We're on our concluding part in our little mini-series on Esther today and we are covering chapters 6 to 10. So again, we'll read selected verses from those chapters to give you an overview of what is happening. So I will read the reference and then do the reading and hopefully you can follow. So we're in Esther 6, first of all, and the first couple of verses says the following. Esther chapter 6, verse 1. On that night, the king could not sleep, and he gave orders to bring the book of memorable deeds, the chronicles, and they were read before the king. And it was found written how Mordecai had told about Big Tharna and Tiresh, two of the king's eunuchs who guarded the threshold. and who had sought to lay hands on King Ahasuerus. Verse 6. Haman came in, and the king said to him, What should be done to the man whom the king delights to honor? And Haman said to himself, Whom would the king delight to honor more than me? Verse 10. Then the king said to Haman, Take the robes and the horse, as you have said, and do so to Mordecai, the Jew, who sits at the king's gate. Leave out nothing that you have mentioned.' So Haman took the robes and the horse, and he dressed Mordecai, and led him through the square of the city, proclaiming before him, Thus shall it be done to the man whom the king delights to honour. Then Mordecai returned to the king's gate, but Haman hurried to his house mourning and with his head covered. Chapter seven, verse one. The king and Haman went in to feast with Queen Esther, and on the second day, as they were drinking wine after the feast, the king again said to Esther, what is your wish, Queen Esther? It shall be granted you. What is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom, it shall be fulfilled. And Queen Esther answered, if I have found favor in your sight, O king, And if it please the King, let my life be granted me for my wish, and my people for my request. For we have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated. If we had been merely sold as slaves, men and women, I would have been silent. For our affliction is not to be compared with the loss to the King.' Then King Ahasuerus said to Queen Esther, Who is he and where is he who has dared to do this? And Esther said, a foe and an enemy, this wicked Haman. Then Haman was terrified before the king and the queen. Verse nine. Then Harbonah, one of the eunuchs in attendance on the king, said, moreover, the gallows that Haman has prepared for Mordecai, whose word, say the king, is standing at Haman's house fifty cubits high. And the king said, hang him on that So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then the wrath of the king abated. Chapter 8, verse 1. On that day, King Ahasuerus gave to Queen Esther the house of Haman, the enemy of the Jews. And Mordecai came before the king, for Esther had told what he was to her. And the king took off his signet ring, which he had taken from Haman, and gave it to Mordecai. And Esther set Mordecai over the house of Haman. Verse 10. And he wrote in the name of King Ahasuerus and sealed it with the king's signet ring. Then he sent the letters by mounted couriers riding on swift horses that were used in the king's service, bred from the royal stud, saying that the king allowed the Jews who were in every city to gather and defend their lives, to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, children and women included, and to plunder their goods. Verse 15. Then Mordecai went out from the presence of the king in royal robes of blue and white, with a great golden crown, and a robe of fine linen and purple, and the city of Susa shouted and rejoiced. The Jews had light and gladness and joy and honor, and in every province and in every city, wherever the king's command and his edict reached, there was gladness and joy among the Jews, a feast and a holiday. And many from the peoples of the country declared themselves Jews for fear that the Jews had fallen on them. Chapter 9, verse 15. who were in Susa gathered also on the 14th day of the month of Adar and they killed 300 men in Susa but they laid no hands on the plunder. Now the rest of the Jews who were in the king's provinces also gathered to defend their lives and got relief from their enemies and killed 75,000 of those who hated them but they laid no hands on the plunder. Verse 22, as the days on which the Jews got relief from their enemies and as the month that had been turned from them, for them, from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday, that they should make them days of feasting and gladness, days for sending gifts of food to one another and gifts to the poor. And we shall leave it there. So we have fairly raced our way through those chapters, but maybe you get an idea. that there has been a great reversal in the story. So, thinking about what we looked at on the previous occasions, well, we know that we have times of blessing from God, and we also know that we have times of trial. But in every case, we get deliverance. Now some Bible commentators would describe it like this, they would say that sometimes God delivers us and sometimes he doesn't. What they mean is, under persecution, God might give us a rescue, allow us to carry on living, or we might end up on the gallows. I would still count that as a deliverance. Because if God deems it that we should be taken out of this world, it is still a kind of deliverance. In fact, you would say it was maybe a better deliverance than one which allowed us to continue to live on this earth. So I think I prefer to describe it in this way, that God always, always delivers his people from their trials one way or another. So we have this great reversal taking place. We left it last time with an edict had gone out to commit this act of genocide against the Jews. and gallows had been built. What it looked like, humanly speaking, was that there'd be this mass slaughter, the Jews would be pretty much wiped out, then Mordecai would be stuck on the gallows and then it would be time to expose the Queen as a Jew and have her replaced and perhaps assassinated. That's what it was looking like. Instead, we see this great reversal. And today I would like to briefly look at these two men, Haman and Mordecai, as representatives, by which I mean the Haman, if you like, could be thought to represent the enemies of God, and Mordecai, the people of God. And first then I want to look at Haman and describe his ruin, his downfall and his eventual absolute ruin. So we heard how in this great reversal, we heard how all the enemies of God were killed. A few hundred here, a few hundred there, but this territory, remember, stretched from India a huge Persian empire and therefore when it was totaled up there was around 75,000 enemies of God killed. But Haman, Haman's end was far more symbolic far more final than any of those people. And so let's think about the aspects of his fall from this position as the most powerful administrator in the empire, in the kingdom. And his fall pretty much overnight, well, literally overnight. So the first aspect of the fall of Haman was Mordecai's honour and so we maybe skipped over this but in Esther chapter 6 Haman walks in and the king says he wants to honour someone. What should we do for such a man? And Haman was so arrogant that he assumed the king was talking about him. So what would you do? Well you would pile it on. He would say, well, if it was me, I'd give him a yacht and a sports car, you know, because he thought it was coming his way. And he didn't realize that he was making it worse for himself. Haman said to the king, chapter six, verse seven, for the man whom the king delights to honor, let royal robes be brought, which the king has worn, and the horse that the king has ridden, and on whose head a royal crown is set, and let the robes and the horse, hand over to one of the king's most noble officials. Let them dress the man whom the king delights to honor. Let them lead him on the horse to the square of the city, proclaiming before him, thus shall it be done for the man whom the king delights. And then the king said to Haman, honey, do all that for Mordecai. So this is part of that downfall, the absolute humiliation of Haman. in having to publicly honour a man who he had planned to kill. It gets worse, he goes home crying. Previously when he went home crying to his wife, the evil woman and his friends came up with the idea of building the gallows and so this time what happens The wife has given up on him. The wife has given up on Haman. Chapter 6 and verse 13 says, he told his wife Zeresh and all his friends everything that had happened. Then his wise men and his wife said to him, if Mordecai before whom you have begun to fall is of the Jewish people. You will not overcome him, but you will surely fall before him. So thanks, love, for that. That's a, you know, positive outlook there. So his wife has given up on him. So he goes home thinking at least my wife and friends will be on my side and they'll help me. No. The wife knows it's the end. The next thing is he's identified as the culprit who's schemed to kill the Jews. Now remember Ahasuerus had put his endorsement on this plan to wipe the Jews out. That's what the kind of man he was. Haman says, there's these troublesome people there, they're a nuisance. And Ahasuerus says, well, just kill them. Yeah, go on, you can kill them all and steal all their goods. And now Esther is saying, there's this enemy who wants to kill me and my people. He's outraged. Suddenly maybe got a moral compass again. And Esther points out Haman. The king says, who is this individual? It's Haman, that wicked Haman over there. So now you can see Esther's courage is really rising dramatically and her wisdom in handling this situation. Surely we can see in Esther someone who is wise as a serpent and dare I say harmless as a dove as well. But her courage and her wisdom are rising. And so now Haman, having just walked through, plans to kill Mordecai still in his head now, he falls on Esther on the couch, begging for mercy. So we see that in itself as part of the reversal. A person who he wanted to kill, he's now begging her for mercy. But that very act, that very act of seeking mercy, was part of the evidence used against him. Because that, in the eyes of the king, turned out to be a sexual assault. So, you know, Hasuerus was wrong to jump to that conclusion. But, you know, he was already mad at Haman. He says, and now he comes in and he's trying to, you know, have his way with my wife as well. So Hasuerus, not being a thinking type of man or a just man, he decides this man needs to die. One of the, what do you call them, eunuchs, one of the assistants of the king, says to the king helpfully, did you know actually there's a gallows right outside, just down the road, just ready, just, it's already prepared. And so the fact that the gallows was immediately available sealed Haman's fate because had there been a delay of a few days, who knows, maybe Ahasuerus would change his mind. And the fact that it was there was providential, you know, and so there he was. I will just throw this in for your interest. It's uncertain. The word gallows, it can mean different things, so we have to pick one. depending on who the translator is, he picks one that he thinks fits the best. It's not important. It's not important if they swung on a rope. Heyman was dangling off the end of the rope or something else, but many believe that the most likely method for killing was rather a large spike. Because these people loved to impale people. That was their favourite. You know, that was the one they really liked. They liked to impale people on spikes. So, like I say, it's not important, but there's the possibility there that Haman is impaled on a spike. High up for everyone to see. Well... That's another part of the downfall, the public display. So here Haman is on show, dead on the top of this gallows, this pole, and he's publicly humiliated. Now, really his whole downfall is a warning to those who would oppose God. In this life or the next, you will receive your reward for opposing God or his people. You remember that, friends, when we receive opposition on the streets, or giving newspapers out, the opposition you receive, they will have to answer for that. That will be remembered. Their opposition will be recorded in the mind of God, and it will be brought to them at the judgment. Every act of opposition, because you touch us, you're trying to harm Jesus. That's the way it is. So, Well, what else? To just end it all, the sons of Haman. The sons of Haman were killed in the great opposition. So his sons would have been those who took part in the attack on the Jews. And, well, the edict had gone out. The king couldn't reverse his first edict. He couldn't reverse it. He couldn't say, no, I've changed my mind. He would look weak. So he has to add to it. by saying, OK, well, we have to leave the kill all the Jews thing. But what we'll do, we'll add to it by saying, another edict is the Jews can defend themselves by killing people who try to kill them. And in all this, the 10 sons of Haman, he loved those sons. He was proud of having this large family of sons. and they were killed in battle. And then, just to draw a final line underneath it all, the sons met the same fate as Haman. Their dead bodies hanged or spiked, impaled for all to see. That was Haman's lineage. That was his family line. Ended. You see how utterly complete his ruin was? compared that to Mordecai. Haman's complete ruin, we compare that to Mordecai's complete exaltation, complete honour. Now in the same way we might say that the Jews were saved, the Jews were saved from that slaughter. But Mordecai was not only saved, he serves as a picture of something else, some level of honour exceeding that. His life was not just spared, he was exalted. And again we'll look at how he was exalted. And it started with something as simple as this. The king, like everyone here, the king occasionally would not be able to sleep. That's common enough. On this one particular night, the king simply couldn't sleep, got fed up, decided, I'm bored lying in bed, I'm going to get up and do something. That's understandable. He decides to have these books read. There's this book and it contains records of battles and significant events in the empire, in the king's life and rule. And so they're sitting there and they're reading this book to him. The next day, there was a plot uncovered against the king and an assassination attempt and they were saved by this man, Mordecai, who sort of grasped them up and saved the king's life. And the king says, why was nothing done about this? Was he honoured? Was he rewarded? And they would have said, well, no. He was just mentioned in the book. He didn't really get proper thanks. So the king said, well, that's wrong. Let's do something about that. And he honours him. So Haman is first of all remembered, and then he's publicly honoured. He's publicly honored, he's raised up to this position, he's honored by the king. The king even takes his ring off, just like the similar story with Joseph, when the pharaoh took his ring off and gave it to Joseph. It's a really big indication of conferring of honor on the person. That ring was taken from Haman. and then give him to Mordecai. What a reversal. And he gets this high office then it says in chapter 9 verse 4. Mordecai was great in the king's house and his fame spread throughout all the provinces. For the man Mordecai grew more and more powerful. Also we've got in Esther chapter 10 verse 2, and all the acts of his power and might and all the full account of the high honor of Mordecai to which the king advanced in, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia? We don't have that anymore. For Mordecai the Jew was second in rank to King Ahasuerus and he was great among the Jews, popular with the multitudes of his brothers, for he sought the welfare of his people and he spoke peace to all his people. What a great reversal. Mordecai, the gallows is there. He's facing being executed and just see how rapidly he is exalted. I thought I would propose to you that we should think about Christ now as our representative. I've suggested that Haman is there as a sort of picture. He's a representative of God's enemies and Mordecai representing God's people. And so I want to think about Christ as our representative. So the first thing to take note of is that we all, by nature, are like Haman. Not righteous. We are by nature like Haman. We are Hamans, every one of us. By nature, we are enemies of God and enemies of God's people. We deserve wrath. We truly deserve wrath. And the only possible way to satisfy justice is for our absolute destruction from the face of God. But what happened to us, brethren, as you know, is that Jesus Christ was crucified. And it says somehow, it says that when Jesus was crucified, we were crucified with him. What does that even mean? In some way, because of the union now that exists between the believer, the repentant believer, and his savior, we are said to have entered into what We are treated as if we were crucified with him. And that's why it is said that the old Paul Forrest is dead and buried. There is now a new person. He looks very much like the old one. He has the same accent, and he has a lot of the same memories. But fundamentally, a different person. And if you think about Haman, it was only when he had been done to death that the anger of the king, remember, was abated and the king was at peace. And in the same way we can think about what happened to Jesus on the cross because that was not a partial, a partial level of suffering, a partial inward destruction if you like, what Jesus encountered on the cross. And nothing less than that would satisfy the justice of God. And it had to go to the very extreme before God in heaven was satisfied and he could rest from his anger, his wrath. The destruction due to us was directed at Jesus Christ instead. What a marvelous savior we have. And so, although like nature, we are like Haman, we might say that in Christ now, we are more like Mordecai. We found favor in the eyes of God. Like I prayed earlier, it was nothing to do with God seeing good in us. It wasn't because we were better behaved. Just pure grace of God And in the same way, there was a reversal for Jesus, you might say, an ignominious death and then put in a hole in the mountains and covered with a stone, ostensibly left to rot like everyone else, just turned to bones. That was what it looked like outwardly. But we praise God that Jesus was raised from the dead and he strode out of that tomb by himself and he raised himself up And in the same way, because of our union with Christ, we are said to be raised with him. We are said to have already been, in one sense, resurrected to new life. it's fair to say that in the scriptures we too are described as even now being exalted, we are said to sit in heavenly places even now. And this is just a token of what is to come. So you can see then that as Haman pictures for us what should have been our just desserts, Mordecai pictures what instead We're sat now in heavenly places. We have the Holy Spirit. We have the Holy Spirit's fruit, which includes things like peace. Is peace not a wonderful thing to have? And we have hope. We have hope in God. We have been exalted, like Mordecai, exalted to a place that is only exceeded by the king himself. The Bible incredibly says that we are heirs of God. me with fear almost, but that's what the scripture is saying, we are joint heirs with Christ, that's what it says. Sure in this life we have trials, as I mentioned last week, we have trials. 1 Peter chapter 5 and verse 10, Peter encourages the saints like this, he says, after you have suffered a little while, because you will, after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen and establish you. And as if the joys of this world that we are able to experience, the joys of this Christian walk, It was not enough we have a promise of resurrection to eternal life. Resurrection to eternal life awaiting us. And no matter what happens, no matter what they do to us, they cannot take that away from us. And we will meet again. We meet again in that new place. And we will enjoy fellowship, which exceeds what we can experience even now. Fellowship. being with Christ. I quoted from a book last week, a book I've been reading on Esther, well I've read, and I thought I would quote this guy again. He says, we, like God's people, are aliens and exiles, and we, like them, may face unreasonable and erratic persecution. We read Esther as we read our newspapers and see and hear our news of our world, trying to find God. We live in Esther's time, and God appears hidden, but is active. He seems unseen, but is powerful. He's often unnamed, but he's always effective. We must learn to trust God's sovereign, providential care, even if we see no evidence of it at the time. Providence. If sovereignty is to do with God's power and authority to rule this universe, we might say then that Providence describes his active government of his world. Providence. The festival that the Jews initiated following this great victory was called Purim. I'm not sure if they still recognise that today, the Jews, what it is that they do. So there's the celebration of Purim. And Purim comes from the word Pur or pure, if you like. And that word describes the casting of lots. So that's a very strange thing. Very, very strange thing to name a festival after the casting of lots. Which casting of lots? Well, the only mention here Sir Haman and all his fellow wizards throwing dice to decide on the day of the slaughter. They did that and the day of the slaughter for the Jews became a day of slaughter for God's enemies instead, completely reversed. And it seems that they wanted to say that this is the festival to remind people that as these enemies of God were rolling their dice to see what the heavens would have in store, God was in control. Remember that Proverbs verse? You cast your lots, but the outcome is of God. The name of the festival tells us about God's providence. We've seen in this very rapid race through Esther, we've seen coincidences, and I've said that coincidences are markers for us, markers for us to see God's hand. You know, think about from the beginning, Esther just happens to find favor among all those women. She happens to be the one who finds favor. She happens to be Jewish. We said Mordecai just happened to be in this place where we overheard a conspiracy conversation. It just so happened that the month of the slaughter was set so far ahead in the future that it gave time for other plans to be carried out. It was, you know, Esther just happened to have approached the king and been accepted. He could have killed her. Haman just happened to be persuaded by his wife to build gallows. Perhaps the turning point in the story, it just so happens that the king one night couldn't sleep. Think about what happened following that. The king just had a sleepless night. It just so happens that when the king was saying, I need to speak to someone about Mordecai. It just so happens that Haman walks through the door and the king says, what should we do to honour the man who I want to honour? It just so happens that Haman was almost on top of Esther, begging for his life as Ahasuerus walked in. It just so happens there was a gallows ready for use. And so Haman came to his end. Providence, friends. The providence of God is active government in this world, whether by natural means or miraculous, whether he is obviously behind it or he hides himself. Providence. I thought it was an interesting connection that because of these series of events which led to the preservation of the Jews across that whole empire, that left us a foundation where the apostles were able to take the gospel to all kinds of different places in the empire and that very act of preservation of those people allowed the gospel to spread and guess what? The gospel eventually spread to Great Britain. to the British Isles, whatever it was then. And one way or another, friends, that is how you are sitting here today, making a profession of faith in Christ, because of the spread of that gospel, which, had the Jews been annihilated, may never have happened. We are, I keep saying this, but, Our final hymn, I'm going through a list, we're on G. Remember? Great is thy faithfulness. And I said, what a coincidence. Well, we're on. Today, the next one on the list is Great Providence of Heaven. Great Providence of Heaven. I assure you that I didn't plan this, but it's an old Welsh hymn. Great Providence of Heaven. Here's the first verse. Great Providence of Heaven, what wonders shine in its profound display of God's desire It guards the dust of the earth, commands the hosts above, fulfills the mighty plan of His great love. Amen. Let's join together now and sing about God's great providence.