Esther 4, Esther’s Renewed Mind

·       Esther 4:13-16:  This passage is, for me, the interpretive key of the whole story of Esther.  We are told that the absence of any direct references to the LORD is problematic.  Mordecai knows the truth about the Jewish people.  They will not be annihilated.  And there is no reason for him to think this except that he trusts God.  You can tell that Esther, raised in Mordecai’s house, was raised in the traditions of the Jews, by which I am referring to the stories of the Patriarchs Abraham to Joseph, and of God’s “relief and deliverance” in the Exodus through the times of the Judges and the Kings.  Esther’s request that all the Jews in Shushan fast and pray for her indicates she trusts in the LORD.  To whom would they be praying that she would gain courage and an opening before the king? 

o   Having said this about Esther, what we also see here is what, in the NT, we call “the renewing of the mind.”  We don’t know if Esther was thinking what Mordecai mentions in v13, that she would be safe because she was the queen.  But it is quite likely.  Esther had already experienced “blessings” in the way she became queen.  She was obviously beautiful.  She had been well-liked by the man in charge.  And the king had made the choice that she would be queen.  There was a lot of room for “confidence in the flesh” (Phil. 3:3).  Her response to hearing about Mordecai being decked out in sackcloth was to send him better clothes to wear.  Her response to the thought that she should appeal to the king was to make it sound impossible to get a hearing from him (it was possibly “unlikely” but not “impossible;” in the end, what other option was there but to do nothing).  She needed to have her mind renewed and Mordecai was the one to do it: Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?  I’m guessing there is a devotional thought in all of this.  Esther got the point: If I perish, I perish!

·       Esther 4:16: Esther asked people to fast for three days.  Quite often in the OT there are references to “three days.”  Some of them, like this one, remind me of Jesus and three days in the tomb.  We know the “death-resurrection” principle is at work all over Scripture.  God brings people to the place of impossibility. There is no way out.  But after three days (often; do your own study of “three days” in Scripture) there is then an answer that can only be seen as from God.  This is the opposite of putting confidence in the flesh.  We die to self, to our own answers and abilities, and after three days are raised to the life that that glorifies God and God alone.  On the third day Esther stood before the king (5:1)!