Esther 4: God's Providence in the Good and Bad

This morning, we continue our look at the book of Esther. I hope you've been enjoying it so far, and I hope you've been following along. If you haven't, if you're here for the first time this morning, you can go back on our Facebook page. We record all our sermons. You can go and watch that and get yourself acquainted with the story of Esther so far.

We're essentially smack bang in the middle of the story as we come to really the climax of this crisis that's happening, the potential genocide of the Jewish people in the Persian empire. And this, theologically, according to God's plan, is hugely significant because the saviour of the world, Jesus Christ, is gonna come through who? The Jewish people. And so what is going to happen to them and to God's plan? That is the big question that we have posed.

We saw at the start of the book of Esther that a king by the name of King Ahasuerus is the great and powerful king of Persia, the greatest superpower that the world had ever known. A woman by the name of Esther, a Jewish woman nonetheless, rises up to be his queen. Esther's adopted father, Mordecai, is a respected official in that same Persian government. Last week, we see that one day he refuses to bow down to a man who is even of more superiority than him, a man by the name of Haman, a more senior official. And through a hurt ego and hate, racial hatred, man Haman orchestrates the genocide of the Jewish people in the Persian empire.

We take up the story from this point as we begin Esther 4:1. When Mordecai learned all that had been done, Mordecai tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and ashes. And he went out into the midst of the city and he cried out with a loud and bitter cry. He went up to the entrance of the king's gate for no one was allowed to enter the king's gate clothed in sackcloth. And in every province, wherever the king's command and his decree reached, there was great mourning among the Jews with fasting and weeping and lamenting, and many of them lay in sackcloth and ashes.

When Esther's young women and her eunuchs came and told her, the queen was deeply distressed. She sent garments to clothe Mordecai so that he might take off his sackcloth, but he would not accept them. Then Esther called for Hathach, one of the king's eunuchs, who had been appointed to attend her, and ordered him to go to Mordecai to learn what this was and why it was. Hathach went out to Mordecai in the open square of the city in front of the king's gate and Mordecai told him all that had happened to him and the exact sum of money that Haman had promised to pay into the king's treasuries for the destruction of the Jews. Mordecai also gave him a copy of the written decree issued in Susa for their destruction, that he might show it to Esther and explain it to her and command her to go to the king to beg his favour and plead with him on behalf of her people.

And Hathach went and told Esther what Mordecai had said. Then Esther spoke to Hathach and commanded him to go to Mordecai and say, all the king's servants and the people of the king's provinces know that if any man or woman goes to the king inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law, to be put to death, except the one to whom the king holds out the golden sceptre so that he may live. But as for me, I have not been called to come in to the king these thirty days. And they told Mordecai what Esther had said. Then Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, do not think to yourself that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews.

For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place. But you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this? Then Esther told them to reply to Mordecai, go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa and hold a fast on my behalf. And do not eat or drink for three days, night or day.

I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish. Mordecai then went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him. This is God's word.

I wanna share with you two thoughts this morning from this chapter, which really is the turning point and contains the central key text of the whole book of Esther. Two thoughts for us this morning as we look at this story. Firstly, we see the truth of how human nature seeks to avoid suffering. Human nature seeks to avoid suffering. When Mordecai hears of the terrible fate that awaits him and the Jewish people, he is beside himself with grief and distress.

We are told that the Jewish people across the entire empire get dressed in sackcloth, essentially rags, and they pour ash over themselves in a public display of mourning. Mordecai rocks up to the palace gates in exactly the same garb, sackcloth and ash. But he doesn't go further than the gates we are told, because verse two tells us no one was allowed to enter the king's gate clothed in sackcloth. Mordecai looks terrible. And some of the people at the gate realised something must be terribly wrong.

So they go to Esther to tell her what's happening to Mordecai. Verse four tells us that Esther is deeply distressed at this news, but she seemingly has no idea what could have caused Mordecai's grieving. In the following verses, we see Mordecai and Esther sending messengers back and forth to discuss the situation of the Jews and the solution of the problem. Poor eunuch Hathach must have been sore that night, running backwards and forwards with these messages. But before we get to the solution to the problem, before we get to the plan that Mordecai has, let's dig into what we see here at the start of chapter four.

Like we have been in the last few chapters, we see here in chapter four a bare naked understanding of the human condition. We've seen previously that the book of Esther is not shy in highlighting some of the critical issues of the heart, the things endemic to the human heart. We saw, for example, the greed and the lust of King Ahasuerus. Nothing will stop him from being satisfied. Last week, we saw the pride and the hunger for power from Haman.

But here, we see perhaps the one thing that sits underneath all of those other terrible heart sicknesses, and that is human selfishness. And unfortunately, we see it in the heroine of the story, the hero of the story, Esther. Have a look again. See how the king's palace has so insulated itself that the laws, the very laws of the Persian empire protect it from even seeing the suffering of the commoners.

No one is allowed into the palace compound wearing sackcloth. Only happy people are allowed in the palace. Meanwhile, we see Esther, the queen, having no idea what her people are facing. We are told she is distressed, but she's not distressed at the news of what has happened. She's distressed when she sees that Mordecai is sad.

But instead of getting to the heart of the issue, she first sends nice clothes out to Mordecai. It's only when Mordecai refuses to get dressed nicely, to put on a brave, smiling, happy facade, does she realise something terrible must have happened. The palace outlaws sadness and a queen is isolated from the political horrors of the empire. It highlights something innate to the human heart. And that is that it seeks out all sorts of ways to avoid suffering.

Whether that is the suffering of others, but more importantly, as we'll soon see in Esther's rhetoric, personal suffering. The royal class doesn't want to allow itself to see people suffering, so they ban sackcloth and ashes in the palace compound. Why? Because the very act of seeing suffering causes someone to enter into that suffering just a little bit. And the king doesn't wanna be disturbed by that sort of thing.

There is something in all of us that seeks to avoid suffering at all costs. It's like the news report I remember watching a few years ago, only how long ago, when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were married. Remember that day? And in this news report, they were talking about organisers trying to make sure that the homeless people were moved off the streets as their golden carriage was being pulled along. Nothing has really changed, has it?

There's something in us that seeks to avoid suffering at all costs. But it's only the wealthy like us who really have the means to avoid it. If you have enough money, you can create at least the illusion of comfortable compounds where the tragedy of life rarely touches. And if you live long enough in a place like that, and perhaps some of us have, you might just start believing the delusion that suffering doesn't exist. Australian society is built on that drive.

I think you could argue. It's the one thing that unites us. The pursuit of avoiding suffering and yet, we don't see the lurking selfishness that is far more sinister than we think. I don't think Queen Esther thought she had bought into that illusion. After all, she had risen through the ranks, remember, as a commoner.

But this is years after she has become queen. And you can see the creep of that comfort seeping into life. Have a look at her initial reaction to this terrible news that Mordecai tells her. Mordecai says that a whole nation is standing at risk of being wiped out at the single command of the king. And her initial response in verse 11 is an excuse that she might be killed by approaching the king uninvited.

She adds that she hasn't been his favourite wife for the past thirty days. She's not the favourite at this stage. I don't believe Esther is being prudent here. I think Esther is abdicating any responsibility. Esther is toying with a weak excuse.

Would the king truly execute his new queen for coming to him uninvited? This is not a heroic Esther. She will be eventually wise and heroic, but she's not at first. Why does she do this? Well, I will make the case that human instinct drives her to avoid suffering.

Does she have a chance of losing favour with the king if she asks something that he doesn't want? Of course. We know that the king has a track record of getting rid of his previous wife for her insubordination. Is it risky? Sure.

There is risk involved. But what is the risk in comparison to saving millions of lives? You have the power. And Esther thinks for a few minutes that maybe it's not her. Why is it that we avoid suffering?

Well, you could argue, as many people do, that there is an instinctive drive to survive, the evolutionary theory inside of us. But that's not really what's happening here in the story. What does banning sackcloth in the palace do for survival? Nothing. It is just uncomfortable.

Now, the thing is, the human heart, apart from God's intervening grace, hates suffering because suffering points to the fact that we are not in control of our own lives. And we hate the idea that we are out of control because the human heart, apart from God's intervening grace, wants to believe that it is the god of its own life. We don't want to give God control back of our lives. The truth is when we suffer and thereby feel out of control, the deepest part of us is distinctly drawn back towards God. Suffering and feeling out of control means we instinctively look upwards to God.

When we suffer, we look to God. But apart from God's intervention to overhaul our hearts, we don't acknowledge God. We don't want to acknowledge God as the God of life. This truth was pointed out in the story that author and pastor Eugene Peterson once wrote about. He says that he found himself in a hospital room one time.

He had surgery on a broken nose. The pain was great, he says, and he was in no mood to talk to anyone. But next to him, as God would have it, was a very chatty man by the name of Kelly. He wore Peterson down with his constant attempts to get a conversation going, and eventually they got talking. But interestingly, when Kelly found out that Peterson was a pastor, he wanted nothing more to do with him, and actually turned away from him and stopped talking.

The next morning, however, Kelly stood above Peterson, shaking him awake. He was about to have his tonsils out and he was panicking. I want you to pray for me, pastor, please. So Peterson did and they wheeled Kelly into surgery. After a successful surgery, Kelly kept ringing for the nurse.

I'm hurting. I have pain. I can't stand it. I'm going to die. Peterson, please pray for me.

Pray for me, Peterson. The staff eventually had to restrain him, calm him down, and after a while, he was fine. Peterson writes, when the man was scared, he wanted me to pray for him. And when the man was crazy, he wanted me to pray for him. But in between, during the hours of so called normalcy, he didn't want anything to do with a pastor.

What Kelly betrayed, Peterson writes in his extremes, is what many people want from God. A God to help them when they have fears, but a God that is forgotten when the fears are taken care of. Human nature seeks to avoid suffering because it forces us back to God. And yet, God is so good, God is so gracious that He uses suffering precisely because He knows how important it is for us to return to Him. And that leads us to the second point, that God allows suffering based upon His good providence.

God's providence allows suffering but also alleviates it. The term providence, if you are new, perhaps, to the reformed faith, is a theological term referring to the continuing action of God in preserving His creation and guiding it towards its intended purposes. God's direct intervention into human history. We find Mordecai expressing the heart of this concept when he says to Esther in verses 13 and 14, do not think to yourself that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place.

But you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this? Like I said, commentators will say that this is the key text for the entire book of Esther. This is what sums up the theme of Esther. Mordecai is saying to Esther, you have become queen for this reason, to save the Jewish people.

Mordecai isn't simply opportunistic. He doesn't see, wow, you know, there's a great person that's on the ear of the king that can save us. Wow, how lucky this is that I can go to her and get her to speak on our behalf. This statement in verses 13 and 14 is a statement made in faith about the unerring plan of God. For Mordecai, there is no plan B.

This is how it had to unfold. Why does he have this sort of confidence? Because he knows that God's name is inextricably linked to the success of God's people through the covenant that was made to them. God's saving purposes for the world will come through the Jewish people and that ultimately, we know, as the New Testament explains, that it comes through the Messiah, Jesus Christ. But so confident is Mordecai in God's intervening providence that he tells Esther in verse 13 that even if she somehow doesn't step up, even as she might refuse to do her responsibility as a queen, salvation will come from another place, Esther.

That is how powerful God is to have His plans succeed. Now, that is obviously all hypothetical. But Esther, Mordecai says, God will save His people even if you don't take action. But I know you will because God has placed you in this very spot for this very reason. God's providence is the central theme in the book of Esther.

And friends, I wanna tell you that God's providence is the central theme of your life. God's continuing action guiding your life towards His intended purposes. Another way we often talk about it is to speak of God's sovereignty, that God is in control of all things, all the time. That every facet of life happens through His say so. For this reason, we know that the situation the Jews were facing in the Persian empire isn't simply bad luck.

If you become a Christian, friends, you stop believing in luck. If we believe in God, we believe in providence. We believe in His sovereignty. We see providence clearly being shown to us in history right now. God's plan is being woven even through all of the human implications, even through the human complications of sin.

We see Him working through things like disobedience in Israel that causes them to be in the exile. We see God working through the lust and the greed of a king, through the hunger and the power of Haman. And all of these things lead to this terrible situation for the Jews. And yet and yet, God has raised up Queen Esther for such a time as this. God's good plan, through the horror of human sin, is being worked together for the good of those who love Him and have been called according to His purposes.

And many of us will say amen to this idea because we've listened to these sermons our whole lives. But many of us live our day to day completely devoid of really believing it. For some of us, perhaps from more charismatic backgrounds, when we look at life, especially the difficult things in it, we don't see God's hand, we see the devil's. We tell ourselves hardship has come from satan. But Esther tells us that's not necessarily true.

God ultimately brings hardship. We see it here. God allowed Esther to be plucked from her family, placed into the king's harem as a sex slave, essentially. God allows Mordecai to refuse bowing to an ancient enemy, causing a whole chain of events that leads potentially to the genocide of a nation. Yes, you can say the cause of all of this is human sinfulness and yet the weaving of God through history, we see a purpose being moulded and shaped.

So we don't need to see a demon behind every bush. Even in hardship, you can find a deep, deep comfort that God is there in the midst of it and that He has placed you there and that He has a reason even for that. Do you believe that? Alternatively, those of us from more traditional reformed backgrounds, people you would think who would profess to hold such a strong teaching on God's sovereignty in salvation that we would somehow also be immune to misunderstanding God's providence. But I've heard some of the most inconsistent thoughts on God's providence come from my reformed friends.

Some friends have said things like God is sovereign over all things apart from choosing for me the person I should marry. When it comes to that, I make the choice based on my wisdom. Others have said, God's providence is all around me. Apart from the job that I have, in that realm, God simply decrees, find something that makes sense to you. Good reformed people have said these things.

Do you know what this tells me? We all suck at being consistent with our view of God's providence. Friends, God is providing for us in all things. From hardship to good, it is God who has brought you to such a place for such a time as this. We may never be called to be Esther, never called to the lofty purposes of being royalty in order to sway the history of an entire nation.

But God doesn't simply concern Himself with the rich or the powerful. We know that as well. The eternal, omnipotent God is involved in every detail of your life. Nothing happens in your life without His say so. This point was reemphasised one day for a preacher, a well known preacher who was asked to speak at a chapel service at a Pentecostal seminary and I'm not picking on the Pentecostals this morning.

He was asked to speak at a chapel service for a seminary. A prayer meeting was held for him just before he spoke. Eight men took him to the back room of the chapel, had the preacher kneel and they laid their hands on his head and began to pray. That is a good thing, the preacher wrote, except that they prayed for a very long time. And the longer they prayed, the more tired their arms got.

And the more tired their arms got, the more they leaned on his head. And he says, the feeling of eight men's weight on your head is not a good feeling. To make matters worse, he writes, one of the men was not even praying for him. The man went on and on praying for someone named Charlie Stoltzfus. Dear Lord, he said, you know Charlie Stoltzfus.

He lives in that silver trailer down the road a mile. You know the trailer, Lord. Just down the road on the right hand side. The preacher was tempted to tell this guy praying that it wasn't necessary to explain all that detail to an all knowing God. But he kept praying, Lord, Charlie told me this morning he's going to leave his wife and three kids.

Step in and do something, Lord. Bring that family back together. The preacher finally got the Pentecostal pastors off his head, delivered his message, got in the car, and started driving home. As he drove towards the highway, he noticed a hitchhiker. And this is what he writes about what happened next.

After picking him up, he says, we drove a few minutes and I said, hey, my name's Tony. What's yours? He said, my name is Charlie Stoltzfus. I couldn't believe it. I got off the highway at the next exit and started heading back in the direction we came.

Charlie got a bit uneasy with that and said, hey mister, where are you taking me? I said, I'm taking you home. He narrowed his eyes and asked, why? I said, because you just left your wife and three kids, didn't you? That blew him away.

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. With shock written all over his face, he plastered himself against the car door and never took his eyes off me. Then I really did him in as I drove right up to his silver trailer.

When I pulled up, his eyes seemed to bulge as he asked, how did you know that I lived here? I said, God told me. Because I believe in hindsight, God did tell me. When he opened the trailer door, his wife exclaimed, you're back. You're back.

He then whispered the story in her ear and the more he talked, the bigger her eyes got. Then I said with real authority, the two of you sit down, I'm going to talk to you and you are going to listen. And man, did they listen. That afternoon, I led those two people to Jesus Christ. God's providence happens all the time.

Now, this is a nice, neat little package of one thing happening in the morning and a completely closed loop happens at the end of the day. Sometimes, we don't get those neat, little packages. But this was a work of God's providence and ultimately, His grace to bring about salvation to people. But it is important for us to see that it is in our nature to avoid suffering. Charlie Stoltzfus was leaving his wife because it was hard.

He was leaving his kids because it was hard. We can attempt to avoid suffering by building all kinds of rationalisations, structures, even societies around us to help us ignore it. But God isn't shy about using suffering to break us down in order to bring us back to Himself. Mordecai's discussion with Esther was telling her that it is foolish to think that we can insulate ourselves against not only suffering, but ultimately against God's will. God's providential care, however, allows suffering and then, it alleviates it.

So please don't believe that what is happening to you, either good or bad, is purely dumb luck. Don't ever believe that your life has no set purpose, no final destination. Don't believe that your position, your calling has simply been a combination of circumstance and chance. You and I believe that we also have been brought to such a time and a place as this, to a country like this, to a city like this, to a family like this, for a purpose determined by God. Now, what that purpose is, you and I may never know on this side of heaven.

But rest assured, our God knows. And He's working through you to accomplish exactly that. Meanwhile, He asks us to simply trust, believe and put one foot in front of the other. But this is the promise from scripture today that with God's guidance, we cannot fail in accomplishing His purpose. And as we take the Lord's Supper this morning, we believe we can have this confidence because we know a saviour who has shown us clearly, who has shown us so magnificently how God's providence has worked in history.

Far from being comfortably isolated from our suffering as Esther was, Jesus identified fully with us and entered our suffering. He took on the form of a servant, the Bible says. He lived as one of us in our fallen world. Then after He completed His life of perfect obedience, He would go to the Father not with the same trepidation that Esther would go to the king saying, if I die, I die. He goes to the Father and says, I laid down my life for them.

Yes, God's providence allows suffering but none more severe than what He was willing to have His own Son endure. God's providential love for us allowed the suffering of His only begotten Son, but His gracious love for us has also alleviated the worst suffering that you and I could ever face. We may seek to avoid suffering, but God's grace allows it. Firstly, it was allowed for His Son, so that we may be drawn closer to Him. And now, we believe and can believe that our life is not an accident.

It has a purpose and that purpose is ultimately for us to know God and to be loved by Him. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the powerful working of Your providential care that has spared, rescued, protected, defended the line of Jesus that was needed. We thank you that in Your grace, we have been forgiven, that we have been set free and now, we can live lives that completely believe and trust in the fatherly care of our God. Help us, Lord, when we are faced with hardship, marriages that are difficult, relationships that are broken, jobs that seem unfulfilling, Lord, confusion about our futures, Lord, all of these things help us to trust and know that You have us where You want us.

Help us to have spiritual eyes to see Your hand. Help us to have trust that You will see us through, even through the hardest of times. Holy Spirit, we ask that You will keep us obedient, faithful, and godly. In Jesus name, we pray. Amen.