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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hey, welcome back to A Year in the Bible with Daily Grace. I am Shelby and I'm here with Scott. Hey, Shelby, Scott. We've wrapped up Nehemiah and we're walking into the Book of Esther today, which is super exciting. We both really love this book, so it's going to be fun to talk through it for a few episodes. I also just want to shout out the people who are leaving us reviews or comments. Those are super encouraging. We just read one today from earlier in the Old Testament where someone said that our explanations are really helping them understand Jesus as their great high priest and their protection. And I thought that was so cool. Maybe those are words that you've like seen in the Old Testament before, but you weren't sure how they actually applied to you. And so if you're learning something, we'd love for you to do the same. Just leave a review or a comment, let us know what you're learning. That is so encouraging to us. But Scott, the Book of Esther jumping in, so excited. We. What do we need to know? Just kind of in general as we begin this book.
- [01:02]
B
Okay, so you wrote the Daily Grace study on Esther.
- [01:06]
A
Yes.
- [01:07]
B
So you're familiar with this book. You love this book. You know already everything I'm about to say about Esther, but this book is amazing. Like, it might be the most just all around exciting book in the Bible. Like it, it feels like a movie. It feels just very fast paced. There's a lot of irony and humor. There's a lot of dramatic reversals or you get the, the righteous being exalted and the wicked punished. But to kind of just set the scene so, you know, Babylon had conquered southern kingdom of Judah, taken its population to exile. Persia a few decades later conquers Babylon and allows many Jewish people to return home to Jerusalem. And so, you know, but some, a lot of Jews did stay in exile and that's where we find ourselves in the Book of Esther. This is the story of a group of Jews living in one of the capital cities of the empire in Susa. And it takes place several decades after Persia allowed the first Jews to return home. Probably a little bit before Ezra, Nehemiah, those events. But that's kind of a little bit of the setting here. There's really four big characters in this book. You've got the Persian king Xerxes. Some translations call him, ah, source. I'm going to stick with Xerxes. It's a little easier to say. Yeah, so he's the king. You've got Haman, who is a Non Persian, very high ranking official. He's going to be the main antagonist here. You've got Mordecai, who is a Jew, and then Esther, who's Mordecai's cousin. Interestingly though, there's one character who does not seem to be present in this
- [02:37]
A
book, who is God, of course, which, yeah, is really interesting for a book in the Bible to never mention God in his name.
- [02:47]
B
Yes, he's never mentioned, which is so interesting. However, I think the author very much intends for us to see his hand at work. And that's another feature I love about this book is like a lot of stuff seems to like just happen. Like there's a lot of coincidences, things that like if you're, if I read this in a novel, I'd kind of roll my eyes and be like, well that was sure convenient that it happened. But a lot of just coincidences. But you know, truth is stranger than fiction sometimes. So yeah, it's just an all around, very exciting, thrilling read.
- [03:16]
A
Yeah, it is. And it's going to highlight God's sovereignty in incredible ways. So let's go ahead and get into today's chapters. We're looking at Esther 1 through what's happening in these chapters, Scott.
- [03:28]
B
All starts with a party. So King Xerxes wants to throw himself a celebration of his greatness. Starts drinking as you do at a party like this, I guess. And in his drunken state he demands that his queen Vash Vashti just parade herself in front of his men. And she's like, no, not doing that. So she commits the unspeakable crime, so to speak, of making the king look very foolish. So he gets rid of her, deposes her, which kind of sets the stage for the story. And right away we start seeing some of those coincidences that I mentioned. So Xerxes goes on the hunt for a brand new queen to replace Vashti, which leads to this beauty pageant in chapter two. One of the women as a candidate that's taken to replace Vashti just happens to be this Jewish woman named Esther. Of all the women that Xerxes meets, he just happens to choose Esther to be his new queen. And then at the end of chapter two, we get this brief scene where again, a coincidence, Mordecai, her Esther's cousin, just kind of happens to be in the right place at the right time to hear about this plot to assassinate King Xerxes. And so he hears this, he tells Esther, who is now the queen, about this, she tells the king and the plot is foiled and it's actually written down in the king's records that Mordecai brought this to their important point to remember for later. It's going to be really, really important later. Yeah.
- [04:53]
A
Okay, so we talked about four characters in this book. We've seen Xerxes, Mordecai and Esther so far. But Haman, who's pretty, pretty important figure in this book, where's he at?
- [05:03]
B
Yeah, so he gets introduced in chapter three, and that's where we get the central conflicts of the book. So Haman is exalted by Xerxes to this really, really high position. So he's very, very important, and he loves that he's important. But one person in particular will not bow down to him, and that's Mordecai the Jew. And so this enrages Haman. And when he learns that Mordecai is a Jew, he kind of sets in motion this plan to kill not just Mordecai, but all of the Jewish people throughout the Persian Empire and then to plunder all of their possessions. And the king just allows him to set this day for this to happen. And so, you know, three chapters in, we've got this massive, massive problem for God's people being at the risk of extermination throughout all the Persian Empire. But I think what we also see in this chapter is that God's kind of carefully been moving the pieces on the chessboard. You know, it may seem like he's in danger, but he knows exactly what he's doing. He's putting all the right people in the right place so that, as we'll see, God's people will be protected.
- [06:02]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to walk through the rest of this book. You know, I think one of my takeaways for this, reading the first few chapters of Esther, particularly as a woman, can be difficult because you see women who really don't have power, and you see King Xerxes in kind of his company, extorting women or having all this control over women. Something that's always been really helpful for me is to say, yeah, there's some things happening here that are injustices that probably shouldn't be happening. But when I look at King Xerxes and his, you know, failures and flaws, I'm reminded that, like, I have a better king in King Jesus. And so where Xerxes uses people, Jesus cares for people and even gave his life for his people. And so I've often just. It can be difficult or uncomfortable to read some of these things that happen in the first three chapters. And I think looking at that and saying, yes, that is uncomfortable, and that is wrong. But the king who is the ultimate king, who is ultimately sovereign, which we're gonna see throughout the book of Esther, is a good king who cares for his people and gave his life for them. So I'm excited to move out through Esther, and we're gonna have so much fun walking through this book together, so. Great. Okay. We'll talk about more tomorrow.