Saturday
Saturday
The Story of Esther
Who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?
Esther 4:14
The book of Esther contains no single mention of God, but it is full of events that can be understood either as human coincidences or as divine providences, or indeed as both. The scene is set in the palace of the Persian King Ahasuerus, or Xerxes (486–465 BC). Mordecai was a Jew whose cousin and ward, Esther, was selected by the king as his new queen and who had reported an assassination plot against the king but had never been rewarded for it.
Mordecai’s rival was Haman, grand vizier to the king. Conscious of his importance, he required everybody to bow down before him. But Mordecai, conscious of the first commandment, refused to do so. Infuriated, Haman determined to take revenge on all Jews throughout Persia and secured the royal assent to his liquidation plan. As the feud between these two men grew, it seemed impossible for Mordecai to rescue his people. But it is now that God’s providence came into operation.
It so happened (to use the language of coincidence) that Queen Esther was a Jewess, that she was willing to risk her life in begging the king for mercy, and that she made her petition at a private banquet at which the king and Haman were her only guests. Haman went home “happy and in high spirits” (5:9), boasting of his high honor—though it gave him no satisfaction as long as he saw Mordecai sitting at the king’s gate.
It so happened also that the king was unable to sleep that night, that he ordered the royal chronicles to be read to him, that in them he heard the record of the assassination plot for which Mordecai had not been rewarded, and that Haman (intending to talk to the king about hanging Mordecai) arrived in the outer court at that very moment. The king asked Haman what should be done for the man the king delights to honor. Jumping to the conclusion that the king meant him, Haman replied that he should be paraded through the city in royal splendor. “‘Go at once,’ the king commanded Haman. ‘… Do just as you have suggested for Mordecai the Jew” (6:10). Such is the irony of the providence of God. The roles of the two men were reversed. Haman was humiliated, Mordecai honored.
For further reading: Esther 7