“There are no guarantees of success when we stand up for God, if success means getting what we want.” – p.57

“…when we step out in faith, however weak and trembling…we cannot know ahead of time how God will choose to use us. He may heal our diseases, transform our breaking marriages, and plant thriving ministries through us. Or He may sustain us in obedient submission to Him as our earthly hopes are dashed and our lives poured out for apparently little purpose. Either way, though, we have the guarantee that He will use even our faint faith as the means of bringing glory to Himself.” p.57

“Esther’s actions raise serious questions for each of us to answer. Am I still blind to the true nature of the world and the plight of many of God’s people around me? Do I know enough about what is going on in the world to mourn and lament the situation of God’s persecuted people? Often we do not know the burdens of our brothers and sisters in the church well enough or care about them deeply enough to fast and pray. We do not even know enough about what is going on in our own hearts to mourn and lament our sin. We are so blinded by our own good lives that we neither hear nor heed the cries of God’s people…What do our speech and our silence say about who our people are?” p.56

“God’s sovereignty operates in such a way that our freedom and responsibility to act are not compromised, yet the result is still exactly what God has purposed from the beginning… What is more, God achieves His perfect goals not just through our best intentions and most self-sacrificing acts, but even through our greatest sins and compromises.” p. 69

“In the harsh light of hard problems, however, we need to choose whose we are and whom we serve—and the nature of those choices cannot but be public. In the midst of the storm, everyone will see where we are seeking refuge.” p.54

“When our eyes are set on our heavenly bridegroom, we will see through the empty charade of the empire. When our hearts are comforted by the knowledge of God’s love for us in the gospel, we will be insulated from the temptation to despair.” – Esther, p. 30

Rejoice, then, ye sad-hearted,

Who sit in deepest gloom,

Who mourn o'er joys departed

And tremble at your doom.

Despair not, He is near you,

Yea, standing at the door,

Who best can help and cheer you

And bids you weep no more.

"His pain was the prerequisite for our beauty."

I never thought about this before. We so often talk about beauty because we live in a world where human beings are consumed with self-image. Women go to crazy lengths to look beautiful. We have ingrained in us this "fairy-tale" idea that Prince Charming will only fall in love with us if we are beautiful. And yet our Heavenly Bridegroom loved us by suffering for us so that we would be made beautiful. We did not capture His eye because we were something special! I'll let the commentary continue...

“As we suffer loss, and as 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… What a husband we are being prepared for! Christ is no despot in the mold of Ahasuerus, eager to use us and dispose of us, like so many discarded toys… 

But our husband is Jesus Christ, who has loved His bride, the church, with an everlasting love. For our sake, He took on a form utterly without beauty, was despised and rejected by those He came to save, was cut off from the land of the living. In contrast to Esther’s twelve-month-long course of beauty treatments, our divine husband undertook a thirty-three-year pilgrimage, stripped of His eternal radiance. No comfortable beds and fattening food for Him, nowhere to lay His head and nothing to call His own. His pain was the prerequisite for our beauty…. 

What motivated Jesus in His pursuit of us? Certainly not our radiant beauty and sweet spirit! … 

Yet we are all too reluctant to give ourselves to Him and to submit to whatever beautifying sufferings and disciplines He would have us undergo. Our hearts are quick to grumble about the course His providence has charted for us. We are so slow to prepare to meet with Him day by day and spend time in His presence along the way. We are so reluctant to fix our eyes on the heavenly banquet He has prepared. Yet what on earth could be sweeter than that heavenly meal?”

Oh to love Christ more!

“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 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.” Esther, p.30

How would I have responded if I had lived in Tacloban? How would you have responded? Food for serious thought and reflection.

Esther

“So also in our own lives, we may well have no idea what God is doing. He may seem hidden and remote, refusing to answer our prayers and to give us what we so earnestly ask of Him. Wait! The end of our story has not yet been told, and who knows how the pieces of the jigsaw that at present seem to have no logical connection with one another will ultimately come together? Even though we cannot see God acting, it does not follow that He is not doing anything. God’s work is not all slam-bang action; sometimes it is a quiet faithfulness to His promises in the seemingly ordinary providences of life, bringing about in the hearts of His people what He has purposed.” Esther, p.14-15

These words jumped out at me as I was reading. I am a person of action. I want to see everything laid out so I can reason through it all. I get frustrated when I can't make sense of my present or even my future. And yet, He is there. He is acting. He is quietly orchestrating all the little details in my life, the little details I bypass because I am restlessly looking for big, immediate, and obvious answers. I have often tried to piece my own life's jigsaw puzzle together and I can't make sense of it and it frustrates me. What a good reminder that God is on His throne and He sees the whole picture!

Esther & Ruth by Iain M. Duguid

My friend recently gave me a commentary book on Esther and Ruth from the Reformed Expository Commentary Series. I've always loved the books of Esther and Ruth, but the commentator has a way of really bringing the books to life and his closing applications in each chapter are so thought-provoking and applicable to our times and needs. The following book quotes will probably be mostly from the book as I read through it. :)

“…we too struggle with the invisibility of God. The God who can part the Red Sea and raise Jesus from the dead does not choose to exercise that same power very often in our experience. We struggle when the goals and dreams we had for our lives are trampled underfoot by circumstances, even though they were good and godly dreams that God could have easily brought to fruition…We cried out to God, asking what cosmic scheme would be disrupted by answering our prayers, but there was no response. God remained hidden, His will inscrutable. Like the Jews of Esther’s time and the Russian diaspora, we too may find ourselves ‘fiddlers on the roof,’ struggling desperately to keep our balance in a confusing world…Remember that this world is not our home: one day, when Jesus returns, our balancing act on the roof will be over and the true banquet will begin.” Esther, Chapter 1

I never really thought too much about God not being extremely visible in the book of Esther. In the face of the recent tragedy down in the Visayas due to Typhoon Yolanda, this is a very timely reminder. I often expect God to exercise that kind of "Red Sea" power or wonder why the "good and godly" dreams I've had are not brought to fruition. And yet there is a God in Heaven who sees, who hears, and who knows what He is doing and that is a great comfort indeed.