Some of Esther's peers, like Daniel, lived with a distinct advantage: they experienced the mighty, miracle-making wonder of God. Esther, on the other hand, was surrounded by extravagant wealth and impiety in the disenchanted empire of Persia. Faith wasn't easy in a place like this, but thankfully, Esther learned there was more to God than what she could see.
Today's suffering and cynicism can leave us feeling that God is long gone. But, in truth, he is still present and active in our lives. In slow, mundane, and even obscure ways, he is pursuing us and repairing our broken world. Follow Esther as she models ten practices that connect us with a seemingly distant God and his unexpected work in the world.
Some of Esther's peers, like Daniel, lived with a distinct advantage: they experienced the mighty, miracle-making wonder of God. Esther, on the other hand, was surrounded by extravagant wealth and impiety in the disenchanted empire of Persia. Faith wasn't easy in a place like this, but thankfully, Esther learned there was more to God than what she could see.
Today's suffering and cynicism can leave us feeling that God is long gone. But, in truth, he is still present and active in our lives. In slow, mundane, and even obscure ways, he is pursuing us and repairing our broken world. Follow Esther as she models ten practices that connect us with a seemingly distant God and his unexpected work in the world.
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Overview
Some of Esther's peers, like Daniel, lived with a distinct advantage: they experienced the mighty, miracle-making wonder of God. Esther, on the other hand, was surrounded by extravagant wealth and impiety in the disenchanted empire of Persia. Faith wasn't easy in a place like this, but thankfully, Esther learned there was more to God than what she could see.
Today's suffering and cynicism can leave us feeling that God is long gone. But, in truth, he is still present and active in our lives. In slow, mundane, and even obscure ways, he is pursuing us and repairing our broken world. Follow Esther as she models ten practices that connect us with a seemingly distant God and his unexpected work in the world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781684269723 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Leafwood Publishers |
| Publication date: | 08/06/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 492 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Refocus
I was three years into my first full-time preaching ministry in the 1990s when I saw the movie Jerry Maguire. More importantly, I was only a decade into my Christian faith. I had spent my entire youth in an unchurched household.
The movie Jerry Maguire was inspired by the real-life experiences of sports agents like the legendary Leigh Steinberg. Most of the athletes and agents portrayed in the movie have relationships we might characterize as "professional." The players and reps are icy and distant with one another. Firm handshakes. Tight smiles. Brief conversations.
But sports agent Jerry Maguire and his client, a pro football player named Rod Tidwell, endure such an emotional journey together that their relationship transforms into something "unprofessional." Brief conversations morph into deep and lasting talks. Tight smiles evolve into wide-eyed laughter. And in a closing scene, in front of a mob of reporters after an NFL game, Jerry and Rod hug tightly, their tears a testimony of heartfelt respect and love.
Another athlete, standing nearby with his agent, sees this friendship. He aches for more from his rep than just the ability to secure the best salary or benefits. He turns to his agent and asks a question. It is the question to which the entire film points: "Why don't we have that kind of relationship?"
There I was — three years into my ministry, ten years into my Christianity — and I realized that was a question I'd been asking.
Not of a sports agent.
But of God.
Why don't we have that kind of relationship?
At seminary, before entering full-time ministry, I rubbed shoulders with missionaries and ministers whose God almost always seemed to answer mighty prayers in mighty ways. Meanwhile, my God seemed to respond to many of my solicitations with silence.
I wondered: Why don't we have that kind of relationship?
In my own congregation, where that pulpit of three years still felt like a pair of dress shoes I hadn't quite broken in, I pastored congregants like a woman who often shared that she heard God speaking to her and a man who frequently mentioned how the Holy Spirit had provided an answer to this question or that concern. Meanwhile, God's voice and the Holy Spirit's guidance were often hidden from me.
I wondered: Why don't we have that kind of relationship?
I recall a night during this time when I stood on the hill at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. I'd flown out from my New Mexico congregation to attend a conference on Pepperdine's campus. The presentations were finished for the evening, and I'd found a spot on a grassy slope under the bright stars, facing the ocean — a vast void that commingled with the night sky, erasing the horizon, leaving me a Lilliputian before a boundless sea that poured seamlessly into a limitless sky. The glow of ships below and the glimmer of stars above were like interchangeable golden pegs in the Lite Brite before me. The measureless nature of it all became a mirror in which I saw some of the measureless features of God, and I ached for more of him. I cried out to God:
"Fill me with your Holy Spirit!"
"Talk to me!"
"Make this more real for me! Make us more real!"
But there was no voice from heaven in response. No bright light with an angelic messenger. There was only the sound of the waves slapping the sand. The sound of the breeze tickling the leaves of the trees.
And I wondered: Why don't we have that kind of relationship?
Center Stage versus Backstage
Many of us long for a God who is center stage, while experiencing a God who is backstage.
When I read Acts or Exodus, the curtain is raised on a God who performs center stage. He is in the spotlight. His voice rises above all others. He's the most visible actor on the stage. His action is indisputable:
He parts the sea.
He pours out the Spirit.
He sends plagues.
He heals flesh.
He speaks from bushes.
He appears in dreams.
Center stage is God's home in Acts and Exodus. That's the God for whom I was hungering in that Pepperdine plea. That's the relationship I was missing in those early days of ministry and during my first decade of faith.
Since those days, I've been blessed to enjoy times with a God more like the one I see in Acts or Exodus. I've seen God cure diseases for the helpless. I've watched him grant employment for the jobless. I've witnessed God stitch broken hearts back together for the hopeless.
• While visiting Christians worshipping in underground house churches in China, I've experienced an undeniable sense of God's providential work and presence.
• Watching a school in the Philippines blossom from a handful of kids in the living room of close friends to hundreds in a three-story educational facility, I've been able to easily detect God's handiwork.
• Recently, I was praying about an old relationship that still filled me with bitterness and anger. At lunch, that very person walked into the barbeque joint where I was eating. I hadn't seen him in years. I attributed the "chance" meeting to God's clear action.
I've had moments in my life when God has been center stage.
In spite of this, if I'm honest, God's still been backstage a lot more than he's been center stage. This confession doesn't come easily. I feel pressured by the lyrics of some of the songs on the Christian radio station in my car to say the opposite. I feel tempted by the chapter titles of some of the Christian books in my library to say the opposite. But the truth is that, early in the morning when I conduct my examen and I review my previous day to try to discern what God is up to in my life, I don't usually find my day reading like Acts or Exodus. Instead, God's voice is lost among the cacophony of other voices. His action seems difficult to track.
I often hear this same confession among those who are suffering. Friends in my congregation in Memphis have voiced this concern with various "why" questions:
• Why did my sophomore daughter die in a car wreck on the way to start her new school year at her Christian university?
• Why did my nine-year-old die of cancer in spite of the best treatment in the world and the prayers of thousands?
• Why haven't I found a job after months of intense searching, even though I'm highly qualified?
• Why did my husband, a preacher, walk out of the church and the Christian faith?
• Why won't God heal my cancer?
These are the kinds of questions that arise when our experience of God is more backstage than center stage — when his power or his presence isn't as front and center as we'd hoped.
Enchanted versus Disenchanted
Charles Taylor, a professor of philosophy at McGill University in Canada, doesn't use the words center stage and backstage to describe this tension. He uses the words "enchanted" and "disenchanted."
Sometimes, life feels "enchanted"— filled with a God who is visibly present and very active. At other times, life feels "disenchanted" — filled with a God who is hidden and whose actions are harder to discern. Many of us long for a life that is enchanted (filled with a visible God), while experiencing a life that is disenchanted (filled with a hidden God).
In fact, Taylor argues that our entire contemporary culture, when compared to the culture of the 1500s, experiences life as far more disenchanted. Those living in the 1500s experienced life as enchanted. First, they believed things happening in the natural world (e.g., storms, plagues, flourishing crops) were the result of divine blessings or curses. Second, they believed that the rise and fall of human kingdoms and societies were rooted ultimately in the will and work of God. Finally, they believed in a world filled with spirits, angels, and demons.
Today, however, most in the Western world experience life as disenchanted. First, most use science rather than theology to explain events in the natural world. Second, most attribute happenings in human kingdoms to human choice rather than divine will. Third, the notion that angels, spirits, and demons are alive and active, while playing well in novels and movies, doesn't play well in response to the question, "Hi, honey, what happened today?"
Some of us, when we compare our relationship with God with the relationship others have (today or in another era), we are left to wonder: Why don't we have that kind of relationship? Sometimes, God feels distant. God appears to be working far behind the scenes. God seems to work in ways that are indirect and covert. Our culture seems disenchanted. And our seasons of suffering leave us feeling disenchanted.
How Do We Thrive in Disenchantment?
All of this raises a critical question: How do we thrive spiritually in a disenchanted world? How do we flourish when God is hard to hear and difficult to discern?
What we need is a book written in disenchanted times. What we need is a tale that equips us to thrive and flourish even when it seems that God is acting backstage. What we need is a resource that enables us to know it's OK when our experience of God is not miraculous.
What we need is the book of Esther. In Esther, God is so invisible that his name never appears. Yet in Esther, God is more present and more powerful than we might have ever imagined.
Secular Not Sacred
The story of Esther opens in a city called Susa — one of four capitals of the ancient kingdom of Persia. Susa was the winter palace of King Ahasuerus, who ruled from India to Ethiopia (Esther 1:1–2). The kingdom of Persia displaced the kingdom of Babylon. And the kingdom of Babylon, as Esther chapter 2 reveals, is where God exiled his people from Jerusalem after centuries of disobedience. Esther's family was included in those sent away in exile to Babylon. Babylon had now become Persia.
Jerusalem was sacred. It's where God once filled his temple with his presence. It's where God would visit us through his son. It's where God seemed near. Jerusalem was the land of enchantment — a place where heaven kissed the earth.
But Susa, the capital city of the kingdom of Persia, once the kingdom of Babylon, was secular. It was the land of disenchantment — a place where heaven and earth sat distrustfully apart like two lone riders in a subway car late at night. Old Testament scholar Adele Berlin writes, "Esther is the most secular of biblical books." It is secular because it takes place in a secular land, a land where God seems absent. It's a time when God seems distant. In fact, there's hardly anything of God in the land or the story. This is an era of disenchantment.
God seemed so absent the Jews couldn't even sing their worship songs there. The Psalmist laments:
By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? (Ps. 137:1–4)
In Babylon, succeeded by Persia (where Esther lived), Jews like Esther could hardly even hum their hymns ("songs of Zion"). That's how secular it felt.
Mercifully, the Persians allowed the Jews to leave this pagan place and return home to Jerusalem. In the years before the book of Esther opens, many of the Jews have done just that. They have gone back to those enchanted spaces, back to the places where God felt present. Where God could be seen and heard. Where praise songs flowed from the lips as easily as breath from the lungs.
But not everyone has returned from Persia. Some have remained — like Esther. Stuck in this town whose parks contain no statues with names like Abraham or Moses or David and no schools with names like Ruth or Deborah or Hannah. Surprisingly, here in Susa, we do not even find the word "God." The Hebrew words Yahweh and Elohim never appear in the book of Esther.
That's what makes this book strikingly different from a book written in a similar time and place — the book of Daniel. Daniel, like the book of Esther, tells of a Jew who serves in the court of a pagan king during the time of the Jewish exile. But in the book of Daniel, unlike the book of Esther, we witness miracles (e.g., Daniel and the lion's den). God is front and center. His signature appears on every page. Daniel portrays an enchanted world. Esther portrays a disenchanted world. Esther is written to help us learn to thrive in those seasons of life when God is hard to find. Esther is God's gift to us to carry us through those valleys when we're forced to live in Susa rather than Jerusalem.
My Kingdom Come
Esther reveals how, when God plays behind the scenes, others will try to steal the scene. Chapter 1 opens with two of the ten feasts featured in the book. The first gala lasts six months. It is thrown by the king of Persia, Ahasuerus:
In the third year of his reign he gave a feast for all his officials and servants. The army of Persia and Media and the nobles and governors of the provinces were before him, while he showed the riches of his royal glory and the splendor and pomp of his greatness for many days, 180 days. (Esther 1:3–4)
The Greek historian Herodotus gives us insight regarding this feast. During this time period, the Persian king was rallying support within his kingdom to go to war against Greece. This feast was part of his scheme to persuade his fighters and financiers to support the plan to take Greece. In other words, Ahasuerus was wining and dining them. That's why he gets so upset when his wife, Queen Vashti, refuses to display herself before his guests:
On the seventh day, when the heart of the king was merry with wine, he commanded Mehuman, Biztha, Harbona, Bigtha and Abagtha, Zethar and Carkas, the seven eunuchs who served in the presence of King Ahasuerus, to bring Queen Vashti before the king with her royal crown, in order to show the peoples and the princes her beauty, for she was lovely to look at. But Queen Vashti refused to come at the king's command delivered by the eunuchs. At this the king became enraged, and his anger burned within him. (Esther 1:10–12)
This isn't the frustration of a seething spouse. This is the fury of a despairing despot. Queen Vashti was meant to be the culmination of the display of this king's wealth, the Santa at the end of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. If any fighter or financier was still on the fence about supporting the king's quest to take Greece, one look at the queen should have persuaded him that this king was worth backing.
Susa is so secular that the king throws a party for six months to influence his fighters and financiers to support his bid to rule over one more piece of the world. Where Christians have been taught to pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth," Esther's world is ruled by a king who wants his kingdom to come, his will to be done. In Esther, the entire world is this king's kingdom. And if God won't act front and center, the king will. He will take the place of God.
Hallowed Be My Name
The first kingdom-wide feast culminates in a second feast, which is held solely for those in the capital of Susa. It lasts seven days:
And when these days were completed, the king gave for all the people present in Susa the citadel, both great and small, a feast lasting for seven days in the court of the garden of the king's palace. There were white cotton curtains and violet hangings fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rods and marble pillars, and also couches of gold and silver on a mosaic pavement of porphyry, marble, mother-of-pearl, and precious stones. (Esther 1:5–6)
Karen Jobes notes the language used here sounds very much like the language used in two other places in the Bible: the description of the tabernacle in the wilderness and the temple in Jerusalem. Susa is so secular that the palace of this king is described in terms that make it sound like the temple of God. Why? Because in the book of Esther, a king is attempting to supplant God. "Ashasuerus is God," Old Testament scholars Samuel Wells and George Summer write.
That is how the book of Esther begins. There is much speculation over the presence or absence of God in this book of Esther. But the book begins with the one who is in charge of all the events and circumstances and arrangements and threats that affect the Jews. He holds the whole world in his hands.
Christians are taught to pray, "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name." Sadly, in Esther's world, the only name being hallowed is the king's name. In the book of Esther, the king is God.
Give Me This Day My Daily Bread
This king now moves from kingdom building to homemaking. Chapter 1 opens with a roundup of all the influential men so the king can make war. Chapter 2 opens with a roundup of all the beautiful women so the king can take a new queen:
After these things, when the anger of King Ahasuerus had abated, he remembered Vashti and what she had done and what had been decreed against her. Then the king's young men who attended him said, "Let beautiful young virgins be sought out for the king. And let the king appoint officers in all the provinces of his kingdom to gather all the beautiful young virgins to the harem in Susa the citadel, under custody of Hegai, the king's eunuch, who is in charge of the women. Let their cosmetics be given them. And let the young woman who pleases the king be queen instead of Vashti." This pleased the king, and he did so. (Esther 2:1–4)
Esther is caught up in this dragnet of young virgins. She and countless other women are forced by the king into a contest to see which of them will become his new queen.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Behind Esther"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Chris Altrock.
Excerpted by permission of Abilene Christian University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword By Lisa Wingate,
Introduction The Land of Disenchantment,
Chapter 1 Refocus,
Chapter 2 Sit Tight,
Chapter 3 Jump In,
Chapter 4 Lie Low,
Chapter 5 Pray Brave,
Chapter 6 Treasure,
Chapter 7 Advocate,
Chapter 8 Pay Out,
Chapter 9 Power Down,
Chapter 10 Work Wonders,
Chapter 11 Thank God,
Chapter 12 Lend a Hand,
Forty-Day Study Guide for the Disenchanted,
Notes,