Esther and why we need to understand this structure as a personal lesson to us, a personal hope for us.

Recall that the Esther's narrative structure is called chiasm. Remember I said it is named that after the Greek letter chi, which we see as an X, and that the symmetry that there in a chi, in an X, that it starts out broad, it narrows to a point or to an axis, and then it broadens out again wide, that that shows the structure of the book. That it narrows to a point and then it reverses. So chiastic structure conveys certain points at the beginning, or the first half we would say, of a passage. And then in the last half of the passage or, in this case, the whole book, those points that were brought out in the first half are turned upside down, they are reversed. So we get the same things happening in the last half as in the first half. But in the first half, they were all bad; in the second half, they are all good.

Scholars often label these significant points in these chiastic narratives with letters or numbers and then later on, in the last half, those same points are lettered or numbered, but they are given a superscription. So you have points, A, B, C, and D as we saw in one of those psalms. And then in the last half, we saw that it was D-1, C-1, B-1, A-1 until everything was wrapped up.

Esther works the same way. Esther is a chiasm. And in doing so it brings out the spiritual points of the book.

Remember too, I also said that if you do not want to look at it as an X, look at it as a U, as a capital U. That might be an easier way to think about it. The events of Esther's first half of the book, they plunge downward like the one arm of a U. And then you have a curve at the bottom where they reach a point where something has got to change. And then in the last half of the book, you have the other arm of the U that goes upward. So that in that sense, in the last half of the book, things turned around dramatically and whereas they were negative in the first half, in the second half, after the turn, everything becomes positive. So you have a reversal there.

So as the narrative unfolds toward the conclusion, the situation completely reverses even though things had been so bad and terrible in the first half and it looked like there was going to be no resolution of the of the problem. There was no way to get out of it. God somehow makes it work, turns it all the way around. And in the end, everyone lives happily ever after. There is a complete reversal from being totally depressed and certain death looms, and then in the second half, all that is turned around, there is joy and there is life now.

That is how we need to think of the way God works with us in a lot of instances. He shows that all the way back in the book of Deuteronomy. If you will go there with me to Deuteronomy 8, we can see that He hints at something like this in the way that He worked with the children of Israel.

Deuteronomy 8:2-6 [just think of the way He worked with the people of Israel] "You shall remember that the Lord your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and to test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandment or not. So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. Your garments did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these forty years. You should know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the Lord God your God chastens you. Therefore you shall keep the commandments of the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to fear Him."

Deuteronomy 8:15-16 [He is repeating some of this] "who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, in which were fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty land where there was no water, who brought water for you out of the flinty rock; who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your fathers did not know, that He might humble you and that He might test you [and here is the reversal], to do you good in the end."

Now, what he described in all of this was mostly all the bad times that He led His people through, but He has a reason for doing it. And so He led them all this time, 40 years of hardship where they had to wonder where their next meal was going to come from. They had to trust in faith that God would give it to them through the manna, that He would give them the water to drink, that He would bring them through the wilderness, that they would not fry in the sun, and on and on it went; where the serpents came up, the armies came up against them, and they had to trust Him through all of this. And He said He put them through all of this to do them good in the end. He was going to turn it around at some point.

So it is necessary for Him to work with us in this way—in this reversal of fortune way—so that we can learn the most, learn to be humble, learn to obey, learn to trust. And He has found this way works and that it produces a people, if it is done right, who are loyal and are steadfast and who endure. And so He uses this way quite a bit.

He also tested Mordecai and He tested Esther in this way. He took them to the very brink where they thought that they were going to die—not only themselves, but every Jew in the empire. And the sentence of death was over them. But then He showed His mercy and His providence and His sovereignty and He turned the situation completely around. By the time we get to the end of the book, they are feasting and happy and they are on top of the whole empire. Mordecai, we find, is second in command; and that is the kind of thing that God can do.

This turn of events that reverses the expected outcome into something much better is called peripety. A scholarly term, I do not know if you really need to know it. It is that access point, that change, that turn where everything goes from bad to better and then continues to get better, increasingly better. And that is found in Esther 6. We went through this a little bit last time, but I want to go back through it to bring out a few more things. This is where, back in Esther 6, that the king could not sleep. This is the story's midpoint. This is the bottom of the U, as it were, or where the two parts of the X cross, the two arms of the X cross.

This is Esther 6, starting in verse 1. I am going to read the whole chapter just so we understand what is going on here.

Esther 6:1-14 That night the king could not sleep. So one was commanded to bring the book of the records of the chronicles; and they were read before the king [probably to make him sleep.] And it was found written that Mordecai had told of Bigthana and Teresh, two of the king's eunuchs, the doorkeepers who had sought to lay hands on King Ahasuerus. Then the king said, "What honor or dignity has been bestowed on Mordecai for this?" And the king's servants who attended him said, "Nothing has been done for him." And the king said, "Who is in the court?" Now Haman had just entered the outer court of the king's palace to suggest that the king hang Mordecai on the gallows that he had prepared for him. The king's servant said to him, "Haman is there standing in the court." And the king said, "Let him come in."

So Haman came in, and the king asked him, "What shall be done for the man whom the king delights to honor?" Now Haman thought in his heart, "Whom would the king delight to honor more than me?" And Haman answered the king, "For the man whom the king delights to honor, let a royal robe be brought which the king has worn, and a horse on which the king is ridden, which has a royal crest placed on its head [showing that it was a royal horse]. Then let this robe and horse be delivered to the hand of one of the king's most noble princes, that he may array the man whom the king delights to honor. Then parade him on horseback through the city square, and proclaim before him, 'Thus shall be done to the man whom the king delights to honor!'"

Then the king said to Haman, "Hurry, take the robe and the horse as you have suggested, and do so for Mordecai the Jew who sits within the king's gate! Leave nothing undone of all that you have spoken." So Haman took the robe and the horse, arrayed Mordecai and led him on horseback through the city square, and proclaimed before him, "Thus shall it be done to the man whom the king delights to honor!" Afterward Mordecai went back to the king's gate. But Haman hastened to his house, mourning and with his head covered. When Haman told his wife Zeresh and all his friends everything that had happened to him, his wise men and his wife Zeresh said to him, "If Mordecai, before whom you have begun to fall, is of Jewish descent, you will not prevail against him but will surely fall before him." While they were still talking with him, the king's eunuchs came, and hastened to bring Haman to the banquet which Esther had prepared.

Here is the big change in momentum in the book. This is where things begin to turn positive. The first significant event that happens here, that really is the catalyst to make matters turn, is a rather mundane thing that the king cannot sleep. That he has got insomnia, that something is on his mind, that there are things going on and he just cannot shut his mind down. This big axis point is not a heroic speech or a dramatic clash of battle or whatever. It is simply that the man cannot close his eyes at night because he has got a problem. So he has got insomnia.

Now, this "coincidence" (and I do put that in quotes) tends to take our focus off the people that are involved here. It actually takes our focus even off the king. It is this problem that he has, and why does he have this problem? Nobody else is causing this problem for him. If anybody is causing this problem among people, it is himself. Maybe he had, you know, too much guacamole or something or whatever it was, and he cannot sleep. But that is not the problem because we know who is causing this problem that he cannot sleep. It is God. What it does is it takes our mind away from the people and makes us think of (you remember this phrase), "The unseen hand from somewhere".? Mr. Armstrong used to use that quite a lot. I think it was a Churchillian phrase. That there is a force in this universe that is working things out here below, that there is an unseen Hand from somewhere sovereignly manipulating events, working with people, making changes that are going to bring about His purpose.

And so this, particularly verse 1 here in chapter 6, it begins to turn the reader's mind toward God even though He is not even mentioned. But it is this "coincidence," and then later on Haman's "just being there" at the time that he is needed to be humbled, that show that God in this axial chapter here, this keystone of the book, is moving. He is making the right moves to turn everything toward the good.

So these two coincidences, verse 1 and verse 4, with Ahasuerus not being able to sleep and Haman showing up at just the right time, show that God is working. These coincidences are not really coincidences, they are the outwork of God's providence and sovereignty in this situation. And of course, it leads, then, to the humbling of Haman and the exaltation of Mordecai, and an interesting statement in verse 13.

I would like to spend a little bit of time here on verse 13, because it may be the central theme of the entire book, said by Zeresh, the wife of Haman. She seems to be the one that took the lead in this even though it also mentions his wise men. But she is mentioned there, "Zeresh and all his friends." She says here, let me just repeat it, "If Mordecai, before whom you have begun to fall, is of Jewish descent, you will not prevail against him but will surely fall before him."

That may be the central theme of the book. This is what we might call a statement of the divine will said through, pardon the expression, Balaam's ass. Someone who should not have known this.

Who is this Zeresh woman? She was the wife of Haman, but she had no connection to what God was. Maybe she knew that the Jews had a certain blessed ability to get out of scrapes; you know, that they never were ever really defeated. But the question here is that God must have allowed her to speak the truth here. It is put into our Bibles so that we understand what is really going on. That this person tells the antagonist of the story what is going to happen, that you cannot beat these people. It does not mention God. But again, our minds are taken away from the actual people that are in here to the One who is behind all of this, working it out.

Why are the Jews not ever totally destroyed and beaten down? The reason is they have Someone in their corner, that there is this unseen Hand from somewhere that is guiding matters and He has a special feeling, a special love for these people, and you are not going to win. That is just the way it works.

Now, there is an important detail here in verse 13 that is hidden in our English translation. What we are going to be doing in the next few minutes is treading on what my dad has been talking about in his covenants and leadership sermons. What is the hidden bit? The hidden bit is in the phrase "is of Jewish descent." The translators did us no service here because really that phrase should be "he is the seed of the Jews." So let me put that in there. "If Mordecai, before whom you have begun to fall, is of the seed of the Jews, you will not prevail against him but will surely fall before him."

We have gone into this. My dad has gone into this quite a bit about the seed of the woman in Genesis 3, the seed of Abraham in Genesis 15, especially the seed of David that is in II Samuel 22. But all these seeds, the seed imagery, the seed theme is constant in the Bible. And then of course, he has talked about the idea that Seth was the new seed that Eve got from the Lord after Abel died. And Seth, then, this new seed, started a line of men through whom God's way was brought down through history until the time of Noah.

So you have what is called the holy line, the line of Seth, they carried the seed with them. And of course, it got to Noah and from Noah, it got to Abraham. And then we have in Genesis 12 that God calls Abraham out specifically, and He wants him to carry the seed. And He talks about a promised seed that he is going to have, which is Isaac. And of course, that goes down through Jacob and the 12 tribes. And finally, you find out that the seed comes to David, especially that he is chosen to be king over all Israel, as it says, that the scepter would be in Judah there in Genesis 49.

You get down to David and you find out that he has a seed, which in one sense is Solomon, the one to build the Temple. But then you know that there is another Seed beyond that that is even more special than Solomon. And He is going to build the real Temple, not just a physical temple in the city of Jerusalem, but He is going to create the true spiritual Temple of God. And so you have this idea of the seed going through Scripture.

Mordecai is called the seed of the Jews. And because he is the seed of the Jews, Zeresh says you cannot stop him. He is going to beat you. It is futile to go up against the seed here. How this woman understood that I do not know. That is why I said it is like Balaam's donkey here, where godly words are put into the mouth of one who would not otherwise know. But she voices this truth that God's purpose through His people cannot be thwarted. It is not the people that are not to be thwarted. It is God that cannot be thwarted. And if He is behind a certain people or a certain person, there is no way anybody can defeat Him. His purpose, His counsel, His will, will stand and it is going to crush anybody who tries to get in its way because this is what God wants.

So she is saying to us, to the reader, that God is with His people, with this line of the seed, with the specific seed here, Mordecai, and with us, as we will see, and He will protect them and defend them, and save them to bring His plan to fulfillment, whatever it is, whatever that specific step is at that time.

Let us go to Matthew the 21st chapter and start bringing this down to us a bit more. This is the Parable of the Wicked Vinedresser, starting in verse 33. Jesus is speaking to the Jews.

Matthew 21:33-45 "Hear another parable: There was a certain landowner who planted a vineyard and set a hedge around it, dug a winepress in it, and built a tower. And he leased it to the vinedressers and went into a far country. Now when vintage-time drew near, he sent his servants to the vinedressers, that they might receive its fruit. And the vinedressers took his servants, beat one, killed one, and stoned another. Again he sent other servants, more than the first, and they did likewise to them. Then last of all, he sent his son to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.' But when the vinedressers saw the son, they said among themselves, 'This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and seize in his inheritance.'

So they caught him and cast him out of the vineyard and killed him. Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those vinedressers?" They said to Him, "He will destroy those wicked men miserably, and lease his vineyard to other vinedressers who will render to him the fruits in their seasons." Jesus said to them, "Have you never read in the Scriptures [He is speaking directly now to the audience], 'The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This was the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes'? Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a nation bearing the fruits of it. And whoever falls on this stone will be broken; but on whomever it falls, it will grind him to powder." Now when the chief priests and Pharisees heard His parables, they perceived that He was speaking of them [much truth].

This is an ironic restatement of the principle that Haman's wife Zeresh voiced. And it is ironic because it is spoken to and about the Jews.

Now, back in Esther 6, it was spoken in their defense, that they were the seed of the Jews and God would save them. But now Jesus turns it right around at them and puts it in their faces, and says, "You cannot defeat the Seed." He uses a different way of doing it. He calls Himself the chief cornerstone, but He is the Seed. And He is telling them that if you try to thwart the actions of God, the will of God, the purpose of God, that you are going to be broken and as it says here, "ground to powder." Because now the situation was that the Jews themselves had become the enemy of the Seed of the Jews. And He said, "Alright, if that's the way you're going to be, then I'm taking the Kingdom of God from you." Israel, the Jewish people, will no longer be the Kingdom of God, but I am going to give it to a different nation." One that will, as He says, bear the fruits of that Kingdom.

They were coming up against the Seed of the woman, the Seed of Abraham, the Seed of the Jews, the Seed of David, and that Seed had a job to do. He had come to live His life in perfection and die on the cross, as well as to begin the church and start that nation of which He spoke there in verse 43. And of course, then, to lead that nation. And the Jews at that time were trying to stop it, to stop Him. And He said, you are going to get the same fate, if you will, as the anti-Semites in Persia got because they tried to stop the seed of the Jews at that time.

So Jesus is here, in verse 43, announcing to the Jews that God is no longer using them as His nation or will no longer use them at a certain point. And of course, in AD 70 they were ground to powder when the Romans came up against them. But we could say that He is telling them here in verse 43 that He was changing horses. You remember the saying, "Don't change horses in midstream." Well, in this case, God was changing horses. The Jews, the Israelites, will no longer be His nation. They are no longer God's Kingdom, as it were. He was going to to raise up a new nation to carry His banner forward from this time. And that nation would be made up of a people who will keep His Word and be faithful to Him, and will reflect His glory.

In other words, as we will see, the seed He was telling them in one way or another, would not be determined anymore by physical descent from Abraham but by spiritual likeness to Abraham.

Let us go to John the eighth chapter where we see something similar to this.

John 8:37-39 "I know that you are Abraham's descendants [Jesus says to them], but you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you. I speak what I have seen with My Father, and you do what you have seen with your father." They answered and said to Him, "Abraham is our father." Jesus said to them, "If you were Abraham's children, you would do the works of Abraham. But now you seek to kill Me, a Man who has told you the truth which I heard from God. Abraham did not do this."

He is giving them an idea here in John 8 that those of the nation that He is raising up who would become part of the Seed. The new seed would not be those who can claim any kind of physical descent from Abraham, but those who worked, lived, acted, behaved, spoke as Abraham did, that they were like Abraham spiritually in the way that he lived.

Let us go to Romans the ninth chapter and chase this out. Some of these scriptures are what my dad has gone through. Maybe going through them in this way, will help solidify some of that.

Romans 9:6-9 [he picks up where Jesus leaves off] But it is not that the word of God has taken no effect [meaning to Israel]. For they are not all Israel who are of Israel [or we could say they are not all physical Israel who are spiritual Israel], nor are they all children because they are the seed of Abraham; but, in Isaac your seed shall be called." That is, those who are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as the seed. For this is the word of promise: "At this time I will come and Sarah shall have a son."

Paul is saying here that the new seed is going to be those who are children of promise. That is, we could say that they are children by God's miraculous choice by election. That is exactly the way it was with Isaac. He could not be born of Sarah and Abraham except for God's miraculous intervention in the matter. It was His choice to have His line, His seed go through a miraculous baby—Isaac. And so here in the New Testament, this idea is used as a type that the seed, the nation that would be brought up or composed, built under Christ, would also be by miraculous intervention and choice—the election of God, the calling of God, the choosing of God.

So those who are God's seed are those people who are granted sonship in His Family through, as the Bible says it, adoption, spiritual adoption, or grafting. Paul uses the idea of being grafted into Israel, into the tree, that is, Israel, the vine that is in Israel. Or we could say, they are grafted into Christ's Body by faith and by the giving of the Holy Spirit, then they become children of God. These are the seed that He is going to work with, the new nation as Jesus said, that would bear the fruits of it.

Let us go forward to Galatians 3.

Galatians 3:26-29 For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.

Galatians 4:4-7 But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, "Abba, Father!" Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God [part of His Family] through Christ.

Galatians 6:15-16 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but a new creation. [This is His miraculous work, not only in calling us but in bringing us to completion. The whole process of being a new creation.] And as many as walk according to this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.

That is the new nation. This miraculous new creation, raised by God through a miraculous calling, a miraculous change of heart, and being grafted, then, into the very Body of Christ.

Let us get back to Esther. What we have in Esther is a demonstration by God of His providence and His sovereignty over His seed and over His purpose. He was working at that time in Persia for a purpose through Mordecai who was called the seed of the Jews. And He was bringing something about, part of His Plan, and nothing could stand against it. What He was doing was preserving the Jewish people, because Jerusalem, the people He had sent back there, were part of that empire and those people had been given a year earlier this decree saying that the people who were anti-Semitic could kill all the Jews. And in that land were the ancestors of Jesus Christ.

And so God, working with the seed of the Jews, Mordecai and Esther his cousin, did a great work to preserve those people and to keep His seed, that line of the Seed alive. And so there was no way anybody could thwart that. So if, as His spiritual seed, we are likewise aligned with His purpose now, He will reverse our trials and our persecutions and our threats of death and exalt us in due time, just as He did with Mordecai, because we are part of the Seed, we are the seed, we are Abraham's seed. And if we are Abraham seeds, we are heirs of God in Christ.

Notice what happened with Mordecai. Let us go back to Esther 10. Notice his reward.

Esther 10:2-3 Now all the acts of his power [Ahasuerus' power] and his might, and the account of the greatness of Mordecai, to which the king advanced him are they not all written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia? For Mordecai the Jew was second to King Ahasuerus, and was great among the Jews and well received by the multitude of his brethren, seeking the good of his people and speaking peace to all his Kindred.

If you look at it in one way, Mordecai's reward is analogous to our own reward in the Kingdom of God. That we will be second in command to the King. We will be given all this honor and glory. We will be well received by the multitude of our brethren. And we will speak peace to all of our kindred. That is the reward of aligning yourself with God's purpose. Same kind of reward that Mordecai received.

Now, I do have quite a bit more here and I am not going to go any further because this is my last sermon on Esther. But I do want to introduce to you just an idea that maybe you can flesh out in thinking about Esther. Remember that throughout the Bible, there is a constant theme of God marrying His wife, having a wife. And we are told that He married Israel in the wilderness and she became His wife. And then of course, she forsook Him and did all those terrible things that she did. And so He visited her with a great deal of pain. And ultimately, He put her away. It says that in Hosea 2:2, He says very convincingly there, "She is not My wife nor am I her husband."

And then several hundred years later, Christ, who was that same God that had married Israel, died on the cross and everything was finished there. His death by the law broke the covenant with Israel in that way that she was no longer His wife. Romans 7:2 says that very clearly, by the law, a man is no longer married to his wife if one of them should die. That is just the way it works. So we can see Christ's death, then, as the final act of putting her away. Now He was free to marry another.

The analogy that we find in Esther is this; this is starting in chapter 1, verse 9 with Queen Vashti's feast. And then immediately afterward, we find Ahasuerus asking her or commanding her to present herself before him and she refuses. And so he asked the men there of who he trusted in his court, what should he do? And their advice was to put her away and to find another wife. And it says that if she was giving a bad example, Vashti was giving a bad example to all the other wives in the kingdom, and that he needed a wife basically, that would be a good example.

And so he puts her away and then immediately the word goes out and they round up all kinds of other women and they are kept for about a year and they are evaluated. (Actually, first of all, they are prepared and then they are evaluated.) And the only one that meets all the requirements is Esther. And Esther is described in various ways to show that she was pretty much the perfect woman having been prepared for this, for her job, and actually I should say having been prepared by Mordecai most of all for this job and then by the eunuch that she found favor with there in chapter 2.

Now, I did want to want you to notice something.

Esther 2:9 Now, the young woman [Esther] pleased him [that is, Hegai, the custodian of the women], and she obtained his favor; so he readily gave beauty preparations to her, beside her allowance [meaning she so impressed him that he gave her an advantage]. Then seven choice maidservants were provided for her from the king's palace [seven, that is interesting], and he moved her and her maidservants to the best place in the house of the women.

Esther 2:12 Each young woman's turn came to go into King Ahasuerus after she had completed twelve months' preparation, according to the regulations for the women, for thus were the days of their preparation apportioned: six months with oil of myrrh, and six months with perfumes and preparations for beautifying women.

Esther 2:15-17 Now when the turn came for Esther the daughter of Abihail the uncle of Mordecai, who had taken her as his daughter [she was adopted, just to put that in there], to go into the king, she requested nothing but what he [the king's eunuch, the custodian of the women] advised. And Esther obtained favor in the sight of all who saw her. So Esther was taken to King Ahasuerus, into his royal palace in the tenth month [By the way, if you would like to know, the number 10 signifies completeness of a divine order or course.], which is the month of Tebeth, in the seventh year of his reign [and seventh symbolizes spiritual perfection or completion]. The king loved Esther more than all the other women, and she obtained grace and favor in his sight more than all the virgins; so he set the royal crown upon her head and made her queen instead of Vashti.

We see her preparations for her duties, which were to please the king enough to be chosen as queen. And this she did in spades. She was the anti-Vashti, if you will. She was a wife who obeyed the commands of her husband, who presented a shining example of a wife's behavior before all the king's people.

The key phrase in these verses that we have read is the repeated phrase, "She obtained favor" or especially the one in verse 17, in the case of the king, it says here that, "she obtained grace and favor in his sight." As a commoner, we could say that she was given grace and raised to royalty through his favor.

Does any of this sound familiar? Is this giving you an idea that perhaps Esther 1 and Esther 2 are a kind of parable of what God is doing between Israel and the church? That the church in this case would be Esther and that she was prepared as a bride for her husband, the king.

Let us conclude in Romans 15. Notice that she was ready and that the people who were assigned to prepare her did their job well, and that the king had no problem in accepting her as his wife.

Romans 15:4-6 For whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that we through the patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope. Now may the God of patience and comfort grant you to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus, that you may with one mind and one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is my hope that this study into the book of Esther has given you both comfort and hope to press forward in your daily walk with God despite the problems that you may have in your life. Because you are one of God's seed. You are part of the seed of Abraham, of the seed of David, and of the seed of the woman. And though we do not see Him, perhaps we do not with our eyes, we do not hear Him with our ears, know from the book of Esther that He is there. He is preparing us to be the bride of Christ in His eternal Kingdom.

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