Pastor Larry Kirkpatrick. 4 February 2000. Moab Seventh-day Adventist Church

Wherein the king granted the Jews which were in every city to gather themselves together, and to stand for their life, to destroy, to slay, and to cause to perish, all the power of the people and province that would assault them, both little ones and women, and to take the spoil of them for a prey.

Today we close up our series on the book of Esther, thinking particularly of chapters 8-10. And those aren't easy chapters. They are full of slaughter. But there are some things to keep in mind.

1. The Jews didn't start the fight.
2. The original plan of their enemies was to exterminate every Hebrew in all 127 provinces of the kingdom through the government ruling the land.
3. This is part of the Scripture, like all other parts, was recorded for our admonition upon whom the end of the age has come (1 Corinthians 10:11). There does come a time when the battle between good and evil hits total closure, and no one is left standing on the side of evil.
4. There is a day of complete deliverance for God's people.
5. To escape total annihilation is generally considered to be a good thing.

What happened here at the end of the story of Esther? The Hebrews were empowered and enabled to stand for their lives. The decree had gone out to destroy them. The reasons given? Their laws were diverse from all other peoples (Esther 3:8). And that's the way it is supposed to be for us. We are supposed to be different than all other people because the laws that we live by are different from the laws of all other people.

Everyone else has some form of human laws built into their schema of life. But somewhere on the planet God always reserves a people for Himself who will hold His laws and His laws alone as their rule of life. He enables them to stand for their lives because they stand for His life.

Keep in mind the story of Esther. Through no real provocation the Jews were to be destroyed. There was a refusal to bow down that meant fealty to the true God and a refusal to lift up mere man. And that's what couldn't be allowed to go on. Haman's self-worshipful world was exposed in the light of Mordecai's refusal to bow down to him. And that is the way it was with Jesus too. If Jesus had consented to give to the Jews a worldly kingdom they would have received Him as the Messiah. But that's not what His kingdom was or is--it is a kingdom that is "not of this world" (John 18:36). It was the purity of Jesus that aroused the greatest enmity toward Him; for His goodness condemned theirs and our badness.

It's like the old western movies when a town just wasn't big enough for two elite gun-slingers; there always ultimately, had to be a showdown. And there ultimately has to be a showdown between good and evil. Just as the Jews didn't start the fight in Medo-Persia, God didn't start the fight in heaven. Satan did. And so there has to be a showdown. And that's where we come in.

The battle in which we are engaged is a winner-takes-all fight. Either God wins it all or Satan wins it all. The Bible tells us that everything has its time and place under the sun--even the time of war (Ecclesiastes 3:8). But there is also a time for peace. And that time will go on for the rest of eternity. But now is the time for war.

There is a subtle attack upon God and His people underway. Every sophistry has been employed to make Satan's adjusted version of morality seem mild and reasonable. But it is at war with the law of God. Make no mistake: every kind of half-hearted obedience is linked to the demonic hatred of God's law. It is because His laws are different, diverse from all others that they are attacked and that we are attacked. And our foe comes to us in so many guises. So often he comes as an angel of light purporting to bring wisdom yet pitching his enticing variants on obedience. But look in the Bible. If its heroes had accepted these deceptions, there'd be no stories of Daniel's three friends refusing to bow down (Daniel ch. 3), of Moses leading the Hebrews out of slavery (Exodus ch. 12), of the Jews being scheduled for extermination in Shushan (Esther ch. 3), or of Jesus dying on the cross.

Why refuse to bow down if just bowing down a little is alright? Why leave servitude if by submission you can get all of the leeks and onions that you need? Why refuse to bow down to Haman if you can escape a universal death decree? But I'll tell you why. Because God can't save us if He sets aside His law. The fiction is that sin isn't really so bad. But that would mean that issues of right and wrong aren't really so mportant. And that would mean that when that group of angels rebelled against God, it wasn't really such a big deal. And that would mean that the death of Jesus Christ on the cross for my sins was nothing more than an option carried out by an overly-dramatic God in a harsher mood than usual.

Oh yes. The consequences for our entire understanding of Christianity would be involved. And it could come in different ways: either through saying that our obedience is really unimportant, or that because of vagueness in the prophetic writings preserved, we cannot obey our Father because we don't really know what He wants of us.

In this case, when God speaks through His prophets, perhaps they don't always hear Him distinctly; perhaps they injected their own "mistakes" into the writings. That the Holy Spirit's preservation of these writings was much less perfect than we had understood.

Another ploy of Satan is to act as your theological spin-doctor, wheter you've asked him to or not. he will come to you through a source that you would not expect, and draw you into disobedience by putting into your hand a subtle re-definition of important ideas. "Grace," for example, might be redefined as "love" or "unmerited favor." And grace those are valid descriptions of grace as far as they go. But standing alone, they are woefully and deceptively incomplete. Anyone who reads the Bible and thinks for themselves will know that grace in the Bible is unquestionably also the power to obey.

Funny. Why wouldn anybody leave that out?

Without the power to obey, how can I obey? Maybe God doesn't expect me to obey--"fully"-- anyway. And where does that lead? Are you catching on? Do you see how this works? Redefine grace, gospel, justification, sanctification, Sabbath, truth, and/or obedience, and you change all the rules. Magically you turn a people who's laws are diverse from all other peoples because they are standing for God and for life, into a people who's laws are not diverse from all other people, having been gently reversed by some misguided individual who was used as a satanic tool.

Friends, dare I ask you to question everything that you read? Everything that you hear? Accept nothing as valid or true based on its publishing-house; but bring everything to the unfailing test of the inspired writings. Let God be your Instructor. Through the Word of God the Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth.

So there we are. Either option is a means of discreetly nullifying God's law and obedience to Him, and stripping away His victory on the cross and in the great controversy. And all of the pain and suffering of ourselves and our loved ones over the years becomes futility that demonstrates nothing at all but Satan's charge that God is arbitrary.

Yes. That is what it would mean.

Why does a good God let slaughter and mayhem continue to rampage through the universe He has created? Why is He and are His people sometimes involved in the slaughter? Why, in the Bible, are the 400 prophets of Baal slain (1 Kings 18:40), why does God's prophet Samuel hack king Agag in pieces (1 Samuel 15:33), and why do the Jews in Esther slaughter 75,000 people (Esther 9:16)? Simple. Because this isn't a celluloid trailer on some movie that adds up to zero in the war; it is the reality of a kingdom of peace hijacked by the devil and turned into a battlefield for the universe's moral OS (operating system). God is Love, but Love is not a fool.

Don't forget the end of your Bible. What happens there? Why, when the New Jerusalem descends to the earth filled with God's people, and the damned rise up in the second resurrection, they surround the holy city. They attack "the camp of the saints" ( Revelation 20:9) They are incorrigible. They are not reformed and have no intention of reforming. They have ruined themselves and can do nothing else but attack the city at the instigation of the one supreme arch-demon who controls their minds. The image of God that was in them has been utterly erased and they cannot function in a moral environment anymore. So fire is sent down from God out of heaven and they are destroyed. Not out of meanness, but to protect those who want to live the way of God's unselfish kingdom. Yes, to protect them from those whose existence has been reduced to empty-automatons; barely animated viruses bent on destroying all that is good, all that is love.

Don't forget, God is Love (1 John 4:16). And as He restores His image in His people, they become more and more like Him. They become more and more like Love. There is love inside the walls of the city, and that is what the teeming and slithering hatred outside of the walls cannot endure. There comes a point of no mixing, no compromise, no changing, beyond which nothing further can be demonstrated. At that point, God will end it. He will finalize His "strange work" (Isaiah 28:21) He will slaughter those who resist the nature of the creation and insist on warping it. It is as unnatural for evil to exist in the universe as it is for a man to marry a man or a woman to marry a woman; it's warped, it's unnatural. And God, when His case for love and goodness has been conclusively proven, fully demonstrated in the lives of His people, will close the whole situation down so that His universe and His people can move on. We have a lot of growing to do.

Good thing there's an eternity around the corner to undergo some of that growth in, isn't it?

As I said, this slaughter is because God delivers His people. Each slaughter like this in the Bible is associated with deliverance. Consider:

• Exodus 12: The firstborn of the Egyptians are all slain, but God's people who have the blood on their doorposts are delivered. And when the Egyptian army attacks the Hebrews at the Red Sea, they are drowned to a man. God's people are delivered out of Egypt.
• Ezekiel 8&9: When God cleans house at His sanctuary, He first sends an angel through to mark the foreheads of those who sigh and cry for the abominations done in the midst of His people. Immediately there follow men with what kind of weapons? "Slaughter weapons." The slaughter begins at His sanctuary too. But the universe is His sanctuary. The heavens are His throne and the earth is His footstool. The moral emergency introduced into the universe through sin must be resolved. Don't fail to see that in this case, those who sigh and cry for God's kingdom are delivered.
• 2 Thessalonians 1:7-9; 2:8: When Jesus' second coming occurs the wicked are cut down, experiencing the first death. But the followers of Jesus are delivered, and meet their Savior in the air.
• Revelation 20: At the close of armageddon, fire comes down from God out of heaven and destroys sin and sinners once and for all. But God's people are protected and delivered from the last attack upon them.

It is normal for sin to be destroyed. It is normal for God to deliver His people. Who is an undelivered Christian? Those words don't go together, do they? No, if the Son makes you free, you are free indeed (John 8:36). Not free to sin, but freed from sin (Matthew 1:21). Sin cannot have dominion over you unless you cave-in. If you are free in Christ, you are free to live God's way, and free from bondage to the control of your own selfish nature built up through years of the sin habit. God wants to deliver you. The slaughter of the sin that controls you, that so easily besets you, is heaven's goal. Jesus came not to bring peace, but a sword. He came to deliver His people.

Some would say to us that the "God of the Old Testament" is a harsh and violent God while the "God of the New Testament" is softer and cuddlier. They had "law" back there, but fortunately for us, we have "grace" up here. To suggest that is to fundamentally twist the Bible and its picture of God. God was always against sin, and it never had a legitimate place in His universe. Death as a consequence for sin is not harsh, but loving, and life as a consequence of righteousness is loving too. We are talking disharmony or harmony. And commitment to wrong or right.

When Haman proposed to kill all the Jews and built his gallows to make Mordecai the dangling showpiece of his power, he enlisted the God of God's people against him. And Haman was not alone. The Jews had many enemies, because their laws were not just "diverse from all other peoples" in the capitol. All through the 127 provinces of Medo-Persia during the reign of Ahauserus there were Jews--witnesses to the fact that His laws were indeed different from those of all other people. Surely they were not all obedient, but just as surely there were some who were. And so you had a showdown.

For those of you who were keeping score in the examples I gave, the score was four-zip: God won four and Satan won zero. When we follow Jesus, we are on the winning team. Oh yes, it may look as if we are going down, as if everything is coming apart and even the church of God is going down into total failure. But don't forget the reversal at the end of the story. God will shake His church; He's doing it now. And He will reverse the abominations and the inroads of compromise and distortion that have wedged in and weakened His people. But He calls us today to stand for our life. Those who believe in the truth for this hour must defend themselves and the truth of their Father. We can stand up for Jesus. And we'll be delivered.

But the choice whether to stand for our lives and fight, or to be overcome, is ours.

The book of Esther demonstrates that God's people are not passive. When there is a need to pray, they pray, when there is a need to stand for their lives, they stand. That's what they do. Neither Esther nor the rest of God's Word teaches a passive gospel. We cooperate with God in letting Him work within us. We receive no merit for or credit for that. And the communion with Jesus becomes more and more fully established inside of us as we dependent little vines abide in the living and powerful Branch (John 15:1-10). We work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that works in us to will and to do His good pleasure (Philippians 2:12-13). We live, but it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. And the life that we now live we live by the faith of the Son of God (Galatians 2:20). We do not frustrate God's grace by living under the impression that we are saved by our obedience, but we cooperate with the grace of God that empowers obedience in us. The Biblical gospel of God makes it possible for us to avoid all the traps and be sound and balanced Christians. And none too soon. It is late in the hour. Jesus is waiting to come. So when will you and when will I get in the plan and on the team and mount up with wings as eagles and run for God (Isaiah 40:31)? Today we can strengthen our purpose to do just that. Because the power is there. Waiting.

And so we close our journey through the book of Esther. And all we have really done is stir the surface a bit. Because there is much more here. But that just means we still can grow in our understanding. But next time we read Revelation 13 perhaps we will think back, not just to the book of Daniel, but also to the book of Esther. And see the parallels.

In a limited sense, queen Vashti can represent a disobedient church and queen Esther an obedient one. In a limited way Ahaseurus in some places represents God the Father and in others, the Roman Catholic Church. Haman represents apostate Protestantism. Esther also represents Jesus. The death decree on the Jews foreshadows the death decree on Sabbath-keepers. The refusal of Mordecai to bow down is a type of our refusal to bow down in false worship on a false day. Haman's gallows pictures for us an alternate plan of salvation as well as reminding us that God has let the devil hang himself with a very long rope. And finally, the slaughter and deliverance at the end of Esther calls to mind the fact that God's spirit will not strive with flesh for all eternity, but He will end the conflict with evil, He will win, and He will deliver us, His people.

And that's good news I think. Don't you?

So lift up your heads. Our redemption draws near. Let's be about our Father's work, so that when the death decree comes to us, we'll be ready. We'll stand for our lives by the power of God and be delivered and finally see the face of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And heaven won't just be a song any more. It will be reality. Oh what a day that will be. Let's be there, all of us. Don't miss the party.