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!!! GOOD GRIEF
*by Ray C. Stedman*
----
The story of Esther thus far concerns a king who is called here Ahasuerus, known also in history as Astyages, the grandfather of Cyrus the Great.
He has married a young Jewish girl named Esther, a captive taken from the city of Jerusalem.
Her cousin, Mordecai, became a judge in the city gates in Susa, the capital of Media-Persia.
In the court of the king is an oily character whose name is Haman, who manages to pull the wool over the king's eyes and deceive him into signing a decree to destroy all the Jews in his kingdom.
These people are called in this book, "the people of Mordecai."
Now this is authentic history as confirmed by the celebration called "The Feast of Purim," named for the casting of Pur, recorded in the third chapter of Esther, when the lot (or Pur) was cast before Haman to fix the day upon which his planned destruction of the Jews was to take place.
This feast is still celebrated today some 2,500 years after these events.
But the startling thing we learn is that this is also a glimpse into our own hearts.
Each of us is a king dwelling in a capital city (the body), and reigning over an empire which touches everyone we know.
At the moment of your conversion, if you are a Christian, you gained a queen -- a spirit made alive in Jesus Christ to serve as a place of communion between you and the Holy Spirit of the living God who dwells in your heart, symbolized in this story in the person of Mordecai.
In Chapter 3 we watch the consummate ease with which the flesh, that is, this Haman within each of us, deceives the human will into making a decision that threatens to destroy the entire kingdom.
This whole story is a picture of a Christian who sincerely sins.
This is not the picture of those stubborn, deliberate oppositions that we sometimes make to God's will when we know we are wrong.
At such times God frequently lets us go ahead and live out our folly because we know to start with that we are wrong.
We can only learn to overcome our stubborn pride by experiencing something of the sad results that follow.
But Esther is not that kind of a problem.
The problem we face here in this book is a picture of those spur-of-the-moment decisions when we react out of our "human nature" and do the usual, commonly accepted thing -- a thing which all our worldly friends would say we were perfectly right and justified in doing, and most of our Christian friends would agree.
And thus, sincerely, with the best of intentions, openly and honestly, we launch upon a course which threatens ultimately to destroy our peace, our joy, our patience, our kindness, and our self-control.
When these results occur we don't know what is wrong; we are confused and baffled.
I would like to suggest that right here is the major cause of weakness in the Christian life.
There are times when each of us deliberately disobeys God and we know we are wrong.
But these are not nearly as frequent as the times when, wanting to do right, and thinking we are doing right, we stumble into a circumstance, or a situation, or a reaction which ultimately proves very wrong and destroys the fruit of the Spirit in our lives.
This is the picture we have here.
It is not our deliberate disobedience that causes most of our problems, it's our ignorant folly.
It's not our love of evil that defeats us, it's our /ignorance/ of it.
So frequently we are victims of spiritual naivety.
We are tricked by our own sense of dedication and become pushovers for the flesh within us (Haman) to do what it desires.
Chapter 4 begins to unfold God's reaction to such folly and how God sets about to save us from our own mad choices.
What a wonderful unveiling this is of the ground of God's deliverance for the believer.
As we read this, can we really doubt what Paul says, that all these things happened as types and examples for us {cf, 1 Cor 10:6}, that we might know the mind and purpose of God in our own lives.
\\ We will pick up the story in Chapter 4.
The first reaction of Mordecai to Haman's plot is a manifestation of what we may call here, divine grief:
*When Mordecai learned all that had been done, Mordecai rent his clothes and put on sackcloth and ashes, and went out into the midst of the city, wailing with a loud and bitter cry; he went up to the entrance of the king's gate, for no one might enter the king's gate clothed with sackcloth.
And in every province, wherever the king's command and his decree came, there was great mourning among the Jews, with fasting and weeping and lamenting, and most of them lay in sackcloth and ashes.
{Est 4:1-3 RSV} *
What a picture of painful grief!
Lay this passage, this parable, alongside a passage from the New Testament:
*And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God in whom you were sealed till the day of redemption.
(Eph 4:30 {RSV}) *
This is the reaction of God to the folly of human choice, following the flesh.
Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God.
And what is it that grieves him?
The next verse says,
*Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, with all malice, {Eph 4:31 RSV}*
These are the things that grieve the Spirit -- these opposite attitudes to the fruit of the Spirit.
What are the opposites of love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control?
They are malice, bitterness, envy, jealousy, anger, clamor, and strife.
So the apostle says,
*and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
{Eph 4:32 RSV} *
When Mordecai learned the choice the king had made (which, though the king did not realize all that was involved, Mordecai knew would destroy, throughout the kingdom, the people of God), he was moved with deep sorrow, and he cried out in heaviness of heart -- a beautiful picture to us of the grief of the Holy Spirit.
It is most remarkable to see that what grieves the heart of God is not the enmity of the sinner so much as the unthinking foolishness of the saint!
Let's take a closer look at the cause of this grief.
Mordecai knew that the matter involved the unchangeable law of the Medes and the Persians and that the consequences of the king's decision were inevitable.
Even the king could not change it now that it had been uttered, and though the ultimate salvation of the people of Mordecai might be worked out by other means, still there would be some suffering they would be unable to avoid.
This is what caused him grief; for later on in this very chapter we hear this man declare that God would somehow work out a deliverance.
He had no doubt that God would deliver his people, but he knew also that suffering would be involved due to the decision that had been made.
Thus, though the Holy Spirit will work out a way to bring us to an ultimate display of the fruit of the Spirit in our lives, nevertheless, he knows that the process, because of the decisions that we make in our consummate folly, will be a painful one and certain consequences simply cannot be avoided.
Some time ago as I was talking with a young man about thirty years old, I remarked about all the white hair he had.
He looked at me with a rather rueful smile and said, "Yes, the Lord saved me from my sin, but the marks of sin are still there."
I thought immediately of that story of a father whose son had gotten into trouble and had come and asked forgiveness.
His father had forgiven him, but the boy seemed to act as though all he needed to do was ask forgiveness and he could forget the whole matter.
He didn't seem to realize that there was a great deal of suffering caused by his foolishness.
So his father took him into the garage where he drove a nail into the wall.
He handed his son a hammer and said, "Now, son, pull out the nail."
The boy took the hammer and pulled the nail out and his father said, "That's like forgiveness, isn't it?
When you do something wrong it's possible to pull out the nail by asking forgiveness."
Then, handing the hammer back to his son he said, "Now, son, pull out the nail hole!"
There are decisions which we make, the full consequences of which can never be avoided, because we are dealing with the law of inevitable consequence; the law of the Medes and Persians which can never be changed.
Mordecai wept because of this.
Also, he wept out of sympathy for the king and the kingdom because of the sorrow they unwittingly brought upon themselves.
Mordecai knew that the Jews were under special protection from God wherever they were.
As a Jew he knew the history of his race.
He knew that no nation laid its hand upon the Jew in anger or in punishment with impunity.
This is the thing that Hitler forgot.
Mordecai knew that if these people were destroyed, as the king in his innocent folly intended to do, it would react upon the kingdom to destroy instead, as every nation has been destroyed that has ever touched the Jew in anger.
So it is in the parable of our own lives -- the Spirit knows that when we unthinkingly permit our natural, human reaction to control us, we ultimately destroy ourselves in the process.
This natural reaction creates in us tensions and pressures, neuroses and compulsions which tear us apart, causing us to come unglued in moments of pressure and creating depression of mind and spirit, so the Spirit weeps out of sympathy.
"The wages of sin is death" {Rom 6:23a}, and so the Spirit grieves.
You see this spirit of grief in our Lord Jesus on the way to the tomb of Lazarus, as he leads that sorrowing, wailing company along the way.
He knew that in a few moments he would speak the words that would bring that man, dead four days, back to life.
All the grief and sorrow would be turned into joy; and yet we read that as he went to the tomb his spirit was moved deeply within him.
The Greek is much stronger than the English.
It says that he was torn inside and being torn, he wept.
Thus we have that shortest verse in our English Bibles, "Jesus wept" {John 11:35}.
The tears rolled down his face even in the expectation of that moment of triumph and deliverance because he knew the sorrow, heartache, and pain that inevitably results from human sin no matter what the ultimate outcome might be.
Thank God for the grieving of the Spirit.
It is this grieving Spirit within us that is the guarantee that God will never leave us in that condition.
It marks the unwillingness of God to let us go on stumbling into the full results of our own folly.
As we read this account, we realize that as yet neither the king nor the queen is aware of this grief.
The next section reveals the results in the human spirit when the grieving of the Holy Spirit is made known.
It's a picture for us of spiritual distress.
The first step is an uneasy realization that something is wrong:
*When Esther's maids and her eunuchs came and told her, the queen was deeply distressed; she sent garments to clothe Mordecai, so that he might take off his sackcloth, but he would not accept them.
{Est 4:4 RSV} *
Have you ever sensed this?
Not in your soul, not at the level of your conscious life, but deep in your subconscious, in the depths of your spirit, have you sensed that you are living with a grieved Spirit?
You don't know specifically yet what it is, but deep in your heart you feel there's something wrong.
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