Esther: Daring Faith for Such a Time as This Exemplo

I have a dear friend in the Amazon who is teaching himself English and practices whenever he has the chance. He’s also fallen in love with American football. Naturally, I talked him into becoming a Tennessee Titans fan. During a recent game when the Titans were losing (this has been happening entirely too frequently as of late), he texted me, “Let’s reverse the score!” His phrasing made me ponder what exactly a reversal is. It is not a mere improvement of circumstances or even a change in score. Reversals are an about-face of direction, where the outcome turns out to be the mirror opposite of what was expected.

The literary term used to describe reversals is peripety, which refers “to a sudden turn of events that reverses the expected outcome of a story.”1 We see layers of peripety all throughout the book of Esther. We have addressed these reversals briefly along the way but haven’t focused on the theme as a whole. We will do that today. As we go, we must ask some questions. What is significant about reversals in Scripture? Why do they matter? And what is God telling us about Himself and His ultimate plan for the world in the telling of divine reversals?

Surrounding books of the Bible shed light on the events and themes of Esther, which help us faithfully interpret the book’s meaning. Much earlier in Israel’s history, right before the beginning of Israel’s monarchy and long before the exile, a woman named Hannah prayed a prayer of praise and thanksgiving after God opened her once barren womb and gave her a son she had longed and prayed for. Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2:8 highlights the motif of reversals perhaps more than any other in the Old Testament, revealing that God’s sovereignty is at the center of these kinds of reversals.2

When God works about-face wonders, whether in Hannah’s life, Esther’s, Mordecai’s, Haman’s, or our own, He shows His good justice over our lives and our world. The arrogant who exalt themselves and oppress the poor will be brought low (Haman), while the humble poor in the dust heap will be seated with nobles (Mordecai). The bows of the wicked are broken (Ahasuerus was eventually murdered by his vizier), while the feeble are clothed with strength (Esther). It is precisely God’s mighty hand of bringing down the proud and exalting the lowly—in all its many forms—that directly coincides with the just foundation upon which He has set our world.

Just this morning, I thanked God for a reversal He brought about in my life nearly twenty years ago. I was financially scraping by, I was barely making it as a singer/songwriter, and the friends I had surrounded myself with weren’t walking in God-honoring ways. I was lonely, anxious, and fighting depression. The rescue God brought about in my life isn’t a short story, but it can be summed up in Hannah’s song—He raised me from the trash heap (1 Sam. 2:8). It is true that these changes did not happen overnight. And it is also true that some of my longings have yet to be met. But I am often brought to tears over the ways God picked me up and brought about a series of tangible reversals that astound me even today.

The book of Esther leads up to this moment in many ways. It’s the grandest and most sweeping reversal of them all. As we consider God’s rescue of His people, we can see in hindsight that any physical and spiritual reversals at work in Esther are mere shadows of the ultimate reversal still to come in Christ. Jesus’s very ministry to you is a ministry of reversals—darkness to light, mourning to celebration, death to life.

Read Esther 8:15-17 and Esther 9:1, then take a moment to praise God for the gospel, which is the greatest reversal of all.

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1. Karen H. Jobes, Esther, The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999), 40-41.

2. Justin Jackson, “Raised up from the Dust: An Exploration of Hannah’s Reversal Motif in the Book of Esther as Evidence of Divine Sovereignty,” Themelios, Vol. 46 Issue 3, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/ article/raised-up-from-the-dust/.