REALITY REORDERED
Esther 9:20-22 (ESV) And Mordecai recorded these things and sent letters to all the Jews who were in all the provinces … obliging them to keep the fourteenth day of the month Adar and also the fifteenth day of the same, year by year, as the days on which the Jews got relief from their enemies, and as the month that had been turned for them from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday …
There is a place in the natural where our situation can seem bleak, where hope is illusive and our hearts are failing with dread and despair. Here worry reigns. Anxiety becomes a stubborn house guest, over-staying its welcome and not taking the hints being dropped. Every spiritual and religious thing we do doesn’t compensate, because staring us in the face is reality – that problem that is still there when we wake up, that impending sense that very bad things are to come, signs all point to its certainty. Our eyes don’t lie, because to our very core we are scientific and have learned that seeing is believing; after all, we can’t deny reality, else we end up living in a false reality. It is frustrating when conversing with someone who refuses to acknowledge reality. They are coughing, sneezing, watery-eyed sick, looking awful, but when asked how they feel, they will espouse a false reality, “I’m well” or “I’m healed!” Yet they aren’t, at least in the natural. It is not helpful to pretend something isn’t so when it is. Our reality in Christ does not rest in embracing a false reality and pretending it is real. That actually is counter-productive to our faith, and brings a sense of disillusionment on the observers of our lives. I read somewhere that one of the religious schools that teach this sort of thing had to remind their students when filling out official forms not to give “faith” answers. Evidently, some student were not answering the questions accurately, but with false answers, with the hope they would become true. When we are faced with the reality of a dire situation in our lives, the reality still smacks us in the face in spite of our mystical concepts of God, religious cliches, and memorized Bible verses. That is reality! But it is not the final reality!
In the story of Esther, the situation for the Jews was real, and no amount of prayer or “faith answers” was going to make it unreal. It required something else. It required God to break in and change the circumstances. Nothing short of this would suffice. The edict for the Jews’ utter eradication from the Persian empire had been set by the casting of lots under the direction of a wicked advisor to the king named Haman. The decree was irreversible, even by the king himself, for he had declared it in such a fashion that he could not even change his own order. This was reality for the Jews. They fasted. They prayed. But they knew that there would be no help for them if something didn’t transpire that was above their desperate religious activities. But something transpiring is exactly what happened. Queen Esther, the Jewish woman who replaced her predecessor at the king’s order, risked her life to go into the kings court and plead for her people. Her attitude? If I die, I die! There was no hiding under her position, and there was no pretending the peril didn’t exist. There was no disengaging the political reality that stared her in the face. She was no longer asleep to the facts, but awake, awake but not overcome with despair. The reality in front of her could not be changed except for a miracle. And a miracle is what happened. Unexpectedly, the king gave a counter order, not reversing his previous one, but allowing for the Jews to defend themselves, and then ordering that the wicked Haman be hanged on the very gallows he had built to hang his mortal Jewish enemy Mordecai (Esth 9:25). Haman’s death, along with the new decree, was all the Jews needed to arise, take up arms, and defend themselves with hope, purpose, and gladness. The reality of fear switched in a moment. That fear went from all the Jews to all of the Persians (Esth 9:2), and the impending doom was abated.
Whatever situation we are in, and however gloomy we may feel, denying reality is not the way forward. Believing something that isn’t so doesn’t change what is so. But we have God, who supersedes all reality. He takes our mourning and turns it into dancing (Ps 30:11). He takes the ashes of our lives and turns them into beauty (Isa 61:1-3), and regardless of our circumstance, even if it means our reality is that we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we can do so without fear and with ultimate comfort of His very real presence (Ps 23:4). We have a God who reorders reality, whether that reality is the natural order around us, or the natural order inside of us.
