Inconspicuous Providence

The Gospel According to Esther

Bryan R. Gregory

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781596387904
• eBook ISBN: 9781596387911
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Esther surprises us by never mentioning God or his intervention. Yet we ourselves are familiar with not experiencing divine intervention in our secular world. Where is God in it all?

chapter one

Reading Esther

Any religion which does not affirm that God is hidden is not true; and any religion which does not offer the reason of it is not instructive. (Blaise Pascal1)

Within the Bible, Esther is a story unlike any other, with a charm all its own. “In Esther, unsubtle villains meet with brutal fates; proud partisans are fully vindicated; lovely heroines retain the affection of all; and stolid, dim-witted monarchs are there to be used by all.”2 But Esther is more than just a good story with literary panache; it is also a distinctively theological work, albeit in the subtlest of ways, with an often underappreciated contribution to make to the whole witness of Scripture as a testimony about Christ. Therefore, a consideration of the theological truths the book addresses and of how the book fits into the redemptive story line that culminates in the person and work of Christ provides the proper framework for reading the book profitably.

Reading Esther Theologically

Through the centuries, Esther has sometimes been judged as theologically deficient, an opinion that was expressed in the mixed reception it found in the early church. This was not so much because of what it does contain, but more because of what it does not contain. Famously, God is nowhere mentioned in the book. Nor is there any instance of a conspicuous miracle or indisputable divine intervention. Neither is there any mention of prayer, which is especially strange because there is reference to fasting, or any of the other central features of Israelite worship, such as the temple, Jerusalem, or the Torah. Furthermore, there is no mention of the essential marks of faithful living in the postexilic period, such as the observance of dietary laws and injunctions against intermarriage with non-Jews. Thus, the book of Esther appears to be merely a “secular” story of court intrigue in the Persian Empire, without any real involvement of God in the events.

Yet, ironically, it is just this aspect that provides the Christian with the perfect entry point into understanding Esther’s distinctive theological contribution. The vast majority of people today will see their own experience in Esther, much more than in many other books of the Bible. Most people today have never experienced a conspicuous miracle or an indisputable divine intervention. Most people today live in a world that looks a lot like Esther’s, where events and situations show no obvious or blatant action of God in the midst of them. They show nothing out of the ordinary, nothing miraculous, and nothing overtly supernatural. On the surface, it often appears as if God is absent or hidden from view. Many people look for clues and traces, but find mostly that God is very hard, if not impossible, to find.

As a result, many people, Christians included, simply default into thinking of the world in reductionist, “secular” ways and then go about their lives as if God were not really involved, even if they would never say so out loud. After all, the world really does seem to operate merely according to natural, scientific laws. Events do seem to be driven by historically explainable forces of politics, economics, psychology, and sociology. Life does seem to be governed by human choices and natural processes. By most people’s accounting, that is simply how the world works, and because it is, it is also easy to understand how many Christians end up being more or less functional deists, believing that God exists and is “up there,” but going about the normal matters of daily life as if he were not really involved much at all.

Nevertheless, we sense that something is wrong with this picture. When the world is viewed mechanistically and we live like functional deists, we inevitably discover that there is a hole in the center, where meaning and life and essence are supposed to be. As Gordon McConville puts it, we live in “a modern world which has become accustomed to explaining things apart from God. We . . . are good at tracing causes and effects, but poor at understanding the meaning of reality.”3 Consequently, most Christians are left with a difficult tension. On the one hand, their world seems to operate without the intervention of God, but on the other hand they do believe that God exists. In the middle of this tension are the same questions that the reader of Esther is forced to ask: Where is God in all of this? Why does it seem as if he is absent? If he is real and present, then why is he so inconspicuous? When life becomes unbearable, when evil is advancing, when suffering becomes intolerable, why doesn’t he intervene in noticeable and obvious ways?

For many, such questions have produced doubts, if not an all-out crisis of faith. A few years ago, the journal Biblical Archaeology Review held a roundtable discussion with four scholars about how scholarship affects faith. Of the four participants, two had kept their faith and two had lost their faith. In their discussion, one of the scholars who lost his faith put it rather bluntly: “I think that faith has to have substance. But once you start putting some substance onto that, you get into trouble. Faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition has a God who intervenes. That’s what the Exodus event is, that’s what the crucifixion is: it’s a God who intervenes, and when I look around this world, I don’t see a God who intervenes.”4 Certainly many others have lamented the same thing—if not out loud, then at least within the private aches of their own hearts.

Even those who have not given up their faith, as this scholar did, still wrestle with the question, why does God seem so hidden so much of the time? As the philosophers Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul K. Moser aptly put it,

Many people are perplexed, even troubled, by the fact that God (if such there be) has not made His existence sufficiently clear. This fact—the fact of divine hiddenness—is a source of existential concern for many people. . . . For many Christians, the difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that their Lord has promised, “Seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (Matt. 7:7). Having sought and knocked (and knocked again and again), they still fail to find, and no one answers the door for them. . . . Trust in God then crumbles, along with any hope anchored in God’s providence. Giving up the struggle to trust the hidden God often seems the only reasonable option as well as the only avenue to psychological well-being. Hence, even devout theists can face an existential crisis from divine hiddenness.5

However, it is precisely into this existential crisis provoked by the hiddenness of God and its related theological questions that the book of Esther can speak with a unique voice. Thankfully, God has seen fit to include within the canon of Scripture books that show a range of explicit divine involvement; Esther is on one end of this spectrum. Some parts of Scripture show that God at times works visibly and unmistakably, as in the accounts of Moses, Elijah, and Elisha. Other parts show that God sometimes works behind the scenes in ways that are subtle but perhaps still detectable, as in the narratives of Joseph and Ruth. In still other parts, most notably in Esther, God seems completely absent and inactive.6 All three are theologically necessary. In a book like Exodus, God assures us that he can and occasionally has intervened in dramatic and unmistakable ways. In a book like Ruth, God assures us that sometimes he works in ways that are only faintly noticeable. However, in a book like Esther, God has given us something that looks a lot like the kind of world most people inhabit: the book of Esther has nothing out of the ordinary, nothing miraculous, and nothing overtly supernatural, and the events unfold with the seeming absence of God and with no detectable trace of his intervention. He simply remains “offstage” and out of view, directing things and working in ways that we cannot see.

In that sense, the book of Esther is theological. It is just that the theology is not on the surface, but under the surface. On the surface, the story is one of conflict between Haman and the Jews. On a deeper level, however, it is a story that evaluates two competing theories of how the world works. On one side is the apparent callousness, injustice, and cruelty of fate, especially embodied in the casting of lots; on the other side is the wise but secret providence of God, embodied in the invisible divine hand (invisible in the events of the book and even in the narrator’s portrayal of those events), which is at work even when we cannot see it, do not understand it, and sometimes even doubt it is there. Thus, Esther, perhaps more than any other Old Testament book, shows us that God must be trusted even when he cannot be seen, and that we must learn to live by faith and not by sight. On the surface, the world may look like a senseless unfolding of injustice and fate, but below the surface is the invisible but providential hand of God, orchestrating all things to accomplish his purposes.

The narrator does this through artful literary techniques that subtly hint at God’s active presence, despite his apparent absence. The firs...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Reading Esther
• 2. Will the Real King Please Stand Up? (1:1–22)
• 3. A Cinderella Story (Only Seedier) (2:1–18)
• 4. Hell Hath No Fury like an Agagite Scorned (2:19–3:15)
• 5. The Moment of Truth (4:1–17)
• 6. Step of Faith (5:1–8)
• 7. The Pivot Point (5:9–6:14)
• 8. Poetic Justice (7:1–10)
• 9. The Tables Are Turned (8:1–9:19)
• 10. An Ongoing Celebration (9:20–10:3)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Scripture