Connecting The Dots | Seeing The Invisible Hand | Mark Earey

Sun 30 Jul | 18:00

Esther 1:1-22

Except for Song of Songs, the book of Esther is the only book in the Bible that never explicitly mentions God which might make it an odd choice of book to study. However despite no actual mention of God, His unseen hand is evident throughout this story and the book can be approached as a long meditation on the sovereignty and providence of God.

The role of God in this book could be easily missed as He fails to act dramatically as He does through other Old Testament characters such as Abraham and Moses. Instead we witness a God who works providentially through the lives of ordinary humans. There are no apparent miracles, merely a series of ‘happenings’ and ‘circumstances’ at the just right time.

The great paradox of Esther is that God is omnipotently present even when God is most conspicuously absent. Jesus’ last words in Matthew 28 were, ‘Go make disciples of all nations…..And surely I am with you to the end of the age.’ And then ironically he left! The significance for us today is that God can be omnipotently present in our lives even when he seems conspicuously absent. He still works, sometimes unseen, through our every day lives, working his purpose out for us and within us when life is good and when it is falling apart. We have a God who we can trust so we root our lives in Him not in the circumstances of our lives.