When God Seems Silent: Finding Hope in the Chaos (Esther 1:1-22)

What a Bible reading. Welcome to the book of Esther. Let me read some of that for you again. It’s too good to miss. Memucan answered the king, “Women everywhere will begin to despise their husbands when they learn that Queen Vashti has refused to appear before the king. Before this day is out, the wives of all the king’s nobles will start treating their husbands the same way. There will be no end to their contempt and anger.” Great wisdom here. “We suggest that you issue a written decree that Queen Vashti be banished forever. Then husbands everywhere, whatever the rank, will receive proper respect from their wives.” This is my favorite bit. The king and his nobles thought this made good sense. This is the word of the Lord. Is there anything more to say? Have we not covered the sermon for the morning? Is this not everything we need to hear? What a great story.

Welcome to the book of Esther. Esther is quite an interesting book in the Bible. One of the reasons it’s quite interesting is we get this sense of an increasing silence from God. It’s been 400-plus years since the glory days of Israel, since King David and King Solomon. The days where God’s people really saw God at work, really saw God raising up his people in a quite an earthly empire sense, it’s been 400 years since that. It’s been 250 years since Assyria came and defeated the northern part of Israel and took out half of the ruling area that they had. It’s been 120 years since the last king of Israel sat on a throne in the southern part of Israel. It’s been 40 years since they’ve heard from a prophet. And as we follow the Bible story, we know that there is only one more prophet that is named in the Bible between the story of Esther and Jesus. John the Baptist showing up as the next named prophet in the Bible. There’s this increasing silence.

The last prophets they had were Ezra and Nehemiah. Depending on the dating, it could be around the same time as Esther. Ezra, Nehemiah, a lot of effort going back into helping Israel rebuild some of Jerusalem. But still, Israel is under the rule of the Persian Empire at this time and there’s an increasing silence we hear, that we feel from God, that less and less God’s people are hearing God speak. As we read Esther, if you’re a person who has ever wished God would just audibly speak, that you’d get that clarity from him where you can really know you heard the voice of God, if you’ve ever felt that, then Esther is a great book for you because that’s not something we see in Esther. In many ways, Esther delivers much more like what we see in our everyday life where we’re not always sure what God is doing behind the scenes. There’s this silence.

In fact, the silence is so loud in Esther that God is never mentioned. It’s the only book of the Bible that God is not mentioned at all. You can imagine over the years much debate has come up over whether Esther should even be included in the Bible as a book that God is never spoken about, that God is never mentioned. On top of that, Esther’s name herself, it’s a Persian name. We expect that she’s been named as she lives in what is modern-day Iran. It’s a Persian name. But the irony is that the sound of the name in Hebrew sounds like “to hide.” Sounds like the word “hidden.” And so there’s this strange play-off in a Hebrew Bible that a Persian name that actually means hidden in a book where God is not mentioned increases this feeling of God’s silence.

If you’ve ever been in a place where you think, “I just wish I knew what God was doing right now. I wish I could see exactly where he is working in my life,” if you’ve ever felt that, then Esther can be a great book for you because that’s exactly the experience of the book. We know God is working, but it’s hard to see what exactly is going on at the time. And then we get Esther herself who is a great hero of the Bible. We’re going to unpack a little bit more of her, but we see a very faithful, out-of-her-depth woman in this story. We’re told her parents are dead. She’s being raised by her uncle and she is in the face of a formidable nation. As the story goes on, she has very real decisions. Decisions of her own life and death and decisions of her own people’s life and death, her own country, her own nation’s life and death. She’s faced with significant decisions.

If you’ve ever been in a place where you’re faced with significant decisions and you just wish God would give you clarity on what decision to make, then Esther may be a great book for you because that’s exactly the place that Esther is in. We never hear God’s voice tell her exactly what to do and she just works along with others in the story to be faithful. The book of Esther is not so much a list of dos and don’ts. There are certain parts of the Bible where we get significant commands from God. Do this or don’t do this, or even places where we get this wisdom on how to build a world, how to obey God in faithfulness. What we get much more in Esther is a worldview perspective, less of dos and don’ts and more the picture of the eternal architect, albeit in this story invisible. The eternal invisible architect in the face of formidable fortresses, albeit actually paper fortresses, temporary fortresses.

That’s the picture of Esther. As we unpack Esther, we will see more and more of this, that we will see people seeking to do what is right even when they don’t know what is right. People who are seeking to stand up in spaces where they are against incredible, formidable, overwhelming opposition. We’ll have some hindsight in this story as we look into it and we can know the outcomes. But if we come to this with the true vision of the storyteller unpacking the story, it is being delivered to us in a way of a complete unknown. That’s a great space for us to be in as we think about the book of Esther.

We really felt like even at the moment we live in a space in our world where there are some significant unknowns. It does feel like the vast majority of world events that happen often happen far from our shores and even now that is true, and yet we’ve felt the impact of some of that. We’ve felt the impact on us personally as we think about fuel prices and those sorts of things. But there is just the impact, isn’t there, of concern for others that are being hurt and damaged and wars that are going on, other Christians in those countries that are facing real disasters. That is not anything new in our world. That is happening all the time. We constantly live in this space where we’re not always sure what God is doing. It does feel sometimes like he is silent. But the message is not that he’s silent but that he is at work. He is the eternal architect always working even when we don’t see it. And it’s in the face of formidable paper fortresses.

I use that language very specifically because we do face things that we think are and feel formidable. When I was growing up, my father was a pilot. At one point in my life, we did some hobby model aeroplane building. There are more modern ways to do it now, but one of the older ways of doing it was this special paper, like a tissue paper, and you put layers of a resin over it, which caused it to shrink and tighten around the plane’s body and wings. You put enough layers, it starts to become almost like a plastic surface. After a while, you start to feel like this tissue paper you’ve been layering on, almost like a papier-mâché, starts to feel like a solid piece of plastic, and your plane starts to take shape. It starts to feel like a solid thing. But the reality is it is still a plane made of balsa wood, one of the softest kinds of wood, and paper, which means it only takes one disastrous flight, of which I had a few, to finish off your glorious model.

We get this picture here of formidable fortresses, of overwhelming odds. But the reminder we always see in the Bible is that all the human fortresses we ever create really are just like paper fortresses to God. They are formidable to us, but they are not formidable to God. The same thing is true in the face of this Persian Empire who was one of the strongest empires, if not the strongest empire on the planet at the time of Esther. And yet it is still a paper fortress.

A Picture of the Formidable Fortress

Let me illustrate those ideas from this chapter. The ideas of God, the eternal invisible architect against these formidable paper fortresses, because we get right from the beginning here a picture of the formidable fortress. We get this picture of Xerxes, who we’re told. Xerxes is the grandson of Cyrus the Great. He is the guy that overthrew the Babylonian Empire. He is a significant leader in the history of that part of the world. This is his grandson through his mother’s line because Cyrus the Great’s successor was Darius the Great who married Cyrus’s daughter in order to cement his claim to the throne. His son, the grandchild of Cyrus, is the one who gets this. He’s a guy with this royal lineage and this great legacy. All these guys did significant things as leaders. They’ve got “the Great” written after their names because Darius the Great is called Darius the Great, not because in his time he was called Darius the Great, although he was often referred to as the King of Kings, which we sang a song today that points out the real King of Kings. He was called the King of Kings. Historians today call him “the great” just to define him separately from the other Dariuses who were not so great. This is the great one compared to the not-so-great ones. He was a great leader and a significant leader in his day.

Xerxes’ Power and Palace

Darius built two fortresses simultaneously. One of the things that showed his prowess of leadership was that he was able to across the expanse of his kingdom pull the resources to build two fortresses that were almost identical, built from different materials because of availability but laid out very similar. He built them exactly at the same time and they are incredible fortresses and one of them is the Susa fortress which this story, which Esther’s story, takes place in. That was Darius’s claim to fame. Xerxes builds on to that. One of the great things about this story is that when we look at archaeology, we can see very clearly the scene that is taking place.

When we look at archaeology in the Bible, there’s a kind of idea that when you dig around the dirt in this part of the world, we find precisely what we expect to find when it comes to Bible stories. Sometimes we find a lot of dirt for starters. God’s people often were nomads and so there are lots of parts of Israel’s history that just aren’t found in archaeology. Egypt doesn’t have very much record of Israel at all. Suspicions are that the area that Israel lived in has yet to be really uncovered and it’s most likely under an area where a town currently resides. Skeptics would say it’s made up and Israel was never in Egypt. But I think the truth is we just haven’t found the evidence, the significant evidence of Israel in Egypt. But this story in the fortress of Susa, we have very explicit, very clear architectural remains. You can see the example of what we see there at the moment, which you can still see the full layout of the fortress. What that means is we get this story of this little Hebrew girl in the palace of one of the most powerful men in the world with intimate detail on the layout of the palace.

We get references like she’s in the courtyard and the king can see her from the courtyard and we can actually see that the king’s throne is visible from the courtyard in that space. That’s something that if someone was making this up, they had to have been in the palace to have known that was true. This is not just something that someone over here said, “I’m going to make up a story about a princess in Xerxes’ palace.” This is a real tangible example we have of the Bible really coming to life through archaeology. Xerxes’ fortress was a formidable fortress. It was laid on this man-made mount. You can see it steeping up at the front there. That man-made mount was 100 hectares big. As a reference, Grasshill Town Center is six hectares. So 100 hectares big. This man-made mount that the whole, not the whole city, this was just the palace grounds. The whole fortress area, palace grounds were on 100 hectares. On that ground, there was a great hall that was built. It was 19 meters high. It had these 20-meter columns in it. I was trying to find a reference that made sense. If you think this is 3 meters, so you’re multiplying that 6.6 times up. The town hall, the Centennial Hall, it’s the same height internally as Xerxes’ great hall. It had 100, it was the hall of 100 columns, had 100 columns built to hold up the wooden roof that was there which covered a significant ground. The town hall, Centennial Hall, the similar height but Xerxes’ great hall was four times the size. So four times that size. The one-hectare block that’s the same size as our new church property was one-quarter of his whole hall. So there’s still time for us to build quite a large church there. He had a huge space. This is an expression of a formidable fortress. This is the scene that the little girl Esther is brought into. This is the power that she is facing as she faces her challenges.

A Display of Formidable Wealth

Right from the start, we get this picture of a formidable fortress. This party he puts on portrays how formidable he is. We’re told the party went for a 180-day banquet. That’s a significant banquet. That’s going on for a little while. It says a 180-day banquet for all the nobles and military officers. So half the year he just parties on with them. Then just to make sure he’s a generous guy and he wants to open the doors to everyone, he has another banquet. I love the way this verse 5 says it. So after 180 days, it says, “When it was all over, the king gave a banquet for all the people,” small text, “from the greatest to the least,” small text, “who were in the fortress of Susa.” So, not all the people, but the ones that were in the fortress. “It lasted for seven days and was held in the courtyard of the palace garden.”

Here we’ve got a 180-day party going on for all the nobles. Now, we’ve got a little short party, but the writer wants to make sure we understand that this was a generous expression of Xerxes. We see that it has fancy stone floors and people drank out of gold goblets and it was an unlimited open bar. Did you catch that bit of the reading? This is what it said. “By edict of the king, no limits were placed on drinking. For the king had instructed all his palace officials to serve each man as much as he wanted.” It was quite literally a 7-day open bar. By edict of the king, it almost sounds like there was pressure to make sure you were drinking enough at that party. You get the picture here. Xerxes is a powerful guy, maybe one of the most powerful in the world. He’s got a powerful fortress. He’s got all the wealth and resources to have a six-month party with a huge number of people followed by a 7-day party with what sounds like it was even more people. He is a formidable fortress.

Our Response to Intimidation

If we pause just at that moment and take that in, there are a couple of things we will reflect on as we think about some of that. The first thing we might reflect on is how attractive some of the idea of unlimited resources is. How much we would love to have access to more things than we currently have access to. Now, maybe as you read that story, you say, “Yeah, but that’s over the top. I don’t need that.” I hope you think that because if you think you do need that, statistically speaking, you’ll be disappointed. But we all think, don’t we? We talked about this with Barefoot Disciple last year. There was a comment that said, “How much do you think you need?” The answer classically is 10% more than you currently have. How much do you need just to be comfortable? If I just had that little bit more, even if we’re going to go for the bare minimum, just so I don’t need to stress about the next cost that comes along or just so that I can eat out a little bit more without having to question it or just so I can get that nice… we just always have that “if only.” But the irony of the statement is that’s true whether you have this much or it’s true whether you have this much. 10% more is just that. Wouldn’t it be nice? There’s something attractive to this idea of having anything you want, everything you need, never having to question about whether you’re going to spend the money or do the things that are going to cost that money. There’s an attractive element to this formidable fortress, but there’s also an intimidation, isn’t there, especially when we come against the formidable fortresses.

The second worldview we see as we face this is just how intimidating some things are in our life that makes us realize just how much we don’t have and how out of control of things we are. When we come against things that seem formidable, it’s going to make us ask even more questions about where is God and what is God doing? It’s easy for us to think that the things of the world are unstoppable. I think we face this in a space we’re in now. I think we think things like atheism is an unstoppable force. It has taken over education systems and it keeps steamrolling on, this idea that we’ve proven God doesn’t exist. It feels like that’s an unstoppable force, doesn’t it? When we come against it, it feels like this is never going back. Surely, we’re never going to get back to a place where people are open to the idea of God existing. The same thing is true as we think of other world ideologies, as we think about gender ideology and sexuality ideology. It feels unstoppable. It feels like it can never be overcome, that we’ve gone to a place in our world that can never come back from that. These feel like formidable fortresses that often we just are left exasperated. Where is God and what is God doing? Surely this is just going to take us all over. It can feel completely formidable.

It’s a helpful place for us to be as we step into this scene with Esther because she is going to face the formidable. And we face the formidable. We want to be reminded that the eternal, albeit sometimes to us invisible architect is fierce in the face of formidable fortresses. That to him they are just paper fortresses. To him they are quite literally a house of cards waiting to tumble. The irony of all this is we know the Persian Empire did tumble. We sit in a space of a formidable king that we know eventually that kingdom came to an end in the way that it was, as did all the other empires along the way. Whatever humanity once thought was formidable has become in the past.

The Fragile Fortress

So there’s a formidable fortress. But we also see in chapter one a fragile fortress. The author doesn’t let us think that this is unbreakable. The fragile fortress turns out to be Xerxes himself. Let me read this for you again. This is verse 10. “On the seventh day of the feast, when Xerxes was in high spirits because of the wine,” I think you can read what that means. He was in high spirits because of the wine, he told his seven eunuchs who attended him to bring Queen Vashti to him with the royal crown on her head. Now, some scholars would suggest nothing but the royal crown on her head might be what he’s asking for. Whether that’s true or not, it’s clear he is degrading her. The next verse makes it really clear. He wanted the nobles and all the other men to gaze on her beauty. So this formidable fortress who can have anything he wants, unlimited resources, he’s got a beautiful wife and he says, “Come out and let everyone see your beauty.”

A Crack in the Facade

What we see is one small no brings down the huge ego. Queen Vashti says no, I’m not going to. She’s running her own party at the same time, we’re told. She’s asked to leave her party to come to his party, her party with the women, his party with the men, come and parade herself in front of all the men. And she says no. This unbreakable fortress sees this huge crack appear. Listen to his… I feel like the way the author calls these guys the “wise men,” there are references in there the whole time that you can’t help but think the author is being a little bit tongue-in-cheek as to what this guy is thinking. They say Queen Vashti has wronged the whole kingdom. They tell the king. Women everywhere will despise their husbands. They say there will be no end to their contempt. These wise men in all their wisdom respond to the crack in the fortress. It isn’t just with Xerxes. It goes deep with his loyalists who want to support him. Suddenly because he’s told no, everything comes crumbling down. We’ve never heard of a world leader like that, have we? Someone who can’t handle being told no and suddenly makes rash decisions. It all comes crumbling down because really it’s a glimpse that this huge formidable fortress is really just made of paper.

The reality is earthly power will always be that. Earthly power that is built on the power of mankind, the power of humanity, will always have the fragility of humanity. Earthly power that is built on the praise of humanity will always have the fragility of the fickleness of humanity’s praise. When people’s praise moves from one to another, we get a little glimpse here of what the author is doing, of pulling back the curtain and saying, “Yeah, everything looks powerful, but really it’s not far beneath the surface that we’ve actually just got a man-child at the helm.” We get quite literally that image from Wizard of Oz of pulling back the curtain. You know that image that he portrays as Oz, from the book he’s called Oz the Great and Terrible, often referred to as Oz the Great and Powerful, a face he has put on just so that he doesn’t get attacked by the wicked witches. When he’s challenged on it he says, “They had power, I had no power, so I had to pretend I was powerful.” When that curtain is pulled back, you find out a scared man. That’s the picture we get here, someone who is terrified of losing all the influence he has. So we see the paper fortress be revealed.

The Contrast with God’s Kingdom

Psalm 146 says it like this. Psalm 146 was most likely written around the time of Esther. It’s not a psalm of David. Some of the language in Psalm 146 has Persian tones to it. So, it’s written, we’ve got it in Hebrew now, but it’s got undertones like it was written probably in the period of Esther while the Persian Empire was at power. This is what it says.

"Do not put your trust in princes,
    in human beings, who cannot save.
When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;
    on that very day their plans come to nothing.
Blessed are those whose help is in the God of Jacob,
    whose hope is in the Lord their God."
Psalm 146:3-5

This is the picture we’re given from Esther, that we shouldn’t put our hope in those fortresses, but put our hope in the eternal God. As we read through scripture, we see this incredible contrast to the paper fortresses and what God’s kingdom actually looks like. We see a situation where a king crumbles because he’s told you’re not going to get your way. Then we get a picture of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane saying, “Please, Lord, please, Father, but not my will, but yours be done.” Not one who cracks under the pressure of not getting his way, but one who obediently submits himself to his father’s will. We get the challenge to trust the eternal architect. Even when we don’t like the answers that we feel like he’s giving us, when we don’t know what he’s doing in our midst, we still humble ourselves to his will. Or we get this show of power from Xerxes who wants to show off to everyone how powerful he is to firm up his kingdom and let everyone know he’s unbreakable, unstoppable, versus Jesus whose power was in his sacrifice, who humbled himself to be killed in order to bring about salvation. We’re reminded of the eternal architect who is pulling everything together, who is working behind the scenes of even the worst things that happen in our world to bring about his good in the end.

Trusting the Eternal Architect

The question for us as we round this up is what does that look like for you? What fortresses do you feel like you’re facing? What challenges are you facing that you feel like, what is God doing here? Where is God? What does God want from me in this space? As you face them, we’re reminded the thing we do is the next right thing. That we are just faithful to him. Even when we don’t know what exactly the decisions we should make, even when we don’t know what he is doing, we trust the eternal architect.

Let me finish with this as we lean into next week, chapter 2 of Esther, but I don’t want to take too much from that because I’m preaching it. I need some resources for next week. But there’s a disaster that happens in this story that’s quite underplayed. The queen is banished. She’s sent out of her kingdom. She goes from hosting these lavish parties to absolutely nothing. The space that is created through that horrible thing that Xerxes does to her is the very space that God uses to build the plan for his salvation. It’s right to say that often we don’t know what God’s doing. Often he uses the space that is created even through disasters to do his good.

I can give you stories and you hear stories about someone who doesn’t know what God’s doing and these things fall in place and suddenly it all feels like, “God, I saw it all. This is how it all came out. I saw the happy ending and I understand where God was at work.” That’s not where we’re at yet in the book of Esther. What we see is the disaster taking place. It’s the disaster that’s happening. As we think of how God paves the way for Jesus, it’s the disaster of the Roman Empire doing horrible things to God’s people that enables a place where the language of Greek is spread wide and far and so God’s word can spread faster than ever before. It’s the disaster of some of the persecution of the early church that causes the Christians to scatter and go to different places and causes the spread of the gospel. It’s not those disasters themselves that you say, “Oh, this had a good ending.” It’s actually those disasters that created a space that God did his good in. That’s what we see here, that a space is created that was driven by evil, but God meant it for good. As we lean into Esther, we will find more and more that God is at work. Even in the silence, he is the eternal architect. No matter how formidable the opposition, God is at work.