Esther 9:3-4 – “Greatness”

Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

 ³And the all of the princes of the provinces and the satraps and the governors and the ones doing the royal business which [was] to the king [were] ones lifting up the Jews because the fear of Mordecai had fallen upon them, ⁴because great [was] Mordecai in the house of the king and his name one going [out] in the all of the provinces because the man Mordecai [was] one going and great,…

Once again, I want to pause here and consider the man Mordecai. We find him here having become what the world (and the Biblical text itself) calls a “great” man. He has risen to the position of prime minister of perhaps the wealthiest nation in history. The position itself no doubt brought him enormous wealth, but it also gave him great power. He is a great man.

What I want to observe is what made him “great.” There was a day when a much younger Mordecai stood at a funeral and said, “I’ll take care of her,” and he became the adoptive father of his little cousin Hadassah, whom the Persians came to call Esther. We don’t know what his financial resources were at that time, but, regardless, he was taking on the expenses of feeding and clothing and doctoring this little girl who wasn’t actually his daughter. Not only was he willing to give up a portion of his finances, it also cost him his time. As we read earlier, he didn’t just give her a bed to sleep in, the text says literally he “took her to daughter.” He was a man who, having adopted her, gave her all the fatherly love and attention he’d have given a girl who really was his daughter. We saw him in 2:11 pacing back and forth outside Esther’s door worrying over “her peace.”

Then we saw him faithfully tending to his job “sitting at the king’s gate.” We don’t know what his responsibilities were, but when he overheard Bigthan and Teresh plotting against the king, he risked his own life to expose the plot and protect his sovereign’s life. Then we saw him go on faithfully doing his job even though he received no reward or even recognition for the great service he had done for his boss, the king.

What is my point? My point is to note that Mordecai’s “greatness” wasn’t first of all a position he had attained. He became the prime minister because he was great. He was a great man in the quiet of his own home where a little orphaned girl lacked for nothing. He was a great man at his job, where others could count on him to do “the right thing” even at great risk to himself. Let us stop and ask, “How would you describe a man whom you personally knew to be a very dedicated father at home and a man you can count on at his job?” I think we would all agree that, regardless of whatever position he had attained in this world, he would be a great man. Even if he was poor as a pauper, we would observe him with a very deep respect.

My point is to note that Mordecai’s greatness came not from the position he attained but rather from the man he was. He was “great” in the privacy of his own home and that was the source of his “greatness” in public. Whether or not he had ever become “great” publicly, he still would have been a great man.

Our world today would do well to note this lesson before us. All around us people attain to “greatness” while they themselves are nothing of the kind. Haman was an extreme example, but he was still an example. He was a bad man who manipulated his way into a position of greatness. In his case, he lost that position (and his life) specifically because of the poverty of his character. Whether he’d lost his position or not, the fact would have remained he was a bad man. As you and I would look around today, it is a rare thing to see a good person who’s attained to “greatness.” In government, in the business world, even in our own workplaces, it would seem the Haman's of this world are almost always the ones in charge.

That hasn’t always been the case. I believe men like George Washington and Samuel Adams (and many of the fathers of our nation) were truly good men. It is not at all surprising that what they forged was a great nation! I believe Abraham Lincoln was truly a good man who became great. More recently, Ronald Reagan was such a man. He won the hearts of the American people because they could see he really was a good man. He did a great job because he was a great man.

That is rarely true today. Unfortunately, you and I can’t change the world we live in. Regardless of what you or I do, this world will go on being run by corrupt, evil people (like Haman). What we can change is us. Like Mordecai, we can hear the Lord say, “My son, give Me your heart…” We can strive to be, in the privacy of our homes and in the quiet of our own lives, people of genuine character. That, of course, is integrity, to be who I am because I’m determined to be, to be who I am regardless of whether or not it ever gets me “greatness” in this world. Is that not exactly what believers should always be?

It’s not really surprising that the OT ends with the Lord saying that when He comes, He’ll “turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and children to their fathers.” What is He saying? He’s saying the result of His kind of working is to make people who are great at home.

May that be true of you and me, and may the Lord raise up among us more Mordecai’s, people who show the world what “greatness” is really all about!

Esther 9:1-2 – “Dawn”

Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹And in the twelfth month, it [being] the month of Adar, in the thirteenth day, in which arrived the word of the king and his law to be done; in the day which the enemies of the Jews had hoped to overpower in them, and it was overturned which the Jews, they overpowered in ones hating them, ²the Jews assembled in their cities in the all of the provinces of the king Xerxes to stretch out a hand in ones seeking their harm and a man did not stand to their faces because the fear of them fell upon the all of the people.

For me, these two verses only further highlight my observations from chapter 8. If I may run ahead, may I say, in a sense, this is the big takeaway of this book, and further, perhaps it could be said it is the big takeaway from the entire Bible itself: “It is often darkest just before dawn.” In so many ways, we all have our “month of Adar,” that “thirteenth day”—that ominous future we fear, that day when our “enemies” hope to “overpower” us. Sometimes it is hard to see any hope at all. Just like our Jewish friends here in the book of Esther, we all have to deal with what appears to be a very threatening world, I’m reminded of Winston Churchill’s words in the pits of World War II, “This is England’s darkest hour.”  

For myself and as I’ve lamented before, I have spent the better part of my life living in the present but fearing the future. These last few years I have been trying to change that perspective. I’ve learned from the Bible that I may actually get thrown into a fiery furnace, or I may find myself, like Ruth, standing by the Jordan River, a destitute, hopeless, foreign widow, or, as we learn from Esther, the government itself may have set a date to come and kill me and all my family—yet my God still reigns!

Yes, it may be “the darkest hour,” yet, because our God reigns, the dawn may be about to break! To belabor the point for just a little longer, just as we find here in the book of Esther, this world fearfully appears to be a world without God. It would seem in a hundred million ways this world is daily conspiring to kill me, to crush me, to steal whatever hopes I may have entertained. As I would look ahead (without God), it would seem there is little hope and rather almost certain despair.

But the fact is there is a God and He is quite present and quite involved. “Be still and know that I am God,” He urges us. All things will work together for your good! This is faith itself—to see the God who is unseeable, to believe His promises, to believe His wisdom and power and His plans to “do me good and not to harm me, to give me a future and a hope!” Moses and the people of Israel were enslaved by the most powerful nation on earth, yet what does it say of Moses, “He persevered, because he saw Him who is invisible” (Heb. 11:26).

One of the things I realized was that what I was fearing really was “a world without God.” What I mean is that for me to “worry” was me imagining a future where somehow God wasn’t there. That of course is ludicrous. He is and always will be the same God who has been faithful to me all day every day of the life I’ve lived. He is “the same yesterday, today, and forever.” He is a “faithful Creator.” I know that in the past. I live it in the present. Yet, I was forgetting that was also my future. Daniel’s three friends taught me that I not only don’t have to fear the future, I can actually run into it, excited to see what the Lord has cooked up. He is my future.

The darkest day in all history is the day they laid Jesus’ dead body in a tomb and sealed the door shut. Yet what happened? Suddenly the tomb burst open, the veil of the Temple was rent from top to bottom, and our victorious Savior King Jesus was alive again! It really was darkest just before dawn. And, oh what a dawn! Death itself conquered and Heaven won!

I wonder if it isn’t part of God’s great fractal of our existence – this darkness before dawn? He set up the very world in which we exist so that every single night it gets very, very dark, and yet every morning there is a dawn. Were we supposed to “get the point?” I hope I do. I hope the book of Esther only further cements in my heart, “I’ve no cause for worry or for fear!” Mine never again needs to be a “world without God.” He was there on Esther’s “thirteenth day of Adar,” and He’ll be there for every one of mine. Even though “the enemies of the Jews had hoped to overpower them,” yet “the tables were turned and the Jews got the upper hand over those who hated them.”

No wonder Paul can write, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13).

Hope. What we all need. Even in our darkest hours, may we all learn to trust that the dawn is coming! Esther would be so happy to know that her story somehow encouraged you and me!

The following is a quote from Alexander Maclaren (ca. 1875). It’s so good, I’m attaching it in its entirety:

“Foresight and foreboding are two very different things. It is not that the one is the exaggeration of the other, but the one is opposed to the other. The more a man looks forward in the exercise of foresight, the less he does so in the exercise of foreboding; and the more he is tortured by anxious thoughts about a possible future, the less clear vision has he of a likely future, and the less power to influence it.

What does your anxiety do? It does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but it empties today of its strength; it does not make you escape the evil, it makes you unfit to cope with it when it comes; it does not bless tomorrow, and it robs today. For every day has its own burden. Sufficient for each day is the evil which properly belongs to it. Do not add tomorrow’s to today’s. Do not drag the future into the present. The present has enough to do with its own proper concerns. We have always strength to bear the evil when it comes. We have not strength to bear the foreboding of it. As thy day, thy strength shall be. In strict proportion to the existing exigencies will be the God-given power; but if you cram and condense today’s sorrows by experience, and tomorrow’s sorrows by anticipation, into the narrow round of the one four and twenty hours, there is no promise that as that day thy strength shall be.

God gives us power to bear all the sorrows of His making; but He does not give us power to bear the sorrows of our own making, which the anticipation of sorrow most assuredly is.

Our hope should make us buoyant, and should keep us firm. It is an anchor of the soul. All men live by hope, even when it is fixed upon the changing and uncertain things of this world. But the hopes of men, who have not their hearts fixed upon God, try to grapple themselves on the cloud-rack that rolls along the flanks of the mountains, and our hopes pierce within that veil and lay hold of the Rock of Ages that towers above the flying vapours. Let us then be strong, for our future is not a dim peradventure, or a vague dream, nor a fancy of our own, nor a wish turning itself into a vision; but it is made and certified by Him who is God of all past and of all the present. It is built upon His word, and the brightest hope of all its brightness is the enjoyment of more of His presence and the possession of more of His likeness. That hope is certain. Therefore let us live in it. ‘Reach forth unto the things that are before.’”