This past week I picked up one of the Bibles that lay by my chair and turned to the Book of Esther. You might think that I wanted to read about the beauty of the Queen and truth be told I did stop and ask God if I could be given a dream or a vision of the way she actually looked, so far I haven’t seen her but stayed tuned, I’ll let you know. But I digress, the reason I wanted to read the account of Esther again was to enjoy the fact that our egotistical nemesis Haman, and his sons, were hanged from the very gallows he built on which to hang Mordecai… or what goes around comes around. Instead of studying that further something else caught my attention, read this scripture:
Esther 12-14 When Hathach told Mordecai what Esther had said, Mordecai sent her this message: “Don’t think that just because you live in the king’s house you’re the one Jew who will get out of this alive. If you persist in staying silent at a time like this, help and deliverance will arrive for the Jews from someplace else; but you and your family will be wiped out. Who knows? Maybe you were made queen for just such a time as this.”
So did you see the sentence that captured my attention?
“Maybe you were made queen for such a time as this.”
This made me stop and think, or as the Psalmist put it, Selah. I tried to scan back over my life to see if there were opportunities, ministry opportunities, maybe it was the chance to give someone a helping hand, or a time I should have spoken up in defense of someone being discussed, or passed up a chance to witness to someone one-on-one about the saving power of Jesus. In my thoughts I have done all of those things but then I remember times that maybe I was intimidated into taking a step back, not coming forward, staying quiet instead of being my normally vocal self, many things come to mind.
What have I missed?
Maybe nothing, maybe a lot of things, I don’t know. What I do know is that from this moment forward I want to be more sensitive to the Spirit, to people around me, to the needs of others I may have overlooked and if there is something that I need to be doing then like Queen Esther I will arm myself with fasting and prayer and face the task bravely!
I share this with you because it could be that you were born for a time such as this in your own life’s circle and you don’t want to miss it…
Harolene.com 
Esther ROCKS!
She is the SAVIOR of her people, a typology for “Christ”. (Actually, I think in technical terms, that is botched, but SAVIOR for sure…) A forerunner of Jesus. And a …. wait for it… this is soooooo scandalous…. a …. WOMAN! There, I said it.
But that is not really the most dramatic part of her story. And she is not the ONLY woman savior of God’s people. We really must remember Judith. Even Rehab the whore …. (in a sense).
The Book of Esther does not mention “God” in it. He is there, but always between the lines. A very curious feature of any book in the Bible.
And there is more, much more, even more than I know by a country mile. (I am amazed at how little of the Bible I really know)
But your post has me seeing something new.
She is beautiful, yes. I have seen that before. And as Saviors go, this also is an opposite to Jesus who is Isaiah’s suffering servant, a person no one would look at and find attractive for the vanity aspects.
But Esther is. She is beautiful yet NOT VAIN. I no of NO OTHER instances where beauty is not vanity. Perhaps I need to meditate on that further, but is surely is not the NORM. And I find it fascinating now that you have highlighted it.
The king finds her irresistibly attractive, and THAT spells salvation for her people. Hmmm…
She did face death. When she entered the King’s court unannounced, she would have died if not he had been looking the moment she entered AND found favor with him. Security protocol dictates that without his acknowledgment, she would immediately be put to death on the spot. But we can presume the beauty God gives her sparked his favor, and like a woman who turns heads when she enters the room, he HAD to entertain her and thus accept her invitation to a party!
BTW, while we are on THAT thought, I ask you to consider how Esther saves her people with a party! A banquet! A meal! Also a forerunner of the meal Jesus gives us which also is his body, the fruit of the tree of LIFE.
More as we go…
I am too busy to get bogged down in blog comments today.
Great post!
LikeLiked by 1 person
So many deep points in there to consider. I think I need to take a deep dive into it 😇
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes. Thanx for your post. I learned something new today. Now I just gotta meditate on it a while… see how it all fits.
Beauty minus vanity.
I could have looked at Esther all my life and not seen that.
It really says some powerful things about the human vocation to bear God’s image and the power of bearing that image. She is opposite to Jesus in some important ways, and yet much like mirror images are opposite, they are paradoxically the same too.
Wow!
Bakes my noodle.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is instructive.
LikeLike