Esther
5:14
His
wife Zeresh and all his friends said to him, “Have a pole set up, reaching to a
height of fifty cubits, and ask the king in the morning to have Mordecai
impaled on it. Then go with the king to the banquet and enjoy yourself.” This
suggestion delighted Haman, and he had the pole set up.
Esther
7:10 So they impaled Haman on the pole he had set up for Mordecai. Then the
king’s fury subsided.
As we read through the book of Esther, we see that there
are many incidences in her life that surely did not add up for her. She had no
mother of father - losing one parent would have been difficult enough for a
young girl growing up, but losing both must have been devastating! She grew up
in a foreign land, in Persia, where her people were exiles and where her
culture and religion were subordinated to the whims of the ruling pagan despot,
Ahasuerus (or Xerxes in Greek), someone who was easily persuaded by his
advisors to act immorally – we see him divorcing his wife Vashti after she
refused to entertain his intoxicated guests by showing off her beauty. We read
that he fell for the suggestion to sleep with any amount of innocent young
girls to select a fitting successor for the previous queen. He listened to and
believed Haman’s lies about the Jewish people not keeping the king’s laws, then
accepted his bribe of 10 000 talents of silver to decree that all Jews be
destroyed.
Esther was captured to join the harem of this very same
king, knowing full well what was required of her, and that, should she not be
selected to become the next queen, she would disappear into the second harem
forever. None of these happenings in her life so far could have made any sense
to her – her upbringing by her devout cousin Mordecai must have instilled in
her the knowledge of a loving God Who cared for her, Who would protect her from
harm. She could so easily have rebelled and gone her own way. But she chose to
let the inner light and beauty that her belief in her God had ignited in her,
to shine through to such an extent that the wayward king could not resist her,
in fact no one could as we read in Esther 2: 15 And Esther won favour in
the sight of all who saw her.
We know the rest of the story, how Esther intervened in
Haman’s evil plot and saved her whole race from annihilation, how his evil
plans to kill Mordecai backfired and he was in fact impaled on the very pole he
had set up for Mordecai. All because Esther chose to stay true to her God, even
though she surely could not have understood the events that unfolded before
her. But there is even more: Esther must have had a hand in influencing king
Artaxerxes I (successor to Xerxes) who appointed Ezra to lead a group of Jews
from Babylon to Jerusalem to teach the laws of God, and 13 years later sent
Nehemia to Jerusalem to rebuild the city walls. I am sure that she would have been delighted
to see the long-term effects of her dedication to her God!
Pearls to ponder:
When God weaves the tapestry of our lives, we simply
cannot see what the whole picture is going to look like. We only see the colour
that He is weaving into it at this moment in time, it does not necessarily make
sense to us as we have such limited understanding of how all our life experiences
are going to fit together in the end. Trust that He has a perfect picture in
mind for the tapestry of your life, and stay true to Him no matter what! Your
decisions to follow God today will impact not only your life, but the lives of
your future generations to come!
