Spirit and Truth Ministries
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THE TRUTH ABOUT QUEEN ESTHER
Don Hawley
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(This extract is from the book Present Truth in the Real World by Jon Paulien, pages77, 78.)
“A rather scary biblical example of choosing between evils is the story of Esther. Please do not confuse Esther with Daniel. The circumstances were similar, but their responses were quite different. While I can understand that you sometimes have to alter biblical stories a little to protect the innocent, I am a little disappointed that I had to read the book of Esther in the Hebrew before I realized that she didn’t become a queen as the result of a beauty contest. The Hebrew clearly says that on her contest date she left the house of the virgins to see the king. The next morning, instead of going back to the house of the virgins, she went to the house of the concubines. Do you follow what was going on there? Esther earned the queenship by a one-night stand with the king—she was better than anybody else in bed. She was probably beautiful also, but the king could have determined that without spending the night with her.
"Did she maintain all the standards of the 'church' while living as the queen? Definitely not. How do we know? Mordecai had commanded her not to reveal her faith to anyone in the court. And the king was surprised to learn many years later that she was a Jew. You could not practice the Jewish lifestyle in the court of Persia without being known any more than Daniel could. You would eat differently, as Daniel did. You would live differently. You would keep the Sabbath. Esther wasn’t keeping the Sabbath; she wasn’t eating the way Jews ate. In a practical sense she had given up the faith. But perhaps the most troubling thing about it is that there is not a word in the book of Esther that condemns her for doing so. Instead, because she made the choices she did, Esther was in the right place at the right time.
"Now I am certainly not writing this book in order to tell everyone to go out and do what Esther did! The point is that God sometimes has agendas that we don’t fully understand."
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