Fragile Authority: Esther Study (Part 1)

We spent the last 7 months going through a chunk of the book of Daniel. Looking at the challenges Daniel faced and how he remained faithful to God throughout. Now we're going to jump into a different book to look at the life of another Jew, Esther. While both have very different experiences, they are good examples of remaining faithful to God in seemingly impossible situations. As I've mentioned before, we probably haven't faced dangerous or life-threatening situations because of our faith like Ancient Hebrews and Christians would have experienced, but we can learn a lot from Daniel and Esther about obedience and God's sovereignty. You'll notice throughout Esther, God is never explicitly mentioned; however, you can see Him working through seemingly small people like Esther.

King Xerxes throws a massive feast for all his governors, politicians, and servants. He uses this feast as a declaration of his unparalleled power, glory, and wealth. But we're going to see that King Xerxes authority is more fragile than he would like to believe. While the king was being generous to his people by throwing this feast, he let his drunkenness get the best of him. It was common to drink a lot at these functions and everyone in attendance had to drink whenever the king drank.

After drinking too much, Xerxes let his drunkenness affect his actions. He wanted to have his wife, Queen Vashti, parade her beauty around, but she refused. This refusal in front of everyone made Xerxes mad. In his anger, he went to his wise men to fix the problem of his authority being publicly undermined by his wife.

The wise men came to the conclusion that the wives of Xerxes' officials will convince their husbands to undermine his authority, just like his wife did. While King Xerxes thinks he has substantial god-like power, his authority is very fragile and was able to be undermined by one single person – in this case, his wife, Vashti. After hearing from his wise men, he didn't want to risk other people undermining his authority; therefore, Xerxes banishes Vashti and plans to replace her with someone more pliable.

After the decision to banish Vashti, it was time for Xerxes to find a new wife. A pageant is suggested by his officials to select the new queen. In this pageant, the women would parade their beauty around (which Vashti refused to do). Xerxes would then assert his godlike dominance over each of them, and would select the queen based on who pleased him the most.

In the end, Esther won the pageant and was crowned the new queen. After the decision has been made, Xerxes throws another feast, again showing his generosity towards his people. Although Xerxes was being generous in this moment, he still ends up abusing his power to dominate his people.

In this section, we see that Mordecai, Esther's cousin (who really acted as an adoptive father to Esther), is in the right place at the right time to help Xerxes. This is just one of the examples where we’ll see God working through seemingly small people, even though He's never directly mentioned. We will continue to see God's hand at work as we study more in Esther.

Application to our lives

While we don't always need to find a way to apply passages in the Bible to our life (sometimes passages will just show us characteristics of God), I think there are a few takeaways from the beginning of Esther.

1. God puts us where He wants us for His specific purposes. Daniel goes from a prisoner of war in Babylon to becoming a higher up and respected person to the Babylonians. Now we see Esther, a young Jewish woman, become the queen of one of the most powerful empires. While we might not have these large, miraculous instances in our own lives, God still works in and through our seemingly mundane lives. We might not always know what God has planned in our lives, but we have to remain faithful wherever He places us.
2. Find favor in God's eyes. This should be our focus, even if it means being unpopular to others in this world. We see how Daniel and his friends stood up to obey God even when it wasn't popular. We'll see the same thing with Esther and Mordecai as they face trials that we will read about throughout this study. James 4:4 says, "Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God."
3. When facing a trial, remember that God is always in control. We might not be facing life or death situations like we've seen in Daniel and will see in Esther; however, we will still go through trials in our lives. During our trials, we need to remember that God has been faithful before, and He's still in control now.

Based on these applications, what is one thing you plan to work on this month?

Cornerstone Impact Update

In June, we started a new series for the remainder of 2024, Invested with Purpose. This is a series through a book by Arthur Ally on the birth of Biblically Responsible Investing. Through the series, we will find that it wasn't (and still isn't) smooth sailing for BRI; however, it is so important to have investing options for Christians. The second part of this series was published last month discussing the origins of BRI.

Inspire

We're starting to see a shift in stock market dynamics. Instead of people looking at the "Magnificent Seven" stocks such as Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, investors are interested in exploring alternative investment options – one of those options being Biblically Responsible Investing (BRI).

Inspire's CEO, Robert Netzly talks more about this in a recent blog:

Is there a difference between the Inspire Impact Score methodology for faith-based investing and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing? There has been a lot of backlash recently of ESG, so it's important to understand the difference between ESG and faith-based investing standards. Check out this blog from Inspire's Robert Netzly discussing 7 critical differences between ESG and how Inspire does faith-based investing:

Eventide

Do you know what you're invested in? Since we've started our Cornerstone Portfolios, we've realized a lot of investors don't know what companies make up their portfolios. It's important (especially as a Christian investor) to understand what you're actually profiting from.

During times of market volatility, it's important to hold onto timeless investment truths. Eventide recently shared a video series they initially posted last year with some reminders as we experience some market volatility: