Esther

[Source: Covenant Reformed News, vol. 11, nos. 11-13 (March-May 2007)]

 

 

And the king loved Esther above all the women, and she obtained grace and favour in his sight more than all the virgins; so that he set the royal crown upon her head, and made her queen instead of Vashti (Esth. 2:17).

  

 

An Outline of the Book of Esther

 

The book of Esther tells a stirring story, the theme of which, as the question indicates, is the salvation of the church from Haman’s plot to commit genocide. It is, therefore, the story of God’s sovereign preservation of Israel, from which nation Christ was destined to come. It is a remarkable and astonishing display of the mysterious and wonderful ways of God’s providence. The whole coming of Christ, through the preservation of the church in the Old Testament, rested upon one sleepless night of Ahasuerus (Esth. 6)!

 

Vashti had, for moral reasons, refused to appear at a banquet her husband had prepared for all his government officials throughout the vast Persian Empire. Although she was not a member of the Jewish nation, and was not a child of God, she had higher moral standards than Esther, the Jewess. Because of Vashti’s refusal to show her beauty to a host of drunken government officials, she was divorced and deposed from being queen. In a sort of beauty contest, which involved at least one night in bed with the king, Esther the Jewess was chosen to be the new queen. She had entered the contest at the prompting of her uncle, Mordecai, also a Jew. Both were in Shushan, the capital of the Persian Empire, because they or their ancestors had been taken to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar and had moved from Babylon to Shushan when the Babylonian Empire had been conquered by the Medes and Persians.

 

Through a marvellous sequence of events, God used Esther, in her position of power, to save the Jewish nation; and Haman, the Jews’ enemy, was hanged on the gallows that he had built to hang Mordecai. It is well our readers read the story once again to refresh their minds.

 

 

Esther: A Spiritual Consideration

 

Question: “How can it have been acceptable for Mordecai to give Esther first as a concubine to King Ahasuerus (Esth. 2:8) and later to marry him (Esth. 2:17)? Yet this event is evidently blessed of God in that the deliverance of the Jews turns on it. How can God’s blessing on Esther’s unequally-yoked marriage to a heathen king be explained?”

 

The questioner asks how it is possible for Esther to marry Ahasuerus and receive the blessing of God. The assumption in the question is, of course, that, because God used Esther’s marriage to Ahasuerus to save Israel, God blessed that adulterous union. That assumption is wrong, although many commentators take the same position. Many have been the discussions (and sometimes arguments) I have had with saints who have taken the position that Esther was a true child of God. The book of Esther is itself the proof that she was not.

 

Think of her sins and the sins of her uncle. Mordecai’s and Esther’s families had refused to return to the promised land, when Cyrus ordered and encouraged the captives to return. Their refusal was simply due to the fact that they far preferred life in captivity to a return to the land of promise. The reason was that they had no interest in the coming of Christ.

 

Esther, at Mordecai’s promptings, entered a royally-sponsored beauty contest, which involved fornication with the king. What child of God would ever enter a beauty contest in the first place? What child of God would ever enter a beauty contest, thereby agreeing to fornication with the one sponsoring it? It was a gross violation of the seventh commandment. She showed that her moral standards, even though a Jewess, were lower than the heathen, Vashti. I think that Vashti is introduced by God into the history simply to demonstrate into what moral decay the Jewish captives had fallen.

 

By agreeing to marry Ahasuerus, Esther violated the marriage ordinance God had established in paradise, for she contradicted the purpose of marriage by being unequally yoked to an unbeliever.

 

The book of Esther is the only book in Scripture which does not mention the name of God. This omission of God’s name is intended to demonstrate to us how wicked everything that happened in Shushan was—a wickedness providentially used by God for good.

 

Did God bless the union of Esther and Ahasuerus? He most emphatically did not! It was an abomination in His sight and the curse of the Lord was in the palace in Shushan (Prov. 3:33).

But it may be argued that God used the marriage to save Israel and preserve His Christ, who was in the loins of the nation. Indeed, He did! The salvation of the nation and the remarkable events that led up to it were surely under the guidance of God’s sovereign control.

 

But we may not conclude from this that God blessed Esther, and that she was a true believer.

 

A principle is at stake here. In a very broad sense of the word, it is the principle laid down by Paul in Romans 8:28, that all things work together for good to them that love God. The “all things” include all the wicked world and everything they do. It is by no means a strange idea in Scripture that God uses wicked men to accomplish His purpose. He did so pre-eminently in the cross of Christ (Acts 2:23; 4:27-28). God is completely sovereign. He rules sovereignly in all the lives of the wicked (although in such a way that they remain accountable for their sins). He uses the wickedness of the ungodly to serve the good of His church, as reprobation must and does serve election. Even persecution is the means to purify and save those who suffer with Christ. All things are yours, Paul writes to the Corinthians, for “ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s” (I Cor. 3:22-23)!

 

Let us together marvel at God’s wonderful providence and bow in worship before Him who governs all things for us and for our salvation! 

 

 

Common Objections

After the last News, the reader who asked me the initial question about Esther sent me additional material pointing out some potential problems with my position that Esther and Mordecai, her uncle, were wicked people whom God used to save the nation of Israel, a nation from whom Christ was to come. The questions suggest the possibility that Mordecai was “a man at the centre of the Jews’ deliverance from genocide, sincerely concerned for their preservation (including those who had returned to Canaan).”

 

After considering carefully the objections, my basic position remains that both Mordecai and Esther were unbelievers. The most important question remains: Would one who loved the Lord and the promises made to Israel do what Mordecai and Esther did? Would a God-fearing believer command his niece to enter a beauty contest sponsored by the heathen king, Ahasuerus, especially when fornication was a requirement for entrance? Would a man who desired to be faithful to God condone Esther’s actions after she “won” the contest, that is, marrying a divorced pagan?

 

God’s Word to His people in both the Old Testament and the New Testament is very particular about marriage. Jews must not marry outside the nation, for that would be marrying an uncircumcised heathen, and there was no salvation outside the nation of Israel. Some heathen, in the course of Israel’s history, were brought into the nation (e.g., Rahab, the Gibeonites, Ruth, Uriah, Araunah, etc.), but they were incorporated into God’s people and became Jews. Think, for example, of Ezra’s insistence that men who had married heathen wives give them up along with the children born to them (Ezra 9-10). This was about the time of Esther’s adultery.

 

Old Testament laws were equally particular about divorce and the only exception that permitted divorce was laid down in Deuteronomy 24 (for the “hardness” of their hearts [Mark 10:5])—an exception which Jesus brushed aside as irrelevant in the new dispensation (Mark 10:2-12). If Mordecai and Esther were God-fearing, they would not have violated such a fundamental law.

 

The fornication that was involved in the beauty contest with Ahasuerus, sleeping with every contestant prior to making his decision for a new queen, was such an abomination that it is inconceivable that a child of God would participate in such a thing. The Jews knew the laws that stipulated that any woman caught in such fornication had to be stoned.

 

A justification of Esther’s conduct is really impossible.

 

But let us consider the specific points raised by one of our readers.

 

(1) “Nehemiah 7:7 lists a man called Mordecai amongst the first to return to Jerusalem. Some commentators suppose that, if he is the same man, he may have subsequently returned to Shushan out of a concern for the Jews who did not return to the promised land.”

 

One cannot determine with certainty whether the Mordecai of Nehemiah 7:7 is the same as Esther’s uncle. I rather doubt it. But even if they are the same, the matter is not essentially changed. If Mordecai’s concern was for the Jews who did not return to Canaan, that concern could not have been a godly concern. It is true that not all the Jews who remained in captivity were ungodly. Some could not return because of illness, infirmities, old age, or, as Nehemiah, because they held positions in the kingdom from which they could not escape. But a believing Israelite would almost certainly have returned. Psalm 137:5 expresses the longing of godly Jews for Canaan, the land of promise: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” This is an Old Testament expression of the believer’s longing to go to heaven (cf. Heb. 11:10, 13-16).

 

 

(2) “Esther 4:16 describes Esther as willing to sacrifice her own life in order to bring about deliverance for the Jews.”

 

I do not think Esther’s conduct at this juncture was such a noble act. She did not commit the whole matter to God. She did not give any indication of reliance on His sovereign protection. She made no prayer that the nation be spared for the sake of the promise of Christ. She expressed the sentiments of someone who views necessary, though disagreeable and dangerous, obligations with a fatalistic attitude: “if I perish, I perish,” she said (Esth. 4:16). What is godly about that? Many soldiers on the battlefield say the same thing when they are fighting for their country and are faced with a dangerous situation in which they might be killed. They too express a willingness to die for their country. Fatalism is not an option for the child of God. When saints comfort one another, they do not say, “If it must be, it must be. Be brave. Keep a stiff upper lip. Hang in there. Let come what will come.” I fail to see anything spiritual about this statement of Esther, done under the prodding of her uncle.

 

 

(3) “What principle kept Mordecai from reverencing Haman (Esth. 3:2)?”

 

I do not know why Mordecai refused to bow down to Haman. As a child listening to this story read from Scripture or told by my teacher or catechism instructor, I always thought to myself, “Mordecai was a proud Jew who would not bow before anyone.” It may be, however, that his refusal to bow was rooted in some notion that a Jew should not bow before a heathen, although so far as I know, there was no law in Israel that a Jew might not bow before someone as a gesture of respect or of submission to higher authority. Abraham bowed before the children of Heth (Gen. 23:7).

 

 

(4) “Mordecai used his advanced position of influence for the good of the Jews and their seed. In Esther 10:3, we read of his ‘seeking the wealth of his people, and speaking peace to all his seed.’”

 

It is entirely possible, and, I think, the case, that Mordecai’s motive through the whole affair was (1) a thirst for power and (2) a love for his countrymen. As far as the first is concerned, why did Mordecai almost force Esther into entering the beauty contest in the first place? He did not know that God intended it to be a means to save Israel. He knew the evil and promiscuity of the heathen court; he knew the laws of Israel; he knew the consequences of such conduct. It seems to me that he saw in all this an opportunity to advance himself in the court of the king. Even if Esther had not become queen but had merely been added to Ahasuerus’ stable of concubines, he would have had some sort of inner access to power. That Esther would have become at least a concubine is almost certain.

 

As far as the second point is concerned, a man may have an entirely natural and patriotic love for his country that prompts him to do anything for his country’s welfare. I am three generations removed from the Netherlands, and the Netherlands has become morally bankrupt and apostate. Yet, even as a child, I hurt inside when the Nazis raped the Netherlands and held it in virtual slavery. They did the same to France, but that did not hurt me as much. I have used an example of a soldier. There are many instances of soldiers willing to die for their country in the annals of British and American warfare.

 

 

(5) “Who wrote the book of Esther? We are not told, yet Esther 9:20 gives us a hint, and Mordecai himself would naturally seem to be the most probable author. If he was, would God use one not included in the covenant of grace?”

 

I do not know who wrote the book of Esther. I have read the suggestion that Daniel wrote it, for he may himself have been in the palace of Shushan (Dan. 6:1-3; 9:1-2; cf. 8:2). But whether he was still living at this time is doubtful. If Mordecai wrote the book, we might have an explanation why the book does not mention the name of God. In any case, we ought not build an argument for Mordecai’s salvation on the remote possibility that he was the man God used to write the book. We do not know the authors of many books in the Bible. We do not need to know (if we are not told). We do not need to know because God, through the Spirit of Christ, is the divine Author.

 

Anyone today who committed the sins of Esther and Mordecai would be excommunicated. In the Old Testament, the law required that they be stoned. God detests such sins. I find it difficult to imagine that God approved of these sins under these circumstances; or disapproving of them, nevertheless, left no hint in the book itself of His fury against such sins.

 

Finally, to take the position that both Mordecai and Esther were motivated by love for God not only creates the dilemma and Jesuistic casuistry that “the end justifies the means,” but it also destroys the whole purpose of the book, namely, to show that God uses even wicked people to save His church.