Sermon Transcript
On the 13th day of the 12th month, the month of Adar, the edict commanded by the king was to be carried out. On this day, the enemies of the Jews had hoped to overpower them, but now the tables were turned. And the Jews got the upper hand over those who hated them. The Jews assembled in their cities in all the provinces of King Xerxes to attack those determined to destroy them. No one could stand against them because the people of all the other nationalities were afraid of them.
And all the nobles of the provinces, the satraps, the governors, and the king’s administrators helped the Jews because fear of Mordecai had seized them. Them. Mordecai was prominent in the palace. His reputation spread throughout the provinces, and he became more and more powerful. The Jews struck down all their enemies with the sword, killing and destroying them, and they did what they pleased to those who hated them.
In the citadel of Susa, the Jews killed and destroyed 500 men. They also killed Parshandatha, Dalphon, Aspatha, Paratha, Adalia, Ariadatha, Parmashta, Arsai, Aredai, and Vizatha, the 10 sons of Haman son of Hammedatha, the enemy of the Jews, but they did not lay their hands on the plunder. Meanwhile, the remainder of the Jews who were in the king’s provinces also assembled to protect themselves and get relief from their enemies. They killed 75,000 of them but did not lay their hands on the plunder. Mordecai recorded these events events, and he sent letters to all the Jews throughout the provinces of King Xerxes near and far to have them celebrate annually the 14th and 15th days of the month of Adar as the time when the Jews got relief from their enemies, and as the month when their sorrow was turned into joy and their mourning into a day of celebration.
He wrote to them to observe the days as days of feasting and joy and giving presents of food to one another and gifts to the poor. So the Jews agreed to continue the celebration they had begun, doing what Mordecai had written to them. For Haman son of Hammedatha the Agagite, the enemy of all the Jews, had plotted against the Jews to destroy them and had cast the poor— that is, the lot— for their ruin and destruction. But when the plot came to the king’s attention, he issued written orders that the evil scheme Haman had devised against the Jews Jews should come back onto his own head, and that he and his sons should be impaled on poles. Therefore these days were called Purim, from the word pur.
Because of everything written in this letter, and because of what they had seen and what had happened to them, the Jews took it on themselves to establish the custom that they and their descendants and all who join them should without fail observe these 2 days every year in the way prescribed and at the time appointed. These days should be remembered and observed in every generation, by every family, and in every province, and in every city. And these days of Purim should never fail to be celebrated by the Jews, nor should the memory of these days die out among their descendants.
King Xerxes imposed tribute throughout the empire to its distant shores, and all his acts of power and might, together with a full account of the greatness of Mordecai, whom the king had promoted, Are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Media and Persia? Mordecai the Jew was second in rank to King Xerxes, prominent among the Jews and held in high esteem by his many fellow Jews, because he worked for the good of his people and spoke up for the welfare of all the Jews.
Maylynn wins the prize for correctly pronouncing some of those names. That was fantastic.
Way to go, it’s awesome. Well, good morning everybody. I’m guessing that some of you have probably played the card game Uno before at some time in your life. It was a big hit in the Durand home when I was growing up. And if you’ve played Uno before, you know that in addition to the regular old cards that you play to try to match numbers or colors There are also special cards that you can use for special purposes, like the wild card.
Always exciting because, well, it’s wild and you get to just for a moment dictate the game and tell people what the color is going to be that everybody has to play and can help buy you a little bit of time if you’re running out of certain colors. Then you can sort of change the game there for a little bit. You’ve always got the old reliable draw 2 card. I always like to draw 2 card, because you can have a few of those and you just keep laying them down in front of the person who’s playing after you, and they get frustrated because they have to keep on drawing cards. And even the skip card is kind of fun to play every now and then because you’re skipping people and they get frustrated and they miss a, they miss a turn until it comes back around to them the next time.
And then of course you have the mighty wild draw 4 card, which is always the everyone at the table just kind of wince and say, ooh, that hurt. That’s always exciting. But if you’ve played Uno before, I think you’ll agree with me that without a doubt, the lamest of all the special cards is the reverse card. It’s not as exciting as the other special cards. It’s lame because what you’re basically saying is, hey, everybody watch this.
I know the flow of play is going to be this way, but play is going this way, but whoa, now it’s going that way, and everybody’s like, eh, you know, it’s no big deal. The reverse card is pretty lame. Reverse isn’t very exciting in Uno. Reverse is a really powerful theme, though, throughout Scripture, and it’s the best news for sad, scared, outnumbered people who are facing great difficulty and danger and a formidable foe, just like the Jewish people were here in the book of Esther that we’ve been doing a sermon series through, and today we wrap up. Up to this point in the story, the odds have been stacked heavily in favor of the enemies of the Jewish people.
You may recall back in chapter 3, Haman, the arrogant and sinister minister serving in the royal government, successfully persuaded the king to enact this crazy decree to destroy all of the Jewish Young, old, women, children. And then in order to decide the date of the Jews’ annihilation, Haman rolled some dice. He tucked that away for later. According to the dice, 11 months later, on the 13th of Adar, all of the Jews were scheduled to be exterminated. Not some of them, all of them.
In chapter 5, though, we learn— we watch the miraculous and ironic reversal of all of Haman’s evil plans. Well, how so? Well, Esther put together a banquet for the king and for Haman, and the broader purpose of that first banquet was to make a special request of them at a second banquet the following day. And so the king and Haman arrived to that second banquet, and Esther bravely informs them. First of all, she’s Jewish, which she had hidden up until that point, and that’s kind of important given the edict that was put forth.
And second, that Haman had enacted this murder to murder her and to murder her Uncle Mordecai, who had served the— who had saved the king’s life earlier, and to murder all of the Jews. Now, the king at the second banquet had had a lot to drink, and that seems to be a theme throughout of the book of Esther. So when he hears this news about, about the potential extermination of Esther and all of her people, he goes into yet one more drunken rage, and he orders that Haman actually be impaled on the very stake that he had erected for Mordecai. It’s ironic. It’s a grisly way for a Haman to go.
But we learned last week in our sermon that Haman’s execution didn’t immediately solve this problem of the decree to kill all of the Jews. The focus now turns to Esther and Mordecai as they make a plan to reverse the original decree. The problem is, is the king cannot revoke a decree for some reason back then that he had made. So instead, the king commissions Mordecai to make a counter-edict, a counter-decree, which was this: that on the exact same day that was appointed for the Jews Jews where they were supposed to be killed the 13th of Adar. Now this counter-edict said the Jews are ordered to defend themselves and to destroy those who plotted to kill them.
So Mordecai, Esther, Israelites everywhere hold banquets, feasts to celebrate this new decree. And the 8th chapter, uh, of Esther that we looked at last week ends with Mordecai being elevated to a seat right next to the king. Amazing. Amazing. So, this last section today is primarily about the fact that we have a God— if you didn’t know this— we have a God who can turn everything upside down.
Esther is about an unlimited, all-powerful, all-gracious God who is able to reverse what the enemies of God’s people have intended to achieve. And we see that right there in verse 1 of chapter 9 that Maylynn read. On the very day that the enemies of the Jews had hoped to overpower them, now verse 1 says the tables are what? They’re turned. The tables are turned, and the Jews now got the upper hand where they had not had the upper hand up to this point.
They got the upper hand over those who hated them. So God plays the reverse card. God plays the reverse card, and what you thought and what they thought was going to happen turned out to be precisely the opposite. And I just want to point out here. Friends, do you realize that God is able to reverse that which seems irreversible?
Did you know that? Do you know God is able to change something that looks like it’s going one direction and that there’s no hope and he’s able to turn it around? Do you realize this? Okay, I just want to make sure I’m hearing from you because this is really good news and I’m getting some silence here. So, that tells me that this is not good news to you.
I’m telling you, it is great news. You need to know that God, friends, is able to reverse your situation. You’re looking at a situation, and everybody’s telling you it’s going this way. God says, no, not so fast. I’m able to do something different here.
That’s amazing. So, as we wrap up this sermon series in Esther today, we’re going to see just how God reversed things, how He turned the tables and the fate of His people around. And we’re going to see it in 3 pairs of words. The first pair of words I want you to see here in chapter 9 and in chapter 10 are the words retribution and reversal. That’s an odd way to start a sermon, but retribution and reversal— or excuse me, retribution and restraint.
Retribution and restraint. We have to deal with an uncomfortable reality that is being described here for us. We can’t just skip over it. I would love to skip over it. We can’t.
Verse 2 says, okay, well, how did the Jews get the upper hand over their enemies? The Jews assembled in their cities. Why? To attack those determined to destroy them. Verses 5 and 10 then continue that the Jews struck down all of their enemies with the sword, killing and destroying them, and they did what pleased, uh, what they pleased to those who hated them.
In the citadel of Susa, the capital city of the Persian Empire. The Jews killed and destroyed 500 men. And then it tells us Esther in verse 13 requests of the king that Haman’s sons be impaled on poles, and she also asked permission for a second day of retribution, which then resulted in the death of at least 75,000 more people. And we’re like, what are we supposed to make of this?
Seriously, what are we to make of this? This was It was one thing to hang Haman, who we could argue had it coming. This looks a bit excessive. This looks personally vengeful, does it not? Look, again, it’d be much easier for us to just skip this section and go right to the feasting and the celebrating at the end.
Believe me, I would love to do that, but we can’t. The fact is, there is a lot of violence, lot of violence just like this throughout the Old Testament. Most people say, well, isn’t God loving? It’s a reasonable question. This is one of the biggest, largest, most complex questions that people wrestle with, Christians and non-Christians alike.
This is one of the most disturbing aspects of the Bible for lots of people, for lots of reasons. So, when it comes to the type of violence that we see here in Esther and that we read throughout the Old Testament, I think it’s really important for us to just acknowledge that the biblical authors don’t really even attempt to give us clear answers on this or tie a neat bow around this topic to just sort of wrap it up. They don’t do that for us. And so, what that forces us to do is to sit with these narratives. And to be humble about it and to admit that we can’t presume to know the mind and ways of God in each and every situation.
And it forces us to consider the messiness of human nature throughout history and to learn about the mysterious purposes of God in the world that ultimately lead us to Jesus. I will say, I think it can help us in this context of Esther 9 to look at the overall context of the other verses in Esther 9. Just because Mordecai is again had issued the second decree doesn’t mean there weren’t Persians still coming after them. And so the writer of Esther seems to be making a point throughout chapter 9 to indicate that Israel’s counterattack was really only about what? Self-defense, to defend themselves.
Okay, but what about Esther herself? Didn’t she ask for a second day for them to avenge themselves against their enemy? She did, but it does appear that she’s not asking for another day to just arbitrarily just take out other people, to just go on a murderous rampage against anyone and everyone, but rather again for a second day to protect themselves against anyone else who was still around who was attempting to harm them, just as they had on the first day. It’s also, it seems worth noting, because it’s mentioned 3 times in this chapter— verse 10, verse 15, verse 16— that the Israelites did not take any of the plunder of their enemies, even though No, this counter-edict indicated that the counter— this counter-edict in chapter 8 said that taking plunder would have been explicitly allowed. They intentionally did not.
That second edict included the permission to plunder because the whole thing was meant to reverse the exact terms of Haman’s first decree that he had previously established. And so these 3 verses in chapter 9 that say they did not take the plunder, they did not lay their hands on it, It’s an important point, I would think, that we’re meant to see that the people are not motivated by enriching themselves. So in fact, there’s actually a measure of restraint, we could argue, being used here. Listen, there had been lots of other occasions previously in Israel’s history which they had shown no restraint, and they had taken plunder from their enemies against God’s wishes. They had trusted in the strength of their own army instead of trusting God.
Had generally at times lived no better than the wicked people that they went to war against. That doesn’t seem to be the situation here though in chapter 9. It seems to be a different tone, I would argue. Again, I don’t want to minimize this issue of violence in Scripture and what do we do with this, and I certainly don’t want to offer pat answers that just say, hey, get over it, because these are real concerns for real people. I do think it is important though to see that the large narrative that goes from the book of all the way to where we are here in Esther.
The story runs from creation to the calling of Abraham and to the Israelites, to the Exodus, their conquest of the land in Joshua, and then Israel’s failure in that land, and then Israel’s exile from that land because of their failure, and they go into Assyria and to Babylon and Persia. All of that is one unified, interconnected story. That forms this section of the biblical narrative. And so all of the violent stories that we read about Israel in the Old Testament have to be understood within that larger, bigger storyline. Because when we read these things as part of that bigger story closely, in light of the whole, a much more complex picture does begin to emerge in which God is working to restore the life and blessing of the Garden of Eden to all of the nations throughout this one family that he happened to choose, the ancient Israelites.
And God’s choice to defend the family of Abraham means that sometimes Israel’s enemies become God’s enemies. And sometimes, don’t miss this, even when Israel has been more corrupt than their enemies at times in history. So, what this is meaning is that God’s choice of the family of Abraham and of Israel Israel and God’s justice are standing constantly in this dynamic tension with each other that is not always easily solved for us or brushed away with pat answers. What we know, though, is that God the Creator is not arbitrarily or flippantly vengeful, even though we as humans have rebelled against him so many times and we have messed things up in so sort— all sorts of ways. So God is building a family.
God is building a multiethnic ethnic family of people who trust him, who are loyal to his purpose, whether they’re Israelite or Persian or whatever. He is simply, utterly, and relentlessly determined— God is— to bring heaven and earth together forever. And for that to even be thinkable, evil itself needs to be eradicated by God for God to complete his rescue operation for the whole world. I hope that that’s helpful to you to just begin to process that, because it’s a very real thing here we see in Scripture. But what we see here is God’s protection and following through of his promises that he’d been making all the way from Genesis up to this point in Scripture.
Doesn’t solve all of the issues, but we have to understand again, it doesn’t change the character of God at the same time. So we see here in chapters 9 this theme of retribution, but there’s also some restraint. But we also see, second, relief and rest, relief and rest. And there are many places in Scripture where God promises rest and relief to his people, rest from their enemies. In Deuteronomy 12, when the Israelites were on the verge of entering the Promised Land, God promises his people that he would give them rest from all their enemies around them so that they could live in safety once entering the Promised Land.
In Joshua 21, it says the Lord gave them rest on every every side, just as He had sworn to their ancestors. Not one of their enemies withstood them. The Lord gave all their enemies into their hands. 2 Samuel 7, God promises King David rest from his enemies. 1 Chronicles 22, God promises David that his son Solomon will have rest from his enemies on every side when he becomes king.
And then here in Esther 9, we see it in verse 16 and in verse 22. That Esther and Mordecai and all of Israel were miraculously delivered by God from harm and were able to get rest and relief from their enemies. But there’s a little problem here. In each of these examples that I just shared with you about God giving rest from enemies through these human people that I mentioned— Moses and David and Solomon and Esther and these kinds of people— each of these people were eventually given rest from their enemies, but the relief and rest was only temporary, wasn’t it? It never lasted.
The rest from enemies for these people never seemed to stick, whether it was accomplished through Moses or Joshua or David or Solomon or Esther. Each of these individuals were absolutely used by God in amazing ways. They were viewed by their people as heroes and as even as saviors, and some who would bring about peace and rest from Israel’s enemies. But it never lasted.
And that is why some of the later prophets in the Old Testament— Isaiah, Daniel, people like that— prophesied that one day the Messiah would come and he would provide not just rest, but ultimate rest, final rest, total rest from our enemies. So, okay, along comes Jesus and his disciples are thinking and hoping that at any moment he is going to lead an attack against their enemies, the Romans. They assumed that that’s what Jesus’ mission was all about. That’s what he wanted, right? And so when they encountered opposition, like let’s say in Luke 9, the disciples say, hey Jesus, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to destroy all of these people?
They’re our enemies after all. Jesus turns and he rebukes them. And they’re surprised by that. And the more that Jesus taught, the more that he interacted with his enemies, the more the disciples just didn’t get him. He told them to love their enemies.
He told them to forgive their enemies. And if someone forces you to go 1 mile, then you go with them the 2nd mile. And when Jesus’ enemies came for him in the Garden of Gethsemane to arrest him, the disciples thought, okay, finally we’re gonna get some rest and revenge. Revenge from our enemies. Jesus told them, put your swords away.
And then, of course, Jesus went to the cross, dying for his enemies and asking God to forgive them. All of this, friends, that we know about from Jesus’ life and his example is meant to cause us then to look back at the story of Esther with fresh appreciation and fresh eyes and understanding and to realize what we have here with Jesus loving his enemies and then dying for them is the ultimate warfare on evil, isn’t it? You want to destroy evil? Jesus did it through what he did. And that is what brings about ultimate rest from one’s enemies.
The cross of Jesus, what Jesus did for us, going to the cross, a sinless man who took our sins upon himself, himself so that those who turn to him and confess him as Lord can receive him and be reconciled to God. All of those things change the warfare with evil so that the way that we behave as believers and handle our enemies is not by trying to take them out, but by loving them and forgiving them and overcoming evil with good. And it is when you and I understand that It’s when we take it in and we chew on it and we receive it and say, thank you, God, so much for what Jesus did, and we become followers of Jesus. That’s when you will get rest from your enemies, because it reminds us that actually we’re no better than our enemies, are we? We’re not.
We can get angry and self-righteous about that and say, no, but you don’t understand these people.
Clearly God loves me and favors me more than he favors them. But the gospel changes all that. You’re a sinner just like they are. And if you’re a believer, you were only made right with God not as a result of your own moral goodness and trying and religion or your superiority to your enemies. You’re not made right with God through that.
And that just humbles us that we would be saved not through our own actions and efforts, but by Jesus and what he did for us. God’s grace, that humbles us. It changes how we think about our enemies because it changes your identity. It changes this need to get revenge. It changes this need to get right.
It changes this need to be self-righteous and see ourselves as better than them. And it enables us to look at our troubles, our very real troubles, with a different perspective, an eternal perspective. And not even our enemies can touch that. Friends, your enemies cannot touch the eternal perspective that God provides for us. If you are in Christ, not even your enemies can touch that.
That’s how we receive ultimate rest from our enemies. And that’s why this rest that we see here in Esther, as wonderful as it is, is only temporary. It’s pointing us towards something even better. But despite the fact that this relief and rest in Esther in chapter 9 is imperfect and temporary, it’s still worth celebrating. And celebrate it the people did.
How did they do this? How did they do this? Well, it’s the third pair of words: with remembrance and rejoicing. That’s what we see here in this passage— remembrance and rejoicing. You’ve probably heard the axiom that those who ignore history are almost inevitably doomed to what?
To repeat it. Meaning, for most of us, it’s far easier for us to forget than it is to remember. And so, many times throughout the Bible, the people of God are called to remember things. Remember this, remember that.
To remember events, to remember what God did, to put in place certain things even to help us to remember.
Just when the instruction— just like the instruction given in Joshua to set up stones in the middle of the Jordan River. That seems like a strange thing for people to do. What are you doing? You’re putting stones here in the middle of the river. That seems weird.
But they set the stones up there in the middle of the river after God enabled them to cross the Jordan River and to enter into the Promised Land. And the people would say, why are we doing this? And Joshua said, we’re doing this so that in years to come, when your children ask and your children’s children children ask, what do these stones mean? You can tell them, look at what God did. If we don’t put the stones there, there’s not going to be a remembrance of what happened, no point of reference for us or for future generations.
And so the people in Esther 9 don’t ever want to forget this. They’re saying God did something miraculous. He reversed things. He turned the tables. And so that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it, to remember and to celebrate So that’s what happened here in this story.
They said, we’re not only going to celebrate this great reversal of events today, we’re going to make sure we remember what God did here, and we’re going to tell our children about this, and we’re going to tell our children’s children about this, and we’re going to do this each and every year from now on. And so Mordecai, it says, wrote down these events so that they could remember. And then verse 23 says that the Israelites The Israelites agree that, yes, this is a good thing, and we’re going to continue this celebration. And then verse 29 of chapter 9 says that Esther put her stamp on all of this is happening. Really, this is at a grassroots level, this celebration.
This isn’t like our fall family fun where we’re like, people, please come. Please serve and do these things. No, like, you didn’t have to compel anybody, twist any arms and say, hey, God rescued you. What do you think about that? They just— this just spontaneously occurred.
Unlike the feasts commanded in the Old Testament, this wasn’t one of those things here in Esther that had been dictated from on high by God. This was a spontaneous reaction to an absolute miracle. Nobody really had to tell these folks to celebrate. They had thought they were going to be killed, and now they’re not. They’re given rest from their enemies.
Are you kidding me? Let’s go 2 miles down the road to Didum’s. Let’s get some party hats. Let’s get the balloons and the table decorations. Let’s celebrate.
They said there is going to be feasting, there’s going to be joy. Moreover, verse 22 says they wanted to use this occasion— I love this— to even give presents to one another of food, and even more, to give gifts to the poor. Why do they do that? I think it’s because they’re saying we are a community and we are a family, and just as God has been generous to us, so we want to be generous to one another. I love that.
And they decided to call this time of remembrance and celebration Purim, which is a day many Jewish people still recognize today. This is the Purim origin story. Purim, if you didn’t know, took place this year back in March, the evening of March 23rd to the evening of March 24th. And pur refers to the Persian word for for lot or dice, just like the dice Haman had thrown to determine the day of the death sentence of the Jewish race. And in its plural form, the word is Purim.
So the name of this feast is sort of a double entendre. It’s signifying that the lot or the destiny of God’s people is not going to be determined by Haman’s casting of lots before the gods. It’s not going to be If you’re part of the people of God, we are not bobbing around on a sea of chance. We don’t cross our fingers and look for luck. There’s a restaurant on El Camino we drove by yesterday and it has the slogan, Embrace Luck.
And I’m like, what is this?
God is in control of all things, friends. The people of God, we’re not bobbing around on a sea of chance. We’re not held in the grip of blind and deterministic forces. We are under the providential care of the one who works out all of the events of life according to God’s good and perfect will. So, only God determines the roll of the dice.
Are you kidding? And only God determines the lot of his people then and now, period. It’s one of the key lessons I hope that we’re taking away here from this journey through the book of Ecclesiastes. If you step back, you see that even though God’s name is not mentioned one time through the entire book— and we’ve been very faithful about every single week reminding you, God’s name not mentioned here, that’s pretty significant— even though it’s not mentioned, God’s presence has been on every page. Which raises the question then, why would God allow in his Bible a book that never even mentions his name?
And I’ll remind you of what we said back in week 1, and we’ve been saying all sense. The reason why God would want this book here is because God wanted to use this Cinderella story— it’s literally a Cinderella story— to teach us something about himself that is critical for your life and for mine, which is this: that there are many times in our life where God is nowhere to be found.
Many times in our life when we are looking for God and we can’t locate him. Many times in our lives when it seems that God is letting things happen to us that he would not allow if He really loved us and cared about us. And He doesn’t seem to be present when these painful circumstances are happening to us. But there is a term for God’s invisibility, when He cannot be located. It’s referred to in biblical theology as the doctrine of God’s providence, God’s unseen hand at work.
And the book of Esther is probably the classic example of God’s providence, His unseen hand at work, as He providentially rules and He providentially overrules rules, and he providentially reverses and turns things upside down when circumstances seem to be taking shape that would result in the destruction of his people. In fact, Esther is so permeated with God’s providence that without knowing the reason this book was even included in the Bible at all, the book would make no sense at all other than it’s a great story. It is a great story, but Esther was put in the Bible to teach us something about God that all of all of us face at one time or another, which is that He is present and at work even when our circumstances are falling apart around us, and God seems nowhere to be found, and we can’t hear Him. When you understand, friends, the truth that God is at work— right now, you need to know this, that God is at work in your circumstances— when you understand that and you receive it, that God is providentially at work, you will be able to move through life not with the cares of the world, not being a reality. They are a real thing, but you’re going to be able to move through life because you know that even though you can’t see, feel, or hear God, he is there.
God is working. God is covering. God is providing. God is intervening. God is restraining.
God is directing. When I was a kid, I used to love doing those connect-the-dot pictures. The dots always looked random until you followed the numbers to connect them, and then the picture would begin to emerge, right? If you merely looked at the numbers, you wouldn’t get the picture, which for us is God’s purposes for our lives and for the world. And so to fill in that picture, God may allow evil to accomplish his purpose and his plans.
God may allow evil. Every now and then, God will let things go downhill. He will allow evil to feel like it’s achieving something in your life so that when he gets you to that day and he delivers you— because God is a deliverer— when he gets you to that point, he knows he’s going to get some sincere, from-the-gut thanksgiving from you. Not the kind of thing where we put words up on a screen and say, everybody stand and you must sing this now. He’s going to get something spontaneous and from-the-gut thanksgiving and praise out of you.
He’s not going to get lip service or that trite stuff we just throw at him because we feel like we’re supposed to do that. He’s going to get some heartfelt celebration because of what he has done, how he did it, how he turned the tables when all seemed lost, how he’s been so faithful and so good. Friends, what God is inviting us to do here through the story of Esther is to be willing to trust him and his wisdom and his providence even when we can’t see it working, and to know that no matter how bad bad things get. God is 100% committed to redeeming us and to redeeming his world. Let’s pray.
God, I want to pray for the truth of this passage to sit on our hearts today and in the days to come. It’s one thing, Lord, for us to give lip service to what it is that we say that we believe, but when we’re walking through perhaps the valley of the shadow of death, or we are walking through difficult valleys, God, and circumstances, and I know many here are, Lord, we don’t want to fix our eyes on the problems. We want to fix our eyes on the one who can reverse things and can give us hope even when all seems lost. And even when evil seems to be making headway, and even when difficult circumstances come our way, Lord, thank you that it doesn’t have to overwhelm us, even in then you are with us, working, intervening, protecting. Lord, remind us of this.
May we always remember and rejoice in that today and personalize this. This is not something we’re talking about in an abstract way. This is real. Lord, we need it. We need hope.
And I pray that you would give it to each person here today. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
