Esther 2 Devotional
By Pastor Lawrence

It would be really unfair to compare Esther with Cinderella, for she didn’t choose to go to the dance, if you will, and she certainly didn’t fall in love with any prince charming. No, this story is not one that little girls dream about, for no girl wants to be placed in a harem to serve as a plaything for a king. Similar to Daniel and his three friends being forced into castration in Babylon, this young girl was forced into slavery with an “opportunity” for advancement—clearly, not the stuff of fairy tales. But because she was beautiful, she was “invited” to be in the king’s beauty contest to replace Vashti as queen.
If God had told her in advance that this was part of his sovereign plan to save the world she would likely have laughed in unbelief, similar to Sarah when she heard that she would bear a child in her nineties. Sometimes, God’s plan simply doesn’t make sense to us, so it’s probably good that he doesn’t fill her in on all the details. Nevertheless, God would use her beauty as well as her sufferings to bring about his perfect will.
Similar to Daniel, Esther would face years of reeducation to be in the service of the king. She was not trained in dream interpretation and pagan literature like Daniel and his three friends, but rather in anything that interested the King, Ahasuerus. In addition, she would undergo two and half years of beauty treatments and receive special counsel on how to make herself most appealing and ingratiating in the eyes of the king.
In another comparison with Daniel and his three friends, this young woman was given a new name. Her Hebrew name is Hadassah, but she is renamed Esther after the Persian god Ishtar. And it seems that Mordecai wants her to keep her Jewish identity hidden just as he has kept his own identity under wrap, for we are never told his Hebrew name but only his pagan name Mordecai, named after the Babylonian god Marduk. So, unlike Daniel, she was told to go ahead and eat the king’s food, to drink the king’s wine and even to share the king’s bed outside the bonds of marriage in order to hide her faith from her captors. We’re not told why Mordecai gives her this particular counsel, but likely he thinks that she is a very vulnerable woman in this foreign pagan court. Regardless of his reasoning, Esther does all that he says.
Unlike the narratives in the book of Daniel, though, Esther is not raised up to serve as an example for young women, nor is Mordecai’s counsel to be commended any more so than Naomi’s advice to Ruth to go and lie down at the feet of Boaz after a night of drinking on the threshing floor. No, God does not work through Esther because of her ongoing faithfulness, but because of his sovereign choice to work even through weakness.
The principal theme or question in this passage is this: will God’s people identify themselves with the Lord and love him more than they love the world or even their own lives? At first, Esther and Mordecai do not, but eventually God would move in their hearts to act on behalf of the whole nation of Israel, to save them from certain destruction. All of this will ultimately point us to Christ, the true and faithful redeemer who would lay down his life for our sins, but it also shows us how a perfect God works through imperfect people.