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.