Today friends we are starting a three-part series on Esther and today we will start our reading from the first chapter of Esther. I would like to read the whole book of Esther over the three series but it's too long and so I'm going to cover a fair bit of chapters one and two today but I will skip certain bits and I will tell you where we are reading from. So, beginning at verse 1 then. Now in the days of Ahasuerus, the Ahasuerus who reigned from India to Ethiopia over 127 provinces, in those days when King Ahasuerus sat on his royal throne in Susa the citadel in the third year of his reign, he gave a feast for all his officials and servants. 9. Queen Vashti also gave a feast for the women in the palace that belonged to King Ahasuerus. 10. On the seventh day, when the heart of the king was married with wine, he commanded Nahum and Bistah, Harbonah, Bigther, and Abagther, Zithar, and Carthus, the seven eunuchs who served in the presence of King Ahasuerus, to bring Queen Vashti before the king with her royal crown, in order to show the peoples and the princes her beauty, for she was lovely to look at. But Queen Vashti refused to come at the king's command, delivered by the eunuchs. At this the king became enraged, and his anger burned within him. Then the king said to the wise men who knew the times, verse 15, According to the law, what is to be done to Queen Vashti? because she has not performed the command of King Ahasuerus delivered by the Eunuchs. Demomuken said in the presence of the King and the officials, not only against the King, as Queen Vashti done wrong, but also against all the officials and all the peoples who were in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus. For the Queen's behaviour would be made known to all women, causing them to look at their husbands with contempt, since they will say, King Ahasuerus commanded Queen Vashti to be brought before him and she did not come. This very day the noble women of Persia and Media who have heard of the Queen's behaviour will say the same to all the King's officials and they will be content and wrath in plenty. Verse 22. He, that's the King, sent letters to all the royal provinces, to every province in its own script and to every people, own language that every man be mastered in his own household, and speak according to the language of his people. After these things, when the anger of the king Ahasuerus had abated, he remembered Vashti and what she had done and what had been decreed against her. Then the king's young men who attended him said, Let beautiful young virgins be sought out for the king, and let the king appoint officers in all the provinces of his kingdom to gather all the beautiful King's eunuch who was in charge of the women. Let their cosmetics be given to them, and let the young woman who pleases the King be Queen instead of Vashti. This pleased the King and he did so. Now there was a Jew in Susa that says that his name was Mordechai, the son of Jaya, the son of Shunay, the son of Kish, a Benjamin. who had been carried away from Jerusalem and when the captives carried away were Jeconite, king of Judah, who never could nurse a king of Babylon and carried away. He would bring up Hadassah, that is Esther, the daughter of his uncle, for she had neither father nor mother. The young woman had a beautiful figure and was lovely to look at and when her father and her mother died, Mordecai took her as his own daughter. So when the king's order and his edict were proclaimed and when many young women were gathered in sooth of the citadel in custody of Hegai, Esther also was taken into the king's palace and put in custody of Hegai, who had charge of the women. And the young woman pleased him and won his favour, and he quickly provided her with cosmetics and a portion of food, and with seven chosen young women from the king's palace, and advised her and her young women to the best place in the harem Esther had not made known it to people or kindred, for Mordecai had commanded her not to make it known. And every day Mordecai walked in front of the court of the Harim to learn how Esther was and what had happened to her. When the turn came for Esther, the daughter of Abahai, the uncle of Mordecai, who had taken her as his own daughter, to go into the king, she asked for nothing except what he gave the king's eunuch. who had charged the women advised. Now Esther was winning favour in the eyes of all who saw her. And when Esther was taken to King Gahasuerus into his royal palace in the tenth month, which is the month of Tila in the seventh year of his reign, the king loved Esther more than all the women, and she won grace and favour in this sight more than all the virgins, so that he set the royal crown on her head and made her queen instead of Vashti. Then the king gave a great feast for all In those days, verse 21, as Mordecai was sitting at the king's gate, Bigfan and Tiresh, two of the king's eunuchs who guarded the threshold, became angry and sought to lay hands on King Ahasuerus. This came to the knowledge of Mordecai, and he told it to Queen Esther. Esther told the king in the name of Mordecai. When the affair was investigated and found to be so, the men were both hanged on gallows. recorded in the Book of the Chronicles in the presence of the King. Amen. So I'd like to say a few things today about our place in this world. As Christians, what is our place in this world? Where do we fit? Now, we are exiles. We are exiles. And so, as you know, an exile is someone who's having to live in a different country where they don't really belong. And that's like us, because we are stuck, if you like, in this world where we don't belong. The scriptures tell us that we should try to live peaceably. live as peaceably as possible in the society we're in. And so we want our society to be peaceful and governed well, don't we? Because we are in it, so we don't want to suffer unnecessarily. I said those three messages I'm going to bring from Esther and hopefully have traced the main themes in the book. And so the first one is the times of favour. And the next time, we'll look at times of trial, and then after that, times of deliverance. And so this is, today, it's about favour. Favour. And the church, the church throughout the ages has fell in and out of favour. They have found themselves, on the one hand, having a respect of society, and on the other, persecuted by society. The world is fickle and you've no way of predicting how the world is going to treat us at any one time. We find sometimes as well as individuals, as individuals we sometimes find a favour in the sight of the world. If you've, you might not always identify, but if you've been in a situation where you've felt some real benefits and it felt unusual because it was so unexpected it could be that God was giving you favor in the eyes of that person. So we might find that in the workplace, in the workplace you might find that your bosses have this liking for you that maybe they don't have for other people. And you might say that's just a natural part of human nature. So I'm saying that for the most part, When you find favour in the eyes of someone, you might not see it, you might not perceive it, but God will do this. This is one of the things God does to get people to be moved into a particular place where he needs them. And so sometimes you find favour in the sight of the world, and sometimes we might, I haven't done it much, but sometimes we might succeed more than we thought we possibly could and that also is God's doing. But when God does this, when God shows us favour in order that he might move us like a chess piece into where he needs us, it's not always ideal, it's frequently far from ideal. God's purpose is in it though and we'll see here with Esther and others how it's not the where God needs them at that time. So, we'll look at the favour shown to Esther, then we'll look at a couple of very brief examples from the Scriptures about other people who were shown favour, and then we shall look at God's favour towards us, especially in terms of the Gospel. A brief word then about the book of Esther. I need to say something about the book of Esther. It's an unusual book. You may be already aware of that. It's an unusual book in the scriptures. It is the only book in the whole Bible that doesn't mention God. So, when time came to, you know, get all these Hebrew writings and put them together and discard the rubbish ones and find the ones that were actual scripture, you know, of God inspired. Then, when they came to Esther, it wasn't so easy. So you have a book that doesn't mention God, it's all about Jews, and it's also unusual because, you know, Jesus, the apostles didn't quote from the book of Esther. He never mentioned it once. So, That's why there was some debate. But the debate was ended. They got through this and they decided, for good reasons, I think they were right to do this as well, I think they were spot on. They said that this belongs in the Hebrew scriptures, it belongs in our Bible today. So, putting aside any considerations about its value or anything else, my recommendation to you is that we accept it as a scripture and thereby inscribe it. One more word about what happened in the 2nd century BC. Jews recognized that the world was becoming Greek. as they call it. So they felt that, well, we need the Bible to be in the language of the common people. We can't expect people to learn Hebrew. So they translated the Old Testament scriptures into Greek, and therefore it became widely used. And you may not know this, it's called the Septuagint, by the way. You may not be aware of this, but Jesus and are quoted from this old Greek version of the Old Testament, rather than the Hebrew. And so, if you looked, if you took time to look at the quotes of the New Testament, and you compare them to the Hebrew, and you compare them to the Greek version, you'll find that they're more often, well, almost always from the Greek. So if Jesus used this old Greek version of the Old Testament, and the apostles used it, and the early church used it, then at the very least, I'm not saying we're going to start using that particular thing, but at the very least, we can't just throw it away, we can't dismiss it. And I mention the exegetion because it contains Esther, it contains the book of Esther, except it has some details in it that are not in the Hebrew text that we use. So what do we do with that? Well, I'm not here to talk about such matters as texts and how the scriptures came to be. So what I propose to do is I will refer to, when I refer to Esther, I refer to the scriptures that we just read, what we have in our Hebrew text. And when I mention something from the Septuagint, perhaps, I will say it's from other sources. So I don't want there to be any confusion. I want us to be clear. So I'm going to be talking about the scriptures and then other sources. And when I say that, you will know that I'm probably mentioning the Septuagint. And it's... The extra bits in that Greek version don't affect any doctrine. So there's no need to worry about that. But they just have little details that you might want to just allow to cast light on the story. So that being said, let's think about the favour shown to Esther, first of all, in this story. So it starts off, the king is a rogue. Xertes, his name is. And he's a rogue. just hedonistic of him to throw this banquet. I mean, that's not, that's not the worst thing. It's excessive. I left out a pile of details, but he had all the place redecorated for this, for this, just for this feast. And it would have been quite an event. But really what got to me was the fact that he kept his heart mean. Now, I don't know how many, I can't remember if it says how many was in it. But he had all these women. So let's say he had 100 in his harem. These are young girls who were just selected from society because they were pretty. Right, you're going in the king's harem. You don't get asked. You don't say, would you like to fill an application form in? That's it. Off you go. And then they would come in. They would come in and spend maybe, I don't know, was it a year or something? applying all these beauty treatments, right? I thought Madison was bad hogging, you know, spending like an hour putting makeup on. But they were doing this for like a year or something. This was applying all these creams and lotions and everything to make them prettier. And finally, you put the makeup on. And all that is just so they can go in and spend one night with this guy. So they spend the night together, and she's whisked off them. And then maybe the next night, a different one comes in. And so, you know, I wouldn't, I'd hesitate to say it was like rape, but it was pretty close to it, you know. These girls had no idea, let's say they were 18 years old, they had no idea whether they'd be called back in the future. They could spend the rest of their lives back in the Harry headquarters, you know, and keep him putting the makeup on in the hope that one day the King would call him. And, you know, for most of them, he didn't. And so the guy was a rogue, really. But he got annoyed about his wife. I wanted a parade around, look everyone how beautiful she is. Jewish tradition, which I don't put much thought by normally, because it's frequently bizarre and fantastic, but Jewish tradition says that he wanted her to come in naked, just wearing the crown, so everyone could see her beauty in that sense. But at the very least, you know, she was thought I'm not going in like some thing so everyone can look at me and ogle me or whatever and so she said no and then it caused all this trouble and then the king's advisors said well if this gets out all the women are going to be saying well she's like the first lady you know she's setting the example so you know we will have to do what our husbands tell us anything at all. The behaviour of this guy was extreme, and depending on what he wanted her to do, maybe she was wrong as well. Maybe she should have, you know, if it wasn't too much of a compromise, maybe she should have agreed to just go in and say hi to the guests and leave. The balance for us in the New Testament, if you have a partner, you have a husband or contract that you have in God's eyes. And on the woman's part, she's to love her husband, and there's an element of submission. As it happens, the man is also to submit to the wife in a different way. But, friends, all the angels of heaven are looking down on each marriage, and they're looking for these things. They're looking to see the beauty of a wife who will be able to somehow submit to a husband who's really maybe not that great a husband. And yet she does it anyway. And so there's the thing the angels are inquiring into. They want to see this picture of Christ in the church. And so I'm saying that because there was a point here. There was a valid point here. But the circumstances were just pretty awful. And so we don't draw too many conclusions from this guy. Esther. Well, Esther is just, you know, and she's taken into the harem. And she immediately gets the attention of the chief eunuch. Now, without going into too much detail, the eunuch is someone who has had his natural passions curtailed in some way. So the idea is that the eunuchs don't fancy women anymore, so the king's harem is safe. Esther was that lovely that even this eunuch was impressed. So she found favor, first of all, in chapter two, verse eight, you'll see, she found favor in the eyes of this eunuch. And of course, he'd give her, he got her all the, what do you call them, the cosmetics. He got her all the best stuff and made sure she was first in line for it and all the best maids, give to Esther. give her the best place to hang around in and, well, she made an impression on him. It turns out that verse 15 of chapter 2, it says that everyone was finding Esther attractive. Now, I thought about this, is that, can that be explained in a natural way? Was she just pretty and everyone liked her? I don't think so, and here's why. When we have those Silly Miss World contests, right, with all these women parading around, They've got there because they're pretty. They've got to the final because they are pretty. In someone's eyes, anyway. And so you've got these pretty women, and at home, there are millions of people there saying, oh, I think she's awful. I think she's better. And someone else says, oh, no, do you think? No, I think she's lovely. Look at the nose on her, and so on. And what you find is that people find different ones attractive. Amongst all the hareen, you would expect the people, generally speaking, to find different ones especially attractive. Because we're all different. But there's something about Esther. She became the new attractive to everyone. She became attractive to everyone. She found favour in the eyes of everyone. And I'm suggesting to you that that is not natural. And so, this is how we begin to find God in Esther. In this Hebrew story of Esther, it doesn't mention God. Today, and in the forthcoming weeks, we will find God. We will find God all over the pages of Esther, if we care to look. And it's found in these sorts of circumstances. God making everyone think this one person was the most attractive. And of course, she finds favor with the king and his maid, So she goes from being on the street, just a normal poor woman in captivity, and then she ends up as the queen of the whole empire. The queen. So, what happens then? A plot is discovered. A plot is discovered and Mordecai overhears this conversation. Why was he in that place at that time? By the ordination of God. put Mordecai in the right place so that he would overhear it, so that he could report it. Because God had something in mind for Mordecai down the line as well. The point being that Mordecai didn't sort of plan this in any way. He was just there, and he overheard it. But that was by the providence of God that he heard this thing. and so he grasses the pair up and they get arrested and get a hand. Now, some of you might be thinking, if the guy was so evil, why didn't Mordecai just keep his mouth shut and let someone do him in? Well, because who would he be replaced by? Someone worse maybe? Who knows? I wonder, I wonder if Mordecai had this idea that we get from the New Testament, where we know that actually God is the one who puts these people in these places. So God puts even wicked people in authority to serve him, to serve his purposes. So maybe, maybe Mordecai was onto this very early. Maybe Mordecai was on to this and he knew that, you know, this guy's wicked, but God's placed him there, he's God's anointed for today. And so it's my duty as a citizen to stop him being harmed, to pray for him and to do everything I can for his safety. Maybe that was him. I notice even the Jews, they have these paraphrases. They take the Old Testament and they just, different Jews, they write it out in their own words, and so it's a paraphrase. But even when we look at those tarlums of the Jews, we find the same idea. They are convinced that Mordecai stumbling on this plot was all of God. And so I mention this because, well, The story is there, so it deserves to be mentioned. But why is it there? It's a minor detail, is it perhaps? Well, it's quite important, because it brings Mordecai into the beginnings of failure with the royal family, with the monarchy. He doesn't get thanked, at least he It's just, okay, a note is made. A note is made in the annals, and that will prove useful down the line. And it really foreshadows, really, what Mordecai is going to become later on, a few chapters later. God is moving all the pieces here, like I say. The providence of God is arranging people in this way. Esther's full of coincidences, you see. and little surprises. And I'll give you a couple of examples. And that's why, that's where we see God. It's in the frequency of these coincidences, these surprises that we get. You know, when we read it and go, wow, that was lucky, wasn't it? I hinted to you before that if God shows us favour and places us in a certain position, it could be that that position is far from ideal. Well, that was the case here. Esther is placed in this position of Queen by the Lord, but she's still in captivity, she's still in exile, she's still keeping her mouth shut about being a Jew. which she shouldn't have done anyway, by rights, but she did. Presumably, she ate the king's food, which she shouldn't have done. It's compromise here, you see. So, we might find ourselves in these awkward positions when God moves us on his giant sort of chessboard. But the point is, God was using her because he was going to save his people. And in this day, in the scriptures here, where Esther's located, the Lord has a formal agreement with one nation of people, and they are ethnically Jews. And so it was for the salvation of his people. That's why Esther was put where she was. I said I would mention just briefly a couple of people in the scriptures you found favor. I think the best example, really, I mean, Daniel's one, but that's maybe not But Daniel found favour in the eyes of the chief eunuch. Another eunuch, notice. But maybe the best example is Joseph. And we see his fortunes changing so much. There was the trouble at home, jealous brothers, and to be fair, Joseph didn't help matters, did he? But he had that, and then he's a slave. Then he's a slave in a foreign country, Then he gets promoted because he finds favour in the eyes of the staff. And he gets promoted. Still technically a prisoner, but promoted. Then, he has trouble with the boss's wife. He gets put in jail. Gets put in jail. And of course, you know the story from there on. He found favour in the eyes of the pharaoh. And it goes from jail to the second in command of the whole Egyptian empire. Now if you think, hang on, this sounds a bit familiar. There's parallels there, friends. And it's beyond the scope of what we're doing today. But I would encourage you, if you want an interesting study, consider the story of Esther alongside Joseph, and maybe Daniel as well. And you will see lots of parallels there. Joseph himself knew this was all in the providence of God. And he said to the brothers, didn't he, at the end of the story sort of thing, he said to the brothers, when you sold me to the slave traders, you intended to do evil. That's all you wanted. He wanted to get shot at me. But God meant it for good. God meant it for good. For what purpose? The same purpose, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive. And that's exactly what happened. Throughout the scriptures, God's changing people's hearts. People are finding favor in the eyes of the most unexpected people. He's creating an unnatural, he's inclining their hearts unnaturally to show favor to this person for almost no good reason. And I would only add to that Joseph and Daniel, by the way, one more parallel is they were in captivity. Joseph and Daniel were still not where they belonged. They were still exiles. They were still in pagan situations. Why is that? Well, before I move on to my final point, I wanted to mention this. When we are forgiven, we still might have to suffer consequences, which might not make much sense. Let me use an example. A drunk driver, he goes down, he merrily misses people, he knocks a cyclist off his bike, doesn't kill him, carries on, and then he goes down a ditch, and then the car tumbles over, and in the accident, the driver loses a leg. He has to get his leg taken off. Comes out of the hospital, of course, he goes to jail. He goes to jail for five years, Now, according to law, our society has forgiven him, sort of thing. Let's say he's paid his debt to the whole society. That's how we describe it. He's paid that debt. We can't go back and say, you deserve to be locked up more for what you did, because it's been decided what the punishment is. It's over there. It's gone. But he still only has one leg. He's still left with one leg. So, he's still dealing with the consequences. And it's a bit like us, friends, because, you know, we who are born again here today, we've been forgiven of all our sins, every single one of them. Ones that have yet to come to our shame. All our sins have been forgiven. But we still must accept that there are consequences to our sin. not eternal consequences, but consequences now in terms of we still have sin within us trying to drag us down. We still live in a sinful world. The effects of sin show themselves in suffering and death and cruelty in this world. So there's still consequences even when sin is forgiven. This is where our great hope is to get away from where we are now into a place prepared by God. Well, let me finish by talking briefly about favor shown towards them because we find favor, as I say, sometimes we don't know the purpose of favor shown towards us in this world anyway. A friend of mine got a job, he was a pastor, he got a job and I suppose he expected that he was no better than everyone else at this particular job, so he went in. And he succeeded in that job, in a very, like an unnatural way sort of thing. He sort of, it's like God was just promoting him, you know? God was promoting him. And he did exceptionally well. And that made me sit up and think how God does this, you know? And we can find faith there. I've just started a new job, as you know. And it's up to God. whether I find favour in the eyes of the people I work with or the bosses. Now, if God wants me to be promoted for some reason, then I will find favour in the eyes of the bosses. Out of all the people there, they will just be I'm sure that Paul, he's really suitable for this. You know, I agree, yeah, I agree. Just on a natural, because I'm no better than anyone else at anything, really. But God can do that, and if God decides Paul's staying where he is, then that's fine also. As a believer, I can rest peacefully knowing that I will be wherever God wants me. So friends, don't despise your station in life. Don't worry about climbing some sort of ladder, God will have you where he wants you, for some purpose, and you might not know it. The church itself finds favour, doesn't it? It has its ups and downs. Let me rewind a little bit before I was born, but say after, say the Victorian era, maybe through the wars after that, and in the 60s, things started to change, then I think that's a fair observation. In the 60s, maybe, then 70s, things started to change for the church in our country. So there was a time when it was respectable to go to church. If you were a churchgoer, that was a good thing. People thought, he's a churchgoer and all. That's what people would say. The churches, up until the 60s, were packed. That's why we have so many churches in Liverpool. There are hundreds and hundreds of churches in Liverpool and virtually all of them were full. The stories of people having to arrive early and, you know, stand outside looking through the window or stand in the corridor or in the hallway and all this. And here we are with our faithful little congregation at New Road and we are wondering, what changed? What changed? Where are they all? Why aren't they in here? So, things seem to be waning for the church, but remember a couple of things to encourage you if you can. We are inclined to always think that our generation is the worst for the church. We would say things like, you know, well, we didn't have this and that and the other back in the day, Friends, we're here today. I don't see anyone stopping us from worshipping. I can go out on any street in Liverpool and stand there with a Bible and start shouting the Gospel all over the place with complete freedom. I won't get arrested. So, we have lots of freedom. We have Christian conferences, we have pastors' conferences, we have all this activity. We have Bibles. Millions and millions of Bibles being sold, translated, going all around the world. So there's a lot, when we think we're in a terminal decline, that's not for you to say. Things are bad in some ways, but good in other ways. And so we don't worry too much about that. What is the purpose? What is the purpose when God lets us, gives us what we've got now? So we have some kind of favour with the world. If anyone tried to break this meeting up, we could phone the police and the unbelievers in the police would come round and arrest those people so that we could carry on our worship. So that means a lot. So why has God given us this space? Well, we could argue that sometimes God gives people a reprieve They've been in a beleaguered situation and God gives them some kind of rest from that. I can think of the 4th century. The Christian church is just experiencing one of the worst persecutions in the history of the world, the Diocletian persecution. And what happens overnight? There's a military victory somewhere on the continent of Europe. Roman emperor, there was two, defeats his competition and becomes the emperor, emperor Constantine, becomes the ruler of the entire Roman empire overnight. And he put his victory down to Christ. He said the other vision, don't ask me if this was God, let's say maybe God gave him the hallucination, but he saw something, he saw a cross in the sky or something. The point is, he put his victory down to Jesus Christ, and he said that he's lifting all persecution from the Roman Empire, and apart from a few sporadic outbreaks, that persecution ended, viewed in a bigger timescale, it ended overnight. And that can happen. That can happen. God can say, right, you've had enough time for a break. The church needs a breather. It could also be that God gives us favour so that we can function, so that we can get specific things done that you can't do in times of persecution. I've said that we are spreading the gospel all around the world, out of Britain, not only Britain, including Britain, that are Bible translations going out all over the world. We have the wealth to be able to supply tens of millions of pounds worth of the Scriptures in different countries. And so God might be doing it for that. And one more thing, when God gives us this kind of favour and this rest, it just reminds us of his sovereignty. It reminds us of this sovereignty because the world, generally speaking, the world hates Christ. And although that hatred might fluctuate, it's never going away. The world ultimately hates God. And so for us to be in this situation is unnatural. This is unnatural. This peace that we have, this lack of persecution is unnatural. So don't get comfortable, folks, because This is not how it was normally meant to be. And because it's unnatural, we can see God's sovereignty in it as we can in the story of Esther. We are exiles right now, as I said. We are exiles right now, and yet we have the favor of God. As individuals and as a church, we have the favor of God himself because it was God. who elected you from eternity. It was God who, in this council of the Trinity, agreed that the Son would come and take your sins upon himself and accept punishment for your sins. It's not fair, but we're glad he did it. And that's how we see the favour of God towards us. But the word favour in the book of Esther, the favour that Esther found is this exact same word that's said in Hebrew, it's the exact same word that God uses to describe his covenant love towards his people. Favour, love, mercy. Esther, we leave her this week at the right hand of the king, we will come to see that Esther ends up interceding for her people, using her position to intercede, using her authority to intercede for the people. And it's exactly, not exactly, it's similar, it reminds us to how Jesus Christ is at the right hand of God now, and he intercedes every day for us, he uses that authority he has to be heard in a courtroom to heaven and he pleads your cause and as it were reminds God that your sins have been taken on him. So we bless God for his favour. Spurgeon will close this meeting with this, say a part of our meeting with this. He says, say, we need not cover money for we shall always have our God and God is better than gold.