The search for Queen Vashti’s replacement was in some ways a competition like today’s Golden Raspberry Award. The original idea when Vashti was deposed and sent away from the king’s presence was to find a better woman to fill her royal position. By “better,” the king’s advisors presumably meant someone more compliant than Vashti, someone who would toe the royal line and obey her husband. Yet strangely enough, in their search for a replacement it never seems to have occurred to those in charge to include a character assessment. Instead, only three virtues were necessary in this “better” woman: she had to be young, she had to be unmarried, and she had to be extraordinarily good-looking (vv. 1-4).

In the midst of this all-consuming empire, two relatively insignificant people, Mordecai and Esther, step onto the stage in verses 5-7. Mordecai was a descendent of Kish, from the tribe of Benjamin. He was related to King Saul, a fact that will become significant later on in the story. One of his ancestors was carried off into exile in the time of Jehoiachin in 597 B.C. In fact, exile was the defining feature of Mordecai’s position, as verse 6 makes clear. As a second or third generation exile, he would thus have known nothing other than life in Persia under the empire.

Mordecai lived in the citadel of Susa, along with the imperial employees, rather than out in the city of Susa itself. The other member of his household was his cousin, whom he had taken into his care because she was an orphan. She had a kosher heritage; she was the daughter of Abihail (v. 15). Esther was her Persian name. She too, like all the exiles, had to live in two worlds. As her life unfolded, though, there would come a day when she would have to decide which of those two worlds define her.

Those two worlds collided one fateful morning in the citadel of Susa. Ahasuerus’s officials were collecting his new flock of young women, according to the edict that his advisors had framed for him (v.8). We had anticipated this fate as soon as Esther was introduced to us as a woman who had a beautiful figure and was lovely to look at. In fact, the text makes the point that she is actually more than qualified. Visually speaking (which is all that the empire – then and now – cares about), she is doubly blessed.

Esther quickly learned not simply how to survive, but how to thrive in her new situation (v. 9). Esther learned that the harem was simply life in the empire in miniature” a relatively pointless existence, where life was regulated in all its details, and promotion depended not on talent or character, but on pleasing those in charge. Thus, Esther learned to be a pleaser, first of all charming Hegai – the “keeper of the women,” to give him his official title. In return for this compliance, Hegai rewarded Esther with special food and an early start to her beauty treatments (v. 12).

Esther had apparently no ethical qualms about eating the empire’s food and being used as the emperor’s plaything, and following Mordecai’s advice, her Jewishness remained perfectly concealed (vv. 10-11). After a year of preparation, Esther’s turn finally came to go in to the king for her one-night audition, she was careful to follow Hegai’s instructions (vv. 13-15). At this point in the story, Esther was the perfectly compliant child of the empire, the ultimate anti-Vashti, and her tactics appeared to be succeeding. Wherever she went, she won with her compliant ways the favor of all who saw her.

We are therefore not surprised to find out that sweet little Esther also charmed the heart of King Ahasuerus (vv. 16-17). Here surely was the “better woman” than Vashti that he had been seeking: as beautiful as the former queen, but much more compliant. The king “loved” Esther more than all the other women; he found what he was looking for. Ahasuerus made Esther queen in Vashti’s place, a substitution that is underlined by the reference to the royal crown and to a feast given in her honor (v. 18). The result of Eshter’s promotion was happiness and blessing all around.

Through all of this lengthy procedure Mordecai had been keeping a watchful eye on his cousin, advising her along the way. He was the one who advised her to keep secret her Jewish identity – not because the empire was inherently anti-Semitic, but because, in his opinion, one could never be too careful in a place like Susa. He knew the way the empire operated. Walls have ears and information is power. Even after she became queen, it was because of Mordecai’s command that Esther kept her ancestry quiet (vv. 19-20).

Mordecai himself proved the power of the right information used in the right way, when he uncovered a plot to harm Ahasuerus (vv. 21-23). Two of the king’s eunuchs conspired to kill the king. Mordecai became aware of their plot while he was sitting at the king’s gate (this location identifies him as an official to the king). He passed the information on to the king through Esther, who herself was careful to give credit to Mordecai. In that way, both positions were made a little more secure by putting the empire in their debt. The result was that the conspirators were hanged, while Mordecai’s name was inscribed in the royal annals.

What this chapter of Esther teaches us is that disobedience and sin – even the disobedience and sin of others – have far-reaching consequences. Why was Esther caught up and condemned to this apparently meaningless life in a gilded cage? In part, at least, because she lived in Susa. Why was she living in Susa? She was there because of the sin and disobedience of her forebears. It was disobedience that had brought the family of Mordecai and Esther into exile at the time of Jehoiachin. The destruction of Jerusalem was not simply and accident of fate: it was the culmination of the judgment of God upon His own people who had abandoned Him. Disobedience brought God’s people into exile in the first place.

What’s more, it was disobedience that kept Mordecai and Esther’s family in exile. In 538 B.C., Cyrus issued a decree permitting the Jews to return home. Some went back with Zerubbabel at that time (Ezra 1-2), but many stayed, comfortably settled where they were, outside the land of promise. Had Mordecai and Esther (or their parents) returned to Jerusalem at some time in the previous fifty years, would Esther still have been taken by the harem recruiters? Perhaps, but she certainly wouldn’t have been such an easy target. The result of the family’s history of disobedience compromise was that Mordecai and especially Esther found themselves in a position that, for all its worldly advantages, was potentially disastrous spiritually. Esther ended up married to an uncircumcised pagan and virtually cut off from the community of faith, successfully pretending not to be a child of the true and living God.

Yet we see in this chapter more than just the bitter fruit of disobedience. We also see God’s ability to turn our disobedience – and the sour fruits of our parents’ sins – to His own glory and His people’s good. Ahasuerus and his cronies meant their edict purely for the satisfaction of the king’s selfish pleasures. Mordecai and Esther found themselves impaled on the horns of a dilemma because of their earlier compromises with the empire. They found it much easier to comply with the empire’s wishes than to resist assimilation – and which of us can be sure that we would have charted a different course? Yet God’s hand hovers over every detail, moving the pieces into the place He has determined – even through their sin and compromise – in order to achieve His own good purposes.

This observation presses us to see both similarities and differences between the empire of Ahasuerus and the kingdom of God. Like the empire of Ahasuerus, God’s claims on our lives are absolute. He owns our bodies, our sexuality, our career plans, our hopes, our dreams, our children…everything we have are His to do with as He wills. When we were baptized into His community, we were marked out with His name – the name Christian – and He will not share our loyalty with others. God demands and will exercise complete sovereignty over our beings. Of course, this is relatively easy to confess in the abstract. What is much harder is to continue to confess that sovereignty joyfully when God takes our lives and the lives of those around us in directions different from those we had hoped and prayed for, and of which we had dreamed. When God brings trials into our lives and calls us to submit willingly to the loss of the very things that this world calls most precious – money, friends, reputation, health, strength, dreams, and aspirations – how do we respond? With Esther’s sweet and compliant spirit? On the contrary, our hearts swiftly revolt against God whenever things do not go our way, whenever our will is not done.

When God exercises His claims on our lives, He does so to bring us good. He wants to move us on in our spiritual walk, to develop and deepen and display our faith before a watching world (1 Peter 1:6-7). As we suffer loss, and He pries our fingers off the idols to which they are so desperately attached, then our hearts are prepared more and more to be with Christ, and to see in Him our only good in this world.

Esther 2:1-23 Study Questions:

How are we sometimes tempted to become frustrated with God regarding His timing? When have you struggled with unanswered prayers or unfulfilled dreams? How were you tempted to view God in the midst of those disappointments?

What evidence, if any, of personal faith and courage do you see on the part of Esther and Mordecai in this passage? Where do you see evidence of the sovereign hand and plan of God?

How is the hidden hand of God evident in the “favor: that Esther quickly wins (vv. 9-15)? What effect does she have on those around her?

What are you learning about the sovereignty of God as you study this passage? How does the kingdom of Jesus Christ (and His role as Bridegroom in it) clash with the values of King Ahasuerus and his kingdom, as revealed in this chapter?