"ESTHER" (6)

Press, 16 April 1979, Page 8

"ESTHER" (6)

The King- suffering from insomnia, reads the records of his reign and finds that Mordecai had not been rewarded for revealing the plot to kill him. Immediateky the King desired to put things . right and calls for Hamman, his primeminister. So Hamman came in and the King?" Hamman thought “What shall be done unto the man who has pleased the King?" Hamman though, to himself, "Whom would he want to honour more than me?" So he replied, "Bring out the royal robes and the King's own horse, and the royal crown, and instruct one of the King's most noble princes to robe the man and to lead him through the streets orr

the King's own horse, ; shouting before him, "This is the way the King honours those who truly please him!" "Excellent!" The King said to Hamman. "Hurry and take these robes and my horse, and do just as you have said — to Mordecai the Jew, who works at the Chancellery, follow every detail you have suggested." So Hamman took the robes and put them on Mordecai and mounted him on the King's own steed, and led him through the streets of the City, shouting, "This is the way the King honours those he delights in." What a shock! To learn that Hamman had suggested the way to honour the man he hated and for whom he had already caused the gallows to be made to hang him on.

Thus Hamman was forced to humble himself before the very man he sought to destroy that day. One can imagine how Mordecai felt with such sudden honours, being under the sentence of death with all his people, and having been through days of humiliation, fasting and prayer. Perhaps

he realised that God was working and this was the beginning of the end of the decree against the lives of all the Jews. After the cutting embarrassment and ordeal, Hamman hurries home utterly humiliated. When Hamman told his wife and friends what had happened, they said, “If Mordecai is a Jew, You

will never succeed in your plans against him; to continue to oppose him will be fatal." While they were

still discussing it with him, the King's messengers arrived to conduct Hamman quickly to the second banquet Queen Esther had prepared. Events move quickly, •"What is your request Queen Esther?" asks the King. Pleading for her life and the lives of her people, Esther explained how they had all been sold to be destroyed, to be slain, to perish: if they had been sold as slaves she would not have asked the King to spare them even though the enemy could not compensate for the damage done. "Who is he and where is he," is the fourth acrostic in Esther where the name

of Jehovah is hidden. This is also the fourth pivot on which the story turns. This statement from Esther was one .of the greatest surprises of the King's life. To think that anybody would presume in his heart to kill his Queen and her people! Neither the King nor Hamman knew that Esther was a Jewess. The King was partly guilty for the evil decree having not studied the case when it was presented to him, such was his negligence. Hamman himself was a tool of Satan, permitting pride to exalt him to destruction, everything he did was unreasonable. Ito be continued) Monday s Message from