Series: Shaped by Environment
Message: Proximal
Preacher: Jessyka Albert
Daily Walk: Jessyka Albert
Refresh: Open with prayer. Read or listen to Psalm 71:1-6.
Read: Esther 5-7 (ESV). Re-read in the English Standard Version for new insights/questions.
Reflect: As we begin reading chapter 6, Haman is pretty happy with life again. The gallows that Mordecai is to be impaled upon are being built and he’s looking forward to a very important party thrown by the queen. Things are finally starting to look up for him again. While Haman sleeps like a baby that night, the king is restless. Since the king can’t sleep, he calls for the book of records, or the chronicles, to be read to him. Some commentators joke that he used this book of records to bore him to sleep.
Remember last week at the end of chapter two when Mordecai informs Esther of the plot to kill the king? Somehow, this is just the segment of the book that is read to the king on this particular restless night. Ahasuerus asks, “What honor or dignity has been bestowed on Mordecai for this?” (6:3). The servants inform the king that nothing at all has been done. Now this is where the beauty of irony in this story is revealed. Haman is on his way to the king to destroy Mordecai at the exact time the king begins planning how he can honor him. Soak in this exchange between the two in chapter six:
“So Haman came in and the king said to him, ‘What is to be done for the man whom the king desires to honor?’ And Haman said to himself, ‘Whom would the king desire to honor more than me?’ Then Haman said to the king, ‘For the man whom the king desires to honor let them bring a royal robe which the king has worn, and the horse on which the king has ridden, and on whose head a royal crown has been placed; and let the robe and the horse be handed over to one of the king’s most noble princes and let them array the man whom the king desires to honor and lead him on horseback through the city square, and proclaim before him, ‘Thus it shall be done to the man whom the king desires to honor” (Esther 6:6-9).
Haman surely thought this was going to be his big day. Mordecai would be impaled and then he would be paraded around the city as the man whom the king desires to honor.
“Then the king said to Haman, ‘Take quickly the robes and the horse as you have said and do so for Mordecai the Jew, who is sitting at the king’s gate; do not fall short in anything of all you have said” (Esther 6:10).
Recalibrate:
Respond: Pray for humility.
Research: The importance of the clothes that someone of high status wore.