“Haman sought to destroy all the Jews!”

“And when Haman saw that Mordecai did not bow down or pay homage to him, Haman was filled with fury. But he disdained to lay hands on Mordecai alone. So, as they had made known to him the people of Mordecai, Haman sought to destroy all the Jews, the people of Mordecai, throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus.” (Esther 3:5-6 ESV)

Most of us are familiar with the story of Queen Esther in the Old Testament; some of you may even be able to locate The Book of Esther in your Bibles without consulting the index. (By the way, it’s right before Job). Most of us are very familiar with the famous line from her uncle Mordecai in 4:14, “And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” But some of us don’t know the background of why Hamman wanted to destroy “all the Jews” throughout the entire Persian empire. This story was about the Jews living under the Persian empire around 483-473 B.C.

This story really began around 1445 BC, when God freed the Israelites from 400 years of captivity in Egypt. On their way to the promised land, descendants of Esau, the Amalekites, attacked the descendants of Jacob, the Israelites, while they were at Rephidim. This was the battle in which Moses went up a hill to observe the conflict between Israel, led by Joshua, and the Amalekites, led by King Amalek. You will remember that when Moses held up his hands, Israel would prevail, and when he lowered his hands, the Amalekites would prevail. We read in Exodus 17:12, “But Moses’ hands grew weary, so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side. So, his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.”  Joshua and his army were successful, and Moses built an altar to the Lord out of thanksgiving and stated, “…the Lord will have war against Amalek from generation to generation.”

 Now we find ourselves about a thousand years later, and the hatred between these two nations is still raging. You see, Mordecai, a descendant of the tribe of Benjamin and of King Saul, continued to harbor hatred for Haman, a descendant of King Amalek, who had risen to second in command to the King of Persia. 

Now, 70 years after the Jews had been deported from their homeland of Israel the first wave of Jews returned to the promised land under the leadership of Zerubbabel in 538 B.C.;  then some 50 years later we find the story of Queen Ester with her uncle Mordecai, who had remained in Persia and did not returned with Zerubbabel as many of the Jews in diaspora had chosen to do.  

We read that Haman, the 2^nd in command to the King of Persia, was “filled with wrath” when he found out that Mordecai was a Jew and refused to bow down to him, and Haman planned to kill every Jew in the Persian Empire to settle a thousand-year-old vengeance debt to his people.

Even if it takes a thousand years, Satan uses sin to try to separate God’s people from God Himself. Satan planned to use the hatred between the Jews and the Amalekites to destroy the Jews and, of course, the promised Messiah. You see, hatred that grows over the years destroys people. Satan has tried to use every opportunity to kill Abraham’s descendants and to nullify God’s word given to Abram in the Abrahamic Covenant in Genesis 12, where God’s promise to “bless the world” through Abraham’s descendants, which, of course, we now know was the promised Messiah, our Lord Jesus. Hatred is a sin that can completely obscure our judgment and cause us to focus on someone or something, leading us to lose sight of God. Instead of being thankful for all that God has given us, ‘hatred’ causes us to focus on the perceived or actual wrong that was done to us. 

Friends, here’s a truth that you can write down: “sin always has collateral damage”. We see it in this story of Haman trying to annihilate all the Jews, not because of anything they had done to the kingdom of Persia, but because of a long hatred that had been passed down from generation to generation by his people.

Sin is a serious matter, and sin left to grow can and will have devastating consequences on us and those around us.  This story of the hatred between Esther’s uncle Mordecai and the King’s counselor Haman is just one example of how sin can and is used by Satan to try to destroy God’s promises and to steal “the peace of God” from His people. The objective of Satan is to separate believers from God, if not for eternity, then from fellowship with Him.

As we continue to discover the many truths that we find in this Book of Esther, remember the part that the sin of hatred played, and how Satan will use every opportunity to separate God from His people.

"Living in Grace is not about what I can do, but about what Jesus has already done!"