The Man Whom the King Honoured

Today, the title of the sermon is the man whom the king honoured. And we'll soon see why we have that title this morning. I'll get you to flick to Esther 6. We're gonna read the whole chapter as well. As we flick to Esther, let's just quickly do a recap.

We find the people of God, a lot of them, not all of them, the majority perhaps, in the empire of Persia, having been exiled from the promised land. The bible says, as a result of idolatry, following other gods, rejecting God, their God, and God punished them by taking them away from the nation, the land of Israel, and taking them firstly to Assyria, and then Babylon, and now finally, Persia. We find specifically in the book of Esther that God's people now, even though they were in severe danger, they find themselves in mortal danger by the time we get to this morning's chapter. Because the pagan king, King Ahasuerus, has decreed that the entire Jewish people in his empire be wiped out and their houses, their families plundered. He gives this command at the bidding of a wicked enemy, a descendant of the historic enemy of God's people, the Amalekites, a man named Haman. Haman hates the Jews because he hates a very specific Jew by the name of Mordecai who refused to pay him homage, refused to bow down to him and fear him.

But through God's providence, even in the midst of a series of extremely wicked and perverted events, Mordecai's adopted daughter, a woman named Esther, becomes the king's wife. Now for the first half of the story, we see Esther and her older cousin Mordecai conceal their identity as being Jewish, as being part of God's people. But three weeks ago, at our last sermon on Esther, we saw Queen Esther decide to risk execution by going to the king uninvited to bring a request before him. She, however, doesn't give that request up front. She masterfully, diplomatically invites the king to a sumptuous feast that night.

Instead of coming right out to say, you foolish, ignorant king with your foolish edict, you have condemned your queen to death. Instead of doing that, she gets crafty and tries to set herself up for success as much as possible by going out of her way to show respect to the king publicly. She does all she can, but as we get to the end of our previous chapter, chapter 5, we wonder whether that has been enough. Because the chapter ends with Haman offended at Mordecai once again. Mordecai once again does not revere Haman, and Haman doubles down on his plans to destroy the Jews and Mordecai at the end of the chapter, building a huge gallows on which to hang. This execution hanging over us that we step into today's chapter, chapter 6.

The situation still feels fraught with danger. It almost seems hopeless. There has been no guarantee by the king to grant Esther's request. Esther hasn't even made it known what that request is. So things are hanging in the balance, but let's see what God does this morning.

Esther chapter 6, verse 1. On that night, the king could not sleep and he gave orders to bring the book of memorable deeds, the chronicles. They were read before the king. And it was written how Mordecai had told about Bigtana and Teresh, two of the king's eunuchs who guarded the threshold and who had sought to lay hands on King Ahasuerus. And the king said, what honour or distinction has been bestowed on Mordecai for this? The king's young men who attended him said, nothing has been done for him.

And the king said, who is in the court? Now Haman had just entered the outer court of the king's palace to speak to the king about having Mordecai hanged on the gallows that he had prepared for him. And the king's young men told him, Haman is here, standing in the court. And the king said, let him come in. So Haman came in and the king said to him, what should be done to the man whom the king delights to honour?

And Haman said to himself, whom would the king delight to honour more than me? And Haman said to the king, for the man whom the king delights to honour, let royal robes be brought, which the king has worn, and the horse that the king has ridden, and on whose head a royal crown is set. And let the robes and the horse be handed over to one of the king's most noble officials. Let them dress the man whom the king delights to honour, and let them lead him on the horse through the square of the city, proclaiming before him, thus shall it be done to the man whom the king delights to honour. Then the king said to Haman, hurry.

Take the robes and the horse as you have said and do so to Mordecai, the Jew, who sits at the king's gate. Leave out nothing that you have mentioned. So Haman took the robes and the horse and he dressed Mordecai and led him through the square of the city proclaiming before him, thus shall it be done to the man whom the king delights to honour. Then Mordecai returned to the king's gate. But Haman hurried to his house mourning and with his head covered.

And Haman told his wife Zeresh and all his friends everything that had happened to him. Then his wife his wise men and his wife Zeresh said to him, if Mordecai before whom you have begun to fall is of the Jewish people, you will not overcome him but will surely fall before him. While they were yet talking with him, the king's eunuchs arrived and hurried to bring Haman to the feast that Esther had prepared. So far, our reading. This is the word of the Lord. Well, we find Haman at the end of chapter 5, at the peak of his career.

He had just feasted privately with the king and the queen, just him and them in the king's garden. The edict that he had written up under the king's name, given the king's very own signet ring to seal it with, had assured the death of his enemy, his greatest enemy, Mordecai. It sealed the fate of his ancient foe, the Jewish people. But now there is just one final step to seal his vengeance on his personal enemy. And it seems a mere formality.

He simply needs to go to the king in the morning, telling the king of the insubordination of one of his subjects, Mordecai, and getting the king's permission to have him executed. How difficult could that be? But Haman's prospects are about to be flipped completely upside down. And as we see in this chapter, it was his decision to speak with the king that morning, asking to have Mordecai hanged, which sealed his humiliation and his ultimate death. Haman's plans, in other words, are about to run head on into the providence of God.

So let's first take notice of that first point. The God of coincidences. In his commentary, Frederick Bush helps to sum up a series of remarkable coincidences which consequentially take place for Haman's plan to quickly come unstuck. Have a look at chapter 6 again, those first few verses. And notice the incredible circumstances that just so happened to take place.

Firstly, the king so happens to have insomnia that night. He can't sleep. Coincidence number one. The king then so happens to spend his waking hours by asking that the royal records be read to him. I mean, I guess they were pretty boring.

Hopefully, he was gonna get knocked out. Coincidence number two. The scribe happens to turn to the page where Mordecai's good deed from several years ago was recorded. Coincidence number three. The king remembers the deed and so happens to ask who is in the court to give him counsel about how he should reward Mordecai.

Coincidence number four. And it just so happens that Haman enters the court at that very moment, coming to ask the king to execute Mordecai. Coincidence number five. We've said it before, but God is famously invisible in the book of Esther. But His fingerprints are everywhere.

It was a remarkable set of circumstances that brought Haman to this particular moment. But you can see how God is about to set in place a great reversal of fortunes. Haman enters the palace that morning with one purpose in mind, securing the death, the humiliating death of Mordecai. But he leaves the palace that morning, needing to parade this same Mordecai through the town, praising his name in the streets. And the most delicious, sumptuous thing about all of this is that it is Haman's swollen pride that entraps him. Have a look again at what happens.

Without a moment's hesitation, when the king thoughtfully muses out loud, seeking advice, what should be done with the man that I would like to honour? Without so much as a second thought, Haman jumps to the conclusion, who would the king desire to honour more than me? The sentence structure of the bible reveals it's this one thing that enthrals and entraps Haman. In three verses, verses 6 through to 8, the word honour is used five times. Once by the king to say, how should I honour this man?

And then four times by Haman himself, either in thought or in spoken word. The idea of honour is the thing that Haman loves and is enticed by. Masterfully, the author of Esther is telling us that it was honour roiling around in his heart as he fantasised about receiving this admiration from the king. It was the stuff of dreams for Haman. First, he got not one, but two dinner invites privately with the king and the queen.

And now this, Haman is on cloud nine. But as we saw previously, his life is a cautionary tale about the destructive power of a heart that worships anything other than God. Haman is totally enslaved to the idol of status. It means that he doesn't advise the king to simply reward this unspecified person with wealth or with power, but he asks for public recognition of being paraded through the city square by one of his noblemen wearing the king's own clothes mounted on the king's own horse with the same phrase that the king used reverberating in the city. This is what is done for the man who the king delights to honour.

But notice how the self-destructive idolatry derails his own evil scheme. He only needed to get the king's permission to execute Mordecai. He thought he had it. His idol, however, causes him to lose sight of this plan when the king asks for advice. It completely leaves his mind.

His idol causes him to humiliate himself in front of the very same Mordecai he set out to kill and he is humiliated now in front of the entire capital city. It is a remarkable reversal of fortune. The question is, who is behind all of this? Was it Mordecai? Was it Esther?

Who can take an evil scheme and flip it like that on its head? Who uses the very same idol driving someone to plan the most appalling evil to bring about that person's own demise? Who controls sleepless nights? Who controls the flipping of pages onto the correct page? Who causes names to be remembered?

Who directs the schedule of arrivals? Who steers the heart of even the most callous man? It is none other than the God of the bible, the only true and living God. He is the God of the so-called coincidences, the miraculous, the hard-to-explain coincidences. Yes, but also the quiet and the unseen ones, the ones that happen in your life all the time.

He is the God of your everyday choices. He's the God of your wake up. He is the God of your sleep. He is the God of your dreams, the God of your rewards. He is the God of your tragedies.

He is the God who tells you this morning that nothing is outside His scope. And your great hope, friend, this morning is that if He is for you, if He has set His heart on you, you are secure in the most powerful hands that there is. Not a hair can fall from your head without His will. Not a skin flake can fall from your skin. Not an eyelash can fall on your cheek without the direct will of your Father in heaven.

If God is so involved in the details of our lives, we have to ask why would we be afraid of any of the unknowns. Our God knows those unknowns. Our God controls those unknowns. He is the God of the coincidences, and we can rest in His providential care even in the smallest of details. So the God of coincidences sets a trap for Haman, but notice that it is Haman and his own evil heart that barges straight into it.

And here, we are shown our second point, the absurdity of wickedness. It's a remarkable thing. It's something that a lot of study has been put into, but one of the key themes in the book of Esther is actually its humour. Books have been written on the humour, the great ironies, the great reversals that happen in the story. Usually, these laughable ironies revolve around the two most dangerous people in the story, King Ahasuerus and Haman.

They are people of frightening power. Yet the story of Esther again and again causes us to smile at their expense. Right at the beginning, we see Ahasuerus ruling over 127 provinces from India to Ethiopia. It was the known world. And yet, he cannot control his wife, who humiliates him.

He rules over an empire. He cannot rule over his own household. But the most remarkable irony comes here at the expense of Haman. The wicked scheming of this man is shown to be utterly absurd. The book of Esther allows the children of God to chuckle at themselves at the expense of Haman when we see how his vanity leads to his own humiliation.

He has to honour the very man he hated most in life. His eventual death on his own gallows that he built for Mordecai seals his fate as an everlasting lesson of how villains can fall into their own traps. It's a great reversal story. There's a funny little folklore story in the Trump family of a great reversal that also happened one day when my brother, I can't remember which one it was, was given a gift from my mum after she had returned from a trip to South Africa. She came back with a khetty.

South Africans will know what that means, a slingshot. But not just one of those wooden ones with a rubber band. This was a lethal one. This was one that had that grip on the arm, the counter lever with a really elastic band. This thing can kill.

I don't know how mum got it into the country, to be honest. This particular day, and when we had been worn sufficiently, this thing cannot be used anywhere near the house, definitely not inside the house, my brother decided, we had had a party, I think, the previous night, and there was one big balloon left that he thought this was going to be great for target practice. He's gonna use this slingshot to pop the balloon. What can pop a balloon the best? What can fly the quickest?

Well, he thought, I'm gonna go to the fishing tackle box and find a massive sinker. And I'm gonna use this to pop the balloon. And my brother, he's the doctor, so he's the smart one in the family. Took the balloon, and in his foresight, put it outside on the patio facing away, so that if the bullet passed through the balloon, it would just go into the bushes. Now, he didn't figure this out but it was a very round sinker and the balloon was sufficiently flat.

So that when he pulled that khetty back and fired it into the balloon, that round object simply bounced off, ricocheted past his head and smashed the screen door behind him. He had the best plan. This was going to be foolproof. And it was literally the reversal of what he had intended. Now, I can't remember if he got a quick rap on the backside for it or if he had to pay for that screen door or whatever.

But it is a great example of something backfiring. And that is exactly what can happen in our sinfulness. There is a theme on the absurdity of wickedness in the book of Esther, that's simply not only stored there, but crops up again and again throughout the bible. The lesson is basically this, that arrogance and pride in thinking that you can set yourself up against God, well, that will never end well for you.

The rich, the powerful, the influential people of this world are never as powerful as they think they are. It is often, in fact, in the bible, the rich, the powerful and the influential who are the furthest from God because those are the very things that have become their gods. And so it is when these people oppose God's people and therefore God Himself that they only ever succeed in bringing about their own destruction. The wickedness in the human heart, and it is a wickedness we see in our unbelieving daughters and sons and family members and friends. People who essentially laugh in the face of God even though they wouldn't think so.

Some of whom will laugh at the church. Many of whom thumb their noses at God's laws. These are the people who do their best to personally, socially, and professionally destroy Christians. The wickedness in the human heart that makes God their enemy is absurd. It is idiotic.

It is so dumb, it is laughable. In contrast, the bible says that God actually laughs at them. God laughs at their futility. Psalm 2 puts it as clearly to them and to us as this. Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?

The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His anointed saying, let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us. He who sits in the heavens laughs. The Lord holds them in derision. Then He will speak to them in His wrath and terrify them in His fury. Hebrews 10:31 says, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Against the omniscient, all-knowing God, even the most well-calculated schemes of anti-God wickedness will be flipped upside down with a simple nod. God brings about the destruction of rebellious people. And the great irony of hell is that it is a pit of people's own making. You see, tragedy and heartbreak, anxiety, depression, bitterness, frustration, all of these can be seen in the life of Haman. Heartbreak, sadness, anxiety are not necessarily honest and pure struggles of an innocent soul.

You may have anxiety and sadness and heartbreak and tragedy sitting here listening or listening at home. And as much as our therapeutic society will try and convince you that this is good, normal, and can be treated in a variety of ways, anxiety, depression, sadness can also be thoughts and feelings you feel as you try to flee from God. In your desire to break free from Him, as Psalm 2 says, you could be experiencing all these mental health issues precisely because your heart is consumed by sin. We see in Haman's example, a man gripped by a soul-destroying wickedness.

Not all emotions are good. Not all emotions are even neutral. Haman loses his earthly and eternal life attempting to free himself from God and he does so by digging a pit for God's people. But in the blink of an eye and a series of coincidences coordinated by an all-powerful God, Haman is humiliated. And the whole world, being his oyster, as the man's second in charge to the Persian empire, Haman is disgraced in his very capital city.

Instead of destroying his enemy, he is forced to celebrate him. Instead of securing Mordecai's execution, he seals his own humiliation and sets his own death on his own gallows. This morning, I gravely want to tell you that if you are resisting God and you are harbouring wickedness in your heart, and I know that we're not very quick to think of ourselves as wicked. But let's define it this way, if you have a desire to live your life in opposition to what God has clearly commanded you in His word, your life and your death will be sealed up in absurdity, idiocy, foolishness. You are dashing yourself against the unmovable law of God and you will come to know the unstoppable force of God's judgment.

So in light of the humour in Esther, I wanna tell you without any humour in my heart that God reserves the right to laugh at your vain attempts to overthrow Him. And so, listening here or at home, if you know that you are living in idiotic self-reliance, lay down your resistance. Bow to the will of God and He will save you. He can save you. Which is our third and our final point, the man whom God delights to honour.

We see King Ahasuerus attempting to do some backpedalling by wanting to honour Mordecai for having forgotten about something he had done years earlier. Mordecai had saved the king's life, and the king had forgotten completely about it up until this moment. Haman becomes the nobleman forced to march in front of Mordecai proclaiming to everyone around them, verse 11, thus shall it be done to the man whom the king delights to honour. Yet, in this reversal of fortunes, we see something in miniature being proclaimed about a far more emphatic reversal found in the New Testament. Jesus Christ is the man God delights to honour.

The bible tells us, as we move from Esther right through to the New Testament, that there will come a day when Jesus Christ will be paraded before the eyes of the watching world. One day, Philippians 2 says, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that He is the Lord. He is the Master. Whether you like it or not, the bible says, you will bow the knee. And God, the Father, we are told, will honour the Son for what He has done.

But this, we know, is only possible because of an even greater reversal of fortunes than the life of Mordecai and Haman. You see, by another miraculous coincidence, Mordecai is a forerunner of Christ. He has a foretaste of what is going to happen. In Mordecai's character, in Mordecai's subsequent exaltation by the king, we see Jesus. Remember who else was marched through the capital city?

Jesus in Jerusalem. Mordecai was honoured before the people of Jesus. It was said in the streets, Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is He. Over Mordecai's selfless life was written the pronouncement, this is the man whom the king delights to honour.

And at the start of His earthly ministry, the voice of God the Father split the heavens when it declared over Jesus, this is My beloved Son. With Him, I am well pleased. Jesus is the fuller and the better Mordecai. Why? Because Mordecai didn't save his people on that day riding that horse.

Only God can save His people. Only God can string together a series of coincidences that would flip an evil scheme back to save His people. Only God has the power to save and that is why God had to come in the person of Jesus. You see, in many ways, Mordecai's exaltation is also the weird antithesis, the foil of Jesus' actions on the cross. As the vehicle of saving His people, Jesus faced the exact opposite of Mordecai's exaltation.

Because in order to save His people, instead of being dressed in royal robes, Jesus walked naked through the streets of Jerusalem. Whereas Mordecai was mounted on a royal horse, Jesus entered the passion week on a donkey. When Mordecai wore the king's crown, what did Jesus wear? A crown of thorns. Why?

Because it is the absurdity of our wickedness that caused Jesus to experience the absurdity of the cross. It was a seriousness in light of the humour in Esther's story. It was the seriousness of our sin that required the seriousness of His death. It was the laughable attempts of our pride that exposed Christ to His humiliation and scorn. But now, forever, He will be the man whom God the King delights to honour.

May you realise this morning that it is more than coincidence you are hearing this message. Believe the good news of your eternal hope. Put aside the absurdity of your wickedness and trust in the man whom God has chosen to honour because of His great work at the cross. Let's pray. Our God and Father, we thank you and we marvel at your incredible wisdom.

We see it in the remarkable reversal of fortunes that you give Haman enough rope by which he will hang himself on his own gallows. Lord, we thank you that you are the righteous One, that you are the vindicator of all that is just and good and that you will protect what is right and good, ultimately. God, we thank you that in Jesus Christ, you vindicated the One that was the best, the truly good One, the man Jesus Christ. And we thank you, Lord, that He was vindicated because of His great love, His great goodness, His great character. And we pray, oh God, that we may come to know that deep, deep in our hearts.

Cause us to never doubt that you are in control of the details in our lives. Cause us to never doubt and never believe the lie that we set our own agenda. That through our cleverness, our cunning, our schemes, we can somehow work around what you have called us to be and to do. And so, Lord, help us to see with humility, with clarity beyond the foolishness of our hearts. We thank you, Lord, for your grace.

We thank you, Lord, for the Lord Jesus Christ. And, Lord, we again take up the hope we have in Him. In His name, we pray. Amen.