I think the book of Esther gets a bit of a bad time. It feels like half the time Esther is shoved into women’s faces as the ultimate, unattainable female ideal that women need to be acting like and the other half she’s some sort of watered down Cinderella story that’s little more than a nice little fairy tale. Either way it falls, it’s a real shame because the story of Esther has an intense core of faithfulness that can challenge us to our very bones if we let it.
A brief overview, when we meet Esther, the Jews are living in exile in the Persian empire. Esther is a young woman with no parents being raised by her cousin Mordecai. After an enormous hunt for a new queen for King Xerxes Now queen, Esther is living a rather cushy life until Mordecai uncovers a plot by the king’s right hand man, Haman, to exterminate all the Jews. Desperate for anything that can save them, Mordecai gets a message to Esther telling her what is going to happen and begging her to use her influence as queen to stop it.
Esther sends a message back that there’s nothing she can really do. You can only talk to the king if he summons you and he hasn’t called for her in quite some time. Mordecai counters that she has to try. At this point, Esther starts talking to Mordecai like maybe he doesn’t quite get what she’s telling him. So she makes it clear that if she does this her own life is at risk.
But Mordecai does get it, and he still pushes back, even getting a little harsher with his language. He’s done mincing his words with Esther and he starts laying it out plainly. “Don’t think for a moment that because you’re in the palace you will escape when all other Jews are killed. If you keep quiet at a time like this, deliverance and relief for the Jews will arise from some other place, but you and your relatives will die. Who knows if perhaps you were made queen for just such a time as this?” (Esther 4:13-14)
Perhaps you were born for such a time as this.
I think all too often we read Esther’s story clouded with the benefit of hindsight. We know that by the end, Haman will get his comeuppance and Esther’s people will be saved. We can, without realizing it, sit back and look at this story as a nice little story of how God looks after his people and used Esther to do great things.
But we can never forget that Esther in no way had no of knowing that was how her story was going to end. The miracle God pulled off flew in the face of everything she’d ever come to expect in her life. Experience had taught her to expect an entirely different outcome. She was facing the very real possibility of death for simply approaching the king, let alone him finding out who she really was.
That was the Esther who said yes to what her people needed of her. Not a queen whose position was secure, but a young woman who was facing down losing her life and the lives of everyone she’d ever held dear. And yet she still acted. She still moved. She still walked out in faith and the result was her people were saved from destruction.
You might not be asked to save an entire people group from destruction, but mark my words, there will be things God asks you to do that require you to step out in faith without knowing what could happen to you. That will be your moment to make a decision, not dissimilar to Esther, about whether or not God is worth trusting with your very life. Like Esther, you will have to decide to act without knowing what the outcome will be. You have to ask yourself if you believe that God is good enough to see you through
Believe me, your “such a time as this” is coming. You need to decide now what you’re resolved to do. You need to decide if God is worth following through your unknowns. But like Esther, your God is far greater than whatever it is you’re facing. You choose him, and he will see you through one way or another. He will see you through every time.
Let’s find some joy,
A
Avalon Robinson Author 