Surprise

I think about images from concentration camps during the Holocaust, or images of Emmett

Till at his funeral, or of that little Syrian boy lying face down on the beach of the Mediterranean,

and these types of images that you just see and ask, where in the world is God?

There's one image in particular, though, that has stuck with me for a few years.

The first time I saw this image was in a documentary, a film called The Salt of the Earth,

which chronicles the career of a famous photojournalist by the name of Sebastial Salgado.

And Sebastial Salgado, he covered the front lines of human suffering for decades.

He captured images to tell the story of suffering people to try to help them, to help the world know what was going on.

So he captured images of workers forced to labor in extreme and dangerous work conditions,

and the countless victims of the countless wars and the refugee crises that resulted from them.

And he worked tirelessly until he covered the Rwandan genocide.

It was this project that broke him.

And so he describes in the documentary a series of photos.

You see pictures, and then he's talking about the pictures.

And in this particular image, it's in the aftermath of the genocide.

Two million refugees fled Rwanda, and they had assembled in a refugee camp in the Goma region in the DRC.

So there's two million of them, and the situation is extreme.

It's really terrible.

Twelve to fifteen thousand are dying every single day from diseases that are preventable, things like cholera.

And there were just too many people to bury by hand.

And so Western governments, I think it was the French government, I don't know what other aid they sent in,

but they provided bulldozers.

And the image that is burned into my mind is a bulldozer with a bucket, and it has a human body in it,

and it's just being dumped into a mass grave and covered with dirt.

I remember the arms and the legs hanging over the bucket.

About this image and this series of images, Salgado says,

everyone should see these images to see how terrible the human species is.

About his experience in Rwanda, he said,

when I left there, I no longer believed in anything.

I no longer believed in any salvation for the human species.

You couldn't survive such a thing.

We didn't deserve to live.

No one deserved to live.

This seems grim, maybe overly pessimistic,

but when I consider the evil and the injustice that I read about,

the images that I see,

maybe, maybe not.

You can pick your poison.

Whether it's the commodification of people and the rise of sex slavery

or systemic racism leading to violence,

leading to women being shot in their own homes and losses of freedom,

or the destruction of the earth fueled by our rampant greed and consumerism,

it's sometimes hard not to see the world as one big wildfire.

And this is just the stuff that we see in the headlines, right?

This isn't taking into account the things that you or I experience on a daily basis.

I wonder what you would add to that list.

When we think about these things, I think it's fair to ask,

where in the world is God?

Is he involved?

Does he care?

Is he good?

As I've thought about it,

I think there are two options for how we can understand God's role in human history.

On the one hand, you have somebody like Martin Luther King,

who famously said that the arc of the moral universe is long.

There will be ups and downs, but it ultimately bends towards justice.

So there's a force guiding history, and that force happens to be a person.

It's God, and he's good, and he's just, and he's loving.

And so we can take heart because we are not alone.

All will be well in the end.

On the other hand, you have somebody like Ta-Nehisi Coates,

who argues that history actually isn't guided by any sense of destiny.

He writes that the moral arc of the universe is bent not towards justice,

but towards chaos, and then is concluded in a box.

Somebody like Coates would say,

there is no God to come to the rescue.

We are forced to fend for ourselves until we die.

And there might be another option, deism,

which is sort of a combination of the two,

that there is a God, but he's not involved,

which functionally is just like Coates' view.

So I wonder which view of history best describes how you see the world this morning.

Maybe it changes every day based on your circumstances,

or maybe you came to church this morning because you're asking these kinds of questions.

And as a church, we believe it's important to wrestle with these hard questions,

to think through them, and to see what the Bible has to say about them.

And I think the book of Esther, the book that we're focusing on in this series,

is a really helpful book to wrestle through some of these hard questions.

It's a story about a people facing genocide,

and God appears to be absent in the story.

God's name is never mentioned.

So as we study Esther, we can ask,

Is the moral arc of the universe bent towards justice,

or is it bent towards chaos?

What role does God play in our lives, in human history,

and what is our role as human beings in the world?

Our chapter, Esther 7, I think will help us to begin to wrap our heads around some of these questions.

We'll learn how God deals with evil and injustice,

and perhaps most surprisingly, uses flawed and imperfect people,

people like Esther, people like you and me, to accomplish his purposes.

So here's my plan for this morning.

I want to summarize chapter 7, summarize our scene,

and then I want to look at how this passage teaches us some things

about the nature of evil and God's justice in the world,

and then lastly, I want to consider how all this points to the greatest surprise in human history.

So first, we're going to summarize the scene.

This is an incredibly dramatic scene.

A lot of things happen.

All of the action up until this point in the story really comes to a head in chapter 7 of Esther.

So I want to rehearse where we've been in case you've missed a few weeks,

or maybe this is your first Sunday.

So recall the opening scene in the book of Esther.

The king of Persia is throwing a banquet,

a lavish feast to show off his wealth and his power,

and we see that Queen Vashti is deposed because she refuses to be an object of lust for the king and his bros.

So he gets rid of her because she was disobedient,

and to cheer himself up, the king says,

you know, I'm going to throw a beauty contest.

And so he gathers all of the virgins around the Persian Empire

and tries to see which one of them will please him the most.

That woman will be queen, or that girl will be queen.

As the story goes on, we see that Esther, this undercover Jew,

just so happens to become queen.

And in becoming queen, she becomes the queen of the most,

the mightiest empire in the world, the Persian Empire.

And then Mordecai, her adoptive father,

as the story goes on, disrespects the wrong guy.

If you remember, he refuses to bow down to Haman.

We don't know why, but he doesn't.

And Haman happens to be the second most powerful person in the whole kingdom,

and not honoring him was an offense worthy of death.

Haman was enraged that Mordecai didn't honor him and respect him,

and so he decides he's going to manipulate the king.

And he manipulates the king to issue an irrevocable edict with instructions

to destroy, to kill, and just in case we're not clear,

to annihilate all of the Jews.

And they end up casting lots to find out,

to determine what the execution date would be,

and it would be 11 months from now.

They'd have to wait 11 months for the final solution.

While all this is going on,

Queen Esther decides to step up to the plate,

and in this moment, she becomes the queen.

And she risks her life to save her people,

and she shows herself to be a brilliant political strategist.

She hatches a plan.

She throws two banquets in order to have a big setup,

to butter up the king so that she can present her request to save her people,

and to thwart Haman and his evil plans.

While all this is happening,

Haman has no idea what's going on,

and he's feeling pretty good about himself,

because he and he alone was a guest of honor invited to the queen's banquet for the king.

And as he's going home, after he gets this wonderful invitation,

he's going home to tell his friends and family how amazing and successful he is,

and as he's walking home,

he just so happens to see Mordecai,

this man that he hates.

And he thinks he just hates seeing Mordecai's face so much

that he can't wait 11 months to kill him,

so he decides to build a gallows,

a 75-foot spike,

and he puts it in his front yard,

and he's going to kill Mordecai on that.

And as we see in the story,

it's all fun and games

until somebody builds a 75-foot spike to kill God's people.

Things begin to turn for Haman at this point,

and he's publicly humiliated twice.

A couple weeks ago,

Tommy preached on what might be the funniest passage in the scriptures.

There's a comical turn.

He approaches the king

and wants to get permission to hang Mordecai on the spike,

and in so doing,

the king decides to have Haman honor Mordecai.

It's a hilarious scene

where he's forced to walk Mordecai on the king's horse

with the king's crown

throughout all the streets of Susa,

saying,

Thus shall it be done to the man

who the king delights to honor.

It would be like the Astros leading the Nats

in the World Series victory parade through D.C.

It just wouldn't happen.

It's ridiculous.

And our chapter is the second public humiliation.

Things are no longer funny.

Things get deadly serious in this chapter.

So that's where we've been,

and we're going to pick up

in the second banquet in chapter 7.

So there's a lot of wine being drank,

drunk, I never know how to say that.

They're drinking a lot of wine at this feast.

Wine is mentioned three times in this story.

So the queen is whining and dining the king and Haman.

King Ahasuerus is feeling pretty good,

and so again he asks his queen,

What is your request, my queen?

And this is the moment that she's been waiting for.

But the situation is fraught.

It's a really complicated situation.

She needs to highlight the horrors of the king's edict

and accuse Haman,

while at the same time doing this

without implicating the king who himself made the edict.

And she shows off her political savvy.

She pulls a play from the playbook of Nathan the prophet,

if you remember this, from 2 Samuel,

when he accused the king of adultery and murder.

Nathan the prophet told a story

to circumvent the king's defenses.

And he aroused King David's indignation

and his resolve to fix the injustice

without initially revealing that David was the person guilty.

And then there's the big reveal,

where he says,

You are the man.

So Esther does something similar here.

She skirts the king's defense mechanisms,

and she appeals to him

by showing how her situation

actually just affects him negatively.

The king is enraged at the injustice,

and he wants to fix it.

This is what Esther says.

For we have been sold,

I and my people,

to be destroyed,

to be killed,

to be annihilated.

She's talking about the edict.

If we had been sold merely as slaves,

I would have been silent,

for our affliction is not to be compared

with the loss to the king.

Then King Ahasuer said to Queen Esther,

Who is he and where is he who has dared to do this?

One of the commentaries describes this sentence.

It's sort of lost in translation,

but if you read this quickly in the Hebrew,

it sounds like machine gun fire.

So he's very angry.

And Esther says,

this is the big reveal,

A foe and an enemy,

the wicked Haman,

he is the man.

And Haman, understandably,

was terrified before the king and the queen.

And immediately the king gets up,

he leaves,

he's pretty drunk,

he's pretty angry,

and now he's pretty confused.

He just heard several alarming things all at once.

It's the kind of news that servers you up real quick.

He learns his queen is Jewish,

and that the destruction of the Jews,

which he himself decreed,

meant that he would lose another queen,

which he didn't want to lose.

He also learns that his most trusted leader,

his number two guy,

Haman,

has been playing him.

He manipulated him

and orchestrated his queen's death,

and not only the death of the queen,

but Mordecai,

the man that he just publicly honored

through the streets of Susa.

And so I want us to appreciate the conundrum

that King Ahasuerus is in.

It really is complicated.

If he decides to punish Haman,

he'll appear foolish and weak before his kingdom.

They'll see that he's been a puppet,

Haman's puppet,

all along.

And if he doesn't punish Haman,

he'll have to kill the queen

and kill Mordecai,

and again appear foolish.

After having honored him,

he'll have to kill the man he publicly honored

and will look like a fool.

So it's complicated,

so he just says,

T, I gotta go outside,

I need to think this through,

I need to process what I'm going to do.

Meanwhile,

Haman stays inside

and is pleading for his life.

And note who he speaks to

when he's pleading for his life.

He doesn't go outside with the king,

he talks to Queen Esther,

because Queen Esther really is the boss.

The king returns,

and I have no idea what his plan was, right?

I don't know how you solve the situation,

but Haman does him a favor.

When the king returns,

Haman seems to fall down on the couch

where Esther is seated.

We don't know what happened.

I don't think he was trying to assault her or something.

He was pretty drunk, remember,

so he was just begging for his life.

And he falls down,

and as soon as the king sees that,

the problem is solved for him.

An assault on the queen is worthy of death.

And so the king says,

Will he even assault the queen in my presence,

in my own house?

And as the word left the mouth of the king,

this is terrifying,

they cover Haman's face.

It's like something out of a spy movie

with a black bag over your face.

It's terrifying.

And as this is happening,

one of the king's eunuchs interjects and says,

Well, you know,

there just so happens to be

a pretty decent tool for execution

in Mordecai's front yard,

the 75-foot spike,

and so the king says,

Perfect.

Let's hang him on that.

And so Mordecai is impaled on the spike,

meant,

Haman is impaled on the spike,

meant for Mordecai,

and the king's wrath is abated.

It's an amazing scene.

What I want to do now

is draw out a few things

about the nature of evil

and God's justice

that we learn from this passage.

So first, the nature of evil.

We see in this passage

and other places of Scripture

that evil is self-deceptive

and it's always bent

towards its own destruction.

So evil is self-deceptive

and always bent

towards its own destruction.

So evil always tricks evildoers.

Evildoers think that they're justified

in their wicked deeds.

They think that they will never get caught

in their evil schemes.

I think of somebody like Bernie Madoff

in the Ponzi scheme

who in his evil shenanigans

thought he would never get caught.

Haman, in his evil ways,

was fooled.

He thought that with his immense power

and his immense wealth

and his immense influence,

that he could do whatever

he wanted to do,

even oppose God,

and nothing could stop him.

He was deceived by evil,

and if you look,

sort of reading Esther in reverse,

he is constantly weaving

a web of his own destruction.

A real-world example,

another real-world example,

sort of the classic one,

the personification of evil.

I might have chosen

a different example than Hitler,

but there's so many similarities

between Haman and Hitler

with their desire to kill the Jews,

but we see this playing out

in Hitler's life.

He deceived himself

into thinking that his evil plan,

the taking over the world

and the destruction of the Jews,

was so good,

was so unstoppable,

that in his arrogance,

he decided to do a thing

that everyone knows

you shouldn't do,

wage a war on two fronts,

on the east and on the west,

and that led to his destruction,

the destruction of the Third Reich,

and prevented the destruction

of the Jews.

So evil is always self-deceptive

and leads to its own destruction.

The second thing

this passage teaches us

is about how divine justice

works into this,

and I think it works

in a surprising way.

God's justice leverages

the corrosive qualities

of evil against itself.

We saw that in Psalm 7,

which we read this morning.

I'll read it again for us,

and I want you to note

the imagery used

to describe God's justice

and then the surprising way

in which God's justice

is meted out.

So Psalm 7, 12 to 16,

if a man does not repent,

if he remains in his evil ways,

note the imagery,

God will wet his sword,

God will sharpen his sword

to bring justice.

He has bent and readied his bow.

God is depicted as standing there

with a bow ready to fire

these fiery darts

at the evil person.

He has prepared for him

his deadly weapons,

making his arrows fiery shafts.

And there's a surprising turn.

This is how God's justice

works itself out.

Behold, the wicked man

conceives evil

and is pregnant with mischief

and gives birth to lies.

He makes a pit,

digging it out,

and falls into the hole

that he has made.

His mischief returns

upon his own head

and on his own skull

his violence descends.

So God's justice

is depicted as

a bow and arrow

and a sword

and how it plays out

in real time

is we fall into pits

that we've dug

for ourselves.

So sometimes I think

when we do bad things

and evil things

God's going to hit us

with a bus

or something like that.

That's what justice would be.

But that's not the case.

So for instance,

if you're looking at pornography

or things that you shouldn't

be looking at

on the internet,

you're not going to get hit

by a bus.

Most likely,

that's not how God's justice

is going to work itself out.

What you're going to do

is slowly destroy your marriage

or your capacity

to have meaningful relationship.

Likewise,

if you're involved

in immoral practices

at work,

you're not going to be

struck by lightning.

You're probably just going

to lose your job

and maybe your career.

You see,

God's justice

isn't a lightning bolt.

It's a hole we dig

for ourselves.

We see that with Haman.

Haman gets himself

impaled

on a spike

that he himself made.

And so we see

God's justice,

how it relates to evil,

is it judo's evil.

It leverages the weight

and the power

and the strength

of evil

against itself.

Now,

at this point,

I think I need to

qualify this a little bit

and make an important caveat.

We all know,

I don't have to tell you,

that we don't always

get to see

God's justice

working itself out

in the world.

Oftentimes,

it's one of the big themes

of the Psalms

where people are crying

out to God,

why did the wicked

seem to prosper?

Where is God's justice?

You know,

I think of somebody

like Jeffrey Epstein,

this rich and powerful man.

He thought he was

rich and powerful enough

to buy friends

and influence people

so that he could

sexually assault young girls

with impunity

for decades.

And he was imprisoned,

he was caught,

and it looked like

justice was going to be

working itself out.

He would go to trial,

and then he died in prison.

So,

true justice

wasn't really served.

I don't know

what it looks like

in your life

where you've experienced

evil or injustice

and you're still waiting

for God

to bring justice.

Sometimes,

God's justice tarries.

I wish it wasn't the case.

I wish we had

easy answers.

We don't know why

God doesn't meet

justice out

right away.

But the Bible tells us

the math is always the same.

Sometimes,

it just takes a little while

to crunch the numbers.

We need to take

God at his word.

So,

I think of

the promise of judgment

or the warning of judgment

depending on where you are

with regards

to God's judgment.

In Isaiah 13,

this powerful language

says,

wail for the day

of the Lord is near.

Sometimes,

we have to wait

until the final judgment

to see justice play out.

Isaiah writes,

behold,

the day of the Lord comes.

I will punish the world

for its evil

and the wicked

for their iniquity.

I will put an end

to the pomp

of the arrogant

and lay low

the pompous pride

of the ruthless.

We might have to wait

until the final judgment

to see that,

but sometimes,

we do see it play out

in real time

and such is the case

in our chapter

in the story of Esther.

We see this dynamic

of evil

and God's justice

and a number

of surprising reversals

in Esther.

Right?

When Haman

wants to,

goes to the king

to request

to kill Mordecai,

God's justice

works itself out.

He actually

has to honor

Mordecai.

Haman thinks

he's being invited

into a banquet

where he'll be honored

and God's justice

works itself out.

It actually becomes

the place

where he receives

his death sentence.

All of Haman's evil schemes

intended to destroy

the Jews

end up resulting

in the exaltation

of the Jews

to positions of power

and influence

in the mightiest empire

on earth.

We see that evil Haman,

this empowered destroyer,

loses his power

and is himself destroyed.

This is how

God's justice works.

And the most obvious

example is the 75-foot spike

that was built

for Mordecai.

This becomes the place

of Haman's own execution.

The scene is full

of surprises,

but the most surprising

thing, to me at least,

isn't that God

judges Haman.

And this takes us

to our final point

this morning,

how this passage

points to the most

surprising thing

in human history.

The most surprising thing

is not that God

judges evil in this story.

That's what God does.

The most surprising thing

is that he doesn't

judge evil.

God uses Esther.

You see,

divine justice

is a bit like

the laws of nature.

So,

we're not surprised,

like if I drop my pen,

what's it going to do?

It's going to fall

to the ground, right?

That's the gravity

taking over

and doing its thing.

We would be surprised

if when I dropped my pen,

it floated,

right?

It would require

some sort of

outside force

into the system,

some sort of miracle

to prevent the laws

of nature

from doing what

the laws of nature do.

And so it is

with divine justice.

It always works itself out

unless it's disrupted

by some outside force,

by mercy,

or by grace.

When we look at

Esther and Haman,

we see two types

of people.

But the binary

is not good people

and bad people.

Don't get me wrong,

Haman is a devil.

He's the personification

of evil.

But Esther is not

an angel.

She's not evil

in the same way

as Haman is evil.

But she's managed

to arrange her life

with no regard

for God

or his purposes

or the plight

of God's people.

She's insulated.

She's comfortably numb.

She's not an oppressor,

but she's a bystander.

Makes me think

of words

from Kirk Franklin

from a couple weeks ago.

He said,

in the end,

it's not the words

of our enemies

that we'll remember.

It's the silences

of our friends.

Standing by

when evil and injustice

is happening

is different,

but it might not be

better than

being an oppressor.

And the only reason

why Esther herself

isn't eventually impaled

on a spike

of her own making

is because

a force

from outside

of the system

broke in.

God's mercy.

She chooses

to embrace

her Jewish faith,

her Jewish people,

and she becomes

God's chosen instrument

to thwart evil

and to bring

God's justice.

She was worthy

of judgment,

but she becomes

the mouthpiece of God.

She was worthy

of judgment,

but she becomes

God's hands and feet.

And this is why

I think Esther

is such an encouraging book

for me.

God uses flawed

and imperfect people

like Esther

to accomplish

his purposes.

So there are

two types of people.

It's not good people

and bad people.

The two types of people

in the world

are unrepentant sinners

and repentant sinners.

Either we are

living a life

where we'll ultimately

be hung on the gallows

of our own making,

or we allow God

to hang on the gallows

for us.

And by faith,

we become empowered

and commissioned

to participate with him

as citizens

of his kingdom

and become the means

by which he overcomes

evil and injustice

in the world.

We become used

like Esther.

The only reason

why every single one

of us is not doomed

to die on the spike

of our own making

is because Christ,

though he had done

nothing wrong,

like we read about

in our gospel lesson,

he had done nothing wrong,

but he hung on the gallows

for us,

in our place,

taking upon himself

the judgment

we deserve

for our evil.

The greatest surprise

is not that God's justice

defeats evil

and judges sinners,

it's that he extends

mercy in Christ

to redeem sinners.

And then he uses us,

it's amazing,

he uses us

to accomplish

his purposes.

The moral arc

of the universe

is long,

and God uses

redeemed people,

he always has,

to help it bend

towards justice.

So I want to come

full circle this morning.

Remember we asked,

we look at these

terrible images,

we read these terrible

things in the news,

and we ask,

where in the world

is God?

Where is God

in the world?

And the answer is,

2,000 years ago,

the image of the invisible

God walked the earth,

and he hung on the gallows

of our own making.

After he was raised

and ascended

by his spirit,

he's now present

among his people,

a group of repentant,

recovering sinners,

people like us.

remade in his image,

and called to bear

his image in the world,

in the broken world,

to repair it.

Let's pray.

Father, I pray

that we would not

consider Christianity

to be just a thing

where we are made right

with you.

Help us to understand

the fullness of the gospel,

the fullness of what it means

to be a Christian,

to be made right with you,

to be reconciled

so that we can become

reconcilers,

that we can participate

with you in the world

to set the world to rights

as we wait for you

to come fully and finally

to bring heaven to earth.

Help us in this amazing adventure,

this amazing task.

Lord, have mercy.

Amen.

Let's sing the gospel.

Thank you.