I want to talk about the topic of luck. I was listening to a small snippet on the topic of luck that comes from a guy called Naval Ravikant. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. He’s an inspirational speaker in business and finance. He talks about luck, but he talks particularly about making your own luck. He gives luck four categories. I’ve heard it titled a few different ways, but generally speaking, there’s a blind luck; that is, you just get lucky sometimes. You see that in life and experiences; sometimes things just fall into place and you’re lucky.
But he pushes it further to say he’s got three other kinds of luck. The second kind of luck he calls hustle luck. It’s the luck that comes when you work really hard to make as many opportunities as you can to get more lucky. You’re working hard at finding opportunities to get lucky. That’s hustle luck. He pushes the next one, which is the idea of a pattern of luck. That is, once you start preparing and you’re looking and you train yourself to look for opportunities, then you’ll get lucky because you’ll see the lucky opportunities. You’ll recognize them and you’ll jump on them, and so you’ll increase your amount of luck by doing that. The last one is becoming a magnet of luck. That is the idea that you brand yourself in a way that people want to be part of what you’re doing, and then lucky people will come looking for you. You’ve trained yourself to look for lucky opportunities, and you’ll grab hold of those lucky people who are coming to you, and eventually, luck comes your way. That’s his idea.
On one level, we might say some of that makes sense, doesn’t it? If you replace the word “luck” with “opportunity”—I think the word “luck” maybe throws us—but some of that makes sense. If you go looking for opportunities, Naval uses this language of, “lightning never strikes the same place twice. So just expand your platform and lightning will strike you more often.” That doesn’t sound lucky. He thinks it is. It seems very unlucky. We can understand that; there is a space where you can generate opportunities by working hard, looking, and educating yourself. You can increase the number of opportunities.
But I think we’d also recognize that there are times where no matter what you do, no matter how hard you work, no matter how educated you are, bad things happen. You just have, it seems, bad luck, no matter what you do. I wonder what happens to the people who pursue this strategy. I think they make an idol of their ability to find, pursue, and obtain good opportunities. They idolize that so high. What happens when that idol comes crashing down for them? When no matter what they do—now, some of this thinking would say, “just stay positive. Another lucky opportunity is bound to come your way.” What about those that are in a life where they are just devastated by disaster, where it’s not just a positive outlook that’s going to get them past that? People would start to use the language, “that’s just bad luck. You just have bad luck. You can’t break the bad luck cycle.”
As we come to the Bible, we will see that there is no such thing as luck. We see a God who is ordaining everything. The picture we get in the Bible is that God doesn’t just roll the dice on what happens in our world. God rules the dice of what happens in our world. Some of that, I think, is His pre-ordained plans and the things He has set in motion right from the beginning. And some of that, it seems, is God controlling the dice where He comes in and intervenes in our world, and we see things happen because God made them happen in that moment. That’s the picture: not that God just rolls the dice and sees what happens, but that God rules the dice. I think we get a great picture of that in Esther chapter 3: a God who is ruling the dice.
The picture we get in the Bible is that God doesn’t just roll the dice on what happens in our world. God rules the dice of what happens in our world.
If you’ve been following along, this is where we’re at. In Esther chapter 1, Xerxes, the world emperor at the time, throws a small party that lasts 180 days with all his military. He then throws a really small party by comparison for all the commoners in his castle for 7 days. At the end of that one, he asks his wife, Queen Vashti, to come out and parade herself in front of the men. She says, “No.” He asks his advisers, “What law can we bust her on for that? Surely that’s not allowed.” They say, “Well, there’s really no law, but if you let this happen, where will it end? All the wives won’t be willing to parade themselves in front of their husbands,” or something like that. These great advisers say, “Okay, you should get rid of her.” So he does. That’s chapter 1. There’s a vacancy in the palace.
Chapter 2, the competition starts: Persia’s next top monarch, Epstein Island version, where he grabs all the young women, captures them, and brings them to the castle. It goes for probably three years, finding the right bride for him. Esther has a bit of bad luck, I think, and becomes the queen. In God’s providence, this is what happens. Esther, a young Jewish girl who’s an orphan, ends up being the queen of the most powerful empire in the world. That’s chapter 2. That’s where we’re up to.
We skipped over a small section at the very end of chapter 2. Another thing happens. Esther’s cousin who has raised her like his daughter, Mordecai, is outside the castle. She has become queen, and he hears about a plot to assassinate Xerxes by two men. He reports their assassination attempt and foils their plans. Esther reports it to Xerxes, saying, “My cousin Mordecai found this plot,” and it foils their attempts. Mordecai gets credit for it. Nothing happens. These guys are executed. Nothing happens with Mordecai. That’s the very last verse of chapter 2. Then we jump into chapter 3, and we meet this new guy, Haman. I think I’ve heard it pronounced Haman, which probably is more accurate, but I’ve always grown up calling him Haman, which is a very Aussie-sounding pronunciation, right? Haman. We’d probably call him “Ham the Hammer” or something like that as Aussies.
Recognize The Immediate Enemy
Haman is this guy who is a vast contrast to Mordecai. Here we have this guy, Mordecai; the girl he raised as his own daughter has been taken away from him, forced to become queen. Yes, it’s a powerful position, a prominent position, but it’s a capturing moment for her. She hasn’t been given the choice. Yet he shows this great loyalty to the king. Even in his terrible situation where a foreign ruler has taken the girl he raised as a daughter for his bride, Mordecai still shows loyalty to the king and looks out for him with this assassination attempt. The very next verse, what happens? We see sometime later King Xerxes promoted Haman to this new position, the most powerful. Mordecai is dismissed, and Haman comes into the foreground.
Haman is a stark contrast to Mordecai in the story. In fact, as you go through Esther, one of the things a scholar, Christopher Ash, who’s done a lot of work on the book of Esther, says is you want to be careful you don’t pin up any characters in the story as the example. Esther, yes, she plays a savior role, but she’s not Jesus. Mordecai, yes, he plays a wise, faithful follower of God, but he’s not perfect. Xerxes has his good moments and his bad moments. But the one exception, he says, is Haman. Haman is the bad guy. Recognize the rise of this immediate enemy.
Here are some things we find out about Haman. One preacher I heard called him “creepus maximus.” If you think that’s an understatement, these are the bits we read in chapter 3. Everyone is bowing down to this new guy, this new leader Haman, except for Mordecai. We’re told he won’t bow down to him. Haman is in a fit of rage. This is what he says in verse 6: he decided it was not enough to lay hands on Mordecai alone. Instead, he looked for a way to destroy all the Jews. That’s this guy. Because one guy won’t bow down to him, he’s got this plan to get rid of every single one of that race that is in that kingdom.
Because one guy won’t bow down to him, he’s got this plan to get rid of every single one of that race that is in that kingdom.
He comes up with this plan. That’s how bad this guy is. “Creepus maximus” probably is an understatement of what Haman is. He even offers the king his own money to get that decree through. He says, “I will give you 10,000 large sacks of silver if you let me kill these people.” That’s this guy. That’s his attitude. Then he needs to decide on a day to kill them. What does he do? He rolls some dice. He rolls some dice to make up the day that’s going to be the best day to commit genocide. That’s Haman. That’s his plan. He does that. It says in a year’s time it’s going to happen.
At the end of chapter 3, we’re told, just topping off Haman’s moments, he sits down with the king for a drink. This is the last verse we read: “The king and Haman sat down to drink, but the city of Susa was bewildered.” The message goes out. Send it out. Tell all these people. Let them know. In a year’s time, you’re dead. Now, all in a day’s work, we’ll finish it off with happy hour with the king. That’s the picture we get of Haman. He is a bad guy. Recognize this immediate enemy that is rising.
Recognize The Ancient Enemy
But there’s a bigger picture going on here because there’s not just a picture here of the immediate enemy. There’s a picture going on in Esther of the ancient enemy. One of the key parts of the whole of chapter 3 comes right in that first verse, and it’s Haman’s identity. This is what we read: “Sometime later, King Xerxes promoted Haman son of Hammedatha the Agagite.” He’s the son of an Agagite. What that tells us is that this is an ancient enemy line for Israel. King Agag was a ruler of the Amalekites. When Israel first comes out of Egypt, the first enemy they ever face is the Amalekites. They face them and they attack them.
The Amalekite Ambush
We’re told later on in Deuteronomy, when Moses is talking about it to the people, he says, “Remember the Amalekites? They attacked us. Don’t ever forget this. They attacked us.” He says, “They attacked us from behind and picked off the weak and the stragglers.” That’s the Amalekites. These guys have just come out of Egypt. They’ve just escaped Pharaoh. They’ve just made it into the desert. They haven’t done anything other than being traveling nomads in a strange land. These Amalekites show up out of nowhere. They don’t just attack them. This isn’t just a group that says, “Oh, we need to deal with this enemy nation that’s come onto our turf head-on.” This is a group that comes around and attacks the stragglers, the weary, those that are falling behind. A lot of scholars will point to the elderly, to maybe some women and children that were at the back of the Israelites. That’s the Amalekites.
They are pictured in the Bible as an ancient enemy of Israel, one of their first as they leave Egypt. There’s the Amalekite ambush. We see that they’re the first enemy. We see they’re an evil enemy. We also get a picture in the Bible that they’re depicted as this eternal enemy because of what they’ve done. God says, “I’m going to wipe the Amalekites out.” It’s said multiple times. In fact, Moses in his final speech, which is the book of Deuteronomy, says this to Israel: “Write this down. Remember this. Don’t forget it.” He also says, “Make sure Joshua hears it.” His successor, make sure Joshua hears it. Then he says the last bit, “I will blot out the name of Amalek.”
I don’t want to correct God on His plan here, but it seems to me if you want to blot someone’s name out, the first thing you don’t do is say, “Let’s write their name down. Let’s make sure it’s heard. Let’s make sure you don’t forget it, and let’s make sure that our successor hears it. We want everyone to know to forget this name.” That’s what it sounds like. But really, you know what’s going on here. God is saying that there is going to be an erasing of this people because they are this picture of this ancient enemy.
A God of Justice and Judgment
We see that story continue into the first king of Israel, Saul. Saul is told, he’s given those orders, “Wipe out the Amalekites.” To be fair, this is one of the hardest sections of the Old Testament to work through because this is a particular command of terror that happens in the Old Testament. It doesn’t happen very often like this, but in the story of God commanding Saul to wipe out the Amalekites, He commands him to wipe out all of them, women and children. It’s a particularly difficult passage to wrap our head around. We’re talking about genocide.
Some of the thinking about that challenge is, first of all, that this is a very specific moment for Israel and God. In recent history in Israel, Deuteronomy has been quoted by Israel in talking about Hamas, saying, “Remember the Amalekites,” kind of trying to draw a tie there. I don’t think that’s an appropriate tie to make. This is a specific moment of a specific ancient enemy who had a very specific trait that we hear about. The way they picked off the stragglers at the end, the assumption is that they are pagan worshippers like all the other nations in the land, which means part of their worship included things like child sacrifice in really horrific ways. One of our understandings of what God is doing here is actually, in a sense, a mercy that happens for those that are being treated badly. Saul fails to kill Agag, the king of the Amalekites. Samuel the prophet ends up doing the job. His last words to the king are, “because you have made mothers lose their children, then I will make your mother lose her child.” And he ends his life. That’s the picture we get there of the Amalekites, that there is a sense of mercy in the cruel things that they had been doing.
Nonetheless, it’s a particularly difficult part of the Bible for us to wrap our head around: the God who is a God of justice and love decreeing something like that. It brings us to some of that idea of understanding the picture we get of what an ancient enemy looks like, what true justice looks like, what true judgment looks like. I think that’s a wrestle for us whether we’re talking about this or we’re talking about the concept of God in its entirety in scripture, isn’t it? The idea of judgment.
I’ve been thinking a little this week about the topic of hell. A very uplifting week for me, thinking about the topic of hell. I don’t want to preach about hell. I would love to spend much more time thinking about the idea of heaven, about this perfect union with our creator, how perfectly united with Him through eternity in perfect worship of Him—the best thing for us in the best place for us with the best being for us. That’s the picture. But the reality is if that exists, there must also be the opposite. That’s the picture we get in the Bible. One of the questions I’ve been asking this week is: is hell an eternal torment, or is hell a destroyed eternity, that is, a final destruction that goes on forever? You see, it’s not super different in its themes, but it’s a significant difference in its idea: an eternal torment that goes on or a final destruction that ends for eternity. It’s a difficult question. I think the Bible actually allows space for either of those answers. The traditional answer has been the first one, eternal torment, for most of the last 2,000 years. Prior to Jesus, it would have been the second one. The Old Testament talks nothing of an eternal torment; only the New Testament speaks about it. But a really well-respected scholar, John Stott, concludes that we want to be careful with it because the vast majority of the last 2,000 years have concluded the other way. But he concludes there is a space in the Bible for either of those answers.
I think the challenge is this: when we experience a world of justice, when we see good lawmakers, when we see things going well, when we see our own lives experience justice, judgment becomes repulsive to us. The whole idea of someone being judged becomes repulsive to us. As a blessing to many of us here, that’s the world most of us have grown up in: a world that is predominantly constructed on significant justice. But if you grew up in a world of injustice, if you did grow up in a world like Israel with tribes around them sacrificing children in horrific ways, if you grow up in a world where your own family members have been taken from you through unjust and brutal means, I think in those kinds of spaces, we’re much more likely to long for judgment, aren’t we? We’re much more likely to desire the kind of justice that will come as a punishment to those who deserve that punishment.
If you grew up in a world of injustice… I think in those kinds of spaces, we’re much more likely to long for judgment, aren’t we?
I think one of the reasons it’s so difficult for us to process this and work through this in contemporary, western, reasonably wealthy spaces is that our vast and majority experience is an experience of justice. But there’s something helpful for us here to recognize the ancient enemy. Because if we don’t recognize the ancient enemy, if we don’t recognize the darkness of evil, then of course we are going to say, “How can a loving God let someone go to a terrible place?” But I think if we take on those moments, those people—you can think of them in history—where you would say if the end of their life was “that’s it, it’s done,” they lived a life… We look at some of these characters like Xerxes, who has a toast with Haman. He says, “Don’t bother giving me the 10,000 sacks of silver. I don’t need it. Just do with these people what you want.” You take him, and he is living a wealthy, powerful life. If his life just comes to an abrupt end, he dies peacefully in his sleep, then what do we think? We think that’s injustice, don’t we? This is the challenge we face as we think about a world of suffering around us. It tells us that there are moments where we will suffer under ungodly leadership, and in this life, we may not see the consequences of their ungodliness. In this life, we may see people who seem to get all the luck, no matter how horrible they are.
When to Stand Against the Ancient Enemy
We will have those moments. Often, in most cases, we’re called to submit to leadership in a godly way. One of the reasons this picture of Haman is so important to think about—who he was in his heritage—is because Mordecai doesn’t submit to him. Mordecai doesn’t bow down to this guy. This brings about the potential disaster of killing off his whole people. Has Mordecai done the wrong thing in not honoring the person that God has allowed to come into power? I think what we see in this story is Mordecai does honor Xerxes. He doesn’t honor Haman. The author of this story has given us this glimpse of who Haman is that ties it into a point that’s being made, and that is he is the ancient enemy. The author is weaving this thread for us to see this picture.
The reality is there are times where we will be called to submit to ungodly authorities in a godly way. But also, like Mordecai, there are moments where we want to stand up against the ancient enemy. What that looks like in our lives usually isn’t in the form of a person, but in the form of the evil that is conducted by them or by this world, the sin that we find in this world. There are moments where we might stand up against an ungodly leader because they are calling us and or others to do ungodly things. There’s a space there for us to actually call them against their ungodliness, to reject submitting to that ungodly leadership. We want to recognize the ancient enemy so that we are able to stand against and know when to stand against the ancient enemy.
Reject The Inner Enemy
We also want to reject the inner enemy. One of the interesting things about the way this story evolves, Haman’s jealousy and his fit of rage that happens, really clearly echoes the first murder that ever happens in the Bible: the story of Cain and Abel. If you can remember the story of Cain and Abel, the way the story goes in Genesis 4 is that both Cain and Abel offer sacrifices to God. We’re told that God found Abel’s pleasing and Cain’s he didn’t. Cain becomes bitterly angry, bitterly jealous about it. In fact, he’s so angry at it, we get this verse where God says to him, “Sin is crouching at your door. It wants to devour you like a lion.” That’s what’s going on there. “Sin is crouching at your door. Beware, Cain. Sin is crouching at your door.” Then he invites his brother out into the field and he kills him.
The story is put there as we unpack and meet these first characters in the Bible as a picture of the snowball effect of sin. We’ve seen the Garden of Eden. We’ve seen what a rebellion against God might look like. But as the story progresses, we get a picture in Cain and Abel of what the snowball effect of sin looks like when it takes hold of someone’s heart, the depths of depravity that are there. We don’t have to go far in our world to see that sort of thing happen. We don’t have to go far in our world to see how sin might devour someone. We know, we see, maybe we’ve even experienced the depth of the darkness of evil. One of the real challenges for us is to also recognize that that’s something that dwells in us: the potential to see a snowball of sin that might devour us as well. We know the darkness; understand that darkness. We see it in its extremes like Cain and Abel. That’s the picture we get of Haman. While he’s a picture of the ancient enemy, that ancient enemy includes the sin that devours him, which is the same sin that has the potential to devour us.
We need to recognize the ancient enemy not just out there but in us and take that seriously.
Sometimes it’s easy for us to trivialize or poke fun at evil. We see it in our society all the time. The idea that something that isn’t godly, but because it seems mostly harmless or because it’s connected to our friends, there’s an easy sense of just laughing that off and trivializing evil. I think of the example of really laughing off evil. I saw this week in my social feed a popup of some old, I think it’s 1960s Batman, where all the evil characters are just completely trivialized. A classic Batman scene: he runs out of a tavern holding a bomb and he runs around trying to dispose of it. He runs one direction and there are some nuns walking towards him. So he turns around, he runs the other way and there’s a lady pushing a pram. So he runs down the other way and there’s a marching band coming there. The music stops while he awkwardly shuffles past them, and then he gets running. He’s finally about to throw it off the dock, and then some ducks swim under. So he runs to the other side of the dock and some lovers on a boat float past. So he runs back, and it’s the pram, and it goes on for quite a while before he stops and he goes, “Sometimes you just can’t get rid of a bomb,” before he goes off camera and explodes. He’s okay, if you’re wondering.
That idea that something actually quite disastrous can be portrayed in a really funny way, that’s fine. There’s a sense of comedy there. But then we’ll see that kind of thing happen with evil in our own lives: things that are rebelling against God, and we trivialize them or consider them funny and not recognize the impact of rejecting a God who made us and seeing the snowball of sin that devours us. One of the great news of Jesus, the good news of Jesus, is that we’re not just looking forward to a day of eternity, a final judgment. There’s actually a sense where at the cross, He took sin on Himself and made it so that we don’t have to live for sin, that we can live for righteousness instead. That is not to say we will be perfect, but it’s to say we are grabbing hold of something to live for more than just ourselves. He promises His Holy Spirit who works in us to break us from the binds of sin and to move us towards Him. We don’t want to trivialize sin. We need to recognize the ancient enemy not just out there but in us and take that seriously. That is the picture we get in Esther 3.
Rest in The Divine Delay
I want to finish with this. While we recognize the ancient enemy out there and in us, one of the real things that comes up in this story is the rest that happens in the divine delay. We keep saying this in this book: God is not mentioned in the book of Esther. He’s a silent operator, has a silent hand. As we read forward, we get to see what happens. But in the moment, if you’re reading Esther for the first time and you don’t know where this is going, you may not know what happens. One preacher, Alistair Begg, says we often don’t see God’s providence through our windshield; we often see God’s providence in our rearview mirror. Knowing what’s coming, a significant thing happens in this chapter: the roll of Haman’s dice. Haman rolls a dice to decide when he should commit genocide of these people, and the unlucky day is almost a year later.
We often don’t see God’s providence through our windshield. We often see God’s providence in our rearview mirror.
Now that is unlucky in many ways. It’s unlucky for him; he wants to see it happen. You imagine the people who have had this decree rolled out to all the people. We were told it was put in writing and sent out to the reaches of the empire so that everyone there would know it’s coming and would be able to commit the orders on the day. That was the picture. All these people are living in that space. However, that delay provides the very thing that enables the rescue to take place. We often don’t see God’s providence in the windscreen; we often see it in the rearview mirror. We are called to rest in God’s divine delay.
Waiting on God for answers that you are praying for is a terrible burden. One of the difficulties that comes with it is we don’t know what the answer’s going to be. The answer may be “wait” or the answer may be “no.” Sitting in that space is a difficult journey. One of the things we’re reminded of in Esther is that God doesn’t roll the dice; He rules the dice. He knows what He’s doing.
Years ago, I was playing chess with a friend. I’m not much of a chess player; he was very much a chess player. In his prideful moment, he said to me, “I’ve got you in five moves.” I said, “Oh yeah, you didn’t see this coming.” And I just sacrificed the queen. Super stupid. He’s like, “You’re right. Three moves.” Real great chess players are thinking ahead. There’s a certain set of rules that they know govern the chessboard, and they know what the limited options are for a player. A real chess player, a master chess player, can understand the sequence of moves that are most likely going to happen or even can only happen towards the end of the game. You run out of moves, and they’re positioning themselves for that. This is the way God rules the dice. He’s not just hoping something comes up. He is in control and in charge.
That doesn’t mean humanity doesn’t have our freedom to express ourselves and be in God’s plans. But as we make our decisions, He remains in control and in charge. It’s a really difficult thing to get our head around. How do we have any kind of freedom in our choices if God already knows the outcomes and has predetermined where everything is headed? But those two things are true: that God is both in control and He gives us freedom to take responsibility for our own decisions. Both those things are true, and the Bible holds them in tension with each other. We want to rest in the idea that God rules the dice, that we don’t know, even when we feel like our number has come up.
Because here’s the real truth: God rules the dice, and the ancient enemy’s number has already come up. It came up on the cross when he thought he killed Jesus, but Jesus conquered sin and death and rose again. The ancient enemy’s number has already come up. We look forward to a day where that justice is complete. But right now, we look at a life where we see injustice. We do see God offering moments of salvation as He draws us more and more to Him. But we long for a day when that justice will be complete.