For Such a Time as This

“For such a time as this!” This phrase goes beyond Carpe Diem – “seize the day” or being opportunistic. “For such a time as this” goes beyond small “p” providence. It is not fate – an impersonal, cosmic scheduler. It is not just destiny – an impersonal, predetermined course of events. The context of the phrase “for such a time as this” has to do with God’s rescue, deliverance, and salvation of us. And not just salvation of us as individuals, but whole families and a people for Himself. Therefore, when you think of “For such a time as this,” I want you to think about when Jesus saved you. Of course, to be accurate and follow Ephesians 1:4, your salvation was before the foundation of the world. God had you on His mind before creation! He foreknew you and has always had a plan for you! His predestination was the initiation of your salvation. It was like having plan – a road map to reach your destination. The activation of your salvation occurred when God sent His Son Jesus Christ to die for you and me on a Cross and rise again from the dead. The invitation of your salvation occurred when you heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. However, the consummation of your salvation occurred when you believed in Jesus as your Lord and Saviour. Your baptism was the declaration of your faith and pledge of allegiance to Christ. Someday when you go to heaven that will be the celebration of your faith and glorification of your body. I want you think about that phrase, “for such a time as this.” Do you remember when you got saved? That’s it, “For such a time as this.” And today, if you cannot say that you have that assurance of salvation then “for such a time as this.” Let’s read Esther 4 to find the backstory to where this precious phrase of salvation came from. Read Esther 4!

God made you for such a time as this. God made you for such a time as this through 4 principles we see in this passage. God made you for such a time as this to … 1) Finish the job others left undone (2:5; 3:1; 1 Samuel 15). Have you thought about that? God made you for such a time as this to finish the job others left undone. It is your turn to pick up the baton. We see this principle in the story of Esther. Let’s recap where we have come so far and I want to introduce you to a backstory. The writer of Esther has been dropping “Easter eggs” or clues throughout the story that we skipped over. The first is in Esther 2:5, “Now there was a Jew in Susa the citadel whose name was Mordecai, the son of Jair, son of Shimei, son of Kish, aBenjaminite.” Did you catch the clue? Kish and Benjaminite may be triggers for you. If you go back to 1 Samuel 9:1-2 (which was about 600 years earlier in Israel’s history), we read, “There was a man of Benjamin, whose name was Kish … and he had a son whose name was Saul.” Saul became Israel’s first king. He stood taller and was more handsome than any other man in the land. Mordecai was a direct descendent of Saul, maybe from the line of crippled Mephibosheth whom David protected (2 Samuel 21:6-7)? That is the first clue. The second clue is found in Esther 3:1, “After these things King Ahasuerus promoted Haman the Agagite.” Haman was an Agagite. Who were the Agagites? They were descendants of King Agag of the Amalekites, the ancient enemies of Israel, according to Exodus 17:8-16. God even made a promise in Exodus 17:14, “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.” So in Esther we find two opposing blue bloods of royal descent in Mordecai and Haman. But there is more. Check out 1 Samuel 15, especially verses 1-3 and 9: “And Samuel said to Saul, ‘The LORD sent me to anoint you king over His people Israel: now therefore listen to the words of the LORD. Thus says the LORD of hosts, I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey … But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fattened calves and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them. All that was despised and worthless they devoted to destruction.” Saul didn’t understand that selective obedience is still disobedience. Saul didn’t do the job God called him to do. He often took matters into his own hands. But fast forward. God raised up Mordecai. Mordecai didn’t take matters into his own hands by killing Haman, but he stood up against Haman and would not bow to him as we learned last week in Esther 3:5. As we continue on in the story of Esther, Mordecai finishes the job that Saul didn’t. This certainly does not give license for us to kill or even be violent to anybody, but we are sometimes called to finish a job others didn’t complete. Maybe you finishing the job means standing up against evil and not bowing the knee to a bully? Maybe you finishing the job means calling people to full obedience to God’s Word where it was half-hearted previously? Maybe finishing the job God has called you to means giving all that others held back for themselves? Maybe finishing the job God has called you is to patch up where others have compromised? Canadian Erwin Lutzer, retired pastor of historic Moody Memorial Church in Chicago says, “The church is to be in the world like a ship is in the ocean. But when the ocean begins to seep into the ship, the vessel is in trouble.”^[1] “Like Israel in Babylon, our challenge is to impact the culture without being spiritually destroyed by it.”^[2] Maybe finishing the job is not so much patching up prior compromises, but dealing with new attacks and heresies? God made you for such a time as this to finish the job others left undone (2:5; 3:1; 1 Samuel 15), which includes letting God help you rather than taking matters into your own hands. Pray first and seek God! He will help. This leads to a second principle we learn from Esther 4.

God made you for such a time as this to 1) finish the job others left undone and 2) lament and fast (4:1-3, 15-16). This is not the first time you have heard from this pulpit a call to lament and fast. When we face a problem, the default is complaining to other people. Most times, they can’t fix the problem, but only empathize. However, lament is redirecting our fears and frustrations in faith to God. Pastor Mark Vroegopdescribes “lament is how you live between the poles of a hard life and trusting in God’s sovereignty.”^[3]Lament is what Mordecai and his fellows Jews, including Esther did when they faced genocide. Look at verses 1-3, “When Mordecai learned all that had been done (by Haman to create an irrevocable law to kill the Jews), Mordecai tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and ashes and went out into the midst of the city, and he cried out with a loud and bitter cry. He went up to the entrance of the king’s gate, for no one was allowed to enter the king’s gate clothed in sackcloth. And in every province, wherever the king’s command and his decree reached, there was great mourning among the Jews, with fasting and weeping and lamenting and many of them lay in sackcloth and ashes.”  The unspoken recipient of the lament was not the citizens of Suza or the Persian people, but God. God is who we lament to! Many of you may not be aware that for the past couple of weeks, I have been battling Lyme disease. It was debilitating – high fever, chills, massive hives and welts all over my body, fatigue and muscle aches and weakness. I apologize I couldn’t spend much one-on-one time with you. However, this illness gave me the gift of focus, because as much as the doctors were trying to help, they couldn’t figure out was wrong with me. God knew. He ministered to me. God made you and I for such a time as this to lament and fast. To express with our bodies that there is trouble and we need to seek God in prayer. God made you for such a time as this, which includes calling others to seek God even if you didn’t immediately obey Him. 

What do I mean? Pastor Jason reminded us that Mordecai could and should have left with all the other returning Jews that began after Cyrus’s decree in 538 B.C (50 years earlier). There were multiple waves of returning Jews through the decades and Mordecai never joined one of those caravans heading back to Jerusalem and Judah. He stayed in Susa. He was what we would call today a late adopter. Maybe he passed his delayed responses onto his younger cousin Esther? We learn that Esther wasn’t quick to join the Jews in fasting, not fasting until verses 15-16. This is because in verse 4, she tried to convince Mordecai not to fast and to put back on some palace clothes rather than sackcloth.

Friends, maybe you have not immediately obeyed God either. God is giving us another chance today. I know you because you are not dead and in hell. You are still breathing. Check with your hand to see if you feel any breath coming out. However, do not delay. For such a time as this. It is time to obey – leaving that sinful practice behind or leaving that secret society where you try to get your sense of belonging. For such a time as this, it is time to surrender your life to Christ for salvation. It is time to get baptized. It is time to become a church member. It is time to start serving. It is time to stop co-habiting and get married. It is time to go public with your faith. Remember, up until this time, Esther was only known for her beauty, not her faith. “Apparently, no one in the court, including her own husband, knew that she was a Jew.”^[4] God made you for such a time as this to lament and fast, which includes calling others to seek God even if you didn’t immediately obey Him in the past. God is so gracious and give us opportunity after we repent to teach His ways to transgressors (Psalm 51:13).  This leads us to the third principle we find in Esther 4.

God made you for such a time as this to finish the job left undone, lament and fast and to 3) alert others to the problem (4:4-9). In verses 4-9, Mordecai has to the use the back channels to communicate to Esther of Haman’s evil law to commit genocide of the Jews. Back in Esther 3:9, we know that Haman was even willing to give to the king’s war machine 10,000 talents or 340,000 kilograms of silver worth conservatively over CDN $340 million today.^[5] That amount for wiping out the Jews. Let that sink in. As OT Scholar Joyce Baldwin aptly wrote, “The betrayal of people in exchange for money has always been particularly repugnant.”^[6] Think the Jewish holocaust of last century. 

Esther was afraid. She felt like she had lost her favour with the king. As verse 30 she says, “But as for me, I have not been called to come in to the king these thirty days.” Men who are in love with their wives have a hard time being apart 30 hours let alone 30 days. But it was in this time and before that God had been working in Esther. As my friend Ray Sawatzky once told me on a mission trip, “We need to remember that Esther had to prepare for ‘such a time as this.” Esther wasn’t aware of the laws being created against her own people. She lost her husband’s favour. We don’t know what we was doing. We can surmise that the Susa spa was pretty nice. Swimming and sweet fruit in the morning, afternoons of nails, hair and massage each day. Sounds good? But what if people are perishing? God made you for such a time as this to alert others to the problem, which includes encouraging the fearful and unfavoured.

Old Testament Scholar Barry Beitzel explains, “Mordecai reminded Esther that it would be more dangerous for her to say nothing to the king.”^[7] She would still die, and she and her family would have missed out on being used by God for deliverance. Have we ever thought that at the moment of courage that it is not only our destiny that is at stake, but our family’s destiny as well? What if our kids and grandkids, our aunts and uncles, our cousins all lose out because of our lack of faith? Think about your neighbours and co-workers.  The next time you have a crisis of belief, picture each of your relatives and ask yourself: “Will my actions lead them to greater faith in the Triune God or not?” This is why alerting people to the problem is not as simple as let them know they tires need air or there is a problem at work or school. We have to explain to people that their biggest problem is sin and self. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). We are all broken. We broke the world. That is the bad news. Do you want to hear the good news? We find it in the fourth principle evidenced in Esther 4.

God made you for such a time as this to 1) finish the job left undone, 2) to lament and fast, 3) to alert others to the problem and 4) to speak up for the oppressed (4:14-16). God made you for such a time as this to speak up for the oppressed. To see this, let’s zero in on the last phrase of verse 16 since we already read verses 14-15. Esther calls a fast and says, “Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.” (v. 16) About that law, Bible Scholar Karen Jobes explains, “There were 7 men in the court known as the ‘king’s friends’ who were permitted ‘to see the face of the king.’ The contemporary historian of that era Herodotus explains that only 7 friends could enter the king’s presence unannounced, except when he was sleeping with a woman.”^[8] But Esther wasn’t sleeping with her husband. She was neglected. She knew that to go to her husband king could mean something worse than her predecessor Queen Vashti’s banishment. It could have meant death for Esther. Some wives are in the same predicament today. What many wives could relate to is being second place. Joyce Baldwin puts it this way, “Other people often have easier access to her husband than a wife.”^[9] May this never be true of us!

 But for Esther, “by declaring, ‘If I perish, I perish,’ Esther realizes that God cannot be manipulated, even by fasting.”^[10] Is this not the same trusting attitude of following-God-come-what-may demonstrated by Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego when facing the fiery furnace? Those 3 friends of Daniel were examples to God’s people. Esther was advocating for God’s people. This is why Elyse Fitzpatrick believes, “‘If I perish, I perish’ are the words of Esther’s Gethsemane.”^[11] It is acceptance of God’s will. You see, God made you for such a time as this to speak up for the oppressed, which includes being willing to die for them. This isn’t license to march into the Prime Minister’s Office demoing audience with him. 

But it raises the question: why would you die for the oppressed? Because Jesus did when you were oppressed – oppressed by Satan, sin and self. Here is where the similarity between Esther volunteering to die for her people and Jesus volunteering to die for us differs. Jesus volunteered His death before it was threatened and He actually did die for us. For such a time as this. Recall Galatians 4:4-5, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” And recall Romans 5:6, “For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.” God made you for such a time as this to receive His Son and tell others about Him. Have you been looking for your purpose? You found it! For such a time as this!

^[1] Erwin W. Lutzer, The Church in Babylon (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2018), 47.

^[2] Lutzer, 42.

^[3] Mark Vroegop, Darks Clouds, Deep Mercy – Discovering the Grace of Lament (Wheaton: Crossway, 2019), 21.

^[4] Karen H. Jobes, The NIV Application Commentary on Esther (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999), 137.

^[5] Source: https://silverprice.org/silver-price-per-kilo.html. Accessed July 20, 2023.

^[6] Joyce Baldwin, Esther – An Introduction & Commentary (Tyndale OT Commentaries) (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1984), 78.

^[7] Barry J. Beitzel, The NLT Study Bible (Carol Stream: Tyndale House Publishers, 2017), 841.

^[8] Jobes, 132.

^[9] Baldwin, 79.

^[10] Barry G. Webb, The ESV Study Bible (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 858.

^[11] Elyse Fitzpatrick, The Gospel Transformation Bible (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), 605.