Sermon Transcript
From the 2nd chapter of Esther. Later, when King Xerxes’ fury had subsided, he remembered Vashti and what she had done and what he had decreed about her. Then the king’s personal attendants proposed, let a search be made for beautiful young virgins for the king. Let the king appoint commissioners in every province of his realm to bring all these beautiful young women into the harem at the citadel of Susa. Let them be placed under the care of Hegai, the king’s eunuch who is in charge of the women, and let beauty treatments be given to them.
Then let the young women— or let the young woman who pleases the king to be queen instead instead of Vashti. This advice appealed to the king, and he followed it. Now there was in the citadel of Susa a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin named Mordecai. Mordecai had a cousin named Hadassah, whom he had brought up because she had neither father nor mother. This young woman, who was also known as Esther, had a lovely figure and was beautiful.
Mordecai had taken her as his own daughter when her father and mother died. When the king’s order and edict had been proclaimed, many young women were brought to the citadel of Susa and put under the care of Hegai. Esther was also taken to the king’s palace and entrusted to Hegai, who had charge of the harem. She pleased him and won his favor. Immediately he provided her with beauty treatments and special food and moved her into the best place in the harem.
Esther had not revealed her nationality and family background because Mordecai had forbidden her to do so. Every day, though, Mordecai walked back and forth near the courtyard of the harem to find out how Esther was and what was happening to her. Before a young woman’s turn came to go into King Xerxes, she had to complete 12 months of beauty treatments prescribed for the women, 6 months with oil of myrrh and 6 months with perfumes and cosmetics. And this is how she would go to the king. Anything she wanted was given to her to take with her from the harem to the king’s palace.
In the evening she would go in there, and in the morning she would return to another part of the harem to the care of Shaashgaz, the king’s eunuch who charge of the concubines, and she would not return to the king unless he was pleased with her and summoned her by name. When the turn came for Esther to go to the king, she asked for nothing other than what Hegai, the king’s eunuch who was in charge of the harem, suggested. And Esther won the favor of everyone who saw her. She was taken to King Xerxes in the royal residence in the 10th month in the 7th year of his reign. Now the king was attracted to Esther more than any of the other women, and she won his favor and approval more than any of the other virgins.
So he set a royal crown on her head and made her queen instead of Vashti. And the king gave a great banquet, Esther’s banquet, for all his nobles and officials. He proclaimed a holiday throughout the provinces and distributed gifts with royal liberalality.
Morality. If you weren’t with us last week, we began a new series in the Old Testament book of Esther. We said Esther is unique because God is never mentioned once in the entire book. Not his name, no one prays, no prophet, nothing. It’s the 1 Corinthians 13 of the Old Testament, which might make you think that God is absent.
Absent from the account. But that would be a mistake because anyone who has studied the book can see God’s providence all over the place. He is working behind the scenes silently but clearly his fingerprints and his orchestration is all over the place. There are these seemingly unrelated plot lines that eventually converge at the exact right time in the exact right way for a dramatic conclusion. The end of the story, which we won’t get to for a number of weeks, is that God’s people— God’s people who are living in Persia— are saved from genocide.
That’s the end of the story. They’re about to be totally annihilated. They are teetering on the edge of being the victims of an ethnic cleansing. It’s imminent. The bomb is ticking down to zero.
It’s ominous. There’s lots of suspense. But because of all these plot lines converging in a perfect symphony of orchestration, God’s people are saved. That’s the end of the story. We’ll get there eventually.
But if you want to understand Esther properly, one way to do it is to start at the end and then trace how all the other earlier chapters work toward this conclusion. It’s like one of those movies where the screenwriter shows you the final scene first first and then spends the next 2 hours developing how we got there. That’s one right way for us to understand Esther. We understand it as an elegant orchestration of God’s providence. That’s how us as the readers understand it.
But of course the people living the story had no idea what was going on. They could only see what was immediately right in front of them. They don’t know how it’s going to turn out. To them, all of this seems chaotic, random, unplanned, much like life, right? It reminds me, there’s a quote from Kierkegaard and he said, life must be lived forward.
Like no choice, right? You have to live life forward. Tomorrow comes after today every time. Must live life forward, but it can only be understood backward. Most of the time, like the people living in the story of Esther, we don’t fully know where we are going, where decisions will lead, how all of our life experiences will fit together.
We can’t see the picture until we look backward, and that’s when we understand everything that happened had a purpose. All of our experiences, good and bad, played some role in, in a life that was guided, guided by providence, just like Esther. So last week we started off chapter 1. We hadn’t met Esther yet, but we did encounter King Xerxes, who has a ton of money and thinks a lot of himself. He was the unquestioned ruler of Persia, the mightiest kingdom on earth at the time.
No one had ever told Xerxes no until someone did. It was his wife, Queen Vashti, and she told him no during a party for the ages. It was a 6-month party with an open bar for thousands of guests in Xerxes’ excessively opulent palace. And Xerxes had thrown this party precisely for the point of showing off his glory and majesty and might and wealth. And as another display of his splendor, Xerxes demands Queen Vashti come in and dance around in front of all of his drunken officials so they can see her beauty, which Xerxes also believes belongs to him.
Vashti says, no, I’m not an object for you to flaunt. I’m not a trophy that you have won to be displayed on a shelf, which we said, of course, was the right thing for Vashti to say. But Xerxes received it as a public embarrassment. Here he had thrown this party, you know, of the millennium in order to prove to everyone that he has endless amounts of power and authority, that he is unquestionably supreme. And then in front of everyone, his wife tells him no.
In his eyes, he’s humiliated in front of the whole kingdom, essentially. It would have been a great opportunity for him to model repentance before all of his people. I mean, if leaders make public errors, sins, wrongdoings, if they act immorally publicly, the best next thing to do is to make a public apology, right? To say to everyone, hey, Vashti was right. I’m sorry.
She deserves to be treated with dignity and I failed. It’s great for leaders to be able to model repentance in front of their people. Xerxes didn’t do that. Instead, he doubled down, removed Vashti from the office of queen. He thinks apparently, I must maintain the image that I’m always right.
And if anyone defies me, they lose. And that’s where Esther chapter 1 ends. Ironically, immediately after his relational humiliation in chapter 1, Xerxes also suffers an embarrassing military defeat. It’s not in our text, but we know historically that it happened in between chapters 1 and 2 because of the dates that we are given. In between chapters 1 and 2 there is a 4-year gap.
Chapter 1 is the 3rd year of Xerxes’ reign. Chapter 7— I mean chapter 2 is the 7th year of his reign. And in that time period between 483 and 479 BC Xerxes attempted to conquer Greece and just utterly failed. I mean he didn’t just lose, he lost bad. So he retreats back home now twice humiliated.
We should see this irony. He had just thrown a party to display how great and supreme he was, but then he is immediately twice defied by Vashti and the Greeks. He’s not as supreme as he thinks he is. So we find Xerxes at the beginning of chapter 2 back in Persia, and he seems lonely. Only.
He remembers Vashti, it says, verse 1. And in response, in case we’re wondering what type of remembering he was doing, one of his attendants says, let’s find you a new lady. You’ve been thinking of Vashti, you’ve been embarrassed in battle, maybe what you need is someone new. And that’s where we pick up the story for today. As we study chapter 2, we will see the next cringe cringe of Xerxes, what to make of Esther, and then the types of circumstances and people that God will engage.
The next cringe of Xerxes, what to make of Esther, and the types of people and circumstances that God will engage. So first, the next cringe of Xerxes: eunuchs, a harem, and a contest. Contest. Eunuchs, a harem, and a contest. Sadly, it was standard operating procedure in the ancient cruel world, especially for kings, to have servants, to have various kinds of forced labor.
One type of servant was the eunuch. We meet 2 of them here in this chapter, Hegai and Sashgaz. But Persian kings usually had way more than 2 eunuchs. They typically actually had about 500 eunuchs at any given time. And eunuchs were young men, often teenagers, who had been collected from all corners of the kingdom and then castrated so that the king wouldn’t need to worry about any of these young men getting any of the women in the palace pregnant.
Eunuch was not a role that anyone would volunteer for. They’re forced into this position. Of course, kings didn’t only collect young men to be eunuchs, they also collected women to be in their harem to be concubines. And then once the king had spent the night with the concubine, she had to remain in the palace forever. So like eunuchs, concubines lived in luxury in the palace, and also like eunuchs, it’s not a role for which women would volunteer.
And Xerxes had many concubines, some of whom he would have only seen once, others Others we would assume were his favorites and he returned to again and again. But when he comes back from his embarrassing military defeat, even with all his concubines, he wanted someone new. Apparently the thrill was gone with all these other women, which of course is totally contrary to God’s design, right? God’s design is for a husband to be married to one wife, to give himself fully and forever to that one woman, to serve her, to cherish her, to sacrifice for her. That’s the design.
And that’s actually what will keep the thrill alive. The answer to loneliness in marriage isn’t to look for someone new, it’s to reinvest in the one you already have. And not to only try that for like a day or a week or a year and say, it’s not working, oh well, I’m out of here, but for your whole life. Keep investing. Testing.
That’s the, that’s the design. Xerxes doesn’t do it. Um, too bad he didn’t attend a marriage conference and learn that he and Vashti would have been better together. Um, by the way, as you heard, we’re having a marriage conference here at the end of the month called Better Together. You can sign up, um, in the lobby after the service or online.
If only Xerxes’ advisors had made such a suggestion. If only they’d said, you and Vashti go to this conference. But they didn’t. They didn’t say that. They said, you’re bored?
Look for someone new. And so he does. Xerxes holds a contest, we will call it, brings women from all over the land to the palace for one of them to be chosen as the next queen. But don’t be fooled. This is not a Cinderella story.
It is not a fairy tale. Xerxes doesn’t send invitations to all the unmarried ladies in the land. He sends an order, bring them here, which means like the concubines, these ladies are more captives than contestants. And whoever wins— is she a winner?
I mean, you get to live in the palace, eat the royal food, be pampered, but even as queen, is she a queen or is she a slave?
The whole situation makes us cringe, and it should. None of this is okay. None of this is God’s design. It’s evil. It’s misogynistic.
It’s exploitative. It’s cringy, but that’s Xerxes. Now what about Esther? What do we make of Esther?
She doesn’t begin where she ends. Esther is essentially the main character of the story. We meet her here in chapter 2, and she will be at the center of significant events basically from here on out. In many ways, she’s the the hero of the story. Of course, with the understanding God is always the hero behind the hero in any biblical account.
But Esther will eventually courageously stand on behalf of her own people at risk to her own life. No one else in the story will be in a position to save her people. Only she will have a chance to do it, and she does it. She’s the Christ figure in the story. She brings salvation to people.
That’s where the plot and her story are headed. But like any good character and like any honest assessment of a real life, and she is a real person, she doesn’t begin where she will end. She begins in obscurity, not significance. She begins in many ways a victim instead of like the empowered overcomer that she will be later. And she begins with unclear commitment to God rather than steadfast faithfulness.
We’ll look at those one at a time. She begins in obscurity. She had been orphaned, we’re told. Her parents had died. So here’s her cousin Mordecai who adopts her and raises her.
She had no status in the kingdom. She’s just one of the millions of teenage girls in Persia from a minority marginalized tribe, no less. She has no access to the king, no possible path toward notoriety and then out of the blue, a lonely king sends out an order to bring girls from all over the kingdom to his palace. And her life changes in an instant. From total obscurity to living in the palace.
But like we said, she and all the other contestants are more like victims than chosen ones. Because even in the palace, she’s living a life that someone else has determined for her. And even when she becomes queen, it takes a while before she asserts herself. She will be empowered later. She will become fierce in the face of danger.
But she’s not there yet. She’s on a journey, like all of us are. And this is the start of it. Which brings us to her faith. At this point, what do we know about her faith?
It’s hard to say. Later, she seems to have a strong footing with God, but at this point, all we see is that she’s not public with her faith, she’s not keeping kosher, and she spends a night with the king. We’ll look at those one at a time. First, she doesn’t tell anyone she’s an Israelite. Now, the reason she hides her background is because that’s what her adopted father told her to do.
Mordecai said, Esther, keep quiet about who we are, and she complies. She listens. But what does that say about her faith commitment? We could ask our students, if your parents told you, don’t let anyone know you’re a Christian because, you know, if people know, they might give you a hard time. Maybe, maybe you’ll have fewer opportunities in life, so just don’t Don’t mention your faith, okay?
Students, if your parents told you that, I mean, I expect you would at least have some amount of turmoil whether you should follow their instructions, right? There would be some debate within yourself. I mean, do I listen to my parents? I know I’m supposed to listen to my parents. Or do I listen to Jesus?
I know I’m supposed to listen to him too. Parents tell me don’t be public with my faith. Jesus tells me the only kind of faith is public faith. So what do I do? We would understand, especially if a teenager wrestled with that.
Anytime your loyalties are split, of course we’re going to hesitate. But as far as we know, Esther doesn’t seem to hesitate at all, right? Or we don’t know if she does. All we know is Mordecai says, don’t tell anyone, and she listens. Maybe it was a big debate in her mind.
Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she has faith. Maybe she doesn’t. We just don’t have any evidence at this point. Second, she eats the royal food.
And if it’s the food from the king’s table, we know it’s not kosher. No chance royal food is kosher, which means Esther is not following Jewish laws. And for us today, we don’t realize the big deal that would have been because we’re post-Jesus and all those restrictions are lifted and and we can, you know, put lobster on top of our pork and cover the whole thing in bacon grease. It’s awesome. But for 5th century Jewish people, it was a big deal to stay kosher.
You may remember from the book of Daniel when he is in captivity and Daniel is given this royal food. Daniel asks, can I not eat this? Can I choose my own food? And Daniel’s in a similar setting. He’s a captive in a palace.
He’s under the similar kind of pressure. They might have been similar ages. But Esther doesn’t ask what Daniel does, or at least we don’t know if she did. Did she ask but they forced her anyway? Did she feel like she has no agency and thought she couldn’t ask?
I mean, we don’t know. All we know is that she ate it. At this point, we have not seen her advocate for herself at all. She will later. She will become so brave and courageous later.
She will get there. But we don’t see her like that at the beginning. And maybe most dramatically, thirdly, we see her spend a night with the king just like the other contestants. She goes on the overnight date as part of the competition. Beth and I used to watch— this was a previous lifetime, this is way before kids— but we would sometimes watch the reality TV show The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.
We haven’t watched it in years. Apparently it’s still on. They just finished the 28th season. Okay, so we used to watch it. I would like to be able to tell you that Beth made me watch it, that it was all her idea.
But I can’t say that. I wouldn’t lie to you, and I got just as wrapped up in it as she did, okay? If you haven’t watched it, good for you. You’re more holy than we are. But the plot of the show, it’s remarkably similar to this chapter in Esther.
In the case of The Bachelor version of the show, there’s one man looking for a wife. And the TV producers bring in a couple of dozen women who all vie for the chance of winning the prize of being the bride of this one man. And each week a few more of the contestants are sent home until eventually there is only one contestant left and the man proposes to her. Right? It is just like Esther.
But toward the end of the season when there are only 3 or so contestants left, left, the bachelor has an overnight date with each of the remaining women.
The show always tried to make it look like sweet and romantic, right? They stay in some villa, there’s candles, the camera fades, and all of a sudden it’s the next morning, right? Like the show tries to make it look romantic, but it’s always uncomfortable. It’s always awkward. As a viewer, you think, like, this isn’t what courtship is supposed to look like.
I mean, like, faithfulness a week before you propose seems to be, like, a pretty big deal, right? And the overnight date always causes drama. The other contestants never like the fact that their potential husband, you know, who might propose to them tomorrow, just spent the night with a different lady. The whole thing makes you cringe.
If you were a contestant on the show, what would you do?
Would you go on the overnight date?
Even if you didn’t, would you marry someone who just went on overnight dates immediately before proposing to you?
What would a Christian do as a contestant?
Esther spends the night. Verse 14, she spends the night. Now understandably, she is under tremendous pressure. She— and she is subject to far more dynamics than contestants on a reality TV show would be, right? Xerxes’ orders are much different than whatever a TV executive might say.
And for Esther, she’s caught between, on the one hand, living in the palace, and on the other, she’s— it’s the uncertainty if she tries to leave. What would that even mean? This is weighty, exploitative situation. Like, we don’t, we don’t know what she was thinking. She might have hated it.
She might have protested. Maybe not. Like, we don’t know what was in her mind. We just know that she spent the night. Verse 14, uh, one commentator on the book of Esther, describes Esther, whoever wrote the book, all throughout the book but particularly here in this account, this commentator says that Esther skillfully describes a morally complex situation because that is the way life often is in the real world.
And I think that’s right because what would we have done in her exact same situation? Situation. We might have in our mind what we hope we would do if we were in her shoes, but there’s a lot going on there. There’s a lot of complexity, a lot of pressure. It’s impossible for us to judge Esther for what she did or didn’t do.
Impossible to judge her. But here’s my guess. It’s just a guess. My guess is the Esther that we will see in a couple of chapters The Esther who says, I’m going to do the right thing, and if I perish, I perish. That Esther.
The Esther that she will become. If that Esther had been in chapter 2, I bet she would have put her foot down about the overnight date. I bet she would have pulled a Queen Vashti and said, no. No way I’m going in there.
But Esther doesn’t begin where she will She’s on a journey. And like us, she’s dealing with real pressures.
That’s Esther.
Now, what does all this say about the types of situations with which God will involve himself? And with whom will God work? What are the types of circumstances and people God will engage? Any of them. God will work with anyone, anywhere, anytime.
The account of Esther and Xerxes is a real mess, isn’t it? The kingdom, the palace, the harem, the contest, it’s all a mess. Mordecai is disappointing. He didn’t try to get Esther out of there as her adopted dad. His only advice to Esther as As she was forced into this contest and facing an overnight date with the king, his only fatherly advice is, don’t tell anyone about your background.
Come on, Mordecai! That’s terribly disappointing. Everyone in this story is a mess, and yet God engages with all of them, and God uses all of it as steps in the journey for the redemption of his people. People. Right?
You can go through it. Xerxes shouldn’t have deposed Vashti. He should have been a good husband. He wasn’t. That led to the search for a new queen.
And women shouldn’t be objectified and forced into exploitative beauty contests. And Mordecai and Esther, when they heard about the contest, they probably should have fled with the other returning exiles back to Israel. So, Esther wouldn’t have been rounded up and brought to the palace. But they stayed, and there was this contest. So Esther becomes queen.
And because she’s queen instead of Vashti, we will see later, Esther has the chance, she has the opportunity to speak to the king, even as risky as it is, to save her people, which she does. God uses our of it. He uses the mess. He uses people’s poor decisions and he wraps it all together to accomplish what is good. It’s Romans 8:28 in action, right?
God works all things together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. God uses it all for good and praise him for that. I know for some of us it makes us or might make us squirm a little because we don’t like the idea of God getting his hands messy, so to speak. We can’t fathom God using something as twisted as Xerxes’ harem to accomplish something good. That’s uncomfortable.
But you realize if God weren’t willing to work with messes to bring about what was good, he wouldn’t be involved with humanity at all. If God said, I only work with people who have their act together, then God wouldn’t work with anyone. Because the only type of humans there are is humans who don’t have their act together. There aren’t some humans who are, you know, holy and blameless on one side of the ledger, and on the other side of the ledger there’s humans with issues. There aren’t 2 groups of humans.
There’s only one kind of group. It’s broken people. So if God weren’t willing to jump into the sinful lives of humans and work with whatever they were entangled in to accomplish good, if he weren’t willing to do that, then he wouldn’t jump in at all and we would all be lost.
So if you think something like, God can’t work with me because I’m not fully formed yet. Neither was Esther. Neither am I. Or if you think, you know, I have a type of trauma in my past that God just can’t redeem. You know, I’m too— too much has happened to me.
If that’s you, look at Esther. She had some trauma and God used her. Used it. Her trauma didn’t define her. God defined it in her life.
And he will show you how he will use whatever has happened to you for your good and for the good of the world. Doesn’t mean he’s okay with the trauma that happened to you. Doesn’t mean he caused it. God does not cause evil. He’s angry it to you.
He will judge whoever he needs to, but also he’s not going to abandon you as a victim. He will empower you. The very things that are most painful in your past, or the very things that are even your own worst decisions, God can turn those into your greatest strengths.
Trauma and sin will be part of your story, but they are not your story.
God has a plan for it. He will use it.
Or to come at this another way, if it makes you uncomfortable that God includes sinful, painful, messy situations into his plan for your life, if it makes— if that makes you uncomfortable, let me ask you this. What’s the alternative? He doesn’t have a plan for it, whatever happened to you? That God says, oh man, I don’t know what I’m going to do with that.
I can’t get involved with something that dark.
If he says that, then we’re all lost, right? As uncomfortable as we might be that God is right in the middle of sinful, tragic, traumatic situations, grabbing them and weaving them all together for our good. As unusual as it seems that a holy God would involve himself in such unholiness, would you rather he didn’t?
Of course not. It’s the best news in the world that God jumps into those kind of places, and we see it time and time again throughout the Bible. The God of the Bible doesn’t wait for us to get our act cleaned up before he engages with us. He engages with us right where we are, wherever we are. God enters into our story and begins to redeem it.
Most vividly he does that, of course, when he jumps into our story in the person of Jesus. And Jesus not only engages with us when we are in our sin, but Jesus carries our sin for us. He removes our guilt. He puts it on his shoulders on the cross that we would be free from blame, that we could be free from condemnation, that we could be free from the shame of our past. So don’t ever make the mistake that you’re too far gone to be with God, or that too much has happened to you for God to redeem it, or that there is some kind of wall between you and him.
Whatever wall was there, he broke it down, and He always will. No matter what you’ve done, no matter where you’ve been, no matter where you are right now, He is coming for you to save you, to write your redemption story.
Let’s pray.
Father, thank You for engaging with us. Thank you for not abandoning humanity, as dark as we can be, Lord. Thank you for jumping right in the middle of our stories and working with whatever is there, whatever we are entangled with, whatever has happened to us, whatever we have chosen, whatever, whatever we wish hadn’t happened, Lord. Thank you for being there and having a plan.
And not wondering what’s for us, but knowing what you have for us. And thank you for leading us to it, Lord.
May we all trust you, even though we can’t see the end of our story yet. We know who’s writing it. It’s you, and you are good. We pray all those things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
