Outline:

Introduction

1) The King’s query, vv. 1-2

2) Finally - Queen Esther’s request, vv. 3-4

3) King Xerxes’ raging response, v. 5

4) Haman exposed, vv. 6-8

5) Haman sentenced, vv. 9-10

Conclusion 

Text:

Introduction

Powerful people’s favour is fickle, and this earthly life gets cut short.

Haman the Agagite was the second most powerful person, in the pre-eminent Empire, that history had heretofore seen.

But he lost all he had in a moment, for his awful and unjust opposition to the covenant people of God.

One puff of the cold wind of heaven, and the setting of the sails of the godly to their breeze, and this haughty man Haman was GONE!

Let’s see what we can gather from this story for our help and encouragement, as it comes to us from Esther chapter seven.

1) The King’s query, vv. 1-2

Vv. 1-2 “So the king and Haman went to Queen Esther’s banquet, 2 and as they were drinking wine on the second day, the king again asked, “Queen Esther, what is your petition? It will be given you. What is your request? Even up to half the kingdom, it will be granted.”

This is the big show down chapter … and look how ordinary it appears to be as the chapter gets launched!

Another day of drinking and feasting at the court of King Xerxes!

Same old- same old going on there, then.

Bear in mind, this is a book where the astonishing work of God progresses in the ordinary and the everyday, not by way of writing in the sky.

And it is worked out as God’s people take the opportunity to courageously act.

Which Esther is doing, when along comes Xerxes’ third invitation to QUEEN Esther to state her request … and again it comes with the assurance from the King of a positive and generous response.

This situation … though only one of those present currently knows it … is both delicate and dangerous.

Esther needs to accuse Haman the Agagite without incriminating the King, who had after all accepted Haman’s bung to issue the edict to annihilate the people of God.

Watch how it goes … vv. 3-4

2) Finally - Queen Esther’s request, vv. 3-4

Vv. 3-4 “Then Queen Esther answered, “If I have found favour with you, Your Majesty, and if it pleases you, grant me my life—this is my petition. And spare my people—this is my request. 4 For I and my people have been sold to be destroyed, killed and annihilated. If we had merely been sold as male and female slaves, I would have kept quiet, because no such distress would justify disturbing the king.”

Esther knows full well she needs to incite the King against his closest friend and advisor … without bringing down Xerxes’ wrath on herself.

But once she goes for it this girl really does GO for it!

Now, by way of identifying with the King, Esther structures her petition quite carefully.

When Xerxes invited Esther to make her petition, he did it quite rhetorically and in exactly the same words he used at the previous banquet: ‘What is your petition … what is your request?’

He uses two words to refer to the same thing - do you see that?

It’s important because of what follows.

You see, Esther structures her response to correspond to that format:

‘Grant me my life … this is my petition. And spare my people … this is my request.’

By framing her response using the pattern of the King’s rhetoric, Queen Esther highlights that her life and the life of her people are one and the same.

In other words, her destiny is one piece with her people’s.

This shows great commitment not just to God but also to His people … which is the way it always pans out.

You can’t have God but not His people, because our God is committed to His people.

Esther sees that and for all her human failings is committed to the Lord and to His people.

So having heard for the third time Xerxes’ invitation to make her request, Esther’s going to fill in the background, and then state it.

She does so decisively, with power and passion.

And as she does so she virtually fills in Haman’s grave!

Quoting almost exactly the words of Haman’s edict in Esther 3:13 … but this time using the passive voice … Esther delays mentioning Haman’s name AND the fact that it was the King himself who sold the Jewish people for Haman’s bribe of ten thousand talents of silver!

(Check that out in 3:9 & 11).

Esther has done enough though to light the King’s notorious blue touch-paper! 

v. 4’s got him going: “I and my people have been sold to be destroyed, killed and annihilated.”

3) King Xerxes’ raging response, v. 5

V. 5 “King Xerxes asked Queen Esther, “Who is he? Where is he—the man who has dared to do such a thing?”

Xerxes volatile temper and indignation erupt, with a demand. 

In Hebrew his words sound like a rattle of gunfire.

His HONOUR is offended that someone would attempt to injure his Queen and her people.

The demand rings out that she tell him who and where this guy is.

Did you notice … Esther has QUOTED the death edict, but it meant so little to the monarch that this despot recognises not a jot of it?

Esther’s language in response is at least as emotional and angry.

4) Haman exposed, vv. 6-8

Vv. 6-8 “Esther said, “An adversary and enemy! This vile Haman!”

In the Hebrew her words are staccato rapid-fire … ‘A man hateful and hostile! This wicked man Haman’.

Then Haman was terrified before the king and queen. 7 The king got up in a rage, left his wine and went out into the palace garden. But Haman, realizing that the king had already decided his fate, stayed behind to beg Queen Esther for his life.

Xerxes has left in something of a quandary … he now seems to have remembered the edict.

Can he punish Haman for something he himself approved?

If he does so, he really stands to lose face.

And the edict he issued is irrevocable … so how can he save both his wife and her people?

Again, God secures the situation in His providential ordering of the way very ordinary things play out.

8 Just as the king returned from the palace garden to the banquet hall, Haman was falling on the couch where Esther was reclining.

Spot the irony here!

This story line takes off when Mordecai the Jew refuses to fall down before Haman the Agagite … and ends with Haman falling down before Queen Esther to plead for his life, only to fall from his high position as second over the Empire to an ignominious death, being impaled as a traitor.

The king exclaimed, “Will he even molest the queen while she is with me in the house?”

As soon as the word left the king’s mouth, they covered Haman’s face.”

Do you see how the King’s dilemma of how to do away with Haman is resolved by this man Haman’s further folly?

Now, of course, Haman knows the king’s fury has fallen onto him.

He’ll have seen it happen to many others before him.

And he also knows that the King is a pawn in the hands of his courtiers … unable to make his own clear decisions.

We’ve been watching in this story a man manipulated by the agendas of others.

So steeped in that culture and aware of how it works, Haman realises his destiny lies in the hands of Queen Esther so he begs her to plead with the King for his life.

But he pleads with her in an already very complicated situation.

You see, Harem protocol dictated that no man but the king should be left alone with a harem woman.

Haman should have left immediately when the King went out into the garden.

But would he flee into the face of an already raging monarch, or flee from the room completely … suggesting guilt and (equally) launching a man hunt?

Haman is trapped.

Even when other men were present, only the King was allowed to be closer than seven steps away from a harem woman, so falling on the couch where Esther was reclining is just unthinkable.

And, in the sovereign providence of God, it is PRECISELY at that moment that Xerxes returns … to find that his quandary about what he can do with Haman has been resolved.

Haman has done enough on that couch for the King to condemn him to death.

And as if to highlight the extent of this great reversal that God has brought about to protect all His covenant people … a suitable sentence is swiftly suggested.

5) Haman sentenced, vv. 9-10

Vv. 9-10: “Then Harbona, one of the eunuchs attending the king, said, “A pole reaching to a height of fifty cubits stands by Haman’s house. He had it set up for Mordecai, who spoke up to help the king.”

The king said, “Impale him on it!” 10 So they impaled Haman on the pole he had set up for Mordecai. Then the king’s fury subsided.”

Now, it is relevant that Mordecai is the man who saved the King’s life from assassination in Esther 2.

So when Harbona suggests Haman should be hanged on the gallows he’d built for Moredcai, it would be only natural for Xerxes to suspect that Haman (who had risen QUITE so high as to become a potential threat) had some sympathy with the assassins.

This point is particularly emphasised in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint.

Now, there is a bit of a technical question here as to quite how Persians would have ‘hanged’ someone on a ‘gallows’, and that’s reflected in differing English translations.

Translations that are dominated by a modern Western approach to translating the Hebrew here when it speaks of being suspended on a pole imagine mention of a rope, a platform with a trap-door in it and (in the chilling words of the hanging judge) being ‘suspended by the neck until dead’.

But there is in fact no mention of such things in this passage, and they don’t fit historical Persian practice either.

The way Persians suspended someone to death in the days of Esther involved the forceful insertion of a pointed pole either longitudinally or horizontally into and up through their body, and then lifting the pole up to exhibit the anguished victim who might take up to several days hanging there to die … depending on which vital organs were damaged.

Fundamentally, Harbona’s suggestion is horrible, a horror it’s hard to just pass over.

This whole scene has had a lot at stake in it.

It’s been all about who gets life and who does not.

·       Esther is very evidently pleading for her life, as well as the lives of all her people … the people of God.

·       Haman is pleading for his life … predictably also the lives of his family.

But for both and for all of them it is totally clear that their OWN lives do not lie in their hands.

There’s the thing.

Yes, they both act in the situation … they are not entirely passive … but they are certainly being shown to us, these very powerful people, as far from being the masters of their destiny.

And behind their actions and their impotence lies the One Who works out everything in accordance with HIS will.

Haman’s name in Hebrew actually means ‘Magnificent’.

But however powerful a person is, even the most powerful of people in the world’s largest of empires, their best laid plans can be reversed in an instant by something as simple as a sleepless King’s insomnia in the providence of the three-times Holy God.

Now this raises a question.

What do you make of the way Esther is totally merciless in destroying Haman?

She’s really blunt about it back in vv. 3-4:

“we have been sold, I and my people to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated. If we had been sold merely as slaves, men and women, I would have been silent, for our affliction is not to be compared with the loss to the king.”

You see, quite a few commentaries struggle to deal with the fact she attacks … going in SO low and hard … and doesn’t plead with Xerxes to pardon her enemy, Haman when the verdict gets delivered later.

Divine justice, of course, inevitably and inextricably involves the destruction of evil, and the author of Esther has shown us an evil that is absolutely personal … Haman has generated and propagated it.

Evil is not some substance ‘out there’ … it doesn’t exist apart from the person who is propagating it here.

Therefore, to deliver the Jewish people from annihilation as He promised in His covenant t them, God necessarily had to destroy the source of the evil that threatened their existence.

And that is Haman.

But Haman is acting in his capacity as a particular part of the whole group of humanity 

… he exists in a national context.

Let me put this to you in another way:

Where do you stand with the idea of a ‘Holy War’?

We live in a secular culture which has gone further than rejecting God to insist that life in this age is all there is (perish the thought … this life can be terribly cruel and if that’s all we’ve got with nothing to look forward to, life is very grim indeed!)

So, no wonder really then our era defines ‘living your best life’ here and now as the highest good, extending THAT to define what counts as morality … it says it’s RIGHT to make sure that you ‘live your best life’.

Moreover it says it’s very wrong for anyone to deflect you from doing that, however you define your ‘best’ life.

So the idea of waging a war against someone else’s evil is anathema to the culture we’re submerged in.

In short ‘Holy War’ has been made into a terrible wrong, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the cause of it.

That’s not uniformly the view of the Scriptures, particularly in the early Old testament books, and decisive opposition to evil is often to be found in their pages.

There’s a very strong case to be made that what Esther does here is to fulfil the commission given by God to King Saul, Saul the ancient, anointed ruler of his people … Saul fell because he didn’t pursue ruthlessly the commission he’d received to destroy the Amalekites in the way that the LORD had commanded him to.

But this is Old Testament stuff so, what on EARTH am I talking about now?

Way back in Exodus 17:8-15 the Amalekites tried to destroy God’s Old Testament people in the earliest of times.

On account of that, God instructed Israel’s first King, Saul son of Kish to destroy the Amalekites because of the thing they had done and the threat they posed.

The words of the account of this are similar to the words used here in Esther in the edict of Haman against the Jews in Persia as well as those in Mordecai’s edict countering Haman’s edict … something yet to come in the next chapter.

Saul had the opportunity to kill the Amalekite king Agag, the King of the enemies of God’s people, but he did not do so.

He spared the man.

And this act of disobedience in the holy war God had commanded is what disqualified Saul as Israel’s king.

Because of Saul’s failure, the Amalekites harried God’s people and His cause across history.

In continuity with that trend, generations later Haman the Agagite turned the power of Persia against the exiled nation of King Saul.

Would God’s people still be protected by God’s covenant promises even in spite of Saul’s disobedience?

Not without holy war against the implacable enemies of God’s cause and people.

Now of course no-one should take Queen Esther’s unique role at a specific and singular point in salvation-history as something to be emulated today.

Of course not.

When Jesus came, He made clear in John 18:36

“Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

Things have changed in the way faithful resolution is expressed in this world.

In these new covenant days says Paul, (2 Corinthians 10:4) “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.”

And resolute pursuit in this New Covenant way of the welfare of God’s people and the fulfilment of His purpose still reflects clear covenant faithfulness to Him.

Conclusion

The entire account here is steeped in deep irony.

The irony highlights the extent and wonder of the reversal God brings about in terrible times to protect both His purposes and people.

It is not the miraculous in this book but the ordinary that God uses to bring about the sea-changes that pepper the account.

But it is miraculous to see the way the changes are brought about in God’s Providence.

And if there’s anything to take away for us today from what we’ve looked at, it must be the role of pinning your colours to the mast as a Christian to act decisively with the courage born of faith.

… to act decisively in the decisive moments God has created, for the cause of His people and purposes, because God acts decisively this day to preserve Jew and Gentile both who turn from sin, trust Christ and enter His New Covenant community … the authentic church of Christ.

God bless you guys - have a faithful and a decisively great week!