<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Advent HOPE Sabbath School

The Revelation of Esther

Roger Seheult

The Revelation of Esther - Part 1

Dear Lord, please be with us as we open your word.

Please make sure that what I speak are not my words, they're your words.

And then also make sure that what we hear is not my voice, but your voice as we begin today.

Well, I have to be honest with you, I am very excited about speaking today.

I feel like, you know, in Samaria, when they sieged Israel and they couldn't find any food and the lepers went out and they found, the 4 lepers went out?

I've gone into the enemy's camp and I found gold and food And I can't just enjoy it by myself, right?

Some evil is going to happen if I just sit on this.

So I feel compelled to kind of show you what I found.

So About 2 or 3 weeks ago, my wife and I went on a cruise to Alaska.

Amazing thing if you ever get a chance to do it.

1 of the stops was this place called Skagway.

It really went into a boomtown in 1898 when they discovered gold up in Canada.

And what happened, as you can see on the map, is just about 100, 000 people rushed up from the United States and Canada to go for this gold.

And for those that didn't have a lot of means, they went the Skagway, because that was kind of the way that they got up to where they needed to go.

They got the Skagway and you know that little panhandle there in Alaska, well the Canadians were just off maybe about 50 or 60 miles and they would not allow anybody into Canada unless they had provisions for 1 year.

They had to carry, every person to get in there for the gold rush had to carry 2, 000 pounds of supplies to get where they wanted to go.

So that meant they had to carry 50 pounds back and forth, back and forth, until they moved it a certain distance and then have to move again.

And you can kind of see here on the map that they had to get to a place called Dawson, which is where there was a big lake.

And in the wintertime, it froze, of course, but in the spring, it thawed out.

After going hundreds of miles, they have to actually build a boat on Dawson's Lake and then travel an additional 500 miles down the river to get to where the gold was.

So here's a picture up in Skagway of these people carrying this stuff up these huge Alaskan mountains and into Canada.

Here they are up in Dawson's Lake building these boats.

You know when the lake thawed, I'm sort of cutting out a little bit, but when the lake thawed, 8, 000 boats were put on that river to go down.

Within the first mile, 2, 000 of those boats had already sunk.

They were completely ill-prepared, completely ill-prepared for it.

As it turns out, I found out doing some research that my great-great-grandfather was actually 1 of those people.

And fortunately, he was a ship captain, so he was a little bit more experienced, and He made it down to Fairbanks, where he did some mining at the turn of the century.

People were willing to sacrifice anything they could for gold.

The study of the Bible demands our most diligent effort and the persevering thought.

As the miner digs for the golden treasure in the earth, So earnestly, persistently must we seek for the treasure of God's word.

By many, man's wisdom, I'm gonna talk, try to set the tone here for the talk.

By many, man's wisdom is thought to be higher than the wisdom of the divine teacher, and God's lesson book is looked upon as old-fashioned, stale, and uninteresting.

But by those who have been vivified by the Holy Spirit, it is not so regarded.

They see the priceless treasure and would sell all to buy the field that contains it.

Instead of books containing the suppositions of repeatedly great authors, they choose the Word of Him who is the greatest author and the greatest teacher the Word has ever known, who gave His life for us, that through Him we might have everlasting life.

Christ is the truth, His words are truth, and keep this in your mind, they have a deeper significance than appears on the surface.

All the sayings of Christ have a value beyond their unpretending appearance.

Minds that are quickened by the Holy Spirit will discern the value of these sayings.

They will discern the precious gems of truth, though they may be buried treasure.

The Bible contains all the principles that men need to understand in order to be fitted either for this life or for the life to come, and these principles may be understood by all.

No 1 with a spirit to appreciate its teaching can read a single passage from the Bible without gaining from it some helpful thought.

But the most valuable teaching of the Bible is not to be gained by occasional or disconnected study.

Its great System of truth is not so presented as to be discerned by the hasty or careless reader many of its treasures lie far beneath the surface and can only be obtained by diligent research and Continuous effort The truths that go to make up the great whole must be searched out and gathered up, here a little, there a little, Isaiah 28 10.

When thus searched out and brought together, they will be found to be perfectly fitted 1 to another.

Each gospel is a supplement to the others, every prophecy and explanation of another, every development of some other truth.

The types of the Jewish economy are made plain by the gospel.

Every principle in the Word of God has its place, Every fact it's bearing, the complete structure in design and execution bears testimony to the author.

Such a structure, no mind but that of the infinite could conceive her fashion." Education 123, God made the human body, God made the Bible.

I have spent most of my academic career and medical career studying the human body, and I'm telling you, we haven't even scratched the surface.

Is it possible that that may be the same with the Bible as well.

Aren't we going to study it for eternity?

We must think not well, we have all the truth.

We understand the main pillars of our faith and we may rest on this knowledge.

The truth is an ever advancing truth, and we must walk in the increasing light.

This is counsels to writers and editors, page 33 and 34.

New light will ever be revealed on the divine word to him who is in living connection with the son of righteousness.

Let No 1 come to the conclusion that there is no more truth to be revealed.

The diligent, prayerful seeker of truth will find precious rays of light yet to shine forth from the sacred word.

Many gems are yet scattered that are to be gathered together to become the property of the remnant people.

You know, when my great-great-grandfather went up to Fairbanks, I'm sure by the time he got there, most of the good places were already staked out.

And in fact, the sad part is the majority of the hundred thousand people that went up to Fairbanks, they didn't get gold.

They were working for other people getting the gold.

Let none think that there is no more knowledge for them to gain.

The depth of human intellect may be measured, the works of human authors may be mastered, but the highest, deepest, broadest flight of the imagination cannot find out God.

There is an infinity beyond all that we can comprehend.

We have seen only the glimmering of divine glory and of the infinitude of knowledge and wisdom.

We have, as it were, been working on the surface of the mind.

When rich gold ore is beneath the surface, to reward the 1 who will dig for it.

The shaft must be sunk deeper and yet deeper in the mind and the result will be glorious treasure.

Through a correct faith, divine knowledge will become human knowledge.

That's Christ's Object Lessons, page 113.

Let all see, I want to make sure that you guys know where I'm going with this.

Let all seek to comprehend to the full extent of their powers the meaning of the Word of God.

The Revelation of Esther - Part 2

Okay, well, thank you all for coming back.

We're going to start in right where we kind of left off.

So we showed how the Book of Esther is a typological scenario chronology of the great controversy.

And now what we've done is we've ended up at the very end of the book of Esther where the saints are finally saved.

Now, you would expect that the saints would be saved on a specific day, just like we all think Christ is coming back, it's very simple.

But in fact, that's actually not the case.

Before we get to that though, let's review quickly.

We have the second in command, if you will, Vashti, who is deposed because she is insubordinate to the king.

Then we have the plan of salvation that is enacted.

Then we have Big Thon and Toresh going against the king.

That is Haman talking to the king, King Xerxes, who then initiates a death decree at the cost of about 10, 000 talents of silver.

And that is associated with the death decree of Adam and Eve from God.

Then we have the execution of the plan of salvation.

Then we have the execution of the plan of salvation, which is Esther going before the king, okay, and she's going into the inner court, and then she goes into the most holy place to plead on behalf of her people against the law that cannot be changed, which is exactly what Jesus Christ did for us in AD 34 and then again in 1844 when he went from the holy into the most holy place.

Following that, just have we have 2 different phases of the investigative judgment.

There are 2, I can feel it getting cooler now, there are 2, there are 2 nights of the banquet.

The first half of the investigative judgment, nothing outwardly occurs.

The first night of the banquet, nothing outwardly occurs.

However, after that, we have the opening of the books.

We have the reviewing of the specific thing that happened with Bigham and Toresh, by the way, who represent Adam and Eve, by the way, who will be the first ones that will be, were the first ones in 1844 when the books were opened.

And we have the rewarding of Mordecai with the robe of righteousness, which is exactly what's going to happen to the righteous dead in the investigative judgment.

Then we move on to the investigative judgment of the living, okay, and that's going to happen at some point after the Sunday law passes, we know, because people who are alive are gonna have to make a decision about which way they're going to go.

Just like Elijah on top of Mount Carmel saying, if Baal be God, worship him, if Christ be God, worship him, right?

And then as you recall, after they made a choice, after 3 and a half years of no rain, the latter rain fell, correct?

Because Elijah prayed 7 times for the rain, remember that?

Okay, So you have the Sunday Law, then you have the falling of the latter rain.

The things that happened at the second night of the banquet which was that it was a wine banquet, that the king was wrath, that Haman fell, and the king thought that he was trying to fornicate with Esther are the 4 words that we see in the second angel's message, which is fulfilled at the Sunday law.

Preferably, specifically, fallen, fallen is Babylon, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.

We see this in the book of Esther, because right after this, Mordecai is elevated to the prime minister of Persia.

He is given power, he is given the signet ring, he makes laws, a law that allows the Jews to stand on that day of judgment against the law that cannot be changed.

And that's exactly what the Holy Spirit does for us.

The Holy Spirit puts the law inside of us, in our hearts, that allows us to stand with the robe of righteousness in the day of judgment against a law that cannot be changed.

It was because Esther and Mordecai worked together to make that happen, just like Jesus and the Holy Spirit makes to work that together for that to happen.

Did the Jews in Persia have anything to do with it?

All they had to do was pray for those 3 days.

They had no part of it, they had no merit, nothing that they did caused them to be saved on the 13th of Adar, and we're gonna talk about that.

We're gonna talk about justification, sanctification, glorification.

Okay, so here we are to the time where the Jews are saved.

Just a few empty seats down here if people want to come on down.

It's all about the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th.

This is gonna be, I could have titled today's talk the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th.

Because what we're going to do is we're gonna show, how many of you have seen 3D printing?

It's kind of a new thing, but not so new.

What happens is the printer prints something, and then it prints on top of that until it actually starts to grow.

What I'm going to show, and I'm sort of setting you up for this, is I'm going to take every single Passover, or I could take every single Passover that was ever mentioned in the Bible, and I could take it and put it in a two-dimensional plane and put another 1 on top of that and put another 1 on top of that, and what you would see eventually is a three-dimensional object of the plan of salvation.

Okay, and that's gonna explain what's happening here in Esther.

So, in Esther chapter 9, let's just read Esther chapter 9, I'll break it down for you.

There are people in the provinces, and there are people in Shushan.

On the 13th day, which is the day of execution, the people in Shushan gather themselves together and defend themselves against 500 attackers.

Okay, 500 attackers come to take their life, come to take their property, but they are successfully defended, and those 500 people are killed.

In addition to those 500, the 10 sons of Haman, who are instigators of this rebellion, are also killed.

In the provinces, 75, 000 go up against the Jews.

This is the largest empire the world has seen up to this point.

75, 000 attackers attack the Jews, but they successfully defend themselves, and those attackers die.

Esther is not the sheepish, innocent girl from the block, okay?

She is now a well-seasoned political operative who understands the workings of Shushan, Washington.

The king says to her, Esther, your people have survived.

These 2 requests are gonna be amazing when we break them down.

The first request, King, give us 1 more day to fight in Shushan.

The other thing is, please take the dead bodies of the sons of Haman and hang them on his own gallows, which is in Shushan.

That's gonna be the piece de la resistance of today's talk when we come back around to Haman's 10 Sons.

This time 300 attackers go against the Jews in Shushan and they are successfully defended and Haman's 10 sons' bodies are hung on the 14th.

While that is happening in Shushan, the provinces are resting.

So while they are celebrating in the provinces, their brothers in Shushan are still working and attacking.

Finally, on the 15th, those in Shushan are able to rest.

And this is exactly, I'm just basically breaking down all of chapter 9.

I told you I studied for Esther for about 3 years now.

Back to Menu

Series

The Revelation of Esther

The Revelation of Esther - Part 1

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Parts

The Revelation of Esther - Part 1

1h 6m

The Revelation of Esther - Part 2

1h 58m

Sound Doctrine