We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Esther

What is the significance of Esther 4:14?

The wise Mordecai encourages Esther to bravely risk her life by pleading the case of the Jews before King Xerxes, saying, “…if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?”

Mordecai is certain that relief will come to the Jews, sooner or later. But the fate of Esther and her family depends on the free decision she has to make. And it may be, he says, that God has raised Esther up in these circumstance to be the means by which he brings relief to the Jewish people. Yet, even God’s plans, to some degree, hang upon the “if” of personal decisions.

Category:
Tags: ,
Topics:
Verse:

Related Reading

What Would You Do If Someone Attacked Your Family?

The New Testament commands us never to “repay evil with evil” but instead to “overcome evil with good” (Rom.12:17; cf. I Thess 5:15; I Pet 3:9). Jesus said, “Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also”(Mt 5:39). He also said, “Love your enemies, do good…

A Very Brief History of Open Theism

While the open view of the future has always been a very minor perspective, it has had its defenders throughout Church history and it has never been called “heresy” (until in mid 1990s when some started using this label). According to some African American church leaders, it has been the predominant view in the African…

What is the significance of Jeremiah 3:6–7?

Regarding Israel, the Lord says “I thought, ‘After she has done all this she will return to me’; but she did not return.” If the future is exhaustively settled in God’s mind, the meaning of this verse is unclear. How could God really think that something was going to happen if he foreknew with absolute…

Topics:

Love and Free Will

God could have easily created a world in which nothing evil could ever happen. But this world would not have been capable of love. God could have preprogrammed agents to say loving things and to act in loving ways. He could even have preprogrammed these automatons to believe they were choosing to love. But these…

What is the significance of Genesis 2:19 ?

“So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was the name.” God wanted Adam to have authority over the animal kingdom…

Topics:

How do you respond to Isaiah 48:3–5?

The Lord proclaims to his idolatrous people, “The former things I declared long ago, they went out from my mouth and I made them known; then suddenly I did them and they came to pass. Because I know that you are obstinate, and your neck is an iron sinew and your forehead brass, I declared…