_THE STORY OF QUEEN ESTHER._
ESTHER iv. 13-17.
The subject to which I invite your attention to-night is the Story of
Queen Esther. The kernel of it has been read to you in the fourth
chapter. I shall read the closing verses, so as to give you the key-note
to the meaning of the narrative. After Esther had refused to go and
plead for the Hebrews with the King of Persia, "Mordecai commanded to
answer Esther, Think not with thyself that thou shalt escape in the
king's house, more than all the Jews. For if thou altogether holdest thy
peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise
to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father's house shall be
destroyed: and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such
a time as this? Then Esther bade them return Mordecai this answer, Go,
gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, and fast ye
for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day: I also and
my maidens will fast likewise; and so will I go in unto the king, which
is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish. So Mordecai went
his way, and did according to all that Esther had commanded him."
It is a very difficult task to calculate how much religion there is in
the world—true religion, that God accepts. Elijah once tried to
calculate, and concluded there was nobody true to God but himself; blind
to the seven thousand that had not bowed the knee to Baal. It is quite
possible to take superficial, indulgent, optimistic views of the
progress made by mankind, but God knows there are as deadly and wicked
and more blasphemous errors committed by good men, who talk of this
world as if it were given over to the devil to reign and rule in it, as
if things were growing worse and worse, as if the number of men and
women whose hearts are God's were few. I think the blunder comes from
looking for goodness often in the wrong place, from a mistaken idea of
what true religion is. It won't do to reckon up our church members; they
are not all genuine. It won't do to count our acts of worship, our
prayer-meetings, our praises. These are often mere sound, breath, empty
air. If you want to know how much of Christ there is in this world, you
must go outside the churches, into the workshops, into the homes of the
people. Ay, you must go to lands where Christ's name is not often heard,
and you have got to listen with a sympathetic ear, and whenever you hear
the accents of Christ's human voice ringing out in any way of genuine
love and tenderness, whenever you see duty done patiently, and loyally,
and uncomplainingly, whenever you see a heart or a soul follow the
light, however dim and glimmering, understand that there you are
touching Christ, and stand on a bit of the kingdom of heaven. The
eleventh chapter of Hebrews is the golden roll of the Old Testament
heroes, men of God, stamped by God Himself as genuine; and the deeds
recited, too, as having been done by them, that gave them their degree
and title as heroes, and nobles, and princes in heaven's kingdom, are
not the preaching of sermons, or the writing of books of theology, or
the fighting about petty little trivialities of doctrinal explanation,
or the performance of rites and ceremonies and acts of worship, but
brave deeds of battle, noble, dauntless generalship, heroism, and
courage, and self-sacrifice, loyalty to the cause of truth and
righteousness in this world. These are the deeds that were done,
following the guidance of God, under the inspiration of Heaven, and the
men who did them are recited in one long unbroken chain, and linked on
in line direct with Jesus Christ, whose death and redemption are
presented as the crown and consummation of that long series of priests,
and kings, and prophets, and warriors, and heroes, true-hearted men and
women who lived for God and fought for God in the olden time. It is
sometimes said that Christ was not present in the Old Testament times.
True, the human Jesus of Nazareth was not there, but oh, the spirit of
Him was! He was the very heart-beat, and pulse, and inspiration of all
that long, continuous struggle to bring heaven down into earth, for that
is what the Old Testament story presents to us. In every brave deed, in
every true word, in every pure and righteous life, it was not the heart
of man that glowed, but the very spirit of Christ—Christ coming to full
birth and maturity in this world's story.
Some people are puzzled to discover how the Book of Esther comes to be
in the Old Testament. It is said to be a romance of history. It contains
no religious teaching. The name of God is not once mentioned in it, from
the first verse to the last. How comes it in the Bible?
Now, it is quite true that there is no direct dogmatic teaching of
religious truth. It is absolutely true that the name of God is not to be
found in its pages. But what of that? what of that, if the book is one
of the most powerful presentations of God's providence working among
men, if the book itself has for its very soul and idea the conception of
God overruling events in a marvellous fashion to preserve His kingdom on
earth? Is the great thing to get the name of God, spelt with its three
letters, or to be shown God? Ah! it is the same kind of blunder that
causes us to make so much of mere forms of words in the Church, instead
of looking to see if the Spirit of God animates the man and woman and
the preacher who inhabit the professed house of God on earth. There may
be no teaching of religion, no prophesying of Jesus, no foreshadowing of
the evangelical truths of redemption in the Book of Esther; but what it
does paint for you is a majestic picture of a human heart struggling
against its own weakness, rising to a grandeur that had in it the glory
of Christ's own self-sacrifice. The name is not there, the phrase is not
there; but the core, and kernel, and heart of Christ's love, and faith,
and redemption of men are pulsing and beating in the book.
It is a puzzling book. There is a great deal in it that is revolting.
The background on which Esther's deed of heroism was done is ugly and
repulsive. She lived in a social state that was degraded and base,
containing in it customs and habits that almost sicken us who, through
Christ's mercy, have been lifted into comparative purity and sweetness.
You remember the story. A dissolute Persian monarch, in a drunken
frolic, requires of his queen to do a deed that ran against all that was
womanly within her, and she refused. Mercilessly he deposes her from the
throne, and he sets to to select another queen. The fair maidens of the
land are collected, and in a very disgusting fashion presented to the
tyrant, and from among them he chooses the beautiful young Jewess
Esther, and makes her his queen. One cannot but pity her for having
lived in such a time, for having had to play a part on such a stage of
the world's story. One may even fairly ask the question, if it had not
been nobler if she had not been presented by her guardian in such a
revolting competition? But it is no good for us finding fault with the
actual course of the world's story. If God was not too fine to lead men
in all the bygone days—polygamy and such like practices were tolerated
in the Old Testament time, because of the lowness of men's hearts, as
Christ explains to us—it is a mistake in you and me being too fine to
recognise God where God was numbering Himself among transgressors, that
He might lift mankind to His own level. And then the narrative proceeds;
presents to us a succession of cruel, unscrupulous intrigues, mainly
between Esther's guardian, Mordecai, (a Jew whom one cannot admire and
love, taking the picture of him drawn in this book) and the king's
favourite courtier, Haman. In the course of the rivalry between the two,
the very existence of God's people throughout the Persian empire is
imperilled. Partly through Haman's scheming, but also through dauntless
devotion to what they believed to be the cause of God, and which was the
cause of God, in spite of the earthliness and imperfections attaching to
its soldiers and defenders, partly by evil fixed to them, partly through
nobility and goodness, a drama is presented to us, a struggle of heroism
and bravery, and in the centre of it is that young queen doing a deed
that we cannot but call Christlike.
Now, I want to say this to you: Men's lights in the world are very
diverse. The possibilities of goodness and attainment for one man are
far greater and far higher than for another. Some of you may be so
entangled with evil customs and habits of commercial or of social life
that you feel your very position there is impossible to make quite
consistent with the full requirements of Jesus Christ. Thus things are.
It is no good blinking them. And what are you to do? To despair, to give
up any attempt to be good, and pure, and noble? Never! never! Look at
all that Old Testament story—men far behind in their notions of common
morality, yet on that low, degraded background discerning always a
higher that may be done, a lower that may be avoided. No matter where
you may stand, no matter how difficult the achievements may be, the one
great question is, not what is the framework, but what is the painting
you put in it. Are you living for self? or are you living for God?
living to your own self-will, or striving to do your duty as far as you
can do it?
From a very lowly lot Esther rose to be the first lady in the land, and
I suppose all her sister Jewesses envied her, and thought that there was
nothing that was not happy, and prosperous, and pleasant in her
position. Yes, it was a position of great advantage, of great pomp,
flattering to her pride—rich raiment, jewellery, the adulation of
fawning courtiers, the admiration of the great monarch of the mightiest
kingdom in the world, promoted to the throne as queen, wielding power
over the destinies of man. Ah! it was a very enviable, happy lot, and
yet not altogether so very enviable. I will tell you why—a thing that we
apparently forget. When we all of us enter into our estates, when we
come of age, nearly all good fortune in this world is heavily mortgaged.
It is encumbered estates that we come heir to; and without disloyalty,
without being renegades and dishonourable, we cannot cast off these
encumbrances. The present has always got to pay the purchase price to
the past. You must not kick away the ladder by which you rose to
fortune. Ah! and sometimes into the bright sunshiny present the past
comes with a very long bill to pay—comes with a very stern face and a
demanding hand, and bids you, perhaps, risk all that is making your
heart so warm, and so proud, and so gay.
That was the case with Esther. She was a Jewess. She owed her birth and
her breeding to that despised, exiled people. She had won her proud
position on the emperor's throne through the planning, and toiling, and
sacrifice of her Jewish guardian. And now her people's destiny hangs on
the balance. A deadly conspiracy against them has brought it about that
on a given day, rapidly approaching, there is to be a universal
merciless massacre of these defenceless Jews. And through the mouth of
her old revered guardian the demand comes to her—the one human being
that might have influence with the cruel king to cancel the decree and
save the lives of men, women, and children—at the risk and peril of her
own life in asking it, to go and intercede for them.
Hard! oh, how hard! Don't you judge harshly the poor queen when she
shrank away from it and could not face the stern summons. Think of it,
the young flesh, the soft heart—a woman's heart—within her, and think of
the cruel death by torture that was wont to be inflicted upon any one
that, unbidden, dared to force his way into the king's presence; coming,
too, in the bright noonday of all her good fortune. It would have been
easier to risk life when she was an unknown Jewish maiden; but oh, in
this good luck, this fortune, this love, this adulation, this
admiration, with her right fair beauty all upon her, to take it all and
go and confront grim death! it seemed too much to ask. And so Esther
began arguing within herself: Was she bound to hazard her life for these
Jews? After all, what had they done for her? They were her race, her
kindred, but what of that? Had she not come out from among them? Has not
destiny taken her lot and separated it from theirs? Why cannot she live
her own life apart from them? Why should she come down from the throne
and take her stand among them, exposed to cruel massacre and death? What
is the obligation? Where are the ties that bound her lot to theirs? Ay,
where were the ties of love and the obligations to generosity? They are
too fine and impalpable to be proved by argument. The moment you begin
discussing them or questioning them—ties that bind brother to brother,
sister to sister, child to parent—they vanish like life dissected for.
You destroy them. They have to be felt, not proved, but are more real,
more solemn, more important in determining a man's destinies than all
the legal bonds and moral obligations that bind him in society.
But then, again, the queen would ask herself, What would be the good of
her running such a risk? Is it reasonable that she, a single weak woman,
unskilled in the ways of courts and of cunning courtiers; that she
should be asked to plunge into a whirlpool of race-hatreds and furious
feuds between unscrupulous nobles and potentates about the court; that
she should confront the reckless rage of the royal tyrant—she, so
defenceless, so impotent, so frail? Ah, yes! once again the argument was
good to shirk the path of heroism; but once again, what business had she
to argue? When duty comes to you it is not a thing to reason about. You
have got to just go and do it.
Mother, when your little one was struck down with the deadliest and most
infectious ailment, did you reason for one moment whether you could be
expected to risk your life, whether you were not too delicate to make it
worth while doing it, whether you would not be throwing away your
existence? If any man came and suggested that to you,—"No!" Love, duty,
they do not argue, they command.
The fact of the matter was, the queen was standing in a false position.
She could not see the truth, she could not see the right, where she
stood. I hope I have been able to show you how very plausible, how very
weighty, the grounds were on which she made her refusal to risk her
life. But have not you yourselves felt something about a home atmosphere
in which such reasoning moved that is contemptible and despicable? Have
not you recognised its infinite pettiness and littleness? Oh, what a
narrow, contracted, selfish world that woman's heart is living in! It
has been all a question about Esther—Esther's life, Esther's risks,
Esther's obligations, as if that were the whole. Why not break down
those prison walls of littleness? Look at those thousands of
Jews—fathers, mothers, young maidens, brave lads, little children with
their bright eyes, and with terrible death impending over them. How is
Esther so forgetful of them, with their white faces and their anxious
eyes, and of God's purposes in this world? Ah, no man can ever choose
the path of right, of heroism, of goodness, of duty, till he sees and
feels himself in God's big world, and with God above him up in heaven!
Mordecai recognised the root of the queen's cowardice, and swiftly and
sternly he sent back a reply that shattered those barriers of her
selfishness, and lifted her out of her little self-centred world, and
set her on the pinnacle whence the whole line and way of duty shone out
unmistakably. "Go back," said he—"go back and tell the queen to be
ashamed of her despicable selfishness. Does she imagine that she lives
separate and unconnected in this world of God's, so that she can save
her own life by sacrificing, cowardly, the lives of her kinsmen? Go,
tell the queen that she does not live in a will-less, random world,
where she may pick and choose the best things for herself. Go, tell her
that confronting her, sweeping round her, seizing her in its currents,
the great will of God is moving on down through the centuries. If she
will not save God's people, then God will find another deliverer, and
she herself shall be dashed aside. Go, tell the queen she may refuse the
task, but the deed shall be done. God's purpose in His chosen people
shall not be baulked. Deliverance will come to the Jews, but she, poor
blind queen, may have missed a noble vocation. Go, bid the queen look at
the strange providence that picked her out among her people, that placed
her on the throne, that set her by the side of the despot in whose hands
the fate of her people is held, and then bid her ask whether she thinks
God did that deed out of partial, indulgent favour of her petty self, or
whether it is not clear as noontide that just for this hour of peril,
and of danger, and of death, to be the redeemer and the saviour of the
Jews, God gave her that dignity and set her on the throne."
Ah, what a new world we are in now! what a new light floods everything!
The queen felt it. All that was noble, all that was good in her waked
and gained the upper hand, and crushed down her baseness, and her
meanness, and her selfishness. And yet heroism had a struggle with the
weakness of the flesh. That is nothing strange. Remember Christ in
Gethsemane: "Oh, watch with Me, with your human sympathy and fellowship,
in My dire hour of need!" It was a cry like that that made Esther send
back that message to Mordecai. She wanted to feel the binding force of
the ties of common human brotherhood that connected her with her people
to make her strong. She saw how it was. Away from them, and living
alone, proudly, selfishly, her heart had got hard, and she could not go
out among them; but it would mean a deal for her during those days if
she knew that in every Jewish home men and women, young men and maidens,
and little children, from morning till night, were fasting, and by the
pain and abstinence of fasting kept thinking, from morning till night,
of the deadly danger hanging over them, and Esther steeling herself to
risk her life for love of them. Oh, wrapped round with that sense of
human sympathy, nerved and braved by the thought of all these human
lives hanging on her heroism, the weak woman conquered, and she could go
and do the deed of valour!
But one thing more: the other element, the sense of her own weakness,
her own impotence—for that she needed to fall back on God. Ah, if it
were the case simply of a nation pleading with her to intercede on their
behalf, she could not have done that all alone! But when she herself,
through those two days, lived face to face with God, till this world was
filled with His presence, till all the old stories of the generous
rescues of bygone days were blazing resplendent before her eyes,
guaranteeing that it was a call of God, that God would be behind her and
with her and that His strength would be sufficient for her weakness—so
backed with intimate love and sympathy with her fellow-men, and a strong
faith in God, she could go and do her duty. Look at this striking
contrast. Read that first refusal of hers—selfish, self-centred,
cowardly, prudent. I think you feel all through it a restlessness, a
dissatisfaction, a vacillation, a nervous excitement, a sense of
uneasiness, a hidden doubt whether in saving her life she may not be
losing it. Read that reply now, when she pledges herself to go and dare
the king's deadly rage. How grand, and majestic, and calm it rings out!
solemn, earnest, like the voice of a brave veteran going on a forlorn
hope, but with the tranquillity, the serene certainty, of a brave heart
doing what it knows to be duty. Ah, the man that goes through this world
regardless of right or wrong, not asking what is duty, taking and
choosing what shall be for his own advantage, trimming, and chopping,
and setting his sails to catch every breeze of dishonourable prosperity,
the restless heart that made response hanging upon himself, every step
his own, if wrong then the upbraiding and the remorse all will be his.
Oh, the sweetness, the grandeur, the calmness of the man who has asked
simply, in any circumstances of danger and difficulty, "What is right?
what is duty? what is the will of God? what alone can and ought to be
done?" and then does it, ay, with death hanging over. He can sleep
tranquilly. He is not responsible for the issue, no matter what it be.
Here on earth he has done the right, done his duty, and the
responsibility rests on God.
Esther, by that deed of heroism, delivered God's people from
destruction. In her measure she did the same thing that Christ did
perfectly later. Like Him, too, she laid her own life down on the altar.
That it was not sacrificed does not diminish the value of the offering.
A man does not need to perish in saving another from drowning, if he
plunge into the wild, stormy sea, to deserve an admiration as great as
if he had perished in the task.
She did a deed of Christ. That deed roused the admiration of her day and
generation. That deed of hers was told with kindling eyes and ringing
voice, and pride and triumph, from father to child, generation after
generation. That deed of hers stood out as a pledge, a guarantee, of the
reality of God's purpose for His kingdom on earth. By her deed, in her
own day and generation, she saved God's people from imminent
destruction; by that deed, preserved in history, she lifted up and made
strong the hope and faith of generations after. And so, rightfully, her
story finds its place in that long record of the hearts, noble, and
brave, and true, who, for love of men and faith in God, at the bidding
of Heaven, loved not their own lives to death, but laid them down for
their brethren.
Oh, we men and women have got to learn this lesson from this Bible of
ours—the real service of God, that is real religion, and that does build
God's kingdom on earth, is done not altogether, by a long way, in our
churches, in our religious exercises of worship; but done in purity,
love, and truth, and goodness, out of generous kindliness to one
another, at the bidding of God, through all the common chapters that
make up our daily life.