So the king and Haman went to dine
with Queen Esther, and on the second day
at the banquet of wine, the king again
said to Esther, What is your petition, Queen
Esther?
It shall be granted you, and what is
your request?
Up to half my kingdom it shall be
done.
Then Queen Esther answered and said, If I
have found favor in your sight, O king,
and if it pleases the king, let my
life be given me at my petition and
my people at my request.
For we have been sold, my people and
I, to be destroyed, to be killed, and
to be annihilated.
Had we been sold as male and female
slaves, I would have held my tongue, although
the enemy could never compensate for the king's
loss.
Then King Ahasuerus answered and said to Queen
Esther, Who is he, and where is he
who would dare presume in his heart to
do such a thing?
And Esther said, The adversary and enemy is
this wicked Haman.
So Haman was terrified before the king and
queen.
Then the king arose in his wrath from
the banquet of wine and went into the
palace garden.
But Haman stood before Queen Esther, pleading for
his life, for he saw that evil was
determined against him by the king.
When the king returned from the palace garden
to the place of the banquet of wine,
Haman had fallen across the couch where Esther
was.
Then the king said, Will he also assault
the queen while I am in the house?
As the word left the king's mouth, they
covered Haman's face.
Now Harbonah, one of the eunuchs, said to
the king, Look, the gallows fifty cubits high
which Haman made for Mordecai, who spoke good
things on the king's behalf, is standing at
the house of Haman.
And the king said, Hang him on it.
So they hanged Haman on the gallows that
he had prepared for Mordecai.
Then the king's wrath subsided.
For the last two nights we've been tracing
the hand of God in Providence, shaping the
events of history and shaping them in behalf
of his people in a very special way.
It's been thrilling to see God working behind
the scenes, although his face was hidden.
He was working behind the scenes and bringing
his people out to their desired end.
Now tonight I'd just like to start at
the beginning of the book again and just
draw out some spiritual lessons.
First let me say that Waldworth comments that
this book has all the marks of great
literature.
In addition to being the inspired word of
God, it has all the marks of great
literature.
Conflict, antagonism, irony, tension, and it's wonderful how
they're all woven together.
And J.
G.
Bellet speaks of the wonderful interweaving of circumstances
which we get in this history.
There's plot and under plot, wheels within wheels,
circumstances hanging upon circumstances, all formed together to
work out the wonderful plans of God.
Well spoken, Mr. Bellet.
The book begins in rather a prosaic way.
Now it came to pass.
You know, the day started like a lot
of other days, and there was no intimation
when the day started of the momentous events
that were going to occur in the days
that followed.
To me, that's one of the thrilling things
about the Christian life.
You don't know on any particular day the
tremendous things that are going to take place
as a result of something on that day.
You've come to this conference.
There's no way of measuring the results of
a conference like this.
Maybe you've come seeking the guidance of God,
and some chance remark by some fellow missionary
has rung a bell in your mind.
You never know.
God is able to do that.
Some of you have come saddened and perplexed,
and some verse of Scripture might have come
home to you in power.
Some have been seeking the direction of God
in their lives, perhaps, and God has been
working.
It's really exciting to me to think of
that in connection with the Christian life.
You just never know when the dawn comes,
the wonderful things that God has prepared, or
that might even just begin at a time
like that, the auspicious events that might be
involved.
This tremendous potential in every day for God,
isn't there?
Now, Esther and Mordecai that day, what would
you say?
They were nobody's, you know?
I mean, they certainly weren't heroes and heroines,
were they that day?
He was just an obscure Jewish maiden, and
he was out there in the court of
the king's palace.
Well, you might think yourself to be a
nobody, and you might think your life to
be very mundane, and probably Mordecai and Esther
did.
But what do you think they think in
retrospect?
When they look back over the history, it's
a different story.
Francis Schaeffer says there are no nobodies with
God.
That's true.
Every one of God's people is important.
Gray, in his elegy written in the country
churchyard, speaks those sad lines, full many a
flower is born to bloom unseen and waste
its fragrance on the desert air.
But that isn't true with God's people.
That isn't with God's people.
There's no wasted fragrance as far as he
is concerned.
Then, of course, we have this feast that
he threw, tremendous feast, and the way he
treated his wife.
How should a man treat his wife?
Is this the way a man should treat
his wife?
Well, I'll tell you, he should treat his
wife like a lady.
I think most wives want that more than
almost anything else.
They want to be treated like a lady.
I often think of that pastor of the
Scotts Memorial Church in San Diego.
One Sunday morning, he drove up to the
front of the church, you know, and the
people were all milling there and moving into
the church building itself, and he pulled up
into his parking space there at the front
of the church, and he jumped out of
the car, and he ran into the church.
I mean, he was thinking of the message
and of the souls that were at stake,
and he was preoccupied.
So his wife just sat in the car,
and after a while, he tumbled.
He realized what was happening, and he went
out, and all the people looking, he opened
the door for his wife to get out.
That night, at the end of a tremendously
busy day, they drove home, and they didn't
have an electric garage door opener, an automatic
opener.
He drove into the driveway, and she jumped
out and opened the door for him, but
there was nobody looking.
It made a difference, didn't it?
She was glad to do this.
She knew he was tired there at the
end of the day, and she was glad
to take that place of a servant for
him.
Men should treat their wives like a lady.
The best thing we saw had to suffer
for righteousness' sake, and she wasn't the last
woman who had to do this either, and
it makes us think of the words of
Peter, for this is commendable if because of
conscience toward God, one endures grief, suffering wrongfully.
For what credit is it when you're beaten
for your faults if you take it patiently,
but when you do good and suffer for
it, if you take it patiently, this is
commendable before God.
And we saw how that in the purposes
of God, Vashti had to go in order
that Esther might be on the throne, but
even so, I think Vashti's name is memorialized
in this book because of what she did
and in a favorable way.
And God overruled the wickedness of Ahasuerus to
bring it all about.
A man plans his ways, but the Lord
directs his steps.
I'm fascinated in chapter 2 by the ceremonial
purification process.
It talks about ointments, and it talks about
spices, and it talks about cosmetics and apparel
and adornments and jewels.
And of course it's easy for us to
make applications.
We think right away of 1 Timothy 2,
verses 9 and 10, applying to the sisters
and like men are also that the women
adorn themselves in modest apparel with propriety and
moderation, not with braided hair or gold or
pearls or costly clothing, but which is proper
for women professing godliness with good work.
Or 1 Peter 3, 3 and 4, do
not let your beauty be that outward adorning
or arranging the hair or wearing gold or
putting on fine apparel, but let it be
the hidden person of the heart with the
incorruptible ornament of a gentle and quiet spirit,
which is very precious in the sight of
God.
But I'd like to suggest that it has
an application for more than the sisters has
for the men as well.
Why?
Because lifetime is training time for reigning time,
and God is seeking to prepare us all
for that day when we'll enter the palace
of the king and see him in his
beauty.
I remember some years ago, Queen Elizabeth was
going to cross the Atlantic.
She was much younger, and she was going
to fly across the Atlantic.
And there was an article describing the course
of training that the flight attendants had to
go through.
They had to be schooled in behavior before
the queen.
They had to be schooled in protocol.
They had to be schooled in courtesy.
And really, it was a very elaborate training
program just to fly across the Atlantic with
the queen of Great Britain.
But dear friends, we have something much greater
than that in prospect, don't we?
Haggai's charm school reminds us that God is
preparing us in a beauty school.
God is seeking to conform us all to
the likeness of his son.
He wants to remove all the warts and
moles and spiritual pimples and wrinkles, doesn't he?
Spiritual pimples and wrinkles.
And it's really marvelous when you stop to
think of it.
At the end of the training course, when
we stand before the Lord Jesus, it says
Paul, writing to the Ephesians, will be without
spots or wrinkles or any such thing.
And I want to tell you that's a
marvel of grace.
Nothing short of a marvel of grace that
we should ever be like that.
But you know, it's more glory for God
if we become like that now.
It's going to be automatic when we see
his face.
As soon as we see his face, we'll
be transformed into his image.
I say it's more glory for the Lord
as the process is taking place now.
And that's rather convicting to me, because I
find it very easy to be satisfied with
where I am spiritually.
You know, it's funny, isn't it?
I spoke to the mother, an unsaved mother
of one of our missionaries in Brazil recently,
and she said, she works with the computers,
and she said, every day I try to
learn a new command on my computer.
Very good.
She said, Germanly, every day I try to
learn a new command on my computer.
And I thought, boy, there's a spiritual lesson
for me in that.
And I exercise before the Lord every day
about some aspect of my character that needs
to be changed.
Satisfaction is the grave of progress, isn't it?
And if I'm satisfied with where I am
spiritually, I'm not going to make any progress.
And God wants me to be moving forward
for him.
And becoming more like the Lord Jesus.
I think I told many of you, we
had an intern a few years ago, dear
Rob Luce, and he contracted melanoma, and it
was to be fatal, obviously, in his case.
And Rob Luce is a very Christ-like
fellow.
He hadn't been saved very long, but he
had memorized 2,000 verses of Scripture.
And you know, it's marvelous that the verses
of Scripture he memorized were just the verses
he needed for this trial in his life.
And I'll never forget how one day a
visiting nurse came to the house, and she
said to Rob's wife, Donna, Rob makes me
think of Jesus.
And she wasn't a believer.
She said, Rob makes me think of Jesus,
and the interns that come make me think
of the Twelve Disciples.
Well, isn't that wonderful?
Here's a fellow, you know, terminal with cancer,
and he was glorifying the Lord through it
all.
And here an unsaved woman comes into the
house, and she detects the fragrance of Christ
there.
I think that's wonderful.
And we're all in the school of God,
and it requires our exercise, too, that we
might become more and more like the Lord
Jesus Christ.
I say the danger is that we become
satisfied with our spiritual progress, and as long
as we are, we will not be moving
forward for the Lord.
Notice verse 13 of chapter 2.
It says, Thus prepared, each young woman went
to the king, and she was given whatever
she desired to take with her from the
women's quarters to the king's palace.
Every young woman was given whatever she desired
to take to the king's palace.
That raises a question in my mind.
What would you like to take to the
king's palace?
We're going.
Your eyes will see the king in his
beauty.
They'll see a land that's very far off.
What would I like to take to the
king's palace?
A good question, isn't it?
And I can't answer it for you.
Of course, I can't help thinking of the
poem supposedly expressing the words of Samuel Rutherford.
He lived in a town called Anwerth by
the Solway River, and Anne Cousins puts these
words in his mouth in the poem.
Fare Anwerth by the Solway, to me your
ever dear.
E'en from the gates of heaven I
drop for thee a tear.
Oh, if one soul from Anwerth meet me
at God's right hand, my heaven will be
two heavens in Emmanuel's land.
He wanted to take souls with him to
heaven, a noble aspiration.
I leave the question with you tonight.
What would you like to take to the
king's palace?
And be careful, because what you want is
what you'll get.
We determine that in this life.
Then, of course, we had the wonderful story
of how Esther was chosen to be queen
against all normal considerations.
In some ways, she was the most unlikely
to be chosen queen, but God is able
to take the most unlikely and work out
his purposes.
What a Cinderella story, huh?
What a Cinderella story.
It's nothing like yours and mine.
It's nothing like yours and mine, from the
rags of sin to the riches in Christ
Jesus.
There's nothing more wonderful than that.
Sometimes we don't realize just how wonderful it
is.
We think back to what we were under
the condemnation of the law.
Worthless, really, in many respects.
And yet he lifts us from the dungheap
and he sets our feet upon the rock
and establishes our way and puts a song
in our mouth to glorify our God and
destines us to eternal glory.
So when I think of dear Esther, I
think, well, I've got something better than you,
Esther.
You were queen for a short time, and
we're going to be heirs of God and
joint heirs with Jesus Christ for all eternity.
And I think it's wonderful in this story
that she became queen long before her people
needed help.
She had no idea when she became queen,
the tremendous position that she was going to
play in the years ahead.
Isn't God wonderful?
Right now he's working in your life and
he's working in my life.
We don't know.
We can't see ahead.
He doesn't show us the blueprint, but he's
working all things out for his glory and
for our good.
We noticed how Mordecai heard this plot against
the king, and it was just filed away
in the files.
No fuss.
Never made the front page of the paper
at all, probably.
The Shushan Gazette.
Seems a bit unfair, doesn't it?
He certainly wasn't rewarded immediately, but we saw
last night that was a good thing he
wasn't.
It was a very good thing he wasn't
rewarded immediately.
And we mentioned that God keeps good records
and he's going to reward everything.
I like those words.
God is not unjust to forget.
That's beautiful, isn't it?
That's not the whole verse.
God is not unrighteous to forget your work
and labor of love, which you have shown
to his name and that you ministered unto
the saints and do minister.
But just take those first words.
God is not unrighteous or unjust to forget.
He isn't either.
He knew what had been done.
It was written down in his records and
he knows all that you have done too.
Every slightest bit of service for him is
all recorded.
It's all going to be rewarded in a
coming day.
That glass of cold water given in his
name, just think of it.
We don't think much of a glass of
water, do we?
Given in his name, that makes all the
difference and it will receive its reward.
Heaven is the best and safest place to
learn the results of our labor.
Heaven is the best and safest place to
learn the results of our labor.
I like this assurance your heavenly father who
sees in secret will himself reward you openly.
That's delightful, that word himself there.
Your heavenly father who sees in secret will
himself reward you openly.
God knows that it's good for us not
to know all that has been accomplished by
our service, probably give us the big hit
if we did.
And so he just waits it.
He just waits for a better time.
When you read the book, things seem to
be moving awfully quickly, but they don't move
quickly.
Actually, there are years, sometimes five years between
some these chapters.
That's hard, friends.
If you find waiting as hard as I
do, that's tough.
It makes me think of Amy Carmichael's poem,
and I think of this poem really all
the time.
She said, thou art the Lord who slept
upon the pillow.
Thou art the Lord who soothed the furious
sea.
What matter beating wind and tossing billow if
only we are in the ship with thee?
And then she says, keep us in quiet
through the age-long minute.
Have you ever had an age-long minute
in your life?
I have.
Between the time when the doctor says yes,
it's going to require surgery.
But the date will be an age-long
minute.
Keep us in quiet through the age-long
minute when the waves are high and the
wind is shrill.
Can the boat sink when thou, dear Lord,
art in it?
Can the heart sink that waiteth on thy
will?
And Esther had to know something of that
age-long minute, and she had to be
kept in quiet by the grace and mercy
of the Lord himself.
And he was there, and he was doing
it for her.
Of course, all the time now, Satan has
acted behind the scenes just as he is
today, and I think we see it increasingly.
We see his rage against the things of
God more than we've seen in the past.
Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman.
It wasn't just courtesy, it wasn't just obedience
to the king, it was because he was
a Hebrew, and he worshipped the one and
true God.
And his fear of God overcame the fear
of men.
I think we've said before, it really takes
courage to stand against the tide, doesn't it?
And he had it.
And as far as the record is concerned,
he's the only one who was willing to
take that stand.
Faithfulness to the Lord and to the word
of God.
And, you know, sometimes I think that this
is a characteristic that's fast dribbling away from
the Christian community.
Willingness to stand for what's right.
When I was a boy, there was a
girl in our Sunday school, and in the
public school, the teacher assigned all the boys
and girls that they were to memorize the
poem Invictus by William Henley.
It's an atheist poem, it's humanism to the
core.
And they were to come to school and
recite it.
I'll read the poem to you so you'll
know why this girl went to the teacher
and said she couldn't do it.
Henley wrote out of the night that covers
me black as the pit from pole to
pole.
I think whatever God's may be for my
unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have
not winced nor cried aloud under the bloody
under the bludgeoning of chance.
My head is bloody, but unbound beyond this
place of wrath and tears looms but the
horror of the shade.
And yet the menace of years finds and
shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how straight the gate, how
charged with punishment the scroll.
I am the master of my fate.
I am the conqueror of my soul.
And this dear girl prompted at home, went
to the teacher.
She said, I can't recite that.
She refused to do it.
It was in the papers.
It was almost as if she was a
Jehovah's Witness refusing to salute the flag or
something like that.
You know, she wouldn't do it.
I tell you, it takes courage for a
kid in public school in elementary school, doesn't
it?
Take a stand like that.
God has.
Can God get around a situation like that?
Well, he can't.
Somebody came to her and said, you know,
Edith, there's a Christian version of that poem.
It's written by a lady named Dorothy Day.
Why don't you go and ask the teacher
if you can say the Christian version of
the poem?
And so Edith did.
She went back to the public school and
she told the teacher about this.
And the teacher, strangely enough, gave her permission.
And and Edith got up and recited this
poem called My Captain.
Out of the light that dazzles me bright
as the sun from pole to pole, I
thank the God I know to be for
Christ, the conqueror of my soul.
Since his the sway of circumstance, I would
not wince nor cry aloud under the rule
which men call chance.
My head with joy is humbly bowed beyond
this place of sin and tears, that life
with him and his the aid that, despite
the menace of the years, keeps and shall
keep me unafraid.
I have no fear, though straight the gate
he cleared from punishment this world.
Christ is the master of my fate.
Christ is the conqueror of my soul.
But I want to tell you, it was
a great victory for Jesus.
That girl had backbone.
She was no jellyfish.
And God honored her.
I often think of dear Eric Little, 1924
Olympics, Scottish lad who loved the Lord and
who loved his day to the Lord's Day.
And you know how his race came up
on the Lord's Day on Sunday.
He said, I'm sorry, I can't run on
that day.
His attitude was, if you love the Lord,
you love his day too.
And of course, you many of you know
the pressures that were brought up.
You're being disloyal to the empire.
We're depending on you in this race.
And he stood by his guns.
He was a man of conviction, stood by
his guns, and he refused to run.
Well, finally, they made a compromise and they
allowed him to run on a weekday in
a race that he really hadn't particularly trained
for.
It wasn't his meter.
And people who, oh, just as he was
about to run, somebody came and put a
slip of paper in his hand, just as
a race, they were just about to start.
And he put a slip of paper in
his hand, looked down and said, them that
honor me, I will honor.
And he ran in that race.
And the people who observed it said it
was the worst possible performance that could be
made.
His hands were flailing around like a windmill,
you know, and his form just wasn't good
at all.
It broke the world's record, broke the world's
record.
How do you explain that?
God honored him.
And later he was, he died actually in
concentration camp under the Japanese.
But he was still the same Eric, still
the same Eric, a man of conviction and
yet a man of tremendous love showing Christ.
They said that a lot of the business
men that were there in the concentration camp
and even some of the missionaries, there was
conflict and strife and all the rest, but
Eric was still the same.
Tearing up the sheet of his bed to
wind it around a supposed hockey stick so
that the kids could play hockey, that type
of thing.
Wonderful.
If you read Our Daily Bread, you read
an interesting thing recently.
Joe E.
Brown was a top notch movie and Broadway
comedian of the World War II era.
And when he was entertaining some troops out
in the South Pacific, he was asked by
a soldier to tell some dirty jokes.
That wasn't uncommon.
I tell you, during the Second World War,
he responded, son, a comedian like me lives
for applause and laughter, but if telling a
dirty story is the price I must pay
for your laughter, then I'm not interested.
Good, isn't it?
I've never done an act that I couldn't
perform before my mother, and I never will.
The soldiers rocked the jungles with tears, with
cheers.
They just broke out in applause to Joe
E.
Brown.
Thank God for men and women of conviction.
Mordecai gave us a picture of it here
in the Book of Esther, and down through
the centuries, we've had other pictures as well.
Martin Luther.
That's wonderful, wasn't it?
He said, the word of God is not
my word.
I, therefore, cannot abandon it, but in all
things short of that, I'm glad to be
docile and obedient.
You shall have my blood, my life, rather
than a single word of retraction, for it's
better to obey God than man.
It's no fault of mine that this matter
causes confusion among you.
Here I stand.
I can do no other.
God help me.
Amen.
He got a swam along with the tide.
He wasn't willing to do it.
My mother brought me up on the tales
of the Covenanters, men in Scotland years ago
who stood by the word of God and
refused to compromise or retract.
The temper of the people is shown by
the reply of a minister, John Ross, who
was summoned before the king for preaching a
sermon in which he said that the king
was a traitor to God for taking the
part of the wicked.
The king asked him, Will you stand and
bide by all you have spoken?
And Ross replied, The heart thought it.
The mouth spoke it.
The hand subscribed it.
And if need be, by God's grace, the
blood will seal it.
We had a calendar.
I can still see it in the pantry
door of our kitchen there.
There was a picture of one of the
Covenanters who had been and actually his name
was John Brown, and he was fleeing from
Lord Claverhouse, living out in the dens and
caves of the woods.
But he had to come home every once
in a while for clothes and for food.
And one day when he came home, Claverhouse
and his men were there.
And Claverhouse ordered his men to kill John
Brown.
And I think when they looked at him,
they thought they saw the face of an
angel and they couldn't kill him.
But Claverhouse did.
And then he turned to the widow and
he said, What do you think of your
husband now?
And she said, I always thought a great
deal of him, but I never thought more
of him than I do now.
And how the church of the Lord Jesus
Christ needs that spirit today, needs it desperately.
We're more like a herd of plump cows
living in comfortableness, with little conviction on many
things that are of primary importance.
In the days of Caesar, you know, the
population was required to come and just take
a pinch of incense and put it on
the fire and say, Caesar is Lord.
That's all you had to do.
You could put it on and then you
could go and worship whatever God you wanted.
All you had to do was just take
that pinch of incense and put it on
the fire and say, Caesar is Lord.
Did you know what happened?
How many Christians refused to say it.
They would say, Jesus is Lord.
I think that's the best bumper sticker you
can have.
Jesus is Lord.
Men and women that were willing to give
their lives for the truth.
Now, I'd like to ask you a question.
Where does the courage to stand true to
convictions come from?
Is it in the genes?
Where do you think it comes from?
I'd like to suggest it comes from a
certain kind of a mother.
I think it's something that a mother breeds
into her children.
I really do with all my heart.
Think about that for a minute.
Think about that godly mother teaching her children
to stand true to the word of God,
no matter what the consequences may be.
Your responsibility is obedience.
God will take care of the consequences.
It's an interesting thing on the secular book
market now there's a book called A Book
of Virtues by William Bennett.
I'm not trying to sell it.
William Bennett was a former Secretary of Education.
Has anyone here seen the book?
A Book of Virtues?
A few hands are up.
Well, it's a very interesting book.
This man is a Roman Catholic.
He's a man of character, William Bennett.
I think when you see the book you
think, he'd make a good president.
And what he's done is he's collected from
literature, articles, poems, quotations on various virtues that
you'd like to inculcate into your children.
It'd be wonderful to have a book like
that, purely Christian.
He has a lot of Bible stories in
it from Agamars.
He has a lot of Bible stories in
it.
Frankly, the bookstores out our way can't keep
it can't keep it in stock.
Costco, every time I go just for the
fun of it, I go to see if
it's there and it's gone.
It's sold out.
They just cannot keep it in stock.
And here are parents devouring this book and
reading these things to their kids.
But I looked through it and I saw
many, many things that my mother had shared
with us.
How Robert the Bruce was in a cave.
He had lost six battles, you know.
And he's in a cave and the cause
seems doomed.
And all of a sudden he sees a
spider there in the cave.
And the spider is trying to make connection
with its web, you know.
And it falls.
It tries again.
Falls.
Tries six times and falls.
The seventh time he made it.
And Robert the Bruce said, that's it.
I failed six times, the next time I'll
make it.
And he did.
He went on to military victory.
What was she saying to us?
She was saying, don't give up.
Keep on going on.
And she bred that into us.
And this is what William Bennett is trying
to do with this book.
To get back to these, shall we say,
family values.
I guess that's a good word for it.
A sense of morality as well.
And as I say, many of the mothers
out our way are just using the book
and reading it.
There are some things about mythology in it.
And of course Esau's fables, some of them
are in it as well.
But that's all right.
You can use it selectively.
Then we come on to where the lots
were cast to determine the date of the
massacre.
And by a seeming coincidence, the date was
almost a year, nearly a year away.
Even superstition was chained to the divine chariot
wheels.
And that should be an encouragement to everybody
here serving the Lord.
God can chain anything to the accomplishment of
his purposes.
Then, of course, Wicked Haman's proposal to the
king.
The Jews were throughout the realm and they
weren't just a local threat.
And he reasoned that if Mordecai refused to
bow to him, all the Jews would refuse
to bow to him as well.
And he was probably right in that.
He said they don't keep our laws.
He said they're different.
They shouldn't be allowed to remain.
And according to Ray Steadman, he was willing
to contribute 275 tons of silver to bring
it about.
It was 10,000 talents to the king's
treasury, probably from the Jews' confiscated property.
When Haman drew up that decree, he didn't
know that he was masterminding the death of
the queen.
It's incredible, isn't it?
Really incredible.
Whitcomb said this ignorance of one vital fact
proved in God's providence and justice to be
his undoing.
And of course, you can't think of this
without thinking of the whole subject of anti
-Semitism.
Isn't that right?
Anti-Semitism.
Down through the years, people turning against the
Jewish people.
No, I don't think any group has ever
suffered like the Jewish people have.
Lord Jacob, let's see what his name was,
Jacobowitz, he was the former chief rabbi of
Great Britain.
And he was interviewed on TV one night.
And he was asked why the Jews had
been persecuted so greatly down through the generations.
Why do the people hate the Jews so
much?
And you know what he said?
He said, it's dislike of the unlike.
The Jews are different.
That's what he said.
He said, it's dislike of the unlike.
It's because we're different.
It started way back in Egypt, didn't it?
Under Pharaoh.
And then, of course, Babylonian captivity and the
Inquisition and the time of the Maccabees and
Hitler and Saddam Hussein and neo-Nazism in
the world today and the coming tribulation period.
But you know, there's a spiritual application in
this for us, too.
The word holiness really basically means different.
Sanctification means to set apart.
A sanctified people are set apart from the
herd.
So in a sense, they're different.
Holiness means to be to be different.
Peter says that first Peter chapter four, for
they think it's strange that you do not
run with them in the same flood of
dissipation, speaking evil of you.
Get it?
You don't engage in the activities of the
world.
So what do they do?
They speak evil of you.
The dislike of the unlike.
Now, there's a great dislike for Christianity in
the United States today, as you know.
I wish I could say it was because
of holiness.
It should be, but it isn't.
It's because of what people see on television.
It's because of the televangelists, you know, and
some of the monstrous things that they see
and some of the monstrous things that they
hear as well.
Some of it is justified.
I think some of the Christian bashing is
justified.
People being trumpeted as Christians while they're living
like the devil in this country.
It brings reproach on the name of the
Lord Jesus Christ.
I would like to feel that the church
of the Lord Jesus would be in such
a condition.
If you win, you win.
How can you more than win?
Well, I think it's because the victory is
ours before the battle's over.
In that sense, we really are more than
victorious while still in the battle.
I love to see in the book of
Esther that nothing happens by chance for the
child of God.
Nothing is fortuitous.
There's no luck or chance as far as
our relation with God is concerned.
I love to see that although God's may
be hidden, he's still watching over his people.
He guards, guides, and cares for them.
And I think I mentioned Sunday down in
New Jersey.
To me, it is a bomb for my
heart to realize that God couldn't love you
and me more than he's doing at this
very minute.
That's pretty intimate, isn't it?
God couldn't love you and me more than
he loves us right now because he loves
us with the same love that he loves
his son.
Esther, the book of Esther teaches me that
I can't always trace God's hand, but I
can always trust his heart.
I can always trust his heart.
He hasn't made his first mistake yet, and
he never will.
He never will.
I like to see in the book of
Esther that God controls nations as well as
individuals.
He works with nations and deals with nations,
and he makes the wrath of man to
praise him, and what won't praise him, he'll
restrain it.
That's great, isn't it?
I see, as we said before, that we
must stand for convictions.
There are things in the Christian life that
are not negotiable, as E.
W.
Tozer said.
And it brings the question to my mind,
McDonald, for what would you be willing to
die?
Now, I confess tonight I don't have dying
grace, but I really believe if I have
the conviction and the time comes, God will
give me grace for it.
Don't you believe that?
Yeah, no use to look ahead to the
martyrs' fires.
I often think of that bishop in England
who was under pressure to recant, and in
a moment of weakness, he took his pen
in his right hand and he wrote a
recantation.
Was it Latimer?
And then after he had signed the recantation,
he realized what he had done.
He had been unfaithful to Jesus Christ, and
he went to them and he said, My
hand signed it, but my heart wasn't in
it.
And they said, You'll have to die at
the fire.
And he said, You'll have to proceed.
The day of his execution came and the
fire was built, and he went out there
with his hands his hands tied.
And they said, Do you have any last
requests?
And he said, Yes, just please release the
fetters on my hands.
They did.
And he took that right hand that signed
the recantation, and he put it in the
fire.
He wanted it to be the first part
of him to burn.
He said, Perish this unworthy hand.
Perish this unworthy hand.
God gave him grace for it.
You and I don't have it tonight.
God can be trusted.
The Book of Esther tells me that God
can be trusted.
You know, during the war, there was a
widow.
There was a lady, a widow out in
Australia, and she had four sons in the
military.
They were all in the Australian army.
And there was a chaplain there in the
area, and it was his duty to take
the telegrams to the house when the news
came.
And one day, this dear Christian woman, whose
roots were deep in God, she saw the
chaplain coming up the front walk.
At least she knew part of the story.
And she went to the door, and she
opened the door, and she said to him,
Which one?
And he said, he could hardly get the
words out of his mouth.
His chin was quivering.
He could hardly get the words out.
He said, All four.
She said, They all belonged to the Lord.
And he chose to take them.
And they got down on their knees and
prayed.
I'll tell you, that's it, isn't it?
That's it.
God always raises his hand, but you can
trust his heart to do what is right.
We'll try to finish the book tomorrow night,
the will of God.
Shall we pray?
Our Father, we pray that in this day
of flabbiness, to this day of weak spines,
that you'll give us, your people, to stand
for the truth of God, no matter what
the cost may be.
Help us to be true to Jesus, even
though we endure the mockery and persecution of
the world in the process.
We thank you for speaking to our hearts
through this wonderful book of Esther.
And as we continue on, we pray that
you'll unlock its treasures to us.
So we ask it in the Savior's name
and for his sake.
Amen.