The Origins of Anti-Semitism
Romans 9:1-6 (Introduction)
We’re in Romans chapter 9 and at the
risk of being redundant at the beginning of each one of these classes I’m going
to review the same basic materials so we understand why I’m doing what I’m
doing. Romans 9-11 is really the foundation in the New Testament for our
understanding of God’s future plan and purpose for Israel. For ethnic
Israel, that is.
I brought some books this time
for a little show and tell. One book I’ve been researching is Israel and the
Church: The Origin and Effects of Replacement Theology by Ronald DiProse. He
has spoken at the Pre-Trib Conference a couple of different times. You can go
to the Pre-Trib website which is www.pre-trib.org
and see all the papers that have been given over the past twenty-one or
twenty-two years are up there under Archives. You can go through and find some
of the presentations and papers that have been written by these guys that are
much more detailed than what I’m presenting. Then another book is by Michael
Bloch who is a professor at the Masters Seminary in California. His work on
replacement theology is called Has the Church Replaced Israel: A Theological Evaluation.
One of the things I noticed in both
these authors’ quotes is their use of the term “national” Israel. This is one
of the troubles with having had one’s work as writer and editor is that you
notice sometime later and you think you could have said it a little better. But
to the writing of books, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes, “there is no end.” You can
edit and edit and edit and proofread, proofread, proofread, and it’s going to
come back from the printer with errors you can’t believe you left in there.
Trust me. I had an extremely detailed Hebrew professor who, like all Hebrew scholars,
was very detailed minded. He published a commentary on Genesis and used his
doctoral students to proofread the manuscript some three or four hundred times
and it came back from the publisher with several hundred errors. You read it
and you get too familiar with it and you let some errors by.
But one of the things that I noticed is
an important thing in these two authors’ quotes is they would talk about God’s
plan for national Israel. I don’t think that’s the right adjective. It’s
“ethnic” Israel. In the work that I’ve done on Romans 11 in the past I’ve
always used that term. God has a future plan for ethnic Israel. National Israel:
yes, but there has not always been a time when there was a state, a Jewish
state in the land of Israel. God always has a plan for the future of ethnic
Israel. That’s a broader term and I think a more precise term when we’re
talking about the future of Israel.
I have pointed out two things that have
plagued Christianity. They have created incredible horrors down through the
centuries killing millions of people and putting them through untold suffering.
Nations have risen and fallen as a result of these errors, which are all a
result of fallacious interpretation. The first is replacement theology and the
second is anti-Semitism. We talked about the issues related to hermeneutics or
interpretation two or three lessons back. The last couple of lessons we looked
at replacement theology and now it’s anti-Semitism. I was going to try to do
anti-Semitism as one-shot but I was just reading too much and there was too
much to cover so I’m not going to make it in one-shot. I’m going to do two
shots because there’s one particular thing I want to do tonight. We’ll have
time for setting the stage for anti-Semitism in the Old Testament. So we have
these two errors that have to be addressed. Anti-Semitism is coming back and
intensifying every year.
It’s interesting, as I’ve gone through
some of my reading I have looked at a book that has been incredibly influential
over the years. It’s Anti-Semitism by R.B. Thieme, Jr. Its first printing was in 1974.
I’m not sure when R.B. Thieme first taught on anti-Semitism. If my memory is
right it goes back to when I was in early high school. I think he taught on the
dangers of anti-Semitism before the ’67 war. Now the reason that’s important is
that up until the ’67 war when Israel defeated the Arab nations and threw
Jordan out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the U.S. wasn’t really that
strong a backer of Israel. Once Israel demonstrated their ability to defeat
their enemies, America all of a sudden loved them. America loves a winner. We
love an underdog and we love a winner and Israel was a little bit of both. We
became much more supportive. It was L.B. J. who was responsible for all of a
sudden deciding to throw the weight of the U.S. behind Israel in that conflict.
In the last fifty or sixty years some of the presidents we’ve had have been
elected solely in relation to what they were going to do for Israel. Harry
Truman, L.B.J., and Nixon, just to name few.
Anyway, R. B.Thieme, Jr. did a series
on anti-Semitism in the mid to late 60s and then Ursula Kemp converted it into
a book. She was my first grade Sunday school teacher. She’s still alive. She’s
probably 89 now. She actually came over here to West Houston Bible Church a
couple of years ago and sat down on the front row. She is a converted Jew. She
was raised in eastern Germany. She was eleven or twelve when kristallanacht took
place. Her family had to flee and buy their way out of Germany. They went to
Shanghai where she finished high school, met her future husband, who was some
fourteen or fifteen years older than she. Some of you might remember him,
Scotty. He was with the British constabulary in Shanghai and took her as sort
of a driver to a party that a co-worker was having at Christmas time. On the
way back, Scotty told her, “You’re the woman I’m going to marry.” She thought
he was crazy drunk or both. Actually, he convinced her that he was serious. He
convinced her to help him write a letter so her father could understand, asking
permission to come and call. A few months later the Japanese conquered
Shanghai. Scotty was put in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp for the duration of
the war. They were allowed to write to one another, once a month, only ten
words. Think about that for a writing exercise. She and Betty Thieme wrote the
entire Sunday school curriculum that I grew up under at Berachah Church. A lot
of it has been converted into the children’s material now. Ursula actually did
the work on this Anti-Semitism
book and then it was revised later in the 80s.
This is a book that Tommy Ice read. He
stands for a number of pastors I know who weren’t pastors at the time but back
in the 70s they read this book and they realized the importance of Israel and
the importance of the Jewish people. Many people who today are staunch, vocal
defenders of Israel, like Tommy, got started because they read this book. It is
a very well done book, written in ’74, updated in the late ’80s. At that time
it cites recent studies by the Anti-Defamation League that anti-Semitism is on
the rise.
Then during the ’90s Bernard Lewis’s
book, Semites
and Anti-Semites was revised. It originally came out in the mid-80s. The
last edition was ’98, which was this copy. Again, he says that by the late 90s
anti-Semitism is continuing to increase. I’ve read several other things I have
at home on anti-Semitism and they say the same thing as late as last year.
Every year the incidence in Europe, in America, around the world is
anti-Semitic is on the increase.
The memory of the Holocaust has faded.
The generation that was involved in those activities is rapidly dying, rapidly
leaving the scene, so the Holocaust is moving from an experiential memory to
history. As it moves to history it fades from significance in the human race.
That is the worst form of anti-Semitism that the human race has experienced but
it’s not going to be the worst. The worst will come during the Tribulation period,
as we will see.
Romans, chapter 9 is where Paul is
explaining God’s faithfulness to Israel though it might appear at the time that
God has forgotten Israel, that Israel appears to have been set aside in favor
of the church. But this is simply a temporary pause in God’s plan for Israel.
God still loves the Jewish people. They’re still his chosen people. That has
not changed. When we get to Romans 11:1-4 Paul again strongly affirms God’s
love for the Jewish people and that there is a future in God’s plan for them.
Anti-Semitism is completely prohibited
by the Scriptures. The foundation for this takes us back to Genesis 12:1-3,
specifically in verse 3. This is the foundation for understanding why it is
wrong to be anti-Semitic. God says, “I will bless those who bless you and I
will curse him who curses you and in you all the families of the earth shall be
blessed.” This doesn’t mean you’re going to like every Jewish person you meet.
It doesn’t mean you have to like every Jewish person you meet any more than you
have to like every Christian you meet. The Scripture says you are to love one
another. What this does say is that holding their Jewishness against them is
not acceptable. They may not be a nice person but everybody in any group has members
of that group who aren’t nice. There are probably people in West Houston Bible
Church that other people wish weren’t here because they give us a bad name.
That’s just the way it is when you have any group of human beings.
This is the foundation here and it’s
repeated again and again through Genesis. God has made a promise and He has set
apart the Jewish people. I remember being asked on my first trip to Israel,
“Why is it that people call it the Holy Land?” We can’t make the mistake of
thinking that it’s holy because it’s something pure about it. Holy comes from
the Hebrew word that means to be set apart. It is a set apart land and it’s set
apart for the Jewish people. That’s why it’s the Holy Land. That’s an accurate
term but it’s misunderstood. There’s not anything mystical, magical about the
soil or anything else but it is territory that’s been permanently set aside by
God for the Jewish people. No other people in history have been given a destiny
tied to a piece of real estate like the Jewish people have. That’s what makes
it special.
That’s why the Jewish people are a holy
people, not in the same sense as we talk about the Church as holy because we’re
set aside in Christ, which is a different context. The Jewish people are holy
because they have been set aside by God for a special plan. They are the ones
through whom God gave His revelation. They are the custodians of the Scripture
from the Old Testament and they are the nation that God chose through whom to
give us the Messiah. He’s not through with them. There is a future destiny for
the Jewish people in the land that God promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
So even today because of the Abrahamic covenant, which is still in force and
has not been set aside or put on hold. God’s plan for the nation has been put
on hold while God is working through the Church but the Abrahamic covenant is
still very much in effect, as we have studied.
We have to understand that any form of
negative thinking, religious thought or political thought against Israel can be
anti-Semitism. The political and the religious thought is intimately connected
usually. In some instances you might be able to separate them but ultimately
they tend to be so interconnected that one affects the other. All of that comes
out of a literal view of Scripture.
Now we’re going to look at this rise of
anti-Semitism. We’ll look at cartoons and editorials. One anti-Semitic cartoon
is a depiction of the Western wall where Jews come to pray and it has the word
“hate” there and the inscription at the bottom says, “Worshiping their God.”
This is the lie that is put out by anti-Semites. They say the Jews are filled
with hate. They are racists. They are an apartheid state. All of this is just
more than typical invective coming from enemies. We look at a number of
different wars that have occurred between historic enemies such as the French
and the Germans, the Turks and the Greeks, the Turks and the Armenians, just
different groups through history have had on-going land battles, claims over
territory, territorial disputes, and they always generate a certain amount of
invective against the enemy but there’s something distinct with what happens
with the language used against Israel. The Jewish people are held to a
different standard than everybody else. That is what makes it anti-Semitism.
Then we’ll see that there’s a rise in
what is called a “new” anti-Semitism. It does get a little more sticky and hard
to understand because of the Holocaust. A lot of people went underground with
their anti-Semitism and it came out as a disguised form under the disguise of
anti-Zionism. They just masked it in the form of being anti the state of
Israel. There’s an article in U.S. News and World Report that says, “Today
several “isms” inhabit the world still. Among the most pernicious is the
atavistic anti-Semitism and its twentieth century version, anti-Zionist.”
Atavistic means primitive, an ongoing for centuries. They’re saying we’ve had
this standard anti-Semitism and it’s morphed into twentieth century with the rise
of the Jewish state. “These isms are graffiti on the wall of history, emblems
of a poison still potent and raw. Evidenced most recently by the remark of
Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohammed who said, ‘Today the Jews rule the
world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.’ ” See this claim
that there’s this Jewish conspiracy that the Jews are behind the evils of the
world. That’s part of anti-Semitic thought.
“Mahathir’s words were deeply condemned
but obscure much deeper strain about this new strain of anti-Semitism which is
not that it is directed at individual Jews or even Judaism itself. It is
directed, rather, against the Jewish collective, the modern state of Israel.
Just as historic anti-Semitism has denied individual Jews the right to live as
equal members of society, anti-Zionism would deny the collective expression of
the Jewish people, the state of Israel, the right to live as an equal member of
the family of nations. Israel’s policies are thus subjected to criticism that
causes it to be singled out when others in similar circumstances escape any
criticism at all. Surely if any other country were bleeding from terrorism as
Israel is today, there would be no question of its right to defend itself. But
Israel’s efforts merely to protect its citizens are routinely betrayed as
aggression. It is a double standard.” The deputy foreign minister of Israel
said in July 2002, “The wave of worldwide anti-Semitic attacks in recent months
is the worst since the 2nd World War.” It’s been another eleven
years since then and it’s even worse than it was eleven years ago. So this goes
on and it continues.
As we talk about it we need to define
it. What is anti-Semitism? What I did was put together a little collection of definitions
because not everybody says exactly the same thing and it helped me to kind of
think through this issue. Alan Dershowitz who is not someone with whom I am
always in agreement. In fact, I am in agreement with him on rare occasions but
his book, The
Case for Israel, is pretty good. A few things I don’t agree with him on but
overall it’s an excellent book and the way he structured the chapters have to
do with the questions people ask. “Is Israel an apartheid state?” “Did the
early Jews moving back take advantage of the Arabs and steal the land?” All of
these charges are ones frequently made against the Jewish people so if you want
to learn how to handle some of these issues if somebody raises a question; it’s
a good resource. He says that a good basic starting definition of anti-Semitism
is “Taking a trait, character trait, that is widespread throughout the human
race, if not universal, and blaming only the Jews for it.” Everybody’s greedy.
Everybody’s materialistic but we’re going to act as if the Jews are the root,
the cause, and if it weren’t for the Jews, there wouldn’t be any greed or
materialism or greedy corporations or capitalism or anything like that. Just
blame the Jews.
On the one hand they’re blamed for
capitalism and on the other hand they’re blamed for Marxism because Marx was
Jewish. Many of the early leaders in the Marxist Revolution were Jews. Then we
have Ron Rosenblum’s book, which is really a collection of essays from a lot of
different sources. He defines anti-Semitism this way, “It’s insisting
that when Jews do wrong it’s because they are Jews, not because they are
human.” He adds something very important to the definition. It’s not just
having an antagonism toward the Jews and blaming them for something but blaming
them because they are Jews. That’s a key element in his book.
Then we have the definition from The Compact OED,
“A theory, action, or practice directed against the Jews, hence, anti-Semite is
one who is hostile or opposed to the Jews.” What’s left out of that definition
is “because they are Jews.” I see the same problem in R. B. Thieme’s definition
in his book where he defines it as, “opposition to or prejudice against or
intolerance to Jewish people.” What needs to be added is “because they are
Jewish.” Not just antagonism, like antagonism against the French, against the
Mexican, against the Germans, but it’s because of that additional element,
because they are Jewish which really ties it together.
Notice how the Anti-Defamation League puts
it, “It’s the belief or behavior hostile toward Jews just because they are
Jewish. It may take the form of religious teaching that proclaim the
inferiority of the Jews, for instance, or political efforts to isolate,
oppress, or otherwise injure them. It may also include prejudice or stereotyped
views about Jews.”
Now what’s important to understand when
we start talking about the rise and development of anti-Semitism is that it has
a spiritual explanation. I used this illustration Tuesday night. I’ve used it
before but it is the best illustration that fits it. When I read the different
works that I’ve got on anti-Semitism such as a four-volume work on the History of
Anti-Semitism since the Time of Christ to the Present by Leon Poliskov
which is a quite detailed history of anti-Semitism and then I skimmed through The Legacy of
Islamic Anti-Semitism, I see their struggle to explain it. That will just
warm your heart every night. The one thing I read is a struggle to explain why
this is going on.
There’s a story that Frederick the
Great said to his chaplain one time, “Give me proof in just a few words that
the Bible is true.” The chaplain said, “Sir, it’s the Jews.” The Jewish
people’s continued existence is unique in history. There’s no other ethnic group
that has generated hostility from every other nation on the planet, especially
western and Arabic nations. Not so much your Asian nations but you have
virulent anti-Semitism among the nations that have been influenced mostly by
Christianity, sadly, and by Islam. That’s where you see the most virulent forms
of anti-Semitism. As you look at attempts to explain why it is that there’s
just one group of people, no other, that has generated a universal hatred that
the Jewish people have. How can you explain that? How do you explain the fact
that this is the same group of people who have managed to survive through four
thousand years of history and all of the nations that have opposed them have
been defeated and their anti-Semitism lies in the dustbin of history? You can’t
explain that from a rational or empirical basis and yet that’s how they
approach it.
Remember the illustration. When God
placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, He told them to name all the
creatures, to identify all the things, to guard and keep the garden. Their
mission to rule over the planet meant they had to go out and learn everything
they could about the planet and to develop it, to develop the natural
resources, and to use it under the authority of God as God’s representatives
over the planet. As they empirically investigated things, starting with Adam
naming the animals, there were lots of things they could observe. But they
could not observe a spiritual reality which is related to the prohibition God
gave them that if they ate from one particularly tree they would die
spiritually instantly. They could eat from all the other trees in the garden.
They could eat from everything else God provided but if they ate from that one
tree they would die spiritually. The only way they could access that truth was
for God to tell them. They couldn’t learn it through experience, through
observation of anything. They couldn’t learn it through reason or the use of
their intellect. It had to be revealed to them.
When we come to the study of anti-Semitism
and ask why we can only answer it if we take God’s version, God’s explanation,
which ultimately is given in Revelation 12 and 13. We’ll get there next time.
We can trace it in the Old Testament and tracing it means tracing God’s promise
that began in the garden to the serpent and to the woman. After the yielding to
the temptation when Adam and Eve are spiritually dead, God appeared in the
garden. They ran and hid. They sewed fig leaves together to cover their
nakedness and then God outlined the consequences of their sin. In doing so He
addressed first the serpent, then the woman, and then the man. To the serpent
He said, “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and
her seed.” That is an expression of history. There is a conflict between the
seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, the human race. Specifically the
seed is going to be a focus on an individual, which is the Messiah. But here’s
a broader more ambiguous promise but clearly a promise. It sets the parameters
for understanding human history. Human history is set within the context of a
broader warfare, the Angelic conflict, the satanic rebellion or any number of
different terms that have been used to describe this.
It is the fact that God has made a
promise to provide a Redeemer that will be a human being, a Redeemer that will
come from the seed of the woman who will provide salvation for the human race.
That’s the antagonism. So Satan’s agenda in the Old Testament was to keep that
from happening. Once it happened there were only a small group of promises that
had not yet been fulfilled. Those were related to the Jewish people. So the
only way that Satan can block God’s plan is to try to destroy all of the Jewish
people. In the Old Testament he tried to destroy the seed of the woman that
went through the seed of Abraham, down through the seed of David in order to
keep the Messiah from coming. Now if he can destroy all of the Jewish people
then Satan can say, “See, God, you can’t control history with these creatures who
have free will. They’re just too chaotic. No one can control it. You can’t even
be God. I win because I blocked you from fulfilling your promises.”
So we trace through the Old Testament
this promise of the seed. Now the next major mention after Genesis 3:16 is in
Genesis 12:7, “Then the Lord appeared to Abraham and said to your descendants…”
This is the word “seed” in the Hebrew. Seed is a singular noun but it’s among that
group of nouns called collective nouns. That means that the same form can either
refer to an individual or to a group. It’s like the word “deer” which is the
same in the singular form and the plural form. You have to judge from context
whether it’s talking about a singular or a group, a plurality. The same is true
with this word, which sets up some interesting exegetical issues that I won’t
go into in this study. So God promises to the descendants, the seed, that He’s
going to give the land to Abraham’s descendants.
He repeats that in Genesis 13:16. “I
will make your descendants as the dust of the earth so if a man could number
the dust of the earth your descendants also could be numbered.” It’s the word
“seed” every single time. In Genesis 15:5 again, “As innumerable as the stars
in the Heaven so shall your descendants be.” Then we get into the fun verse,
Genesis 22:17. God says, “Blessing I will bless you. I’ll multiply you and I’ll
multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is
on the seashore and your seed shall possess the gate…” This is one of those
places where the Masoretic text monkeys with the text a little bit so it won’t
be Messianic but what you have in a number of the other readings is not a
plural, their enemies, but His enemies, so it’s obvious in the mind of the
writer the word seed shifts in the mind of the writer to a singularity, an
individual, not the collective of the descendants of Israel. “Your descendants
shall possess the gate of His enemies and in your seed [Paul quotes this in
Galatians 3 when he emphasizes the fact it’s a singular that refers to the Lord
Jesus Christ] all the nations of the earth will be blessed because you have
obeyed My voice.” So we follow the seed. This is important.
Now it’s coming to the line of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob. This is the Semitic line. The word Semitic is really sort of
an ethnic term to describe those who are descendants of Noah’s son, Shem. Those
descended from Shem, which includes many of the Arab tribes, are called Semites
from that name. It includes both Arabs and Jews and sometimes you’ll hear
people say, “Well we’re not really anti-Semitic because we’re Arab. How can we
be anti-Semitic? Well, you can have anti-Semitic Jews, as well, and there are
some that are that way. They’re called self-loathing Jews. This is a whole
different minority category.
But the term of anti-Semitic is an
assault on Jews because they’re Jews. It’s an anti-Jewish belief. It’s a hatred
for the Jews. Now Abraham’s descendants were targeted. Then we get a refinement
of the seed in the Davidic covenant, “When your days are fulfilled and you rest
with your fathers, God said, “I will set up your seed after you who will come
from your body and I will establish His kingdom.” So now we have this term seed
identified as a singular, as an individual, but now it’s an assault on the
Davidic line to prevent the Messiah.
Historically as we go through the Old
Testament we see various assaults on the seed. There’s Cain’s murder of Abel in
Genesis, chapter 4:8. It is one of the first attacks on the seed. Then there’s
the corruption of the human seed through the infiltration of the fallen angels
called the “sons of God” in Genesis 6, a term always used for angels and here
it refers to fallen angels who took on human form and took human wives so they
could corrupt the human gene pool to prevent a true seed of the woman coming
from God incarnate as a human being—Genesis 6:1-12. Then we have the
attempted rapes of Sarah and Rebecca when they’re included in the harems of the
Philistine leaders and the Egyptian pharaoh, described in Genesis 12:10-20 and
then in 26:1-18. If the Pharaohs or the ruler of the Philistines had taken them
then this would have caused great doubt upon whether or not their offspring
were the offspring of Abraham or Isaac.
Then comes Rebecca’s plan to cheat Esau
out of his birthright and the consequent enmity between Esau against Jacob
might have resulted in the brothers killing each other off and this would stop
the line. The murder of the male children in Egypt by the Pharaoh in Exodus
1:15-22. We have the attempted murders of David by Saul in 1 Samuel 18:10-11
and several other places. Queen Athaliah’s attempt to destroy the royal seed in
2 Chronicles 22:10. Remember she killed all but one who was hidden. That was
Josiah who was hidden by the high priest in the temple.
Then Haman’s attempt to slaughter all
the Jews in Persia, described in the book of Esther. There were also attempts
to lead the Jews into idolatry, the worship of Moloch where they would emulate
their children in the fires of Moloch’s belly where live sacrifices and burnt
offers took place. This again is an attempt to destroy the Jews through the
idols. We have Herod’s attack against the children of Bethlehem in Matthew 2:16
and then many attempts during Jesus’ life which are part of the attempts to
derail Him from being the Messiah.
The rest of this evening I want to look
at a major early attempt in the Old Testament to destroy all of the Jewish
people in a huge assault. That occurred under the Persian Empire during the
rule of Xerxes. This is in the book of Esther. Turn with me to the book of
Esther and we’re going to take about twenty of twenty-five minutes and just
skim the book of Esther. This is one of those great stories that I think
suffers to some degree if we do just sort of a verse-by-verse or
paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of it because we lose the drama of it. This is
written as a drama. It is incredibly intense. It is a great story and you
wouldn’t take a play and watch it one scene at a time over a period of twenty
or thirty weeks. There is benefit in doing that because you can teach a lot of
different things, but we also gain much just from taking in the entire episode.
There are a couple of things unique and
distinct about the book of Esther. The first reason it’s distinct is that it’s
the only book in the Old Testament that has no mention of God. God is not
mentioned and for that reason there were some who doubted whether or not it
should be included in the Old Testament canon. The Jewish authorities accepted
it even before the time of Christ as part of the canon of Scripture. It was
part of the group known as the writings. Remember the Old Testament is divided
into three groups, the Torah, the five books of the Law, the Nevi’im, the prophets and the Ketuvim, the
writings. This is in the section of the writings as is Daniel.
There’s something distinct about both
Daniel and Esther in that they depict the Jewish people in the diaspora and are
out of the land, which God has promised to them and they are living in a pagan
world much as the Church is living in a hostile world today. There are certain
lessons and application that we can take from it. How do we live wisely in the
midst of a hostile environment? Daniel and his friends demonstrate a lot of
wise principles on how to live in the midst of a pagan environment without
taking everything to the level of a head-to-head confrontation. So they avoid a
lot of confrontation by wisdom and the way they handle the conflict.
The same can be seen with Esther.
Esther showed a remarkable amount of wisdom. God is in the background here. The
fact that God is not mentioned doesn’t mean that God is not involved. It’s to
teach the fact that in certain times of history God is not directly involved in
things or He’s not seen as being directly involved but He is the hidden puppet
master behind the scenes overseeing the events in history. He’s not there in an
overt way. He is definitely providing for and protecting the Jewish people
outside of the land in a hostile environment but He’s not seen. Neither is
Satan seen, like we see Satan in the book of Job. Satan is the one who goes to
God and wants to test Job. The curtain is drawn back so we can see what’s going
on in the divine throne room when we’re looking at the book of Job. The writer
of Esther doesn’t pull the curtain back for us. So we just see things as we do
in our day-to-day lives as they are without an exposure of the spiritual
realities behind the scene. We come to understand God’s hidden hand and His
providential protection.
The events take place during the reign
of Ahasuerus, which is the Persian name for Xerxes, when he has suffered
military defeat by the Greeks. He’s come back and he is not in the best of
moods and he is trying to drown out some of his sorrows because of his military
defeat. The book begins by sort of setting the stage in the first chapter by
showing why he is looking for a wife. Now we see that God is really working
behind the scenes here. What happens here is that he throws a party. This party
goes on for a while. His wife, Queen Vashti, is throwing a feast for the women
at the same time. On the seventh day as they reach a certain stage of
drunkenness at the king’s party and he wants to bring the Queen out in order to
display her beauty before all of his men friends. There’s a hint there that
this is extremely inappropriate but we don’t know exactly what that entailed.
She refuses to do it and according to the laws of the Persians, this is an
affront that is really punishable by death. Ahasuerus is gracious; he doesn’t
have her executed but he does banish her from the court and for all practical
purposes he divorces her.
This sets the stage for searching for a
new wife. He has a beauty contest and talent contest and all of the best
virgins in the land come forward to see whom the king will choose. It was a
twelve-month training process where they prepared them before they came before
the king. One of the young ladies that come is a young Jewish girl by the name
of Hadassah. Her Persian name was Esther. Her cousin is Mordecai. We’re told in
Esther 2:7 that Mordecai had raised her from childhood, that she was his
uncle’s daughter so he was actually her cousin. She was much, much younger and
her parents had died and so Mordecai raised her. He encourages her to go
forward. He warns her not to tell anyone she’s Jewish. This is emphasized twice
in chapter 20. In verse 10 we’re told that Esther had not revealed her people
or her family for Mordecai had charged her not to reveal it.
Now why Mordecai did that we don’t know
but this is important as the story unfolds because as the enemy, Haman, comes
along he hates the Jewish people. He hates Mordecai, which he transfers to all
the Jewish people. If he had known that Esther was Jewish this would have
changed the dynamics so for whatever reason under the providential oversight of
God Mordecai stresses that she’s not to let anyone know she’s Jewish or who her
relatives are. She is presented before the king and the king is going to fall
in love with her, love at first sight, and she is the one who is going to be
invited to be his new queen.
Now in chapter 3, all of a sudden we
shift to the strong baseline and the evil villain comes on the scene, Haman. If
you go down to one of the Jewish bakeries in town, if you go to Three Brothers
in Memorial City area, you can buy hamantaschen. Hamantaschen is a tri-corner
little cookie that they eat the feast of Purim. This is the origin of the Feast
of Purim, one of the Jewish holidays and every year they put on a little
morality play. The way you know the bad guy he wears a little tri-corner hat.
At least that’s how Haman is recognized so the hamantaschen is a tri-corner
cookie representing that. They’re not bad, as cookies go. They have some little
fruit fillings and they’re tasty.
Haman is identified as an Agagite. Now
Agag was the king of the Amalekites at the time of Saul. I talked about this on
Tuesday night. The Amalekites were traditional enemy of Israel and they were
sort of a large tribe of Bedouin desert pirates frequently attacking different
groups all through the Middle East; a real scourge at that time. So God
directed Saul to kill them, kill them all, men, women, and children, sheep,
goats, cattle, everything. Saul disobeyed. He doesn’t kill them all. He lets
Agag survive and it is believed that Haman is called an Agagite is because he
is a descendant of Agag. He’s an Amalekite. He has a history of being the enemy
of the Jews, the enemy of Israel.
So he comes and rises in the ranks of
Xerxes. When he comes through the gates into the palace, everybody bows and
scrapes and does homage to him except for one man, Mordecai. And every day
everybody shows him this deference and respect and feeds his pride and
arrogance except for Mordecai. This gets under his skin. He builds up this
hatred for Mordecai, and he transfers that to all of the Jewish people and
builds this intense hatred for the Jews. Haman wanted Mordecai to bow and
scrape to him and show him a little respect. Mordecai wouldn’t do it. Then they
told Haman that Mordecai was Jewish and so then Haman sought to destroy all the
Jews who were throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus.
First Haman decides he wants to kill
the people of Mordecai so he goes to the king. He decides they need a date when
they’re going to have this empire-wide assault and kill all the Jewish people.
So they’re going to cast lots, called purim, which is where we get the name for the
Feast of Purim, the feast of casting lots. So they cast lots; they pick a date,
the 12th month of Adar and this is when they’re going to have this
assault. He goes to the king and tells the king he’s going to give an enormous
amount of money into the treasury if the king will sign this decree for the
destruction of all these people who he says are really the enemies of the
Persians and the king. Now the King doesn’t really know what’s going on and
gets sucked in by his advisor. He’s kind of an absent king at this point.
The king then took his signet ring from
his hand and gave it to Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, the enemy of
the Jews. So again we get this drumbeat roll: this is the enemy of the Jewish
people. So he sent out couriers all over the land to get all the military, the
militia, the national guard, all armed and ready to go on the 13th
of Adar when they’re going to kill all the Jews.
But God is working behind the scenes.
So no matter how dark things may appear in your life or mine, God is always in
control. We never know what God is doing. The left hand doesn’t know what the
right hand is doing and the right hand is doing something very interesting. So
Mordecai finds out about this and he is just terribly upset, as you can
imagine. He tears his clothes and he puts on ashes and sackcloth and he goes
out to the men of the city. When this visual expression of his grief comes to
Esther’s attention, she is trying to get Mordecai to tell her what’s going on.
He eventually gets a message to her and tells her this is really a position
that God has placed her in to come to the aid of her people.
At first she’s a little resistant but
in 4:13 we read, “Then Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, ‘Do not imagine
that you in the king’s palace can escape any more than all the Jews.’” No one
may know you’re a Jew but they’ll find out and you’re not going to be able to
escape. “ ‘For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will
arise for the Jews from another place.’ ” That’s his strong faith in the promise
of God. It’s not stated as such but we know that’s what’s there. Even if you’re
not the one to take advantage of this and be blessed by playing a part in the
deliverance of the Jews, God’s going to bring someone else along because God’s
not going to allow this to happen.
He tells Esther, “And you and your
father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not attained royalty
for such a time as this?” What a great line. We never know what opportunities
we might have in whatever place or circumstance that God has placed us. So
Esther rises to the challenge and she tells Mordecai to gather all the Jews for
a time of prayer and a time of fasting. And they do so.
She then sets a plan. Now this is a
fabulous plan. She’s thought this through. We’re not told what came into this
or how she came up with a plan or anything but she comes up with a plan. Rather
than just confronting Xerxes with what’s going on, when she goes before him,
and he recognizes her, instead of saying right away what the problem is, she’s
going to build a trap for Haman. And it’s very subtle. She shows a lot of
restraint and discipline and skill. This is a great illustration of what I’ve
been talking about in terms of Proverbs on Sunday mornings in terms of wisdom.
This is a great illustration of chokmah, wisdom and skill.
So after three days of prayer and
fasting, she gets all dressed up, puts on her finest royal robes, and she’s
going in to the inner court in the king’s palace. Now in Persian law, if she came
out into the open, and the king didn’t want to recognize her, then that’s a
death penalty. But if he picks up his scepter and he holds it out, she will
come place her hand on it, then he has recognized her, and allows her to come
forward. He accepts her and she comes in and she says that she wants to invite
him and Haman to dinner the next day.
So the next day they come to dinner and
they have a nice banquet dinner and wine. The king asks her what she wants to
request. She says she’d like them to come back the next day. She’s not in a
hurry. How many times when we’re witnessing to somebody, when we’re dealing
with some problem, we get in a hurry? We want to rush things. She’s very calm,
very relaxed, and she is waiting on the Lord. This is a great example of
Proverbs 3:5-6, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not unto your
own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths
straight.” God is working behind the scenes.
So this has just so fed Haman’s ego. He
goes home and he’s just so excited. He’s just dancing on air. Verse 9 says,
“Then Haman went out that day glad and pleased of heart; but when Haman saw
Mordecai in the king’s gate and that he did not stand up or tremble before him,
Haman was filled with anger against Mordecai.” It just ruined his whole day. He
goes home, grumpy, kicking the cat, throwing everything against the wall. He
calls for his wife and friends and finally begins to get back in a better mood
and tells them all the great things that are going to happen to him, riches,
honor, and power. He is counting all of his chickens before they hatch, as it
were. He is living as though this is going to happen. He has created a false
scenario for himself.
He tells that he’s been invited back by
the queen the next day and he’s sure wonderful things are going to happen. But
he told about his problem with Mordecai, how he sat outside the king’s gate and
doesn’t give him any respect. So his wife and friends tell him to go ahead and
build some gallows since he’s going to have so much power. That way he would be
ready to execute Mordecai and to hang him for treason since he would have the
power to do it. So he issues the orders to have the gallows built. He’s just
rubbing his hands together in glee that he’s going to be raised to this
position of power and at the same time he’ll be able to destroy his enemies and
all of the Jews along with it.
But that night, God is working. Xerxes
can’t sleep. He gets up in the middle of the night like many of us do at two or
three o’clock in the morning. We turn on the television or pick up a book but
we can’t sleep. Xerxes calls for one of his chroniclers because history puts
people to sleep. He wants them to read through the chronicles of the king. In
that, an event passed over earlier is discovered where Mordecai had discovered
an assassination plot against the king a few years earlier. This had been
recorded. Mordecai had reported those who planned this assassination of Xerxes
and he’d never been rewarded. When this is read to the king he realized he’s
never been rewarded. Why wasn’t some honor given to Mordecai for saving his
life? They tell him no one did anything for Mordecai.
The king asks who’s on duty in
the court. They heard Haman outside and they brought him in. The king asked
him, “What should I do to honor someone who has done great things for the
king?” Haman, of course, thinks the king is talking about him. He’s so
self-absorbed he tells him to bring a royal robe, and a royal horse the king
has ridden upon, and put one of the king’s prince’s before him, leading the man
through the city proclaiming, thus shall it be done to the man whom the king
delights to honor.”
So the king tells Haman, “Hurry up. Go
get Mordecai and put him on the horse and take him through the city.” You can
just imagine how Haman felt at that point. Worse than being sucker punched.
He’s just seething on the inside but he takes Mordecai through the city and
then afterwards, Mordecai went back to the king’s gate. Haman hurries home with
his head covered. He knows that everything is about to crash in on him. He
tells his wife and his wife says, “If Mordecai, before whom you have begun to
fall, is of Jewish origin, you will not overcome him but will surely fall
before him.” She prophetically announces his doom.
So the next day the king and Haman go
to dine with Esther. While they are there, Esther then tells the king how he
has been duped into signing this order to allow for the assault and execution
of all the Jews in the land. She says, “For had we been sold as slaves, men and
women, I would have remained silent, although the enemy could never for the
king’s loss.” The king wants to know who would dare do this awful thing. She
tells him it’s that wicked, evil adversary sitting right there, Haman.
The king arose and lost his temper. You
don’t want someone with that kind of power losing his temper against you. He
looks outside, sees the gallows, and orders Haman to be hanged immediately upon
the gallows that have been prepared for Mordecai. So Haman, rather than reaping
a judgment against the Jews loses his life. God is protecting them. But then
this date is still set; the law has been announced; so what are they going to
do to save the Jews on the 13th of Adar?
Esther comes to the king with another
plan to allow all the Jews to arm themselves, a good principle of self-defense,
and to fight off any attacks. That is exactly what they did when the orders
went out that they could do this, the Jews partied and celebrated all
throughout the land, and then they prepared themselves. We’re told at the very
end of the story that they killed 75,000 of their enemies. After all that
happened and all the praise that Xerxes had for the Jews in the land, you would
think that the people would be smart enough to see that the king liked the Jews
so they shouldn’t fight against them but they fought and lost their lives. That
shows the irrationality of anti-Semitism. It’s not rational. It’s not
empirical. We can only understand it if we put it within the framework of
spiritual warfare of the angelic conflict. It can only have ultimately a
religious, spiritual explanation. We’ll get into that next Thursday night.