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Fingerprints

When her father and mother died, Mordecai had adopted her as his own daughter…. Every day Mordecai took a walk in front of the harem’s courtyard to learn how Esther was doing and to see what was happening to her.

— Est. 2:7, 11 CSB1

I have an irrational fear of snakes. I am like Indiana Jones—without the cool hat and theme music.

My wife fears spiders. For my daughter, it is the basement; she will not go down there alone for fear the basement monster will swallow her up. My friends are irrational too; they fear quicksand, being stuck overnight in a Walgreens after it closes, and pulling into one of those instant oil change places and driving the car down into the pit—on top of the workers.

Irrational fears: we all have them, and it is no wonder. The year 2020 pushed many people’s fear meters from rational to irrational to downright out of control. Have you seen the meme of the “Mayhem Guy” from the Allstate commercials featured on the cover of Time? The caption reads, “Person of the Year: Making 2020 His Best Year Ever.”2

Mayhem may be sitting next to you in the front seat of 2020, but his buddy, Fear, is leaning up from the back seat and whispering in your ear.

What if I test positive for a contagious disease?

What if someone I love gets hurt?

What if the government shuts everything down again?

What if I get furloughed from work?

What if school does not start on time or is cancelled altogether?

What if my sports season is cancelled?

What if my wedding gets postponed?

What if I die and no one can attend my funeral?

The list of what ifs can paralyze us into irrational fear. Fear can become its own pandemic.

Fear Factors

Take heart: 2020 is not the first era to have a pandemic of irrational fear. In 483 BC, Xerxes the Great hosted a six-month war planning conference for the Persians at the royal palace. The purpose was clear, the reason obvious: invade Greece for revenge. Xerxes’s father, Darius, had been trounced by the Greeks at the battle of Marathon.3 This was the famous battle where a man ran twenty-six miles to relay war information. Yep, you guessed it—people have been putting oval 26.2 stickers on their rear windows ever since.4 Darius died without exacting revenge, so—a few years after the events of Esther—his son Xerxes picked up the mantle of paybacks by gathering 250,000 soldiers to attack the Greeks. One of the famous conquests was the Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans ultimately pushed back the huge Persian army.

To sum it all up, Alexander put Xerxes in his place once and for all. History made Alexander’s last name “the Great,” and Xerxes headed home.

The Bible introduces us to Xerxes in the Old Testament book of Esther, sandwiched between Nehemiah and Job. Some years before being thrashed by Alexander the Great,5 King Xerxes (also known as “Ahasuerus”), is front and center from the opening words: “These events took place during the days of Ahasuerus, who ruled 127 provinces from India to Cush” (Est. 1:1).

For readers who hate it when the end of the story is told first, let me give you a spoiler alert. If you do not want to know how our sovereign God manipulated history for his glory through a young Jewess named Esther, then skip the next paragraph.

Almighty God used an exiled orphaned teenager to bring down a mighty monarch. God positioned a Jewish orphan girl in Ahasuerus’s court and poured courage into her soul to the extent that Bible scholars use the word “brave” to sum up her story.6

It would be fair to guess that most Jews living in Ahasuerus’s kingdom did not fear snakes or spiders; they felt fine going into the basement and would not think twice about entering a Walgreens right before closing time. What consumed them was genocide. Fear had poured rocket fuel into their gas tanks.

God Almighty’s plan was not simply to rescue the Old Testament Jews in eras BC; by his sovereign plan, God gave us the Book of Esther as a template to show those of us in AD eras what bravery looks like Monday through Saturday.

When we meet Esther, she and the other Jews have their backs against the wall: they were outnumbered and faced imminent death. You probably are not facing genocide, as Esther’s people were, but you may have more doubts than you have dollars. The chaos around you is causing consternation within you; the daily headlines about disease, civil unrest, and constantly changing information are enough to drive you mad. But in his matchless grace and sovereignty, God has something specific for ordinary people like you to accomplish. In a word, God is calling you to be brave, like Esther, even in a world where fear threatens to paralyze you, and where Mayhem is driving around with his buddy in the back seat.

Orphan Esther was not the Billy Graham of the Old Testament. She did not hit in the clean-up spot on the temple softball team or graduate as valedictorian from rabbinical school. It was not a special skill set or perfect record that positioned Esther to be used by God, but something much more: God routinely uses broken, fearful people and makes them brave for his glory.

Hard Times

For men and women of faith, bravery is built upon the belief that hard times cannot neutralize the unseen hand of God.

Most of us like dreaming about being brave. I want my wife and kids to think of me like a gladiator, a Spartan, one of the three hundred that defeated Xerxes. Truth be told, though, I am terrified by every news story or Facebook post that tells me that the slightest cough or sneeze means I have COVID-19. I spell brave c-o-w-a-r-d.

Here is another spoiler alert: the book of Esther covers ten chapters, and, in the end, God wins. Oddly enough, the name of God is not mentioned once in the entire book, but his fingerprints are on every page.

Seven-Day Party

In the first chapter of Esther, King Ahasuerus throws a party. This was not your standard Chick-fil-A Polynesian dip sauce kind of party. This party lasted for seven days, with the most exquisite foods and decadent drinks. After a week of taking shots, the king is in a drunken stupor and decides to parade the queen in front of his guests. Queen Vashti—some scholars believe she was pregnant7 and not in the mood to be paraded in her delicate condition—refused. The liquored-up king did not appreciate being made the fool in front of his fraternity brothers. They poured fuel on the fire of his wounded pride and gave him the following advice:

Queen Vashti has wronged not only the king, but all the officials and the peoples who are in every one of King Ahasuerus’s provinces. For the queen’s action will become public knowledge to all the women and cause them to despise their husbands and say, “King Ahasuerus ordered Queen Vashti brought before him, but she did not come. Before this day is over, the noble women of Persia and Media who hear about the queen’s act will say the same thing to all the king’s officials, resulting in more contempt and fury.” (Est. 1:16–18)

By the time the first chapter of Esther ends, Queen Vashti is in disgrace, the king is off to fight a losing war, and before you can turn the page, four years have expired, and the king is limping home to an empty marriage bed.

A Beauty Pageant Like No Other

It is probably not possible for the king’s hangover from years previous to cloud his judgment, but in the absence of his disgraced queen, Ahasuerus made another ill-advised decision: to hold a nationwide beauty pageant to find a new wife. Esther 2:1–4 sums up the action well:

When King Ahasuerus’s rage had cooled down, he remembered Vashti, what she had done, and what was decided against her. The king’s personal attendants suggested, “Let a search be made for beautiful young virgins for the king. Let the king appoint commissioners in each province of his kingdom, so that they may gather all the beautiful young virgins to the harem at the fortress of Susa. Put them under the supervision of Hegai, the king’s eunuch, keeper of the women, and give them the required beauty treatments. Then the young woman who pleases the king will become queen instead of Vashti.” This suggestion pleased the king, and he did accordingly.

If you are trying to picture the scope of a nationwide beauty contest, picture this: if the Persian Empire is roughly eighty million people and half are female, they are going to need a fortress-sized stage.

After the opening rounds narrowed the field, the stage is set for the finals at the fortress of Susa. But not everyone at the palace was on equal footing:

In the fortress of Susa, there was a Jewish man named Mordecai son of Jair, son of Shimei, son of Kish, a Benjaminite. Kish had been taken into exile from Jerusalem with the other captives when King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon took King Jeconiah of Judah into exile. (Est. 2:5–6)

These verses imply two facts: These Jews had been exiled, and they were hated. Being exiled is code for “enslaved”—which kind of sums up the concept of being hated. For a dozen years, the exiled Jews had lived in constant fear of being killed, the relatives of some having been deported and “carried away.”8

The Jewish exile Mordecai happened to be the cousin and legal guardian of a Jewish orphan girl named Esther.