Wednesday, 23 September 2020

The king’s edict granted the Jews in every city the right to assemble and protect themselves; to destroy, kill and annihilate the armed men of any nationality or province who might attack them and their women and children, and to plunder the property of their enemies. – Esther 8:11

 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It is a decree that God has never rescinded.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 To make that situation clear, once a proclamation was issued, it could not be rescinded.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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