In recent weeks we have turned our attention to end-time parallels between events in the book of Esther and our time. We noticed when last we met, that at the center of this story stands a young lady named Esther whose intervention saves the Hebrew population of Medo-Persia from genocide. We've noticed how plainly her role echoes that of Jesus. So we've taken some time to go through the story of the book again. But today we are going to turn our attention to what is arguably the most powerful question this book asks us: "And who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

Mordecai asks young queen Esther a rhetorical question--a question to which no answer is really expected. The expected response is more than obvious, as we'll soon see.

Would you take then, a close look with me at this question? Let us consider what is here; if we boil this question down to its bottom-line, then what are the elements? "And who knoweth;" well, obviously God knows what His providences are all about. But He asks, "And who knoweth whether thou." You. Yes, you. Yes, you Esther. But not just Esther. God asks us; we must insert ourself into the same question. "And who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom?"

While the first main element of the question is "you," the second main element is "the kingdom." Esther came to the kingdom of Medo-Persia. The effect of the decree made by Haman using Ahauserus' authority was to impact on a universal scale all of the Hebrews within reach of the authority of the empire. Esther's potential influence of the king could impact events all through the kingdom. Why? Because the Lord had placed her in a position to impact it.

The third main element of this verse from Esther is point-in-time. The Verse says "And who knows whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" In Hebrew there are no "a" or "an" articles, and the word "such" here, in italics, is added by the translators. This verse could well be read, "And who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for this time?" Not "for a time like this," but "for this time." See the difference? Not for a time like that, but specifically for that time Esther had come.

When God created you--when He positioned you in place and when He positioned you in time--He knew what He was doing. When, in His manifold wisdom, He worked out the time-frame of events in the plan of salvation--all the windows opening and closing at certain points along the 6000 year pathway--He didn't do it randomly. He did it fairly and with a purpose. Our Father is all-wise; He could use an infinitude of different situations or circumstances to interact with you and with me--to place before us the opportunities to receiving Jesus into our lives and being changed.

The Pharaoh alive at the time of the Exodus (probably Thutmose III) was also put into place in the providence of God. Moses was even instructed to tell Pharaoh this. Read Exodus 9:16:

And in very deed for this cause have I raised thee up, for to shew in Thee my power; and that My name may be declared throughout all the earth." See, God even lets the enemies of His people rise to power at given points. Satan operates within very limited constraints, because God even superintends when and where and into what circumstance each of us will be born. Pharaoh from his birth was destined to be a billboard advertising the power of God by showing the obstinency and wickedness of sin. He wasn't forced to become what he became, but God knew he would become what he became.

Nor is this fatalism. It would not have been true to say that you and I have no choices along the way--that everything is predetermined somewhere else and that we are just going through our paces, actors incapable of doing anything else. God knew when you would be born. You were born onto a specific map, into a specific place and time; it would be accurate in regard to those things to say that, you came here, not of your own free choice, but according to a divinely-determined destiny with which you had nothing to do and no say in--but that is only a part of the situation. You were placed into the setting of the war between good and evil with a free will, and that throws all of our potentially whining excuses into the garbage disposal. Your capacity to choose good or to choose evil makes you a very "free agent." This is one of the foundational teachings supporting the great controversy.

Let's think for a moment about how God placed Esther at the nexus--at the key position in what was happening. She could have been born at any other time, but God put her here. And that's interesting. Because this whole thing is, indeed, a war.

If you are fighting a war, very much depends upon your strategy, and upon the timely deployment of your forces. A war involves much more than sheer strength; it involves manouvering and timing. When the German generals combined the principles of rapid movement with firepower, they arrived at a strategy for fighting called the "blitzkrieg," or the "lightening war." God also fights a war, but the battle He fights involves ideas and principles and morality. It is a very different kind of engagement. God is conducting His operations according to a very wisely wrought plan. And we are in it.

Consider, for example, the game of chess. Now I don't know whether you know anything about chess, but it is a fascinating match of wits between two opponents as they manouver their pieces against each other in an attempt to checkmate the enemy king--to leave him with no place to move. If you sit down and play a game of chess against anyone who knows anything about the game, and you don't have that knowledge, they will rapidly annihilate you. Chess is a consumate game with operations bearing some similarity to the situation of the great controversy.

Chess is not just two combatants pounding on each other; it has a lot of timing in it. A game of chess is considered by experts to have three main phases: the opening, the middlegame, and finally the endgame. In the opening, each side deploys its forces in relation to the other side; and we see this very thing happening in the great controversy. Back in the garden of Eden God was deploying His forces against Satan, and Satan was trying to recruit Adam and Eve over to his side--trying to deploy more pieces too. Ah yes. And he did manage that, didn't he?

And God began to reveal many things about His gospel, but in a careful, step-by-step process. The detailed meaning and system behind the sacrifices didn't all come out in the book of Genesis; it was revealed in a step-by-step process all through Exodus and Leviticus too. And if you've ever played chess, you know that the most powerful piece on in the game is, by far, the queen. But if you've ever seen someone bring their queen out right at the beginning of the game, you've almost certainly seen someone loose their queen near the beginning of the game. And God didn't send Jesus back while Adam and Eve were still alive. It was still the opening.

But there comes a time in the game of chess when your pieces are deployed, your armies are ready, and they are staring down the barrels of the enemy weaponry. Then it is a matter of advancing on the enemy. This is the middlegame. God delivered His people out of Egypt, sent His prophets to them, and built up to be a nation. Finally, He sent His only begotten Son. No, not when Moses or Isaiah was alive, or Malachi. But as the battle really began to rage, He brought out His most powerful Weapon, and Jesus joined the battle!

In chess you can sacrifice your pieces--send them in to make an attack knowing that you'll lose them and exchange them for other pieces. When there is a series of moves where one piece is taken by another, and that piece is taken by another, etc., you have what is called a series of exchanges. And no other exchange can match what Jesus did at the cross. He exchanged His live for ours. He sacrificed so much for us so that we could receive eternal life and so that heaven could win the great controversy. Yes, a great series of exchanges has been initiated. But the middlegame isn't the end. At the last comes the endgame.

It is during the endgame that you work to corner the enemy's king until you checkmate him. To checkmate the king you must trap him in a position in which he cannot move without being taken. So when you checkmate someone, you are putting them into a position in which they will have no where to go. And God is in the process of trapping Satan into a position in which he will have no where to go. Finally, all of his arguments against God will have been met and demonstrated to be false, and God's ways will have been vindicated by incontrovertible evidence. This didn't happen in the opening, or even at the cross. True, immeasurable progress was made at the cross. True, in terms of making an offering for sin, that ultimate Sacrifice was provided for us at the cross. But even at Calvary Satan had not been cornered--he had not been checkmated. At that point he sustained a decisive loss, but he wasn't driven into the corner yet where he couldn't move. If you don't believe me, then read the latest headlines on any given day. No, Satan is still loose on the board wreaking havoc. But God is driving him up against the edge where he won't be able to manouver. By the way, did I point out that in chess, the king can only move one space at a time? Again, God and Satan are battling and purposefully making their movements, but it is a steady process of single moves toward the finish.

See, history doesn't have just one hinge; it has three hinges. The fall of humanity, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, and lastly, the full-fruitage of the gospel demonstrated in the lives of the last-generation. You and I were born, not at the beginning of the sentence, or at the comma or the dash, but at the period of the sentence. A divine statement is being made, and you bring closure.

God could overwhelm Satan in less than a moment if this were a matter of raw power. But this involves a whole universe, and whether God is truly fair. See, we--you and I--we need to stand up and be counted. Don't you know that we are going to be counted either way? Look back there at Esther 4:14 again. What did Mordecai tell Esther? Look again at the first part of the verse: "For if thou altogether hold thy peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father's house shall be destroyed." Either way that Esther chose, God's plan would succeed; but Esther would be counted. She could try to lay low; she could attempt to blend into the shadows while a whole people were exterminated; but she would finally be counted just the same. Her opportunity to intervene for God would be added into the equation when she was judged, and there was no question about it. Esther was not a wizened, aged prophet or preacher; simply a young person obeying God. And she stepped up to the fight.

Was there risk? Was there hazard? Yes! It was clearly life and death and eternal life and death. But she went forward by faith. And God saved His people.

And what about us? We are born into the battle at the climax-point; we have arrived here at ground-zero. Consider all these points converging together:

• Satan's devices and deceptions are fully matured now. He is much more skilled at deceiving and at understanding how to manipulate human nature now than he was even at the time of Esther. He has had a 6000 year course in experimental psychology with humans, and before that (we don't know for how long), he was practicing his persuasive skills on unfallen angels of brilliant intellect. I'm telling you, his skills are fully ripened. And we are the target individuals upon whom he is bending all of his smooth brilliance and intellectual firepower.

 
• God's gospel also is now standing fully revealed. It is shining from the inspired writings with an intense brilliance never before known. When the fourth angel comes down in Revelation 18:1, the Bible says that he "lightens the earth with his glory" in a way none of the other angel messages is ever said to do. The gospel is "the power of God unto salvation," Romans 1:16; but now the universe is waiting to see it lived out as it never yet has been. God has raised up a people whom, the Bible informs us, will keep His commandments, and will be so entirely obedient to Him that they will "follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth."

 
• Again, the reason why all of this adds up to the absolutely ultimate climax-point of demonstration in the great controversy is because our race is degraded by not 1000 years of sin, not 2000 or 3000, no, not even a mere four or 5000 years of sin, but we have inherited 6000 years of moral degradation. We were born with the weakest moral nature of any human-beings to ever stand on this planet. We have the weakest spiritual element in our nature of anyone ever to pray, to read the Bible, or to fight the battle to overcome the fallen nature.

All of this now comes together here in our neighborhood on planet earth. Through us, God will show the universe "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27-19) in a weak, 6000 year degraded humanity. Or, we'll end up showing them "Satan in you," and become finally irredeemable character-photocopies of the devil.

See, God's gospel is fully matured. Now its theory stands fully revealed.

Is There a Cycle of Generations of Opportunity?

God is no respecter of persons. And I do not think that He favors one generation over another. The Bible speaks to all of us. And at every point down through time God has had his representatives among every generational bracket, among every age-groupable category. At the time when Jesus came, God's people covered every part of the generational spectrum, from the youthful Mary, John the Baptist or John the apostle, to the aged Simeon and Elizabeth. And it is the same today.

But a very interesting question can be asked at this point: is there a cycle of generations of opportunity? Could it be that in God's wisdom He knows something that He wants to use in the fight? Could certain generational groups be better-equipped than others to finish the great controversy?

Now today, God is speaking to all of us. But for a moment let's consider a certain possibility. Let me speak to those of us here in the "X-generation" bracket: people born from 1962 on.

A lot of demographic work has been done, and this has resulted in certain generational profiles. That's where we get the "boomers," the "X-ers," and so forth. As they have pulled all of this information together (not because they were bored or had nothing better to do, but because they wanted to maximize the sale products to each specifically definable generational niche), they have managed to come up with four rather well definable generational archetypes. There are groups of people sharing many common characteristics passing through time together as a mass. As the researchers Strauss & Howe put it in their fascinating book Generations, these generations are, so to speak, "aging in place" as they travel together through time. Each of these generational groups they liken to a passenger train leaving a depot on schedule every 21 years. As each generation travels through time, it reaches certain significant points in its travel. As it moves through the cycles of life it reacts to them in a way adapted to its unique time and place.

What are these four generational types? They are identified as

• A "G.I.," or "civic" generation; people who build-up the institutional structures of a society; folk who tend to be busy, followed by
• A "Silent," "adaptive" generation, who, because of the vast achievements of the preceding generation tend to be unsure what to do with themselves, followed by
• A "Boom," or "idealistic" generation, who tend to be focused on themselves; they are either sure that they have the answer or that they can make one up. These are followed finally by
• A "13th" or "X" "reactive" generation, who tend to come under heavy criticism by the preceding generation, and may rebel against what appears to them to be a very myopic viewpoint.

Well, "so what," you say, "we've heard these kind of labels before." Here's the "so what": in their book, Strauss and Howe have studied a 400+ year slice of history, and they propose that these four group-types repeat over and over. That would mean that a regular pattern could identify a generation like ours at a previous point in history. It could also mean that at certain pivot-points in time we could look and see what our generational analogs were doing.

That's all well and good, you might be saying, but can you prove that from the Bible? Well, actually I think we might be able to show real likelihood of it, but this is just a theory by some interesting historians and demographers. I'm not trying to prove it to you here, nor do I really plan to do much more than to share the idea. But there is a fascinating point I discovered as I read through their book that you may find intriguing as well.

If there is some truth to this idea, then the generation that our present "13th generation" is the echo of is the generation born between 1821 and 1842. The Seventh-day Adventist church was originally built by the members of this generation. The founding members of the SDA church were the "Gen-Xers" of a previous age. James White was born in 1821, Ellen in 1827. The generation that gave birth to the children who grew up and won World War II was another generation of the same kind, and then we at present are the third echo from the generation that built this church.

Here's the last thing I want to mention on this. As Strauss and Howe, who probably know little about Seventh-day Adventists or the 2300 year prophecy, outline their generational theory by reviewing 400 years of history, they find one and exactly one abberration in their pattern. There is one place where there is a "hiccup" in their theory about what should happen at each generational transition and epoch. Does anyone want to make a guess at where that "hiccup" happens during the last 400 years?

I'll tell you where.

During the 1844 era.

Listen to Strauss and Howe from page 86 of their book:

The average interval [between "social moments,"] is forty-four years, matching the forty-four year span for two phases of life. The somewhat longer intervals come early, where we notice somewhat longer generations. The single and telling exception is the twenty-eight year interval before the Civil-War Crisis, precisely where we observe a truncated three generation cycle.

I think it could. Yes. It could very well be. But I am sure of this. The boomers who are bent on impressing their values on to this generation will be rudely awakened. Because that certain smug spirit indulged in by some of the "boomers" here and there in the work, who insist on new-modeling what the church is all about, don't have a clue about what drives those of us who have been labeled "Gen-Xers." Young people in the church today are tired of being entertained by the boomers; we are tired of their sickening rock-and-roll party attempt to buy us off to get us into the church. We are tired of their shallow attempts to water-down what God's message in these last days is all about. We want Bible truth, real Adventism, real truth. Substitutes won't do.

This is the end. What are you guys thinking???

In closing, let each one of us keep this in mind: God has called us into the endgame. Mordecai's question "And who knoweth whether thou art come into the kingdom for such a time as this?" sounds today in our ears. It is late in the hour.

The developments in science are coming so fast now that we can hardly keep up with them. In just recent weeks major advances have been announced in computer technology, scientists have completed the mapping of a major part of the human genome, and they say that they are ready to create life from bits of the DNA that they think they now understand well enough to do it with. This year saw cloning advance, and if this isn't enough, the frontiers of human-machine interaction have been pushed way back, too. Now there are some human subjects, paralysed from the neck down, who have had surgery installing a computer-chip into the front of their brain. A glass tube is inserted and the brain tissue is cut and then grows into the tube across a grid enabling interaction by concentration of thought. These aren't items from the National Enquirer. I'm telling you that the advances now are coming faster and faster. We are not so far away from a lot of things that not many years ago were mere science fiction. In many cases, we are already there.

But what ought to perk-up our ears is that we know that technology is not driving us to the end of time. It is entirely the other way around; it is the end of time that is leading to such shocking advances in technology. Technological innovation on the scale that we are now seeing it is a sign of the end because it shows us that God is letting loose the four winds of the earth mentioned in Revelation seven. Remember the angels there holding back the four winds, so that we would not be harmed? They are called to hold back until His people are sealed. But when I look around me and when I listen, I hear the rising pitch of the storm starting to roar. And I know that the end is even at the doors!

The Bible tells us that unless God should cut short the time, no flesh would be saved (Mark 13:20). It also tells us that we live at the final nexus--the final climax point of all time--after which sin will not rise up again (Nahum 1:9). We are urged to "redeem the time, because the days are evil" (Ephesians 5:16). The Bible tells us that ""as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the coming of the Son of Man" (Luke 17:26). The days were very evil in the time of Noah. Our time has more than equaled that wickedness.

But the question is, will we, like Esther stand up and be counted. Or will we slink away into the shadows and deny our Lord at such a time as this?

Either way, we will be counted.

If there ever was a generation having an appointment with destiny--a generation that could be the one to stand up and let God use them to intervene for a world coming unglued into a final nightmare--it is you.

Now that's worth thinking about.

You can change the world. If you're serious. Or you can buy what the marketers are selling to your generation, and go comfortably to your grave while another generation comes on to finish the work.

The decision is ours--all of us. Remember, when Jesus came there were members of each generation then living that joined in the work. Let's go into the king's inner chamber, as did Esther. Let's choose life. We have come to the kingdom for this time.

Jesus is waiting.

Last Modified 23 March 2000