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It Is Written

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2023: God's Mission My Mission

Eric Flickinger

Kleber Goncalves

01 God’s Mission Part 1

02 God’s Mission to Us Part 2

Greg Whitsett

03 God’s Call to Mission

Amy Whitsett

04 Sharing God’s Mission

05 Excuses to Avoid Mission

Doug Venn

07 Mission to My Neighbor

06 Motivation and Preparation for Mission

Clifmond Shameerudeen

08 Mission to the Needy

09 Mission to the Powerful

Jeff Scoggins

10 Mission to the Unreached Part 1

11 Mission to the Unreached Part 2

12 Esther and Mordecai

Welcome to Sabbath School brought to you by It Is Written.

Today we're going to be looking at Lesson 12.

We are very near the end of the quarter, but we are not there yet.

We're looking at a very significant story and some lessons that we can learn from it today.

Father, we ask that you will be with us and bless us today as we look at this incredible story, a story of how you are very much at work in the world.

And we ask that you will bless us with encouragement from it.

Well, we're grateful to have back with us again this week, Jeff Scoggins.

Jeff, thanks for coming back with us again.

So last time we came together, we were looking at reaching the unreached or mission to the unreached.

This week, we're looking at a little bit different story.

It's a story that I think most of us are somewhat familiar with and maybe even very familiar with, but perhaps we're going to learn a few new things about this story this week as we go through the lesson study and as we kind of look at this story in a whole.

So give us a little summary of what we're looking at here.

Where does this story take us and what do you think we could learn from it?

Maybe 1 of the first questions that we might ask in a study about mission is, how is this a mission story?

There's voluntary mission and there's involuntary mission, right?

And so Esther and Mordecai, they were missionaries, not by choice, but that's how they had ended up.

And so that's kind of where we're going, the perspective we're going to be taking a look at this here.

1 of the key things that probably most of your listeners have heard is that this is the 1 book in the Bible, Esther, that never mentions God's name at all.

The closest we get is to some prayer and that's it.

And God simply, in fact, this bothers people so much that there are sometimes that people suggest that Esther shouldn't even be in the Bible.

But it is, and I think it should be, and I think there's actually a very profound thing that's happening here in the story.

But let's just kind of quickly go through the story, kind of summarizing the story overall in this first part of it.

And what I would like us to do is to kind of pull out everything that is, that seems like a coincidence.

And at first, you know, something just happening seems normal because things do happen.

But when it starts building, you start to think, wait a minute, could this really just happen?

All right, so we start off, King Ahasuerus, King Xerxes, is the king of Persia.

They are the empire that reigns over the known world, really, and they're fabulously wealthy.

And the king is, how to say, he is all-powerful as far as a human being can be.

Okay, so the story starts off describing how this little girl is born named Hadassah and her parents die and she's an orphan and her uncle Mordecai comes and gets her.

Mordecai is in the service of the king, this king Ahasuerus, or Ahasuerus in what is it Greek?

And he comes and takes her, he raises her, and the king decides that he wants to attack Greece because he's never been able to subdue Greece.

But really what's happening is it's a council of war because the Persians had this weird idea that all councils of war had to take place in 2 phases.

You would make a decision when you were sober and then you had to get drunk and see if it was still a good decision.

And then, or you would make a decision while you were drunk and then you would get sober to make sure it was a good decision.

So they have 180 days of this partying and drinking is the big thing and so they're just getting smashed and not and they decide to go and attack Greece, which turns out to be a massive failure.

And this is really kind of the decline of the empire, the Persian empire.

But the king comes back and of course he's depressed.

And so his counselors suggest, hey, you had to get rid of your wife.

He calls his wife in during this banquet, the queen, to be gawked at by all the men and she refuses and so he kicks her out.

And his advisors then come after this disastrous campaign and say, why don't you just start testing young ladies from around the Empire and we'll bring them to you.

And when you find 1 you like, make a new queen.

You know, and this will make you feel better.

And it gives you a little bit of an insight into the shallow character of this king because he goes for it.

Okay, and so they go around kidnapping young ladies.

I mean the storybook sometimes make it sound like this is a beauty pageant and the ladies were just overwhelmed and happy to be chosen.

So they come in, They bring in these girls, they spend a night with the king, and they can never go back to life as normal.

They go into a harem, never to marry, very likely to never even see the king again.

It was almost worse than a death sentence, really, for a young lady to do this.

And so Esther is 1 of these that happens to be taken.

We won't get into the ethics, we won't get into any of that stuff, that's not the point.

She gains the king's favor, happens to gain the king's favor.

Then the story switches and there's this guy named Mordecai, Esther's uncle.

The king gives him his signet ring, signet, signature.

Anything that he wants to do he puts that signet ring on and the king's name is on it.

And he doesn't like Mordecai because Mordecai won't bow to him.

Now Haman, we sometimes miss this, Haman was an Agagite.

Most of us just read right over that and don't even think about it.

But it comes from Agag, the king of the Amalekites, back from Saul's time when God said, go and wipe out the Amalekites, their cup was full.

Remember that now, apparently some other people got away or whatever it was, because this is a descendant of that person, that king.

And the story also hints at the idea that Esther and Mordecai descend from Saul's line.

So anyway, so you've got all this history for anybody that recognizes what's happening here, they're like Agagite?

You know the verb that was the Saul's descendants?

There's something more going on underneath the story here.

So all of this background is alluded to and you can just, if you know the stories, you can just incorporate it into the story.

Series

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2023: God's Mission My Mission

12 Esther and Mordecai

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2023: God's Mission My Mission

11 Mission to the Unreached Part 2

28m

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2023: God's Mission My Mission

04 Sharing God’s Mission

28m

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2023: God's Mission My Mission

13 The End of God’s Mission

25m

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2023: God's Mission My Mission

06 Motivation and Preparation for Mission

28m

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2023: God's Mission My Mission

10 Mission to the Unreached Part 1

28m

Talking Points 4th Quarter 2023: God's Mission My Mission

02 God’s Mission to Us Part 2

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Sabbath School 1st Quarter 2025: God's Love and Justice

02 Covenantal Love

28m

ASI Spring Chapter Conference - Thursday Evening

1h 58m

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2023: God's Mission My Mission

01 God’s Mission Part 1

28m

Talking Points 4th Quarter 2023: God's Mission My Mission

12 Esther and Mordecai

29m

Recharged: Finding Your Safe Place

04 Longing for More

44m

InVerse, 2nd Quarter 2020: How to Know God’s Will for Your Life

04-What’s Your Mission?

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Sound Doctrine