God is good even when things aren't going your way.

I was in this habit, a gang member.

I'm succeeding in speaking to the youth, feeding the homeless, and I'm going to college to be a counselor.

He's changed my life completely.

God is good.

God is good.

God is good.

My cancer comes back.

I know God has a plan for us.

God is good.

God is good.

God is good.

God is good.

God is good.

He can do everything, no matter what.

God is good.

God doesn't ever change.

He's always faithful.

And he restores.

All right.

I'm so glad you're here and I'm not on.

I probably did.

Am I on now?

Yeah, I think so.

All right.

Yeah, all good.

It's good to see you.

Love the Saturday crowd.

Love you guys.

We start a new series.

Man, it's summertime and it's going to be great going through this book.

I've wanted to do this for a long time.

Before I get started, though, on our new series, I got to tell you that I've been preaching for over, let's see, 44 years.

I have never received as many emails from a message that I preached that I did last week.

I want to give you some quotes.

from people.

I never do that.

I've never done this.

Some quotes.

That is the best sermon I've ever heard, said one person.

Another said, truly the Bible is the word of God and speaks to every aspect of life.

Another one said, I now believe that God's word is true in everything it says.

I now believe that God's word is true.

Pastor Jeff is truly a man of God and speaks the words of God to us.

Those were just from the women.

What did the men say?

One man wrote, I hope my wife listens to Pastor Jeff's sermons this week.

It was truly inspiring, truly inspiring.

Another said, I have decided to become a Christian and follow all of Jesus' teachings.

In 1 Corinthians 7, I'm praying my wife will as well.

I thought, well, actually, another friend of mine, I'm not going to mention any names, but a friend of mine said, you know, we couldn't make it, so we watched online, but my wife kept getting up and going to the bathroom.

All right, so this weekend we move on.

I'm just kidding about some of those were half-truths, but interesting emails on the series.

Esther is an Old Testament book.

It is an amazing book.

It's part of what is called the Megillat.

Megillat is a scroll that contains five books, and those books are Ruth, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and of course, Esther.

Now, Megillat is a Hebrew word that simply means scroll.

And if you ever, have you ever heard anybody say, man, Pastor Jeff, sermons are long and drawn out.

Have you ever heard anybody say that?

Well, that comes from this word, Megilat, because it means long and drawn out.

And long and drawn out comes from a scroll, because you open it up and it's long and drawn out.

Each book in the Megilat will be read in its entirety during certain celebrations and feasts by the Israelites during the year.

Still Jews today, Orthodox and Messianic, still celebrate these feasts.

And the feasts primarily talk about how God saved people when it looked like they were near the end.

When it comes to this feast that is associated with the book of Esther, it's called Purim.

And Purim is a holiday.

We're going to talk more about this in a moment.

But Purim is a holiday associated with the book of Esther.

And the rabbi will stand up and read Esther, and even the Messianic Jews will read the book of Esther in its entirety on this given weekend, and then there'll be celebrations.

And the reason they do that once a year is to, there are two themes here, to remind the people of God that even when defeat looks imminent, victory's just around the corner, but also to remind them, and I love this, to remind people that God is always working even when it seems he's not.

So God is not a God that takes a break or goes on vacation.

He's not disinterested.

God's absence is never true.

His silence is not absence.

His hiddenness is never abandonment.

So this series, if you come through this entire series, it is going to be incredibly encouraging.

I told you last week that I've been hard on you lately.

So I just want to come out and encourage you with what it means to be a Christ follower and the history of your faith.

One of the primary questions people ask as Christ followers, even deeply committed Christ followers, they'll ask questions like, where is God when I lose my job?

Where is God when I lose my wife or my husband or my child.

Where is God when the doctor told me that it's terminal, it's hopeless, it's over?

Where is God during the Holocaust and the killing fields and the earthquakes and the floods and the famines?

And my friend Vince Vitale, a few weeks ago, dealt with some of these primarily from a philosophical perspective, but what the book of Esther does is it deals with it from a personal one.

So here we go.

Hollywood could not write a better script, folks.

It's intriguing, it's comical, it's profound.

But in order to get all the messages from the book of Esther, I got to spend half of this message at least giving you an overview of what this story's about.

In the past, I've assumed that everybody knows the intricate details of Esther, and the reality is we don't.

So here we go.

Let me give you the overview.

It's going to move fast.

I've got some photos for you, okay?

Because I know some of you are visual.

I gave you some pictures to look at, okay?

Chapter one, King Xerxes, king of the most powerful nation on the earth, has an enormous banquet.

All the expensive utensils are out.

There's gold and silver, all the wealth of the kingdom's on display.

He's parading his success before all the dignitaries, and he has a party that lasts 180 days.

So of course you're going to get drunk.

By the 180th day, everybody's going to be drunk.

So when they're all drunk, he commands the queen, Vasti.

By the way, her name means, and we're never told this, means beautiful one.

Now, how would you like to be a young girl and a guy walks up to you, what's your name?

Well, I'm called beautiful one.

That's her name.

But she refuses to come and to be paraded before King Xerxes' drunken friends.

In a way, you don't see it directly in the text of the Hebrew, you do, but basically he wants her to come and parade without any clothes on.

They're all drunk.

And she says no, which took incredible courage.

It's a different time.

This is a shame and honor culture.

When she does that, she dishonors the king and usually you die.

And how does chapter one end?

She dies.

He has this cabinet meeting that says, fellows, what should we do?

We can't have all the women of the kingdom thinking.

that they can deny the request of their husbands or the king.

So a bunch of men sat around and came up with a solution.

Well, we got to kill her.

And so they killed her.

End of chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Now we have the world's most famous beauty contest to replace Vashti's queenship.

Scholars believe that they would have invited over a thousand women to take part in a beauty contest.

They were taken.

Verse 8 of chapter 2 tells us there was no choice in the matter.

If you were beautiful, they snatched you up.

and then you would undergo a year of beauty treatment for one night with the king.

Four things could happen.

At the very least, you would become part of the permanent concubines that the king had in the palace.

He may never call on you again, but he's decided to keep you in the palace, which means you'll never have a family of your own because you're around the age of 18 and you've been banished to permanent widowhood.

So you're not going to have a family, you can't go home.

Once you've been called into the palace, you stay in the palace.

Or Second, you could be chosen as one of the king's concubines that does come into the palace from time to time, and you spend a little bit of time in the king's court, but that's it.

Third, you might be unique and appealing enough to the king that you actually become one of his many, many wives.

He marries a lot of women.

In fact, kings did this in ancient days.

King Solomon was no better.

Do you know his story?

What was it?

700 wives, 300 concubines, or 300 concubines and 700 wives.

I don't know, but our wives...

Can you really be if you've got a thousand wives?

Or four, you are most favored, you win the beauty contest, and they crown you as queen, and you get all the rights and the privilege.

By the way, even if you didn't become the primary queen, if you were one of the wives of the king, it means that your children get all the inheritance.

So there are advantages, but primarily disadvantages.

So here we have Esther, and this is what the story, the writers...

The writer is brilliant using this literary device, but you have this young Jewish woman from nowhere, she's an orphan raised by her older cousin Mordecai.

She is favored more than all the other women, and she's even in a place where she's exiled.

She's not even indigenous to Babylon or to Syria.

She's in occupied territory, and she's chosen.

This little orphan Jewish girl becomes the queen of the most powerful kingdom in the world.

What a story.

Also in chapter 2, we're told that Mordecai, again, Esther's older cousin that raised her, uncovers a plot to kill the king.

He informs the king, and he saves the king's life.

Even though Mordecai, like Esther, is Jewish, is occupied by the king in his kingdom, and yet he serves the king in this way.

End of chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

We're introduced to the villain.

His name is Haman.

Now, if you say the name Haman in synagogues, everybody boos and hisses.

Boo!

Hiss!

Because in a way, this was the first attempt at genocide.

He hates the Jews, every single one of them.

Now, why?

Now, most people are unaware.

This is one of the reasons I love getting old.

That's the only reason I love getting old, is that the Bible starts to just come together for you because you've been studying it for so long, now you start to get it.

So I can't stop preaching now, I've just learned how to do this.

And so you go into the book of Esther and you realize, wait a minute, in chapter two, verse five, we're given a genealogy.

Let me read it to you.

Now, there was a Jew in Susa, the citadel, whose name was Mordecai, the son of Herod.

son of Shemi, son of Kish of Benjamite.

Now, why would the writer record this?

And the answer is, he's making a point.

By tracing back the genealogy, we discover who Haman really is.

The text doesn't tell us.

It just gives us genealogy, and most of us aren't going to do the tracing.

By recording Esther 2 verse 5, we soon discover that this Jew, Mordecai, and Esther both were of the lineage of King Saul.

They say, so what?

Big deal.

Well, the writers reminded us, let's take a pause here for a second.

I'll get back to Haman.

The writers pausing just a moment to give us the genealogy so that we would recognize a very valuable lesson.

That is that this entire situation of God's people needing deliverance could have been completely avoided if one man had just done what God told him to do.

If he would have just obeyed this one man, we'd have never gotten ourselves into the situation.

Because in 1 Samuel 15, God commanded King Saul to execute judgment on the Amalekites for how they attacked the children of Israel when they left Egypt.

Deuteronomy 25.

Remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you came out of Egypt, how he confronted you on the way and attacked among you all the stragglers at your rear when you were tired and weary.

And he did not fear God.

So it shall come about when the Lord your God has given you rest from all your surrounding enemies in the land, which the Lord your God has given you as an inheritance to possess, that you shall wipe out the mention of the name Amalek from under heaven.

You must not forget because the Amalekites, as we talked about under the question, you asked for it.

Why would God have the Israelites go in and annihilate an entire group of people?

Because they were steeped in the worst possible issue of child sacrifice.

They were ruthless.

They loved to attack women, children, the elderly, the disabled.

And they would look for those who were completely exhausted after the trip through the Red Sea and into the Promised Land.

And instead of fighting warrior to warrior, they would basically choose those who were most vulnerable.

Now, I don't know if you've seen, how many of you have seen the House of David on Amazon Prime?

Man.

Go home tonight and watch the house of David.

It is a fantastic series.

In that series, this is the first season, and in that series, we learn this story.

And in the story, Saul is called to completely destroy the Amalekites, but he only obeys half the command.

He eliminates most of the people, but he spares the king, King Agag, and he plunders some of the spoils along with the best sheep and oxen.

And later he blames the soldiers for doing this because God said, don't leave anything.

He claims he's going to sacrifice the best of the goods to God, but he hadn't done it yet.

Sure you are.

So Samuel shows up and Samuel in the series of the house is David.

I tell you, I think he came back because it looks like the real thing.

I mean, he looks like Samuel.

And the Bible says, and Samuel said in 1 Samuel 15, 22, has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord.

Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams.

For rebellion is a sin of divination, and presumption, oh man, presumption on your part, is an iniquity and idolatry.

Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king.

So Saul, his rebellion and for...

presumptuous sin cost him the kingdom.

And now Samuel is going to anoint David, but David's a little boy.

He's going to have to wait for a while and ends up causing Saul a life of torment.

But that's not all because now his sin will affect the children of Israel 500 years later when a descendant of King Agag will rise to a royal position in the Persian kingdom by the name of Haman.

If he would have killed Agag, there'd be no Haman.

Instead, he imprisoned him.

And somewhere along the line, even in prison, he has a child.

And over the course of 500 years...

His descendant is Haman, so Haman's probably heard all the stories of the Israelites, and no wonder he plotted to utterly destroy them.

Now, just a quick application, and man, I cut so much out of this sermon, even though you're the Saturday Not Holy crowd and like the whole thing.

You don't want to be here forever.

Here's the application.

An enemy that is not totally destroyed will keep coming back at you again and again.

What happens when you don't totally destroy some sin in your life.

Let me tell you, you're going to fight it forever.

You're going to fight it forever.

And the thing that I've learned in ministry in my own life and dealing with kids and watching them grow up is this, we don't change.

People are the same without the transformational power of the Holy Spirit.

So my high school basketball coach, as I mentioned, just died.

And I didn't get to go to the funeral, but I watched it online.

I was amazed.

These guys that I played with in high school.

So it's been how many?

So I'm 60, 40 years.

They're still the same.

Now they look different because they're older.

I'm the only one that hasn't changed there, but the rest of them look older.

But to hear them get up and speak, oh my goodness.

The narcissist is still a narcissist.

Rather than talking about coach, he talked about himself.

How do you do that at a funeral?

The one that's insecure, you know, the Chihuahua, the Napoleon syndrome, the little guy who goes out his whole life barking like mad at everybody because he's got a complex, has not changed a bit.

And I started doing some introspection.

I wonder if I'd changed.

Without the power of the Holy Spirit, most people just go on and they continue to go to warp speed on who they've always been.

When I speak at basketball camps to high school players.

Here's what I tell them.

Whatever your weaknesses are now and whatever your flaws are now, they're going to be the same thing when you're 60, unless there's a dramatic transformation.

So the kid who wants the ball now, when the game's on the line, he'll always want the ball when the game's on the line.

And the kid who's like a deer caught in headlights, don't give it to me.

Don't give it to me.

I'm afraid I might fail.

We'll always be afraid of failure.

Unless the spirit of God transforms you, whatever you dealt with when you were in high school, you're going to be dealing with all your life somewhere along the line Any flaw, any weakness.

And folks, I know that those flaws and those weaknesses don't always come into your life because of something you did.

Sometimes your parents pass their flaws and weaknesses down to you.

Your coaches can pass them down to you.

You may have been abused and taken advantage of when you were younger, and they're all passed down to you.

Whatever way they come into your life, they're still there.

And if you don't deal with them, it's like any giant, any flaw or weakness.

that you don't deal with, you will fight your entire life until eventually it will destroy you.

King Saul spared the life of the Amalekites, King Agag.

The king had a son during his time of imprisonment somehow, whose lineage led him to Haman.

The king died, but his seed lived on, and it came back from Haman to finish what King Agag had started.

Now listen to the old guy.

Might as well take advantage of it.

Giants don't go away.

Ask David and Goliath.

They just keep coming down the mountain, yelling across the valley day after day, week after week until you cut their heads off.

Somebody's head's coming off, either yours or the giants, and everybody has a giant to slay.

And I'm telling you, only through spiritual transformation.

What is that?

Only through discipleship and accountability and people around you who will call you out for your faults and he will hold you accountable.

Because you know they love you.

And if you listen, you can slay the giant.

Okay, we got to keep going.

Chapter four then.

The Jews learn of Haman's evil decree.

Now Haman learns through the dice what date he rolls the dice and he is spoken to from the world of real evil.

And he gets the date he's going to attempt to wipe out the Jews.

Now here's what's interesting.

The word for dice is pure and multiple dice is Purim.

Now, when I saw that, I think, wait a minute, you mean the Jews have a feast every year and they call it Purim and that just means many dice?

Why would you call it Purim?

Well, we're going to get to that in a moment.

But in this chapter four, the Jews realize what Haman is up to and they respond.

And Mordecai, older cousin, goes to Esther and basically says, you No, you're in the palace.

You have the ear of the king.

You got to go and you got to plead for the Jews or we're going to be exterminated.

Exterminated.

She responds by saying, man, if I go into the king's palace uninvited, they'll kill me.

And Mordecai has a great comeback.

He says, if you don't go, you will certainly be dead.

And Esther said, good point.

So she goes to the king.

Chapter five, Esther decides to go before the king.

She is accepted, not killed.

And she also invites Haman and the king to a big banquet at her place.

Haman is so full of himself now.

He's thinking, man, I'm pretty special in the kingdom.

I've been invited by the king and the queen.

So he gets really confident to move ahead with his plan to kill all the Jews.

And he has these enormous...

gallows built that we're going to talk about in a later sermon.

These enormous gallows that he's planning on hanging all the Jews on.

Chapter six, the king can't sleep one night and he orders the books of the kingdom to be brought and read to him.

Now, I want you to, you don't see this in the text.

We're talking about massive volumes of all the annals of the king and all the stories of the kingdom.

And the king can't sleep.

So he wakes up and he says, man, I want to do some reading.

So he probably goes into the toilet and grabs a book.

And he's going to read.

And it just so happens out of all of these volumes, the one who chooses the story picks this one volume and goes to the specific page where it records the time that Mordecai foiled an assassination plot and saved the life of the king.

And he reads it and he says, wow, do you remember?

Did we ever honor Mordecai for what he did?

whoever the reader was said no.

And he said, send for Haman.

And he asked Haman, what should the king do for someone he really wants to honor?

And of course, Haman is so full of himself, he thinks it's about him.

So he goes big.

He says, well, put him under your best horse and put the king's best robe on him and parade him through the streets, proclaiming that this is what happens when you are loyal and you honor the king.

And Xerxes says, great, that's a great idea.

Do that for Mordecai.

Can you imagine?

Oh, and he has to do it.

Chapter seven.

Esther has another banquet and she invites the king and Haman.

And in that banquet room, she reveals the plot of Haman to destroy all the Jews.

And man, Zerch sees this furious and he hangs Haman on the very gallows he had built to kill all the Jews and especially starting with Mordecai.

Chapter eight, the Jews then are given permission to defend themselves.

Chapter nine, they're victorious.

Not one Jew loses life.

And then chapter 10, they live happily ever after.

Now, There's a lot to do, but here's where we're going to start.

The book of Esther is so unique in number one, nowhere does it mention the name of God.

Nowhere in the book do you see the name of God.

It almost appears that everything that happens in Esther happens by chance, by happenstance, incidental, the luck of the draw.

Nowhere in the book are we told that God did this or God did that or God said this or God said that.

Meanwhile, in the heavens, these things were happening.

I mean, at least in the book of Job, while all the bad stuff is happening on earth, we're given a glimpse of what's going on in heaven, but not in Esther.

Now, yeah, we read it.

And in retrospect, we can see how God was involved in many of the details that seemed to be incidental at the time.

In fact, come on, God revealed his hiddenness, no pun intended, to Isaiah.

and said he was going to operate like this from time to time.

That would be seasons.

And this is the way God would operate.

Yes, he told Isaiah, sometime you're going to see my activity in dramatic ways.

Other times it will appear as if I'm not even involved, but don't be fooled.

I'm never uninvolved.

And he gives Isaiah a powerful illustration that once again, you really can't see unless you understand a little bit about Hebrew, because in Hebrew, you have words.

that not only have meaning, you have letters that have meaning.

Remember when we talked about Yahweh, Yod, He, Vav, He, and we talked about behold the hand, behold the nail.

Not only that, but the word themselves, the letters themselves and the words also represent numerical value, much like Roman numerals.

So the Hebrews didn't have numbers, they had letters placed side by side to determine value.

Well, the Hebrew word for God, other than Yahweh that is not pronounced, is the word Elohim.

And its value is 86.

But the word for nature is also 86.

So which ones at work?

In Isaiah, in chapter 45, verse 3, God says, I will give you hidden treasures, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord.

Okay.

And then in verse 5, notice carefully.

I am the Lord and there is no other.

Apart from me, there is no God.

I will strengthen you, though you have not acknowledged me.

So that from the rising of the sun to the setting of its place or the place of its setting, people may know there is none besides me.

I am the Lord and there is no other.

I form the light and create darkness.

I bring prosperity and create disaster.

I, the Lord, do all these things.

You heavens above, rain down my righteousness.

Let the clouds shower it down.

Let the earth open wide.

Let salvation spring up.

Let righteousness flourish within it.

I, the Lord, have created it.

Now, in a meeting that I had with a Messianic Jew in my days in Jerusalem last year, he explained Isaiah 53 and 55 and also Isaiah 45 to me in a way that I'd never understood.

And that is that what God does here He juxtapositions the natural and the spiritual side by side.

And then in verse 15, he says, truly you are a God who's been hiding himself, the God and savior of Israel.

What does that mean?

It means that God is revealing to the prophet Isaiah that he's involved in everything, in every single detail.

He's creating and sustaining, ordering all things at every moment, holding all things together and sometimes breaking them apart.

And the language God uses in Isaiah.

is supposed to remind you and me, listen now, that in the same way, in the physical realm, the complexity, the intimacy, the majesty of creation tells us that God, although we don't see God face to face, that God is underneath all of it, even in the storms, the floods, and the earthquakes.

In the same way, so too, in the spiritual realm, God is alive and active, even in the storms, floods, and earthquakes of your life.

He controls all of it.

Now, guess what the name Esther means?

We said that Vashti means beautiful one.

Esther means hidden one.

It's the meaning of her name.

I'd like to think of it.

You didn't see her coming.

Now, you think about that for a moment.

The most powerful kingdom on earth attempts to destroy the people of God and all the wild.

Esther, an adopted little girl from nowhere.

is being raised up in the middle of nowhere to become queen and rescue her people everywhere.

Just as God's hand is all over the events of Esther, Esther is meant to tell you that God's hands are all over the events of your life.

Now stay with me.

We're just starting.

Let's build on this.

You're going to have to think a little.

Now, yes, you and I can go back and read Esther and easily deduce God's involvement after the fact.

The providential hand of the Lord can be seen when this clueless king of Persia is unable to sleep one night.

He asked for the records to be read to him.

And it just so happens that the story of Mordecai, who had saved the king's life, would be the story that would be read.

And then the thought somehow would occur to the king, did we ever honor Mordecai?

Kings usually don't care that much about those things.

And then he asked Amon, the guy who actually wants to kill all the Jews, to come and say what should be done for the man the king wants to honor.

Haman in his pride, he's thinking, man, this is about me.

And he provides a wish list.

And then King Xerxes commands Haman to perform this wish list for Mordecai.

Now, come on, come on.

Really, the story of Mordecai just happened to be read when the king can't sleep?

What are the odds?

Volumes and volumes, and he chooses that one book and that one page?

See, to me, it requires a lot more faith to believe this is coincidence.

than to believe it's the hand of God.

So what is the overall arching message of Esther?

God is always working underneath everything, everything.

The writer records the narrative in such a way to make this strong point.

And the point is that even though there's no mention of God, and that, by the way, it's the only book in the Bible, so it can't be an oversight.

I mean, the writer doesn't go back later and say, oops, I forgot to mention God in prayer.

and all that religious stuff.

No, it's a literary device to make a larger point.

What's the point?

The Jews are in danger of extinction, extermination, genocide.

And in the past, whenever the God of Israel sees the people of Israel in trouble, he responds spectacularly, doesn't he?

Oh my goodness, he dazzles.

I mean, when he acts, you know it's him, there's no doubt.

Ten plagues in Egypt, locusts, frogs.

Darkness, blood in the Nile, pillar of fire to guide and watch over them at night.

The Red Sea parting.

I mean, yeah, you go back to Egypt and the Red Sea and the people of God were in deep trouble, especially when Pharaoh's army is closing in to destroy them.

But God shows up and he creates an opening of the sea.

You've got this wall of water on the left and the right.

They're walking through the walls, which would have been spectacular because it's one thing to go down in when the walls are separated.

It's another thing to believe they'll remain separated until you get to the other side.

So you have this first outdoor underwater dry land aquarium.

And when God comes through for them in the past, it's obvious, man, the events are extraordinary, miraculous, visionary, marvelous.

But not here in Esther.

No miracle, nothing extraordinary, no vision, no dream, no mention of God.

He seems completely absent, and yet there's a whole string of coincidences that happen.

And if they had all not happened at the precise time they had happened, then the people of God would have been totally wiped out.

But because they happened in the order that they happened, in the timing that they happened, salvation.

Victory came riding in on the horse of God's sovereign will and control under the surface, undetected until the very end.

So think about that just for a moment.

Just two quick things, and then I want to really move into application here.

It's uncanny really.

Had the king not gotten drunk and made a boast about his queen, asking her to parade before his drunken buddies, Vashti would have not have refused.

She would not have been killed, and Esther would never become queen.

The second thing is, and I don't mean this crash.

What if Esther had been ugly?

I'm sorry.

I have to ask.

What if Esther had been ugly?

So did God make Esther attractive to the eye of the king?

I mean, beauty's in the eye of the beholder.

Did God know what the king really liked?

Now, why is this important?

Well, what most of us don't understand is that God works behind the scenes long before the scenes take place.

Now, stay with me.

This is amazing.

King Saul disobeys God and allows a king to live who will have a son whose offspring will commit genocide against the Jews.

The devil's working overtime.

He's tempting.

He's haunting Saul.

And yet God knows what the devil is going to do and how the king's going to respond.

So he starts immediately raising up Mordecai and Esther.

God raises up a descendant of King Saul to complete the work Saul was supposed to complete.

In other words, listen, there are two parallel roads, two parallel plans running at the same time.

Xerxes and Haman, Esther and Mordecai, parallel.

And God always wins.

He always wins.

You know the verse in Revelation that says, that refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God who was slain before the foundations of the world.

What does that mean?

Well, it means that before Adam and Eve even sinned in the garden, before Adam and Eve were even created, God had already established his plan of redemption and restoring all things.

I mean, it means that God stands outside of time and space and sees every event that's ever going to occur in your life.

He sees every temptation the devil's going to give you.

He sees every way the devil's going to attempt to store you.

But while that's running, he's seen that a long time before it even came.

See, that's what the devil doesn't have.

He doesn't have that gift of foreknowledge like God has.

And so he sees what the devil's up to, and simultaneously he runs another plan so that when they meet, all you have to do is make a choice.

Take the exit ramp, and victory is yours.

yours.

It's amazing, really.

This gives the words of Mordecai to Esther, very deep meaning, when he says in Esther 4.13, then Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, do not think to yourself that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews.

For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place.

But you and your father's house will perish.

And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time is this man that is so powerful.

Basically what he's saying is, make no mistake, God made a promise to Abraham that his seed would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sands on the seashore.

So no one's going to eradicate the people of God.

And who knows that if you've been the one raised for such a time as this, but Esther, if you don't have the courage and faith and trust, God will use somebody else, but his plan will come to fruition.

God had waited patiently to redeem the mistakes.

of Saul through his own lineage.

And now he's ready to enact his plan of redemption.

In fact, three times in chapter nine, we're told that when the Jews were victorious, they touched none of the plunder after the victory over Haman.

So God's will will be done.

It just depends on who's it going to be done by.

I love what we're going to see in the book of Esther, because you see one coincidence after the next, and you think they're ordinary things.

There's no mention of God, no mention of prayer.

You look at the 10 plagues and you know, wow, that's God's intervention.

That's significant.

That's God.

There's God at work.

But when you look at King Xerxes getting drunk for 180 days and then asking the queen to come in, nobody says, wow, that's God right there.

Wow.

And this is so important for us.

Listen, because for every plan of destruction, Satan throws at you.

God is already working on the plan to redeem and restore you.

And here's the key.

This is the key.

This is the point of this first sermon.

But it requires something from you, and that is faith and trust.

And they're not the same thing.

Now, stay with me.

I mentioned earlier that Esther is part of the Megillah, the scroll, long and drawn out.

And there are five scrolls, Ruth, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther.

And each of These are celebrated in feasts.

And they read the scroll in its entirety.

But there's another commonality among these five books.

And it's these two words, faith and trust.

Faith is the Hebrew word amunah, from which we get our word amen or amen or what they say in, what do they say in Jerusalem?

It's a little bit, it's, come on, Anthony, help me here.

Amen, amen.

And every time they say that, I think, why don't you just say amen?

Well, who knows?

But basically, you can have faith that God is all-powerful, sovereign.

You can have faith that God is powerful and sovereign.

He can do anything.

And at the same time, not have trust that God loves you and is able to do anything for you and work everything together for you and bring about ultimate good for you.

And you cannot have an intimate relationship with God as father unless you have both faith and trust.

When you read the book of Ruth, Naomi is a Jewish woman.

She escapes the Moab to get away from famine.

And while she's in Moab, her husband dies, her two sons die.

She's left with two daughters-in-laws that she can't take care of.

So she decides to go back home to Israel.

And when she gets there, she's greeted.

Let me read it to you.

Ruth 1, 19.

So the two women, that is Ruth and Naomi, because her other daughter-in-law decided to remain behind.

So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem.

When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them.

And the women exclaimed, can this be Naomi?

Don't call me Naomi, she told them.

Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter.

I went away full.

Now that's a lie, she didn't.

But the Lord has brought me back empty.

Why call me Naomi?

The Lord has afflicted me.

The Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.

So Naomi returned from Moab, accompanied by Ruth, the Moabite, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.

Now people will read that and say, wow, Naomi didn't have faith in God.

Yes, she did.

That's why she blamed him for everything.

You think about that.

That's why I tell you I've never met a real atheist.

You can't be mad at somebody who doesn't exist.

And so she blamed him for everything, but she didn't trust that God was working everything together for good, that he loved her, that ultimately he would rescue her, that he cared about her good.

And if you know the rest of the story in Ruth, by the end of the book, Naomi has both faith and trust in God because she begins to see how the problem is also the solution, that the main purpose for all the pain in Moab was to bring Ruth back to become Boaz's wife.

who would eventually become the grandmother of King David, whose lineage would bring Messiah, perpetuating God's plan to save and redeem the world.

God had been involved in everything.

For you, if you ever want to feel on cloud nine, if you really want to go about your life with incredible joy, I mean, joy to where you have a peace that passes all understanding, where you just don't sweat the smoke.

My father-in-law, I had to take he and my mother-in-law to the airport last Wednesday, and they've gone back home now.

Thank God.

No, I mean, they've gone back home now.

And I had to get up.

Of course, they leave at like 6 o'clock in the morning, so I got to get up at 4.

And, of course, I can't lie in bed because that would be an insult.

So I take them to the airport.

I don't know why I told you that.

I'm just getting it off my chest.

So I take them to the airport.

But, you know, Charlie and I had some great talks this time because his health is not good.

And I said, Charlie, as you look back over the course of your life, Do you have anything that you regret?

Now, let me tell you what he said.

Here's an 87-year-old man of God preaching the gospel all of his life.

He goes, yeah, I can't believe how many events in my life that I let bother me because I saw later how God used all of it.

I wish I would have had more faith and trust in God to say, I know this is bad and I don't like it, but God, I know you're up to something because Jeff, every time he was up to something.

Doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.

Doesn't mean it's not difficult.

But man, Charlie thinks that when we all get to heaven, one of the things we're going to do is look back and we're going to look at all the small stuff we sweated, all the struggle and tension and anxiety we had, and we're going to laugh at ourselves because we now know for certain.

Before we saw through a mirror, but then we shall see face to face.

We'll be able to see how God was always just underneath the surface, just like the book of Esther.

Faith and trust.

You know, I hear people sometime today say, I tried God and he didn't work.

And I so desperately want to say, what on earth does that mean?

Does that mean he didn't give you everything you wanted?

It means that your life didn't turn out the way you wanted him to?

Or it too?

It means you ask him for something, he didn't give it to you.

Wow, are you really so narcissistic and entitled that you think God's job is to give you everything you want?

So you ask him and he didn't give you something?

That's not a loving father.

You don't give your son everything he asked for.

Hey, dad, how about a, you know, I don't know, some cocaine, marijuana?

You don't love me.

You're not real.

Really?

So there's one final piece of the puzzle.

And I want you to see this and it's the end.

One final piece.

In Leviticus 23, 28, now stay with me here.

I mean, I know, you know, one of the things that changes as you get older, when you're younger, you just want to make blanket statements without explaining anything.

When you get older, you want people to understand that we don't just make this stuff up, that the Bible is so rich.

I mean, do you realize how much get cut out every week that I'll never get to share with you?

Well, here's one piece I'm determined to put in.

In Leviticus chapter 23, verse 28, it refers to the day of atonements.

It's plural, not a day of atonement, but day of atonements.

And if you've been around one and all in the length of time, you know that's one of my favorite festivals because it's the day on which the priest goes into the temple the one time a year and he takes the sins of the people.

They're in the tabernacle.

They've been celebrating because this is that day when the priest takes his hands and he places it on the head of the goats and then...

One goat is sent out into the wilderness.

They hire a Gentile to do it because all the sins of the people are placed on the head of the goat.

And they take him out into the wilderness.

And that goat is called the scapegoat.

And they take the goat out and send him over a cliff.

And there go all our sins.

And the people are rejoicing.

There go all of our sins.

All forgiven.

There's the scapegoat.

All transferred away from us onto the head of that goat.

And the day of atonement.

Or the days, in this case, of atonement.

It's called what?

Yom Kippur. But actually it's called Yom Kippurim.

When you put a reem at the end of a Hebrew word, it makes it plural.

So it's actually the day of atonements or the day of coverings.

Now, stay with me.

What does kippurim sound like?

Kippurim sounds a lot like purim without the k, right?

Well, in Hebrew, when you put the k in front of a word, it says that this thing is like this thing.

For instance, the word in Hebrew for table is shakhan.

So if you say kishakhan, you say it's like a table.

Got it?

or father is the word of.

So if you go kit of, it's like a father, like a table, like a father.

So when you say kit parim, it means it's like parim.

So the question is, how is the day of atonement, how is Yom Kippur like parim?

Because they seem to me to be two totally different feasts.

One is the day of atonements.

The other is the feast of Esther.

Yom Kippurim is the day of fasting.

You don't need any food.

In Purim, you eat everything you can get your hands on.

It's a day of feasting.

Yom Kippurim is a day where you've got all these lights lighting up the name of God.

Usually you're not allowed to say the name of God, but there's one day on the Hebrew calendar where the high priest would speak aloud the name of God, Yahweh, again and again and again.

The only one day of the year that that's permitted.

Yet in Esther, the name of God appears nowhere.

In Yom Kippurim, everything is about putting away sin.

It's spelled out in tremendous detail.

holiness, the temple, the sacred, God's house, God's people.

Yet in the Feast of Purim, it takes place in a foreign land among a pagan people and a terrible enemy while partying for 180 days with crude behavior, drunkenness, and debauchery.

And yet the name, hidden in the name Yom Kippurim, is a day-like Purim, which is a valid translation.

Why?

And this is the lesson I want to leave you with.

Because in one book in Leviticus, God is giving us details of what's going on in the spiritual realm.

In another book, he's saying that while all this is happening in the spiritual realm, you need to understand something.

The world is going to look like this.

You're going to think you don't see God anywhere.

Culture is going to be crude and filled with sacrilege.

Men are going to abuse women.

There's no guilt, no shame.

Sexual immorality will be everywhere.

The wicked seem like they're prevailing and the righteous will be persecuted.

And it will seem to you like God is nowhere to be found, but oh, don't make that mistake.

He is busy at work just underneath the surface.

So that you can have two people side by side.

sitting together, and yet they come from two different worlds.

The first person lives only in the physical world according to his or her animal instincts.

He or she does not see God.

Everything is science, material, chance, a matter of the odds, happenstance, probability.

His or her life is divided between worry, fear, anxiety, and indulging in the animal instincts and appetites.

And no matter how often you tell them about the spiritual world, they just won't get it because they don't live in that world.

And then you have a second person, which I hope is you, who believes that God is always behind the scenes, a God who is active in every circumstance, a God in whom we can place our faith and trust.

trust that even in the deepest, darkest days, even when something happens in your life that you have no explanation for, and it's horrible, you can still know that as bad as it is, that there's something just underneath, hidden.

that you can't see, that God is doing.

And when these two meet and converge, the victory will be yours when you have faith and trust that God has not abandoned you.

He is not hidden.

You may not be able to see him, but he's there.

And that person sees a world where there's light in the darkness, purpose in the chaos, order in the universe, where there's a God who runs the world.

And even though there are times of trials and testing, there's a peace that passes all understanding for those who have faith and and trust in God.

Folks, that's the end.

You and I are battling, listen to me, listen.

You and I are battling an enemy that's already been defeated.

You know that, right?

See, Satan's going to continue to do what he does, but God already knows every event that he's going to do.

Everything he's going to try, God already knows, and he's already got the plan underneath to defeat it.

That must be very frustrating.

Going back to the cross, the devil must have thought he won, and it ended up being the means by which God saved the world.

Think about that.

So no matter what's going on in your life, I call on you once again, one more time, follow God and trust him.

Trust him.

You know, you don't have love and you want love desperately, but you want to be involved with somebody that's married.

Stop it.

You know why you do?

Because you don't trust God.

You don't trust God.

Whatever flaw that you've got in you will come out during difficult times, and you will act according to the one kingdom or the other, to the one that you don't believe God is involved in.

He's abandoned you, or you won't respond to the way.

God is in this.

God is in this.

I need to be patient.

I need to obey God.

I need to do the right thing.

Now, one last thing.

I said that was the last thing, but one last thing.

The word Amalek for the Amalekites is a word that actually is always associated with doubting God's involvement.

Isn't that amazing?

Amalek means to doubt God's involvement.

And by the way, the name Haman...

this is not the first time we've seen it, but you wouldn't know that unless you understand Hebrew.

Haman, his name is always associated with doubting the word of God.

You know why?

Because the phrase Haman Hayetz is found all the way back in Genesis.

And it's a phrase that's used by God when he says to Adam and Eve, when they had sinned against him, he asked them, have you eaten from the tree, which I told you not to eat from?

Haman ha-etz, eaten from the tree.

So that the name Haman is associated with someone who doubts that the word of God is true and goes out on their own and goes against the word of God, believing that God is not involved.

in your life.

I'm asking you as we start this wonderful series, will you make a commitment today to have faith in God and trust God even if you can't see him?

Because I can assure you, he's at work.

Father, thank you for the book of Esther and the journey that we're about to embark on.

Fathers, I just sit here and stand here and think about where you're taking us.

It's just amazing the things that I've never seen before now that you are revealing to us.

us.

And I just pray for every person in the room who's in a difficult season.

Let me encourage them.

Let your word encourage them that it must have been so difficult for Esther and Mordecai and for the Jews to see their lives falling apart, getting or going from worst to worst.

from exile to annihilation.

And yet all the time, all the while, God was working his plan underneath to bring salvation.

I pray that every person in the room who's struggling with something right now would go back home tonight and say, you know what, God?

I have faith in you, but I'm going to start trusting you now.

Trust that you always will work everything together for good.

And in the end, you will save me.

In Christ's name, everybody said.

We hope you enjoyed today's message.

If you want to know more about what it's like to be a Christ follower, I want to encourage you to go to oneandall.church.com to get more information, as well as to reach out to us to walk alongside you in this step.

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We hope you have a great rest of your week, and we'll end as we always do with one hope, one life in Christ.