Today's Scripture Reading (September 23, 2020): Esther 8
God issued the decree to Adam in
the beginning. “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will
certainly die” (Genesis 2:16b-17). From the very beginning, the penalty for
wanting to go our way and against God’s way has been death. We can argue over
how that death might take its final form in our lives; is sin the reason for the
presence of physical death at the end of our lives or is God referring to the
spiritual death that we suffer while we are still alive because of our
decisions to sin. But the bottom line is that God decrees that the direct result
of our sin is death. The Apostle Paul agrees; “For the wages
of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).
It is a decree that God has never
rescinded. What was true in the Garden of the Eden was still true for Paul in
the first century C.E. and is still true for us. The result of
our sin is death. The difference, while admittedly something that we don’t
totally understand, is that Jesus, the perfect Son of God, has taken the
prescribed penalty on himself, dying in our place despite the fact that the sin
is ours and not his. He became death so that we might live. And so, our hope is
not in God changing his original decree issued in the Garden of Eden. Our hope
is and always will be placed solidly on the sacrifice of Jesus.
King Xerxes issued a decree. We can discuss the merits of the
King’s proclamation, but the reality is that the decree, once issued, could not
be taken back. And part of the reason for this likely has to do with ancient
communication. It was hard to get the message out in the first place, rescinding
an order once it had been given was almost impossible. And the resulting
situation was often muddy, with people unsure of what to do. To make that
situation clear, once a proclamation was issued, it could not be rescinded.
The only thing that Xerxes could do was issue a second
proclamation. The purpose of the second proclamation was to minimize the
effects of the first. In this case, the second proclamation gave the Jews the right
to defend themselves. They were allowed to kill any who attempted to kill them,
regardless of their nationality. They were also given the right plunder the
riches of any who tried to harm them. Originally, none of the Jews had
possessed these rights. But now they did.
The hope of the edict was that those who had thought to
follow the original command, would be given a reason to pause, considering the
cost that their action might visit on them. The edict to eliminate the Jews was
still present, but now the Jews could fight back, and the hope was that that
would present a significant deterrent to anyone who might want to follow the
demands of the first proclamation.
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Esther
9 & 10
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