The God of Covenant Faithfulness

We are quickly coming to the end of our series on the book of Esther. We have seen the turning point of the story last week, the great pivot point where the king has a sleepless night, goes through the record books, finds that Mordecai once saved his life and was never repaid for that great generosity, that kindness. And then he decides just by happenstance that Haman, who walks into his palace at the time, should go and honour Mordecai on his behalf, completely flipping the script on Haman's plan to execute Mordecai, the Jew, as sort of the start of the punishment of the Jewish people. Today, we see the part B, I guess, of that story because all along, there's this quick turnaround of a couple of days where there are two feasts that are held by Esther in order to bring a request of saving the Jewish people, saving herself and Mordecai from Haman's vile scheme. And we're sort of hopeful by the end of the previous chapter, last week's chapter six, that this is going to resolve well because we hear there the prophetic statement of Haman's wife and friends that you are beginning to fall before Mordecai, the Jew.

And if Mordecai is from the Jewish people, you won't be able to stop what is about to happen to you, which is your utter destruction. So we're sort of hopeful as we come out of chapter six into chapter seven as we start this morning. So turn with me, please, to chapter seven, Esther chapter seven, as we begin to read the story that happens there. Esther seven, verse one. So the king and Haman went into a feast with Queen Esther.

And on the second day, as they were drinking wine after the feast, the king again said to Esther, what is your wish, Queen Esther? It shall be granted you and what is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom, it shall be fulfilled. And Queen Esther answered, if I have found favour in your sight, O king, and if it pleased the king, let my life be granted to me for my wish and my people for my request. For we have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated.

If we had been sold merely as slaves, men and women, I would have been silent for our affliction is not to be compared with the loss to the king. Then King Ahasuerus said to Queen Esther, who is he and where is he who has dared to do this? And Esther said, a foe and an enemy, this wicked Haman. Then Haman was terrified before the king and the queen. And the king arose in his wrath from the wine drinking and went into the garden, the palace garden.

But Haman stayed to beg for his life from Queen Esther, for he saw that harm was determined against him by the king. And the king returned from the palace garden to the place where they were drinking wine, as Haman was falling on the couch where Esther was. And the king said, will he even assault the queen in my presence, in my own house? As the word left the mouth of the king, they covered Haman's face. Then Habanah, one of the eunuchs in attendance on the king, said, moreover, the gallows that Haman has prepared for Mordecai, whose word saved the king, is standing at Haman's house, fifty cubits high.

And the king said, hang him on that. So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then the wrath of the king abated. So far the reading. Well, today, we see an absolute masterpiece in drama and suspense in the dialogue and the setting of this conversation between Esther and the king. Let's have a quick look at how that narrative unfolds.

And then at the end of the message today, we're going to look at what that means for us, the application of it. So firstly, see in the first six verses, Esther pleading for her life and the life of the Jews. This is what it's been working up towards the past few weeks. Chapter seven begins with a simple transition sentence. So the king and Haman went in to feast with Queen Esther.

This short, pithy sort of statement is full of tension, however. Because on the one hand, we have a vague hope, like I said, that Haman's demise is sure. It's been sort of spoken over by his wife and his friends. There's also a small hope that Esther's request will be granted because remember in chapter five, Esther had so masterfully manipulated the king that he was all but assured of giving Esther's request to her. So there is a small hope that the Jewish people will also be saved, but it is a small hope nonetheless.

The great X factor remains with the king. He's that fickle, weak, up and down sort of character we've seen all along. King Ahasuerus, otherwise known as King Xerxes by his Greek name, is a fickle man. So despite his generous promises, his public declaration that Queen Esther can ask anything of him, and he will give her up to half his kingdom if she so wanted to ask, he makes a decision, however, on a whim to eradicate an entire people group when he is asked a similar request by Haman.

We see him swayed by the advice of his advisers to send out an empire-wide edict that all wives must worship and honour their husbands. He's gripped by his lust for women, money and food. That is how we've come to know this king. And so it is not at all certain what his response will be when Esther puts his request to him, which ultimately pits his favoured adviser, Haman, against his favoured wife, Esther. Who is he going to choose?

Once again, after a very sumptuous meal and while having some after-dinner drinks, like they had in chapter five, the king repeats both his questions and his magnanimous promise to Esther for the third time now. Verse two, what is your wish, Queen Esther, he says, it shall be granted you. What is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom, it shall be fulfilled.

This is Esther's moment. Carefully, wisely, and courageously, she's worked the king, having almost guaranteed a favourable outcome for her request with some of the most diplomatic words and the most generous service of food and alcohol. And Esther's reply in verses three and four gives her response to those questions, and it reveals that she understands very well how delicate and precarious her situation is in bringing this request to the king. Because the threat that is against her and her people have come about by two perpetrators sitting in that room with her at that very moment, Haman and the king himself. So on the one hand, she has to somehow fully expose the guilt of Haman, while at the same time never appear to be bringing any charge against the king.

And so for this reason, you see Esther respond again to the king's invitation to bring her request with amazing diplomatic skill. Have a look. First, she introduces her request with the same lavish courtesy that she has been dealing with the king before. She makes, however, a few subtle changes in her introduction. So she's done something similar in chapter five, verse eight, but now she makes a few subtle changes. First, instead of the third person address she used initially in chapter five, saying, if I have found favour in the sight of the king, that's how she says it in chapter five, if I have found favour in sight of the king, now she subtly introduces the second person.

If I have found favour in your sight, O king. In doing so, she emphasises her intimate relationship with the king, that she is his queen. Second, in this preamble, although she uses the form of the king's question to make her request, she modifies that request in a suggestive way. The king's question is doubly stated, sort of lavishly with classic sort of parallelism. He says, what is your wish?

What is your request? And he simply means, just tell me what you need. Like, the one thing, but he says it in two different ways. It's just two words expressing a single idea. But Esther uses both these words to actually ask for two things.

Her request is actually not one request. It is two. She says to him, have a look, O king, if it pleases the king, let my life be granted to me for my wish and my people for my request. Save me and save my people. Two requests instead of one.

But notice how she also, in this moment, this is the moment she identifies herself with the Jewish people. This is the big moment. This is her saying, I've kind of been lying to you for five years. I'm a Jewess. I belong to the Jewish people.

And so in that moment, very carefully, she reveals her and her people's awful predicament, and that places the king now in an even more tricky predicament. The edict that threatens the Jews, she says, threatens the king's wife. And you have to understand, for an emperor, he cares very little for the Jews. I mean, they're just a minority group. Appealing to the king's mercy for that would have been a very low form of leverage.

But talk about the king's wife and you have something to work with. It's the moment that Esther shines. For many parts of the story, we've seen Esther as either naive, self-absorbed or simply faint-hearted. But it's moments like these where you see that God gave Esther a very good brain and probably an even higher EQ. She knows how to work with people, and she gives us a master class in courtly diplomacy.

But no matter how shrewd, no matter how wise Esther has been, she can't avoid exposing herself to the greatest danger, which is revealing her racial identity. The question hangs over her head. What will the king's reaction be when he realises that his queen belongs to the race of people he has consigned to destruction, and he realises that his queen has been lying to him for five years? Now we might say, well, perhaps it was just, again, more shrewd wisdom for Esther to hide her Jewishness from the king, you know, just to downplay that a little bit. But it's not sort of this passive nondisclosure of Esther, you know, just staying silent when no one has asked a question of you.

We see some of the weakness in Esther. And for many of us, we grew up admiring Esther and thinking she's a great hero in the story of the Bible. But Esther was weak. Esther was weak in her faith because in the hiding of her Jewishness, she would have had to have undermined the Jewish morality all the time as well. Think about being the queen of a Gentile empire, and no one knew that she was a Jew.

Why? Because she probably ate pork like all the Gentiles did. She ate all the non-kosher foods that the Jews were not allowed to have. She would have probably participated in all the pagan rituals of the Persian empire. As the queen, of course, you would attend all of those temple sacrifices on the holy days.

So this is not Esther having simply stayed quiet. This is Esther actively denying her faith. But we have seen now a tremendous turnaround in just a few days where Esther has seriously realigned herself with God. Now, fully realising the enormous risk of revealing her Jewishness, with great tact, she apologises for even raising this matter and putting the king into such a precarious situation. Have a look.

Verse five, she says, if we had been sold merely as slaves, us men and women, I would have been silent. For our affliction then is not to be compared with the loss to the king. So, you know, we could have merely been made slaves. And this loss she refers to is the public embarrassment that the king would have facing up to somehow needing to break his own edict. The public humiliation that the law that is unbreakable in Persia is somehow needing to be called back and revoked. And so you can just see the tension, you can feel the stakes here.

Everything now depends upon the king's reaction to this massive revelation. And yet by God's grace, we see the king fully on side with his queen. After this revelation, he is incensed at the threat to the life of his queen and also clearly shows no memory whatsoever of his own guilt in condemning the Jewish people. How convenient. He roars, who is he and where is he who has dared to do this?

You can virtually hear him biting off each of these short syllables. Who is he? Where is he? This one, this man who dared to do this. You see, Esther amazingly, cleverly responds in the same sort of staccato rhythm, a foe and an enemy, this wicked Haman.

So there we see Esther pleading for her life and for the life of the Jews. And then in verses seven and eight, we see poor Haman pleading for his life from Queen Esther. Can you imagine the dread that would have just fallen on Haman as he sat there next to the king? Can you imagine the shot of adrenaline that shot through him when he realised that he is in the crosshairs? Poor Haman had probably been sitting there during the dinner licking his wounds from that day's embarrassment of having had to parade Mordecai through the town square, lavishing praise upon his mortal enemy.

This intimate dinner party was just what he needed to soothe his broken, frail ego. He thought he was probably at his safest right there. But after Esther's angry accusation, the narrator no longer leaves us to imagine Haman's reaction. We see Haman is gripped by terror as he sees the king storm out of the room. We are told that he knows the king intends to do him harm.

And so Haman decides to stay behind to plead with Esther for his life. But as he falls before her, as he falls on the couch that she is sitting in to plead, to beg for mercy, the king returns and he sees this thing happening. And he finds this perpetrator to the threat of the life of his queen, the very man who was sitting at the table with him. And Dugood, in his commentary, makes this good observation that as Ahasuerus leaves in this fury to go and take a walk in the palace garden, he's not doing that to figure out how he's going to save the Jews, how he's going to revoke the irrevocable law, or how he's going to sort of, you know, protect his wife or whatever. Dugood says, no, the king is trying to think how he's going to save face.

How is he going to sort of repair his broken image if he has to bend his law? How could he, without losing face, punish Haman for publicising a decree that he had personally approved with his own signet ring? Can he punish Haman for a plot to which he gave full concurrence? That is what is on his mind when he leaves. And so faced with this dilemma, he returns to the hall just in time to see Haman neatly solving the problem when he sees Haman falling on Esther's couch pleading for mercy, and he thinks here is an opportunity.

Which leads us to the third scene in the story. Haman loses his life. As it's been all throughout the book of Esther, it's God's providence that resolves the king's dilemma. There's no doubt, there is absolutely no doubt that the king believes Haman is about to assault his wife when he falls on that couch. That the king cannot think that.

But he does find a great opportunity, a great excuse, a corporal crime that he can charge Haman with. The king chooses to interpret Haman's actions in a way that provides a charge to condemn him that neatly relieves the king from dealing publicly with the true reason for this man's execution. In keeping with the weak character of Ahasuerus, he chooses to leave hidden and unexamined his own guilt in the matter and simply eradicate Haman. We're told that Habanah, one of the king's eunuchs, senses that the king's accusation implies a sentence of death, and he relieves the king once again of having to make any independent decisions by simply placing a bag over Haman's head, a sign that he will be executed. While doing this, the eunuch points out an ironic and extravagant means of execution.

We should hang Haman on the gallows that he had built for Mordecai. Incidentally, king, Mordecai, the man who saved your life. A second reason to charge this man and condemn him to death. And just like last week, we see these amazing coincidences piling one on top of the other. Remember last week, the king was having a sleepless night, the book of memorable deeds was brought to him, and it just so happened to fall upon Mordecai's saving of the king five years earlier. But in a similar way, we see a tight bundling of coincidences that just so happened to fall into place.

And Frederick Bush, in his commentary, writes, not only is providential coincidence heaped upon providential coincidence, but irony is heaped upon irony. Haman is executed upon the very gallows that he had intended for Mordecai, and he is executed for a crime that he did not commit. The Jews and Mordecai were going to be killed for no reason apart from being Jews. Mordecai didn't bow to Haman, but that was not cause for execution. So Haman's demise is a terrible one.

Because when we read gallows, we might think of the traditional gallows that we know in our minds, the ones that people traditionally are hanged upon with a rope. But historians will tell us the gallows for the Persians were giant stakes on which you were impaled alive. Haman is impaled, in other words, on a stake that he had built twenty metres high in the air. And so we see the end of Haman. We see the end of Haman the Agagite, the enemy of the Jews, as the book of Esther calls him.

That leads us to the question, what are we to make of all of this? What do we hear and understand of God and His people from this? Why has God given us this bit of history? Well, I wanna say to you, it's because we see very specifically a God who is faithful in keeping His promises. God keeps His covenant of grace.

We see from the end of Haman's life how faithful God is to His people. And we see His covenant faithfulness not simply in His display of His love and protection of the Jewish people. It is also seen in the display of His cursing and destroying of God's enemies. Remember the great promise that God had made to Abraham, the father of Israel, when He made a covenant with him and said, I will bless those who bless you. And what else did He say?

I will curse those who curse you. And remember when we were introduced to Haman nearly two months ago, we were told that he was an Agagite, the descendant of King Agag of the Amalekites. And then we looked at the history of Israel and the Amalekites and how God had told King Saul to destroy all the Amalekites for having attacked Israel in their infancy, escaping Egypt. But what happened? Saul never did.

Israel disobeyed God. And so what Israel never did with Agag, God took upon Himself in the death of Haman. Haman, as a tool of Satan, conspired to avenge himself and his people against the Jewish nation. And by aiming at their total destruction, Amalek would have won and Israel would have been destroyed. If Haman had his way, the Amalekites would have won, and the Israelites would have died.

And so if Haman had it his way, then God's great plan of salvation through Israel would never have eventuated. Jesus Christ would never have been born. And that would spell the end of God's covenant to save the world through the Jews. But the Lord executed His wrath on Haman, and Haman fell under God's curse, not because he was a greater sinner than anyone else, but to display and to prove that the Lord keeps His word. The Lord is faithful to His promise.

Haman's death is therefore a very visceral and memorable message that you and I can and should always rely on God to keep His promises. It's a reminder that you and I can build our life on His covenant. Because this covenant gives us incredible hope for all the situations of our lives. It's not simply a theological truth to hold. It is something that affects us in our daily living.

God told us in the Bible that the covenant promise is not simply made to us who have received the benefits of the covenant through faith. As we will see next week in the baptism of two little babies, the covenant is made to our children as well. The covenant promise made to our children in baptism is not simply a promise we make or a commitment we make as parents to raise these kids to the best of our ability, because we know that if our spiritual destiny rested on our ability to persuade them to believe, they are doomed. But God has not simply committed Himself to individuals. He's committed Himself to families of faith.

That's why Peter, in his great speech at Pentecost in Acts, says to the people, the promise of God's salvation is not simply to you, but to your children as well. The fact that God is faithful to His covenant seen here in Haman's death causes us to pray now with boldness to God to save our children, to save our children, to cause them to believe. Why? Because they are recipients of God's promises as well.

We see them not as outsiders to Christ's community. They are insiders to the promises of God's grace. Secondly, God's covenant faithfulness gives us a great hope for our church. We have great confidence for this little church of ours. Why?

Because we don't place our hope in the strength of our elders, even though they are as capable as Tony. We don't place our hope in the knowledge of our pastors. If our hope rested on those things, we may as well shut the doors of this church because the church would inevitably fall. Indeed, we might feel the ever-increasing pressure on Christianity even in our country, the way that the church is heading in the sight of our friends who don't believe. But our confidence rests not on great leaders, on great programmes, on great defenders of our faith, but on God's promise that He is the one that builds His church and that the gates of hell will not overcome us.

So we pray with boldness, knowing that God will surely accomplish through even our small church the very purposes that He has set out for us in spite of our shortcomings. So God's covenant faithfulness affects our confidence in our kids, our confidence in our church, and God's covenant faithfulness impacts us personally as well. The fact that God keeps His promise to protect and to save those upon whom He has placed His name, even for us, that gives us incredible hope. Because in our struggle with sin, we can't place any hope, any confidence that we will grow towards holiness based on personal strength of will.

The longer we live as Christians, we know this, the longer we live as Christians, the more we realise how sinful we are. But because God is faithful when He said in His covenant promise, I will be your God and you will be my people. Because of that great promise, we trust that God will shape His people to be the people He wants us to be. The work of our sanctification may not always move as quickly as we want it to, but the progress is assured. That the one who has started a good work in us will carry it through to completion until that day when Jesus comes again.

So we pray with boldness, for holiness, for transformation in our lives, for a final victory over that one sin that we just cannot shake. Because we know that God is busy working His righteousness into our very souls. Why? Because God is faithful to His promise. You see, Haman's life ended miserably, impaled on a stake twenty metres in the sky, cursed by God, and put to death for attempting an unspeakable sin against God's people.

Why did this happen to him? Friends, because God is faithful. He protects His people. Meanwhile, we see Jesus Christ, God's only and beloved son, who was also raised on a stake into the sky, the cross. And we know that He also was cursed by God.

He was put to death. The Bible says clearly by God and no one else. Why? For the same reason, because God is faithful. Haman lost his life because he was an enemy of God.

Christ lost His life because we, at one time, were enemies of God. In both Haman and Christ, God was protecting His covenant promise that even those who were enemies of God, but whom God has set His heart upon to save and bring into His kingdom, over you and I, it has been proclaimed. I will be your God. You will be my people. And so one man, Haman, dies to spare God's people from extinction.

The other man, Christ, dies to save His people eternally. Because of God's covenant faithfulness, friends, all who believe the gospel will hear again and again when we open God's word the precious words summed up in Romans eight, there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. As an enemy of God, Haman died under the curse. But as recipients of God's grace, the Lord Jesus has made peace between us and God. And it is a peace that nothing under heaven or on earth can ever take away.

So friends, we place our hope in nothing else, not in ourselves, not in our ability, but only in God alone who remains faithful always and forever. Let's pray. Lord, we have received a great hope. We have been rooted and built up in our great faith. We have been assured, past tense, completed action, that Christ has died for us, that there is now no condemnation for those who find themselves in Christ Jesus.

And yet, Lord, we know that there is doubt, lingering sin, thoughts and actions that assault us every day. And we know that Your grace is sovereign. We know that it is the powerful force that has made us alive to even see our need of God. And so we know, Lord, that this is all Your work. But we are reminded again that as we have received Christ, so we must continue in Him.

As we have been assured of our great forgiveness, so we must continue living in abundant thanksgiving and gratitude. Lord, may our lives of thanks reflect how great Your sacrifice was for us, how great Your love has been in Jesus. And may we, with great assurance, know that You are the God who is faithful forever to Your great promises to us. Thank you for that hope that gives us courage today. In Jesus' precious name we pray. Amen.