Objective Morality is Making a Comeback
Can you imagine living in a world where evil was never punished? What if criminals always got away? What if people could do whatever they wanted to us and get away with it?
Justice, or fairness, is something we all intuitively desire. Have you ever considered where this desire comes from and what best explains it? If we’re the product of time and chance and natural selection, then why would we think that some things are right and some things are wrong, and why would we want to promote what’s right and punish what’s wrong? Wouldn’t we just care about what best serves our interests?
The idea that each person should get to choose what’s right or wrong for them is called relativism. It’s the idea that all moral viewpoints are equal and that morality is fluid rather than fixed. But, I’d argue that the upheavals in our culture are good evidence that relativism isn’t a workable worldview. The view that there are no moral absolutes is being undermined without many seeming to notice. Things are starting to be seen as right or wrong. For example, why are there signs that say “racism is wrong” and not “racism is a bad idea” or “my personal view is that racism is wrong”? It’s because we all intuitively know that treating someone differently based on the color of their skin is wrong. Objective morality is making a comeback. This is surprising in a culture that has long viewed ethics as a matter of personal taste.
It seems that the most plausible explanation for why we think this way is because God made us in his image. As God’s image bearers, we’re hard-wired to know if something’s right or wrong. We have a longing for things to be made right. Do you ever get sick and tired of watching the news and hearing about all the bad stuff going on? It’s depressing, and we want it to end. Again, the question is, where does this desire come from? Why do we care about people we don’t even know? Because God made us in his image, like him in a way, we want the things he wants. We want justice.
The interesting thing is that many are quick to champion the cause of justice now and think little of the justice that God will bring when Jesus returns. We’re quick to want the sins of others exposed and punished now and slow to want our sins exposed and punished later. But the Bible teaches clearly and repeatedly that a day will come when all sin will be exposed and judged by God. How can we deny God the right to do later what we so desperately want to do now? All sin will come to light. Nothing will remain hidden. Jesus said, “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be revealed” (Lk. 12:2). Upon Jesus’ return, he will execute judgment swiftly and fairly and there will be no appeals process.
Evil Will Be Exposed and Justice Will Be Executed
We see foreshadowing’s of this future judgment anytime we see justice served in the here and now. The Bible gives us many glimpses of what God’s swift and fair justice will look like one day. One of them is in Esther chapter 7.
After a remarkable turn of events where the king honors Mordecai, the man Haman is about to kill, Haman’s plan to kill all the Jews, including Queen Esther, is made known to the king and judgment comes quickly for him. Chapter 7 is about God’s justice. But it’s also a sign of God’s love. God loves his creation so much that he doesn’t just let bad people off the hook.
Haman Hangs with the King and Queen
In Esther 7, we see Haman hanging with the king and queen (vv. 1-6) and Haman hanging on a pole (vv. 7-10). First, Haman hangs with the king and queen (vv. 1-6). Haman goes with the king to the second feast hosted by Queen Esther for them. This is when Esther told the king that she would tell him what she wanted (5:8). After the meal and while they’re relaxing on couches and drinking wine, the king asks Esther for the third time to tell him what she wants (v. 2). Because of her shrewdness, Esther has made the king commit publicly three times to giving her what she wants.
Finally, in verses 3-4, Esther lays it all out there and breaks her silence about her ethnic identity and the plight of her people. Esther’s request is simple: please spare my life and the life of my people. She finally publicly identifies herself with her people, the Jews. She asks for her life to be spared because she recognizes that her fate is the same as theirs. She’s taken Mordecai’s challenge to heart (4:13-14). Her life and the life of her people are inseparably joined. Whatever happened to them would happen to her.
Publicly Identifying with the People of God through Church Membership
What an antidote this is to the way we think as American Christians! We too often assume that our spiritual life is our business and that the lives of other Christians isn’t really our concern. But this contradicts the Bible’s emphasis on the people of God, not the individuals of God. This is why the New Testament is full of “one another” commands. This is why, when you join a local church, you’re actually taking responsibility for the spiritual growth of the other members. It’s your job to pray, encourage, and serve them. Joining a church isn’t a sticker on your religious report card. It’s a solemn duty. It’s saying, “My well-being is directly related to theirs.” It’s to stop living like your fate is all that matters. It’s to confess that you need community. It’s to view the reputation of the community as more important than your own. Joining a church has far more implications than you probably realize. Publically and officially identifying with the people of God is not new. It’s as old as Esther.
Esther’s Reasoning
Verse 4 tells us how Esther reasoned with the king. The last phrase is hard to translate. It means something like, “But as things are, it will be beyond the means of the persecutor to make up for the loss that the king is about to sustain.” Esther says that had the Jews just been made slaves, the king wouldn’t have lost anything. But their annihilation would result in loss for him. How so? Because he would lose his queen. This is the “loss to the king” Esther is referring to.
Referencing the king’s needs is good psychology on Esther’s part. She knew that the king’s needs were more important to the king than her people’s personal freedoms. So she frames her case in terms of how it would result in “loss to the king.” Telling him that her people were all going to die wasn’t enough to make Esther’s case. In the empire, there were no moral absolutes. Whatever the king wanted happened. Remember that it was the king who signed the edict to kill the Jews. He had no problem with genocide. Esther knew this, so she needed to convince him by playing to his self-centered ego.
Notice also how she subtly describes the situation without pointing fingers at Haman. Why hasn’t she mentioned him yet? Because she wants to make the king angry before giving him a target. She wants to make him angry first, before he has time to think about whether it’d be harder to find a new wife or a new prime minister. She is subtly provoking his anger and then giving him someone to be angry at.
In verse 5, the king wants to know who has had the audacity to do this. And then in verse 6, Esther tips the cup of wrath that she handed the king onto Haman. She says that he’s an adversary to the king because his plan would hurt the king. The king now had someone to direct his anger at.
Can you imagine what Haman was feeling at this moment? Verse 6 says that he “was terrified.” His terror is compounded because he didn’t know that Esther was a Jew. Have you ever had an “Oh crap!” moment, a moment when you suddenly realized you did something really stupid? If Haman knew that the Queen was a Jew, he probably wouldn’t have been so passionate about killing the Jews.
Talk about a bad couple days! The day before he had to parade around his enemy and tell the city how great he was. Then he realizes that Queen belongs to the people he’s trying to kill.
This is an ironic reversal to say the least. The man who wanted to kill the Jews is now terrified before a Jew. His evil plan and its implications for Esther have now been brought into the light. What will the king do? How will the king respond to this revelation?
Haman Hangs On a Pole
In verses 7-10, we read how the king responds. Haman finds himself with a difficult decision to make. Should he follow the king into the garden to reason with him? Probably not because he realizes that “harm was determined against him by the king” (v. 7). He knows he’s not changing the king’s mind. He’d be stopped if he tried to flee the palace. He knows that no man should ever be alone in a room with a woman from the king’s harem, much less the Queen. He doesn’t have a good option here.
Why does the king leave the room? Does he just need time to think or to cool down? He’s already decided to punish Haman. But even that probably didn’t upset the king too much. He could easily find a replacement. So why is he so troubled? Because the thing he loves the most, his reputation, is being threatened.
Remember that he was the one who authorized Haman’s edict to have all the Jews killed. He’d signed and sealed it. How could he now punish Haman for a decree that he personally approved? It’d be like a Senator needing to overturn a bill that they wrote. This is a tricky problem for the king. His queen’s life is in danger because of a law that he signed into effect. What can he do?
Haman solves his problem for him (v. 8). In desperation, Haman chooses to risk misinterpretation by staying with the queen alone to beg for mercy instead of walking out with the king. But even this plan backfires on him. The king walks in and sees him “falling on the couch where Esther was” and accuses him of assaulting her. Now the king had a reason to get rid of him without losing face. He didn’t need a trial by jury. In the empire, whatever the king wanted was the law. He was the judge, jury, and executioner, approving of the plan to hang him on the gallows he’d made for Mordecai (vv. 9-10).
Again, notice the irony here. This whole saga began when Mordecai the Jew refused to fall before Haman the enemy of the Jews, and now the enemy of the Jews is falling before the Jewish queen. The one who wanted to execute a Jew for not falling down before him is now going to be executed for falling down inappropriately before a Jew!
Yet another Providential Moment
Haman’s apparent assault of the queen gives the king all the reason he needs to condemn Haman, and allows him to do so without losing face. What a turn of providence! Haman could’ve done any number of things when the king left the room, but he does the one thing that will allow the king to grant Esther’s request, punish him, and not lose face.
We’ve seen throughout this book how things just happened to happen a certain way, and noted that God’s providence is behind everything that happens. This was clearly seen last week in chapter 6 when the king is sleepless in Susa and has the account of Mordecai saving his life read to him.
What’s interesting in this section of Esther is that the chapter that doesn’t even mention her name, chapter 6, the pivotal chapter where God’s quiet leading is most clearly seen, is bookended by two chapters (chs. 5 and 7) where Esther is diligent to use all her powers to bring about her desired end. So you have God’s providential blessing in the middle surrounded by the active movement and initiative of Esther.
This is a great example of how God’s sovereignty and our responsibility are related to one another. God works in ways that we can’t explain and through means that we can. Many of us struggle with passivity or hyper-activity. We may err toward just praying and “Letting go and letting God.” Or we may err toward “If it’s going to be, it’s got to be me,” or assuming that progress is the result of my hard work and effort.
But Esther shows us that it’s both. God must do things that we can’t do, and we must apply all our energies toward our desired ends. God’s sovereign act in chapter 6 was the turning point, but God also worked through Esther’s shrewdness and courage.
How does this play out in our everyday lives? Do you want to see your friends follow Jesus? We can’t change their hearts, only God can do that, but we can plan to talk to them about Christ and invite them to church. Are you waiting on God’s leading in your life? God will open the right door at the right time, but there’s nothing wrong with getting out there and knocking. Do you want a better marriage? Only God can change our hearts and the hearts of our spouses, but that doesn’t mean we should just sit around and do nothing. Don’t just sit back and wait for God to work while being unwilling to pursue a wise course of action.
God is Angry about Our Sin
Haman’s wife tried to warn him what would happen if he kept pursuing the destruction of the Jews (6:13). She may’ve known about the promise that God made with Abraham, how he would bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him. Turns out his wife was right. By cursing the Jews, Haman was picking a fight with God, not just Esther and the Jews. His evil plan was uncovered and he was brought to justice.
We may be quick to laugh at Haman and say, “Come on man, don’t be such an idiot!” But our laughter is like a boomerang that comes back on us because Haman is a picture of how we all think and act. In a very real way, what happened to Haman will happen to us. The Bible says, “No creature is hidden from God’s sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give an account” (Heb. 4:13). God sees through everything we put on to make our lives look better than they are. But, like Haman, we all love the praise of man and the riches of the world, all have murderous hatred for our enemies and are consumed with ourselves.
How do you suppose all this makes the God who made you feel? He created us to live for him, but instead we live for ourselves. Can you imagine making something only to see it defy the reason for which you made it?
This does not make God happy. The Bible says repeatedly that God is not happy, indeed that he is angry about what we’ve done. Yes, he’s also slow to anger and patient and kind. But one key to understanding God is to understand that he, like the Hulk, is always angry. Why should he not be upset when we’ve broken his laws? Would God be just if he didn’t feel something about what we’ve done? Would he be good if he let evil and rebellion go? How could he be good if we all got away with our crimes against him? And how could we know anything of the sweetness of his mercy if he was indifferent to our sin?
God Arose in His Anger and Came to Die for Us
God is not indifferent. In fact, he’s already taken decisive action. Like the king in Esther, God arose in his anger and came to the earth to do something about what has happened. But the beauty of the gospel is that God didn’t come to execute us. Rather, he came to be executed for us. In a dramatic reversal, he came to die on the gallows that we’d built for ourselves. He came to pay the penalty for our crimes so that we could go free.
Unless someone pays the penalty for our crimes, God’s anger remains. The “wrath of the king is abated” (v. 10) only after justice has been served. On the cross of Jesus Christ, God poured out his wrath on his Son so that he wouldn’t have to pour it out on us.
If all of God’s anger was poured out on Jesus on the cross, then that means that there’s none left for us. If he paid our debt, we’re free to go. We’re even free to come into the King’s presence as his sons and daughters. And nothing will ever change the King’s mind. No matter what we do, he won’t love us today and hang us tomorrow.
We all had or have fathers who disappointed or even harmed us in some way. But in the gospel, we learn that God wants to become the perfect Father we so long for. In the gospel, we learn that the just Judge of the universe actually wants to become our Father. He wants to bring us to his house, give us a seat at his table, let us drink his wine, give us all that is his, and even enjoy being with us. Yes, he is the Judge and he will execute justice. But he’s also the Judge who wants to bring you home and be your Father. When you turn away from your sins and put your trust in Jesus, the Judge will exonerate you and the Father will adopt you into his family.