Where is God?

The Lord is curiously absent from the book of Esther: God is not mentioned at all in the Hebrew Bible’s text. For this reason, it was questioned whether Esther should be in the canon of scripture. Esther’s place in the Bible has also disquieted theologians with a supersessionist¹ mindset, who found the theme of ‘Jewish nationalism’ troubling. Yet the seeming coincidences and perfect timing indicate God is guiding events. The book of Esther delivers a clear message about the sovereignty of God and his undefeatable messianic purpose worked out through the Jewish people.

Proverbs 21:1 says, “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will.” This is another pattern of biblical deliverance: a king who is unexpectedly redirected. Esther’s king, like the kings in the stories of Joseph and Daniel (Gen 41; Dan 2:1), suffers from disturbed sleep that alters the course of events. He lies awake and for a little light reading decides to look at some official records – presumably hoping they’ll be boring enough to send him to sleep – but what does he find? Mordechai foiled a plot to kill the king but was never rewarded.
From there the comical subversion of Haman’s plot begins. He is forced to honour Mordechai, the man who would not honour him, in front of everyone.

The book of Esther delivers a clear message about the sovereignty of God and his undefeatable messianic purpose worked out through the Jewish people.

Divine sovereignty is indicated throughout the story, but nowhere more clearly than in Mordechai’s statement (Es 4:14) that if Esther were to remain silent then deliverance for the Jewish people would arise from another source, but that she and her family would perish. The importance of human obedience within the context of divine sovereignty becomes clear. God prepares us, he places us in certain positions in his perfect timing, then he gives us the opportunity to serve him to accomplish his purposes. But his will shall always be done, with or without us.

The Lord is in control

The story of Esther is full of ‘what if’ moments. There are so many fragile elements, fine threads on which hang the fate of a whole people, but the Lord has complete control of the tapestry of events. Esther happened to be beautiful and so caught up in the seeming lottery of who would be the next queen. Mordechai happened to hear of the plot against the king and the king happened to be awake on exactly the right night and chose to read the exact section from the chronicles which reported the incident. These are just a couple of examples from the story of seeming coincidences or God-incidences as we might call them. About the element of ‘chance’, Proverbs 16:33 says, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.” In fact, the name Purim means ‘lots’, although in the biblical worldview there is no such thing as chance, luck or fate.

In the book of Esther, we are given a God’s-eye view of the whole story: we see all the events and how they unfold in one go. We marvel at the elements of seeming chance, how character and ‘fate’ conspire to turn events. Usually, we do not have that privilege. Corrie ten Boom pointed out that we see life as though viewing the underside of a tapestry – hanging threads and a mish-mash of colours with often no sense of design or pattern. Yet, the Creator of the tapestry is weaving a beautiful picture.

The Lord delights to thwart the enemy’s plans using those we might regard as the least, the ‘weak things of the world’.

God knows who to choose to do his will at different times because he knows our characters and how we will react under duress. Mordechai withstands repeated pressure to bow to Haman: “Day after day they spoke to him but he refused to comply.” (Es 3:4) Esther may be a teenager, but she shows a wisdom beyond her years, following advice and instigating a time of fasting and prayer to receive guidance from the Lord before she acts. The Lord delights to thwart the enemy’s plans using those we might regard as the least, the ‘weak things of the world’ (1 Cor 1:27), in this case a teenage girl called Esther, who just happens to be in the right place at the right time.

Purim and Passover

Esther’s fasting initiative is divinely inspired, but according to Jewish tradition Mordechai protested because it fell during Passover, a time when fasting is prohibited. Esther 3:12 says that Haman’s decree went out on the 13th day of the first month. The first Hebrew calendar month is Nisan, the month of Passover, the precise date would apparently have been 17 April 474 BC². It may not have been tradition to fast, but how apt that this fast fell on the original festival of deliverance from Egypt – surely a sign of God’s unseen hand in these events, signalling his intention to deliver. Religious Jews today keep the Fast of Esther (Heb. Ta’anit Ester) from dawn to nightfall on the day before Purim is celebrated.

Another curious element in the story is that Esther does not present the King with her plea for her people at the first banquet. With the greatest restraint, she waited until the next day and a second opportunity. Something or rather Someone held her back from giving her request straight away. That night, between the first and second banquets, the king had his sleepless night which changed everything.

Lies used to promote persecution

Esther was clearly led by God’s Spirit and it has often been said that we are called in these days to be an Esther Church, boldly Spirit-led in our readiness to stand up for the Lord’s ancient people, the Jews. However, this is a relatively recent development post-Holocaust. The Church’s history over the preceding centuries shows a very different picture. Haman used lies to persuade the king to annihilate the Jews, saying they were a threat, when actually the Jews had been instructed through the prophet Jeremiah to seek the peace and prosperity of their city of exile, and pray for it (Jer 29:7). Mordechai had, indeed, saved the king’s life.

Similar lies have been used against the Jewish people over the centuries which play on ‘otherness’ and difference. The Church fuelled those lies, encouraging Christian rejection of Jews from the time of the Church Fathers onwards (John Chrysostom in particular being notorious for his anti-Semitic rhetoric). Christian prejudice grew through both the Dark and Middle Ages. However, despite the flowering of study of the Hebrew scriptures brought by the Protestant Reformation, understanding of the role of God’s ancient people and tolerance for their presence in Christian society did not emerge. In fact, the greatest of the reformers proved himself to be an enemy of the Jews.

Luther’s anti-Semitism

In Part 1 of Purim: Patterns of Deliverance, the Nazis’ interest and subversion of the festival of Purim to re-enact Haman’s revenge was discussed. However, you might have wondered where the Church stood and whether anyone objected to the use of a Bible story as anti-Jewish propaganda. How did Hitler managed to persuade so many German Christians to support him? He was greatly helped by the testimony of a Christian hero, the reformer Martin Luther, who wrote in his notorious work, On the Jews and their Lies about the Jewish people, “Oh, how fond they are of the book of Esther, which is so beautifully attuned to their bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous yearning and hope.”³ He also created a model for replacement theology, commenting on the Zionist hope:

"Why, even today they cannot refrain from their nonsensical, insane boasting that they are God's people, although they have been cast out, dispersed, and utterly rejected for almost fifteen hundred years. By virtue of their own merits, they still hope to return there again. But they have no such promise with which they could console themselves other than what their false imagination smuggles into Scripture."⁴

Luther also denied that Jews could be saved, saying, “God regards them in all these respects as dust and ashes and damned by birth the same as all other heathen.”⁵ It obviously did not occur to him that the disciples were Jews.

Luther’s anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism was seized on by Hitler, who described him as one of history’s greatest reformers in Mein Kampf.⁶ Hitler is said to have drawn on Luther’s recommendations on to how to treat Jews (“We are at fault in not slaying them”⁷) as support for his own programme of destruction.

Aryan Jesus

Many German Christians were easily swept along by Hitler because they themselves had created the fiction of an Aryan Jesus.

The Old Testament was rejected by some because of its Jewishness, and along with it the study of Hebrew by trainee ministers.⁸ It was argued that the Jews had suppressed the true picture of Jesus and Christianity, largely aided by the Jewish Paul, and that it was through the spread of this pernicious teaching that Jews had achieved world domination. Others defended Paul and said that he had known that the Jews “displeased God and were repulsive to all people” (written by a pastor from Hanover).⁹

Hitler was also able to carry German Christians with him because they themselves had created the fiction of an Aryan Jesus.

The Sermon on the Mount was changed to make it more militaristic. Matthew 5:5 became, “Happy is he who bears his sufferings like a man” rather than “Blessed are the meek”.¹⁰ The Cross was seen as weakness and a result of the weak, feminine influence of Jews.

No Jews allowed

Funding for missions seeking to win Jews to faith in Jesus was drastically reduced. Jews were not welcome in the churches, so they did not want to win any to faith in their Messiah. Jews who were already church members were refused pastoral care.¹¹

Church leaders who had hoped for political influence found themselves held at a distance by the Nazi regime, but they persisted in their support, referring to Hitler as God’s agent and to the Lord as “Führer Jesus”. They insisted that Christianity was essential to the struggle, albeit purged of its Jewishness. They even founded an Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish influence on German Christian Life.¹²

All this seems so obviously wrong with the benefit of hindsight, but we should not be complacent. Ignorance about anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism persists among Christians. Most are unaware of Luther’s dreadful legacy in that regard. Anti-Semites are still using Luther’s work to justify their views, catching out unwary booksellers whose website algorithms trust Luther’s name. At the time of writing, a work by a known Holocaust denier could be found on a number of bookseller sites, including one Christian site where apparently the name “Luther” automatically caused the title to be picked up as ‘Theology’. The title has since been removed.

This surely illustrates the legacy of years of Christian theologians ignoring, brushing under the carpet, or looking for ways to excuse Luther’s anti-Semitism, presumably because the truth is too uncomfortable: that it is possible to be both ‘hero and zero’, used by the Lord in the most extraordinary way and also drastically deceived.

The desire to discredit and distort the word of God to suit ourselves persists in sections of the Church today, along with man-centred interpretations of scripture, or the tendency simply to omit the parts of scripture we don’t like.

We should also not be complacent because the desire to discredit and distort the word of God to suit ourselves persists in sections of the Church today, along with man-centred interpretations of scripture, or the tendency simply to omit the parts of scripture we don’t like. Jesus’ Jewishness is often downplayed or ignored in Christian teaching and replacement theology is still dominant.

Next week, we will look more closely at the lessons that Purim and the book of Esther have for us today. In the meantime, let us pay attention to the message here: are we blind to parts of God’s word? Do we ignore parts that do not fit with our biases or pre-conceptions? Are we willing to be an Esther Church, standing against persecution of the Jewish people? And just as God chose Esther to stand against the lies of the enemy in protecting her people, is God asking you to speak up for his truth to our communities, nation or world today?

Endnotes

¹Supersessionism is also known as replacement theology.
²The NIV Study Bible Hodder & Stoughton, London: 1998, p.710.
³Martin Luther, On the Jews and their Lies, 1543 - Luther Martin - On the Jews and Their Lies - Free PDF.
⁴Ibid.
⁵Martin Luther, On the Jews and their Lies, 1543 - Luther Martin - On the Jews and Their Lies - Free PDF
⁶Emily Paras, The Darker Side of Martin Luther (core.ac.uk), Illinois Wesleyan University, 2008.
⁷Martin Luther, On the Jews and their Lies, 1543 - Luther Martin - On the Jews and Their Lies - Free PDF
⁸Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, Princeton and Oxford, 2010, pp.228-30
⁹Ibid., p.50: Otto Borchert was the pastor from Hanover.
¹⁰Ibid., p.53
¹¹Ibid., p.54
¹²Ibid., p.67