Lessons in the Ladder Days

Candace Long: I’m Candace Long with Lessons in the Latter Days, offering biblical commentary to make sense of the times that we’re living in. Today’s episode is called TORAH 101: Purim, Lessons from Esther.

Even though Purim is not listed in the Torah as one of the appointed times all the Jews were to celebrate, some 1,200 years after the Torah was written, readers were instructed to celebrate Purim every year at this time because of what God did to save the Jews during their captivity in Persia.

Ironically, the Book of Esther almost didn't make it into the Bible because there is no mention of God in it. He is hidden, and yet his work is everywhere. My purpose today is not to tell you the story of Esther; I want you to read it for yourself. You'll find it right after the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. It took place during the time of the Persian Empire, which ruled 127 provinces all the way from India to Ethiopia.

The year was 586 BC when King Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple, but I want you to see how the nation of Judah got to this point because this was a devastating event. To briefly review some biblical history, Solomon was king of all of Israel when the nation was at its height of power and world influence. The leaders walked in the ways of the Lord, but after Solomon's death, the people began to fall away.

They quit studying the Torah as before, and their hearts grew cold. They refused to live by God's ways and were influenced by the gods of the worldly culture. They fell into idolatry, corruption, and sexual perversion. So God began to judge the nation and discipline them by allowing civil unrest, plagues, and wars. Prophets were raised up to preach repentance. They knew the Torah, which spelled out exactly what would happen to the nation when God was no longer regarded as the Lord.

The Hebrew nation became divided through two different ideologies. The northern part of the kingdom, referred to as Israel, was geographically and spiritually removed from Judaism. These ten tribes were the first to fall. The other two tribes down in Judah watched all of this happen. They witnessed the Assyrians invade the northern kingdom and take the people away. They watched the Assyrians bring in Gentiles from other provinces to take over the land. These were people who worshipped other gods, and they began to intermarry with the Jews who were left behind. Their capital was Samaria.

So God raised up the prophets—Elijah, Elisha, Amos, and Hosea—all warning that God was going to turn Israel over to Assyria. Now, about 130 years later, the Jews living down in Judah saw that the same corrupt behavior was happening in their own nation. So God raised up more prophets who foresaw the Babylonian invasion. These were Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Nahum, and Zephaniah. But sadly, Judah did not repent either. Babylon came in, they destroyed the temple, and took the leaders to Babylon for 70 years.

It is at this point in time that we find the Book of Esther concerning what was going on with the Jews who were scattered all over. This was about 450 years before Jesus was born and about 20 years before Ezra and Nehemiah were given permission to return and rebuild the temple.

Esther is a dramatic story set against the backdrop of the struggles that the Jews went through living in Persia, now modern-day Iran, during the time of King Ahasuerus. The queen was named Vashti, but the king got rid of her after she refused to come when he called her to a banquet that he held for the leaders of the empire. The story centers around one of the captives, a Jewish virgin named Esther, who, because of her beauty, was taken against her will to live in the palace as part of a harem of young women to be groomed as the king was searching for a new queen.

Esther was an orphan who was raised by a relative named Mordecai. During her 12 months of purification, Mordecai watched over her from outside the palace. The villain in the story was named Haman, who was an Amalekite who rose to become prime minister to the king. But he harbored a secret hatred for the Jews, and he set forth a plan to kill all of them.

Esther found favor with the king and was chosen queen. But when Haman's decree to kill the Jews was made public, she risked her life and appealed to the king to save not only her life but the lives of her people. I want to spend our time together first of all encouraging you to read this short Book of Esther for yourself, but more broadly, to pass on seven important lessons that apply to us who are living in these end of days.

I consulted various resources while celebrating Purim myself, and I'll list them in the notes to this episode. You'll find it at CandaceLong.com/podcasts.

Lesson number one places readers in the timetable of the kingdom. The story of Esther begins with King Ahasuerus throwing a party for all of his leaders that lasted 180 days. Messianic Rabbi Michael Washer notes that this is a hidden picture. 180 days is six months, which the sages regard as a Tavnit, or picture, representing the 6,000 years of human history, after which comes the kingdom.

This interpretation is confirmed in chapter 1, verse 5, which says, "When these days were completed," referring to the six months, "the king gave a banquet lasting for seven days in the court of the garden of the king's palace." This is a hidden reference to the seven-year wedding feast in heaven after the 6,000 years are completed. So, from the beginning of the book, God hid clues to tell us that this is not just a little story from of old. Rather, it has great significance about the days leading up to the Day of the Lord.

Lesson number two shows us the breach or open door to what made the Jews vulnerable to being destroyed. What did they do wrong to bring about this judgment? Because remember from Proverbs 26, a curse without cause does not come to pass. The understanding is that if God's people are not walking rightly, the enemy will have legal cause to harm them.

If we, as followers of Jesus, have aligned ourselves with our Jewish roots, this warning is also for us. According to one source, God's people endangered themselves by participating in the king's pagan six-month-long feast. This was a national celebration, and it overflowed with non-kosher food and wine.

Let me comment here. The Jews have always been associated with the Sabbath, circumcision, and the kosher laws. These are the three things that drive Gentiles crazy. Now, from God's perspective, these so-called laws were set up by God specifically to separate his people from the way of the Gentile. They aren't just some crazy rules; they were established by God as pictures to show that walking in God's ways makes his people different. That's what sets them apart.

With the kosher laws, he does not want his children to sustain themselves and be nourished by the ways of the Gentiles and by food that has likely been sacrificed to other gods. With circumcision, he instills protection and regard for the holiness and purity of the seed, the semen. And with the Sabbath, this too is a picture of honoring the appointed times that God set apart to teach us about the coming kingdom.

So, in the very beginning of the story, we find the Jews of that era immersed in the Gentile celebration, eating food that was unclean to them. Many of you won't like to hear this, but we are guilty of this ourselves. We participate in the Gentile festivals of our day, like Christmas and Easter, and Sunday dinners. These are not celebrations Jesus would have attended. These are our traditions, and part of why we do them is so we will blend in like everybody else and not stand out. The same thing happened in Esther's day, and it became an open door to their destruction. God is restoring his ways, and the lesson here is that we will have to choose between our traditions or God’s.

Lesson three comes at the time when Esther has won the beauty contest and been named Queen of Persia. So she could not have been more secure living in a beautiful palace married to a king who adored her. But then the day came when she learned that Haman sent out a decree in the name of the king that within a year, on a certain date, every Jew in the empire would be killed.

Her uncle Mordecai appeals to her to go before the king and ask him to save her people, but she was terrified. The king didn't know she was Jewish, and according to the customs of the day, anyone who dared to go to the king inside the inner court without being called would be put to death. It's here in the Book of Esther that we hear what Mordecai said that moved her heart. He said, "If you keep silent, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

Some of you listening to me are amazed at what God has done behind the scenes to get you to the place where you are today. You are in a position of leadership and influence. Your colleagues listen to you. You have favor with those in positions over you. But now suddenly, you are seeing some things you know in your heart are not right, and you're torn up about it. The temptation, of course, is to say nothing, because if you speak out and expose the truth of what they're doing, you know what they might do. You'll be like gangrene to them. You'll lose your standing with them. You might even lose your job. Taking a stand for what's right is not easy in this day, but who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?

Lesson number four is found in how Esther responded when she learned about the danger to her people. She could have been furious at the king, knowing that he had allowed this to happen. He was totally complicit. He knew the decree Haman had sent out. She could have vented her rage and badmouthed the king behind his back, raking his reputation over the coals in front of her servants and anyone else who would hear, calling him out for being weak and letting Haman wrap him around his finger.

But instead, she called for every Jew in the empire to fast and pray for God's mercy before she went into the king. This fast was a congregational sign of repentance, pleading with God to save them because the Jews had less than a year to live. This is a picture of Teshuva, biblical repentance—a collective cry for mercy, knowing only God could save them. This kind of repentance touches God deeply. When she came to her meeting with the king, she came in with great humility, honoring his position of authority. Her beginning words were, "If I have found favor in your eyes." And then she softly and calmly made her appeal. She did not suppress anger, sarcasm, or arrogance. The takeaway here is that in her presence, there was an anointed atmosphere because her heart was right, and both God and the king showed favor to her that day.

Lesson five is what happened to the king after Esther's first appeal to him, which was a private feast that she held for the king and his prime minister, Haman. The very night after this feast, the king was unable to sleep. He asked his servants to bring the book of records and read it to him. The Chronicles recorded that Mordecai had saved the king's life. Suddenly, the king remembered that and he asked what had been done to reward Mordecai.

This aha moment changed everything. The king decided to reward Mordecai on the very same day that Haman was about to ask the king for Mordecai's death on the gallows that he had just built for this purpose. So, the feast, the fast, and Esther's humility so touched the heart of God that the tables turned. The gallows that were built to hang Mordecai were now used to hang Haman instead. You see, God is always at work on our behalf when we walk in humility before him. His miraculous intervention is what the celebration of Purim is all about.

Lesson number six centers around the anti-Semitism that grew to great heights during the time of Esther. Haman was not just an evil man; he was fulfilling an ancestral destiny deep within his DNA to kill Jews. You see, he was descended from Amalek, who was Esau's illegitimate grandson. That hatred of Jacob and his descendants, the Jews, ran deep in his veins. In the Torah, we find that God had a long-standing war with Amalek because they attacked the Jews from behind as they struggled in the wilderness.

God told his people, "Blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven," and he added, "You shall not forget." King Saul forgot that admonition when he pardoned King Agag, who was the last remaining survivor of the Amalekites. So, rather than destroy Agag as God had instructed, the spirit of Amalek, his descendant, lived on and surfaced in Haman's bloodline.

That spirit is still alive. But where is it? In the Babylonian Talmud, written in the middle of the first century, the rabbis reveal that Jacob prayed this: "King of the universe, grant not to Esau the wicked desire of his heart; draw not out his bit." The Talmud says this refers to Germania, that descended from Edom, which is another name for Esau, saying that if Germania were allowed to go forth, they would destroy the whole world. At that time in the first century, there was no nation called Germany, but Torah scholars prophesied that Germania has 300 crowned heads. I want you to remember that number.

In the book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, author William Shirer wrote that Germany remained a patchwork of some 300 individual states. In our day, Dr. John Coleman, former MI6 intelligence officer, has spent his whole life exposing today's elite in his book called The Committee of 300. It is these 300 who are the power brokers of the climate change agenda. They are rooted in the ancestral bloodline of Esau, who is the founder of Rome. And the DNA of Amalek, then Haman, then Hitler, and soon the man of sin who will be revealed right before the kingdom.

I bring this up for several reasons. Not all Germans are like Hitler, but many people, me included, have some German blood in our ancestry. Several years ago, the Lord led me to this understanding and impressed on me the need to repent for the sins of my forefathers and renounce any acts that they may have done against the Jewish people.

If you have German ancestors or any other race who persecuted the Jews, such as through the Crusades, it is critical to confess these ancestral sins, renounce them, and place those sins verbally under the blood of Jesus. This act will remove any open door from our bloodlines that the enemy has access to. The ways that anti-Semitism manifests is in disdain for the Jews, looking down our noses at Judaism, dismissing the Old Testament as unimportant, or reinterpreting God's word to say that Christians replaced the Jews in all end-time prophecies. This is a false teaching known as replacement theology. It is a lie out of the pit of hell and belongs to the seed of Amalek.

The final lesson, number seven, is a life-changing one I learned a few years ago while celebrating Purim. The king asked Esther three times, "What is your petition? It shall be granted you." She spent days thinking through how to answer the king's question, and she finally said this: "Let it be written to return the scrolls that were sent as part of the plot and annul the decree they contain."

This was a concrete, brilliant, thoroughly researched solution to the problem. She did not come to the king crying and wringing her hands, waiting for him to figure it all out how to save the Jews. She learned the legal procedure, saying that one document sealed with his ring could cancel out an earlier document. This was easy to do. It was in his power to do, and it made the king look good.

The lesson for us is that just as the king asked Esther three times, "What is your petition? It shall be granted to you," so the Lord asks us to make our petition to him. This is a huge revelation if you can hear it, because most believers have been programmed to say, "Lord, I'll do whatever you tell me to do," and we sit and wait for him to say something and nothing happens. What I learned that day is that he was waiting for me to bring him my petition according to what was on my heart to do that would help his people. The first question I had to answer was, "Who are you petitioning for?" Esther's plea was for the life of the Jews. Who was it I cared about and would sacrifice my life to help?

It took two months to make my first petition to the Lord. The process changed my career direction totally. Once I made it, though, the Lord began to bless my work as never before, and the expansion of Lessons in the Latter Days was the result.

In an episode I produced a few months ago, I share a template called the 24 Steps, which helped me think through who I wanted to help and how I proposed to do it. Making my petition opened the door to God's hands-on presence in my work life. If you want to learn how to make your own petition to God, I encourage you to learn more about it in the episode called "God's Kingdom Bootcamp for Leaders." I'll put a link to it in the notes to this one. You'll learn how to get the 24 steps and some incredible business strategies that I learned in the process.

I also encourage you to go to my website at CandaceLong.com and subscribe. That way you'll know whenever a new resource is available. I want to thank you for spending time with me today looking at the lessons that God gave us on Purim. For almost 6,000 years, our Father has been preparing us for the kingdom. He wants us working alongside him to build his kingdom and restore his ways in the earth. If you'd like to share this episode, you'll find it on my podcast page at CandaceLong.com/podcasts. I hope you join me again next time for Lessons in the Latter Days. God bless.