September 19, 2024: Thursday Old Testament Bible Study - Esther 2:1-28
Peace and Christ's Love for you today and always.
On Wednesday Holly had an angioplasty which resulted in a stint for a completely blocked artery. She is home recovering and daughter, Liisa, and husband Rudy are here with her through the weekend. Pray for complete healing and restoration of health. Please also pray for a sense of unity and calm in our nation the closer we get to the election in November. This Saturday at 2PM we will be showing Babette’s Feast, a wonderful award-winning movie from Europe. It is a great movie to reach into our hearts about healing, forgiveness, and generosity for a small village which has little hope of any of it. A week from this Friday we will be eating with our Foodies of Faith at the Istanbul restaurant at 11:30AM on East Speedway. Sign up at church or call the office to let us know that you will be joining us for this treat. Of course, we have rally day coming on the last Sunday of this month, September 29th at 9AM. Please bring a morning snack or brunch item to share and be a part of the beginning of our study of the Book of Ruth during the Sunday School hour. Games and a lot of fun for all ages. Gospel Music Sunday will be on the October 6. That day there will be no Sunday School hour to provide for the rehearsal time of our Gospel Group.
We move into the second chapter of Esther today. After seeing the kind of behavior we can expect from the king, with a six-month long feast filled with an abundance of overeating and over drinking. And we get a really good picture of the place of women in Xerxes' capitol and palace. His wife Vashti is tired of being commanded to show herself off for her drunken kind, and she refuses his order. Obviously, the king is really frosted by her refusal, after all she is the queen, but the other piece of that is that Xerxes is the one who appointed her queen because of her beauty and earlier willingness to be at his beck and call. So out of the first chapter what should you and I expect. The king is angry and decides to pull into the palace every beautiful teenage girl to make the best one the new queen. This is where Esther enters into the picture. She is a beautiful young woman who is orphaned due to the death of her parents, and her uncle has adopted her with promises to care for her at every turn. Needless to say, because of Esther's beauty she is one who is selected to come to the palace and undergo a 10-month practice of bathing in perfumes and with the application of skin softeners and makeup. It may sound like a dream, but for these young women this was a real nightmare. If they are the one selected, they are subjected to sexual abuse with an old king, who then, if they are not pleasing in that way, face the possibility of a lifetime of loneliness in the king's harem. During this prolonged period Esther's uncle Mordecai stays close by the area where the young women are being prepared making certain that Esther is doing OK. I am uncertain about what his options would be if he discovered that she was being mistreated. After all, they were both Jews living under exile in the kingdom of Xerxes, and at a point in the book, Xerxes is determined to murder Persians and Judahites because of his anger. Esther is faced with being the one who gets selected, so how will she move to keep herself and her people safe from Xerxes' tantrum? By the way, when Xerxes selects Esther, he throws yet another party as he replaces queen Vashti with Esther. Of course, we must talk about whether or not we are happy with the way that God allows Esther to be used to save His people in Jerusalem. We have seen one sacrificed for the many later in the New Testament. Is this the role that Esther will be called to take?
More later. In Christ's Love, Pastor Kim
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