The King’s Man: When God Feel Hidden - 2/19/2023

Esther 3:1–6 ESV

After these things King Ahasuerus promoted Haman the Agagite, the son of Hammedatha, and advanced him and set his throne above all the officials who were with him. And all the king’s servants who were at the king’s gate bowed down and paid homage to Haman, for the king had so commanded concerning him. But Mordecai did not bow down or pay homage. Then the king’s servants who were at the king’s gate said to Mordecai, “Why do you transgress the king’s command?” And when they spoke to him day after day and he would not listen to them, they told Haman, in order to see whether Mordecai’s words would stand, for he had told them that he was a Jew. 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 6:1–10 ESV

On that night the king could not sleep. And he gave orders to bring the book of memorable deeds, the chronicles, and they were read before the king. And it was found written how Mordecai had told about Bigthana and Teresh, two of the king’s eunuchs, who guarded the threshold, and who had sought to lay hands on King Ahasuerus. And the king said, “What honor or distinction has been bestowed on Mordecai for this?” The king’s young men who attended him said, “Nothing has been done for him.” And the king said, “Who is in the court?” Now Haman had just entered the outer court of the king’s palace to speak to the king about having Mordecai hanged on the gallows that he had prepared for him. And the king’s young men told him, “Haman is there, standing in the court.” And the king said, “Let him come in.” So Haman came in, and the king said to him, “What should be done to the man whom the king delights to honor?” And Haman said to himself, “Whom would the king delight to honor more than me?” And Haman said to the king, “For the man whom the king delights to honor, let royal robes be brought, which the king has worn, and the horse that the king has ridden, and on whose head a royal crown is set. And let the robes and the horse be handed over to one of the king’s most noble officials. Let them dress the man whom the king delights to honor, and let them lead him on the horse through the square of the city, proclaiming before him: ‘Thus shall it be done to the man whom the king delights to honor.’ ” Then the king said to Haman, “Hurry; take the robes and the horse, as you have said, and do so to Mordecai the Jew, who sits at the king’s gate. Leave out nothing that you have mentioned.”

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We’ve been looking at the story of Esther.

Esther is a Jewish woman who becomes queen of Persia.

As we have seen (and next week we’ll see the resolution of the whole narrative and story), she uses her position to save her people by working for justice in society.

She is the protagonist of the story, but tonight we’re going to look at the antagonist, the villain, a man named Haman.

Haman is the most vivid and sustained case study in the Bible of everything the Bible says about pride and humility and what happens to people who let pride rage unchecked. It is very vivid. It illustrates so many other places the Bible speaks about pride and humility, and we’re going to learn a lot, but I don’t want you to think this is hype when I say I really want you to listen because it might save the rest of your life.

Not kidding.

There are three things we learn here.

The nature of pride (what it is),

The consequence of pride (what it does),

The antidote for pride.

1. The Nature of pride - What it is…

“After these events, King Xerxes honored Haman … elevating him and giving him a seat of honor higher than all the other nobles. All the royal officials at the king’s gate knelt down and paid honor to Haman, for the king had commanded this concerning him.”

Now we’re told he was given the highest position. That means he must have been essentially prime minister.

It’s pretty amazing. He had the highest position in the king’s administration.

That other statement in verse 2 is pretty intriguing.

-Haman must have been a particularly obnoxious person because in hierarchical and traditional societies, bowing is absolutely instinctive, totally instinctive.

Therefore, Haman must have been particularly obnoxious if the king had to command people to bow to him, which he did.

One man wouldn’t do it. - Mordecai, the cousin of Esther, who was the older cousin who raised Esther when her parents died, refused to give respect where respect wasn’t due.

The fact that he wouldn’t bow down wasn’t galling to Haman simply because this one individual wasn’t giving Haman respect.

It really was a reminder of what Haman certainly knew in his heart of hearts, and that is in spite of this great power he had, in spite of this great position he had, he didn’t get the respect and the approval of people he thought should go with it.

At one point, he even says to his wife and his friends (this is in chapter 5), “Calling together his friends and … his wife, Haman boasted to them about his vast wealth … and all the ways the king had honored him and how he had elevated him above the other nobles and officials. […] ‘But all this gives me no satisfaction as long as I see that Jew Mordecai sitting at the king’s gate.’ ”

So he is furious … do you have that one person … the grate on you … bug you, their face, their expressions, their demeanor, the way they order their coffee, talk, laugh … that’s mordecia for Haman

Now what he does about it we’ll look at soon, but right now let’s stop and say, “What do we learn about pride?”

Pride, according to the Bible, is concentration on the self, absorption in the self. I’ll give you a definition - self-obsession

It’s from C.S. Lewis = Pride, he says, is the ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self.

This is what pride does: Pride makes you concentrate everything about you so you don’t get into relationships, you don’t get into jobs, you don’t do anything that isn’t focused on self

Therefore, nothing is about the thing you’re doing; everything is about you.

Job, house, marriage, kids … infidelity, retirement, sports … friendships, relationships … none of them are about that thing …

Trophies … look at me’s … gold stars, achievements, resume builders

Soccer dads - lacrosse dads

You don’t have the affair because you long for the physical or emotional pleasure … pride means you sleep with her to prove to yourself, and anyone else that you can

Which means that you don’t marry the beautiful woman because she is your equal and your complementary piece, because she is the other half of who God is calling you to be … you marry her to show her off, look what I can achieve, look at how beautiful of woman I can have,

Look at my kids, job, car, lawn, tattoo, size of my Bible, lift on my truck … some of them become so obvious

Pride turns everything into a means to an end

Nothing is done for itself … we want respect, approval, value

Haman has arrived, he is everything but the king … but he has no satisfaction …

He has the whole kingdom bowing down to him as he walks by … all he sees … the one guy who isn’t

Pride is sleepless - Lewis …. It is an endless calculation … likes, follows, retweets - we’ve made it measurable

Who noticed and sometimes more importantly - who didn’t … how does this make me look … did they see, do they know

Give gifts but they need to be sure that the tag has their name on it

Flowers at the funeral … but need to be sure that they know I gave them

We want all of the credit … none of the blame

Everything is a comparison

And when you feel like you are mostly on top … mostly winning … that’s one form of pride

But there is a second … I think it’s probably more dangerous

Mostly because most folks don’t recognize it as pride … so it slips through, in it’s most basic forms it’s almost celebrated, valued … self deprecating … self-effacing form

Constantly down on yourself … don’t like yourself … don’t like how you look, don’t like how you are doing … constantly self-conscious, beating yourself up … you’re just as self-absorbed

All of the comparison games are still happening … you just aren’t winning very often

If pride is self-obsession … this is it

You’d better get it straight because those two kinds of people have far more in common than a humble person.

Now if you understand self is self-absorption and pride has both inferiority and superiority forms, then you realize what humility is.

According to the Bible, humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.

It’s just not being needy for approval or respect, not caring about approval or respect.

People become inherently valuable for who they … not because of how they make you feel about yourself, or what you can get from them

Activity and sacrifice and relationship become about the other … they become about their value, worth, dignity

Genuine humility looks like someone who is comfortable in their skin, interested in the folks around them … uncalculated

They’re not doing it. They’re relaxed.

The Screwtape Letters, written by C.S. Lewis, is about a senior devil writing to a junior devil about how to tempt people. So you have to understand the enemy here is Jesus, and the patients are we human beings. Once you understand it’s a devil talking to another devil about how to tempt patients and come against the enemy, who is Jesus, when you understand that, it’s a pretty good quote. You do kind of have to get your head into it. Here it is. He says (and I paraphrase), “You must conceal from your patient the real nature of humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a low opinion of his own talents and character. To thwart the Enemy, we must consider his aims. He wants to bring your man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in that fact without being any more or less glad at having done it than if it had been done by another. Our Enemy, you see, wants to turn the man’s attention away from self altogether toward him and the man’s neighbor. Remember, both vainglory and self-contempt equally keep the mind on the self. Both can be, therefore, the starting point for some wonderful contempt of other selves, other people, cynicism, and cruelty.”

2. The consequence of pride

You say, “All right, you’ve defined pride rather broadly. Okay, I see your point. So how bad is that?” Why should I be afraid of pride … its bad … Very bad.

Verses 5 and 6: “When Haman saw that Mordecai would not kneel down or pay him honor, he was enraged. Yet having learned who Mordecai’s people were, he scorned the idea of killing only Mordecai. Instead Haman looked for a way to destroy all Mordecai’s people, the Jews, throughout the whole kingdom of Xerxes.”

He wasn’t satisfied with just killing Mordecai and thereby, as it were, making him bow; rather, he wants to destroy the whole community.

So he goes to King Xerxes in verses right after this that we didn’t read, and he tells the king about a group of people who don’t obey the king’s laws.

He says, “If you give me permission to slaughter them and take their wealth, lots of that will come into the king’s treasury.”

The king, who had depleted his treasury through a very disastrous campaign to Greece, needed the money.

So he gives him the signet ring, says, “Go ahead,” and doesn’t even find out who this group of people is. Haman makes a law.

The law of the Medes and the Persians was irrevocable. When a king made a decree, it was irrevocable.

Haman designated a day, and on that day the neighbors of the Jews anywhere in the Persian Empire were able to destroy them and take their wealth as plunder. Thousands of people are going to die no matter what.

As we see, though the Jews are saved, thousands of people still die. Haman himself is going to die.

Everywhere in the Bible, we’re told, pride goes before a fall. Pride leads to devastation. Pride leads to destruction. Pride is deadly.

You say, “This is an extreme case.” Okay, I want you to see that all pride is deadly, all pride. How? Let me count the ways. Ready?

pride makes you a fool. This might seem low level, but it’s important. How so?

Pride keeps you from ever learning from your mistakes in general.

Why? Because you’re self-justifying. A proud heart is always justifying itself. In other words, your relationship breaks up. There’s a falling out with this person. This job doesn’t work out, and that doesn’t work out. What are you always doing? “It’s him. It’s her. It’s them. It’s the circumstances.” It’s never you. You justify yourself, so you just can’t learn from your mistakes.

Humble people are not always looking at themselves. They’re not always standing on their own dignity. They can laugh at themselves.

As a result, they learn fast. When something goes wrong, they actually look for what they have done wrong. Even if it’s not mainly their fault, partly it’s their fault, and they find it and they learn from it. They grow so fast, but proud people don’t.

Not only that, but proud people don’t learn from criticism in particular. One of the best ways to grow as a person is to take criticism, but with

the superiority type of pride, when someone criticizes you, you dismiss them or you attack them.

In the inferiority form of pride, criticism so devastates you that when people even try to talk to you, you just melt down. They just say, “Forget it.”

You never learn anything. Because you don’t learn from your mistakes in general and you don’t learn from your criticism in particular, you are a fool.

What do I mean?

You constantly make bad choices.

You choose the wrong jobs.

You choose the wrong boyfriends or girlfriends.

You choose all kinds of things that are wrong.

Why? Because the superiority form makes you overestimate your gifts, and the inferiority form makes you underestimate your gifts. You’re always feeling down on yourself. You resent and fear the people who are above you, and you find them threatening. You tend to disdain the people you think are below you, and you don’t learn from them.

As a result, you’re constantly making miscalculations. You’re constantly making wrong moves just like Haman does here.

Secondly, pride makes you evil.

Pride is what made the Devil the Devil.

Since Saint Augustine, Christian theology has understood that pride is not one sin among many but really the root under all of them.

Pride is the hellish spiritual petri dish that grows all kinds of stuff in your life. Let me show you.

Bitterness. Some of us, many of us, struggle a great deal with bitterness and anger toward things people have done or people have done to us or classes of people or individuals. There are many people whose lives are being distorted by anger, but remember this: You can’t stay angry at someone, you can’t stay resentful at someone unless you feel superior to them. There is no bitterness without pride, because you’re saying, “I would never do anything like that.” If your life is distorted by anger, it’s because pride is at the root of it.

What about paralyzing fear? Some people are paralyzed by worry. Do you know where that comes from? You know exactly how things have to go. You’re sure you know what’s best to happen in history, and it’s has to be this. If this doesn’t happen, it will be disaster. You’re freaking out about it. Why? Because you know exactly how things have to go. How can you know? You just know. That takes arrogance. You can’t be horribly worried without being proud. You can’t be terribly bitter without being proud.

Pride leads to being opinionated, which nobody likes, but pride also leads to be being indecisive, because that’s the inferiority form. You’re just afraid of making a wrong move and how you’re going to look.

Pride makes you too shy; that’s the inferiority form.

Pride makes you too abrasive; that’s the superiority form. That’s just the personal stuff. Then there are the social evils.

All the great social evils (racism, injustice, imperialism) come from class pride or racial pride or overweening national pride.

How often do we hear or read about some young man gunned down late at night over some argument … and what will the cause be? Pride. That’s what so many of them are. Maybe that’s what most of them are.

Thirdly, pride is the one sin that hides itself.

Pride is the carbon monoxide of sin, killing you without you having any ability to tell it’s happening. It’s odorless.

By definition, the more proud you are and, therefore, the more in its clutches you are, the less proud you think you are.

Pride hides itself. You know when you’re committing adultery, right? You never say, “Oh my gosh, you’re not my wife.” No, you know when you’re committing adultery. You know when you’re embezzling somebody. You don’t say, “Oh, how did that $300,000 get into my bank account? You mean I don’t make that much every year?”

No, you know when you’re embezzling. — but You don’t know when you’re proud.

Virtually nobody ever comes and says, “I’m proud. I have a problem with pride.” I’ve listened to all kinds of sins confessed to me over the years. I don’t think anybody has ever come and told me about that one. Let me show you just how inescapable it is.

How many people hate snobs, disdain those who think they are superior to everyone else … but the only way we can hate snobs, disdain those who think they are superior to everyone else … by believing we are superior to those who think they are superior 🙂

Now let’s look down our long noses at the people who look down their long noses at people … see how hard this gets to be … see how pervasive and encompassing pride is … see how it sits at the bottom of sin

Let me go one step further. Let me just show you how it’s a carbon monoxide. Honestly now, up to now haven’t you mainly been thinking about a couple of other people during this sermon? Haven’t you immediately said, “Oh my gosh. Boy, did that sound just like him or just like her”?

It takes a certain amount of pride to have come through the sermon up to now mainly thinking about somebody else. I’m serious.

Fourthly, religious pride is the worst kind of pride.

Some of you are saying, “Well, it’s about time for point number three.” - shouldn’t we be wrapping this up 🙂

Being a pastor, I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, “Pride is very bad. Yes. Okay, I got you. It’s very bad. What’s the solution? God. You need to get closer to God. You need to obey God. You need to pray. You need to obey the Ten Commandments. You need to humble yourself before God. That will deal with the joy-killing psychological and sociological deadliness of pride.”

I’m not going to tell you that, at least not that way, and here’s the reason why. This is the worst thing about pride of all. If you get somebody really religious and they start to be really good and they come to church and they study their Bible and they try really hard to pray and obey God, religiosity will kill off lust to a great degree.

Religiosity will kill off materialism to a great degree, but it just makes pride worse.

There is no pride like religious pride.

There are no proud people like Pharisees. Just to be told, “God is great and you need to obey him,” doesn’t necessarily decrease pride at all.

3. The Antidote for pride

At the beginning of chapter 6, Haman is coming to see the king.

Do you know why?

Because as we learn here down in verse 4, Haman has not just been satisfied to kill Mordecai, and he hasn’t just been satisfied to kill his community.

He wants to make a public spectacle of Mordecai, so he has built a gallows in a public place.

He has come to the king to ask for special permission to make a public spectacle of Mordecai and to hang him in that public place on the day in which the Jews are going to be slaughtered. But God has a different idea.

That night, the king can’t sleep. He begins to read a book or have a book read to him. He suddenly remembers that Mordecai had saved his life from assassination, and he’d never been rewarded. Haman happens to come in just as the king is realizing this and says, “Haman, what should we do for a man the king delights to honor?”

Haman, desperately needing respect, desperately needing approval, desperately wanting honor and glory, thinking the king means him, comes up with a fascinating proposal.

Haman - obsessed with himself couldn’t believe that the question wasn’t about him

He says, “Let the king’s robes be put on that man, and let him be put up on the king’s horse, which of course is the position of a conquering king.

Let your greatest noble take the position of a slave or a servant, because that person will simply walk along, leading the horse by the reins, through the streets as a kind of herald. That will show how much you delight in that man.”

Now why does he talk about the robes? In ancient times, the robes were much more significant than they are actually today. We miss the significance. Let me help you with it

For the king to put the robes on someone was more than just giving him a high position. When Pharaoh puts the robes on Joseph in Genesis 41, it means he actually partakes of the king’s position.

When Jonathan gives his kingly robes to David in 1 Samuel 18, it’s Jonathan’s way of actually saying, “I love you. You should be the king, not me.”

For the king to put the robes on somebody, his own robes, was a way of not just simply saying, “I honor this person,” but, “I delight in this person. I love this person.” Here is why Haman is excited.

Haman is saying, “If the people out there saw that I’m loved like that by someone as great as that, that I’m loved but not just loved, I’m loved like that by someone as great as that, I’m loved by the king, then they’ll know and then I’ll know my worth, my value.”

That really is what we need.

We don’t just want love. We want someone who we think the world of thinking the world of us.

As one writer put it, “The praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards.” That’s what he is saying. “If I had that, if I had the king putting his robes on me, the king loving me like that, if I was loved like that by someone as glorious as that, then I would know. Then everyone would know.”

To his absolute shock, the king says, “Do that to Mordecai, and you take the role of the servant leading the horse along.”

Great twist, plot twist → shock

It’s astounding to Haman. It’s the most incredible and astonishing reversal of fortunes, because Mordecai was literally about to be trampled into the dust, but suddenly he is up high on the pinnacle.

Haman was about to go up on the pinnacle, and he is down in the role of the servant. But he is down worse than even the king knows, because he realizes now he couldn’t possibly (now that they’re doing this to Mordecai) move against Mordecai or his people.

Haman knows he is doomed. There has been a total reversal, and Haman also knows it’s because he tried to put himself up there he has been brought down.

This is exactly what the Bible says everywhere. This goes across the board.

This is part of life. What is part of life? If you humble yourself, you’ll be exalted. If you exalt yourself, you will be humbled. All through the Bible.

In fact, C.S. Lewis writes about it in Mere Christianity.

“Lose yourself to find it. Does that sound strange? It works in everyday matters as well. In social life, you will never make a good impression on people until you stop trying so much to make a good impression on people. In literature and art, you will never be original until you stop trying so hard to be original. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Lose your life and you’ll save it. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in.”

Why is this a principle of the universe, that if you seek to lift yourself up you’ll be brought down? I’ll tell you why.

Because it’s the nature of God, and he made the universe.

How do we know this is the nature of God? Like this.

Haman did not ask for the wrong thing. What Haman was asking for is something we all want. We want someone of ultimate glory loving us, not love in general.

What we need is this ultimate assurance of who we are, ultimate assurance of our worth.

We need someone like that loving us like that. We need someone we think the world of thinking the world of us. We need the praise of the praiseworthy.

He didn’t ask for the wrong thing. That’s what’s wrong with us. That’s why we all have a problem with pride. We all have this problem.

That’s why we’re so needy all the time.

He didn’t ask for the wrong thing; he asked the wrong king.

He went to the wrong king. There is a better King. There is a King with ultimate glory who, believe it or not, came to earth and stripped himself of his glory.

When he went to the cross, he wasn’t just stripped of his clothes. Literally, he was. He was stripped of his Father’s love. He was stripped of his Father’s approval, of his Father’s respect.

Why? He was reversing places with us.

Mordecai was saved only because Haman reversed places with him, but it was involuntary.

Jesus does it voluntarily. There’s the ultimate King. There’s the King of Glory.

Jesus Christ is the King you can go to because he at infinite cost to himself reversed places with us.

“God made him sin who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”

Jesus Christ was stripped naked so we could be clothed in the righteousness of his Son. Jesus Christ exchanges places with us.

He takes what we deserve so we can get what he deserves.

Now in John 17, there is a place where Jesus actually says, “Father, give them the glory you gave me before the foundation of the world.”

That’s unbelievable. We’re the disciples.

Glory isn’t just some kind of divine phosphorescence. Glory is delight. Glory is honor.

Jesus says, “You must realize that the praise of the ultimate praiseworthy One, the glory and honor and robes of the ultimate King are yours.”

When you know he loves you like that, when you know he went through all that for you, that’s the one-two punch the ego needs to make it finally self-forgetful and at rest, to fill it so it’s not needy anymore.

It’s not enough just to say, “Oh, I believe in God.” That doesn’t make you humble.

We just said that will make you either superior or inferior. What you have to see is God coming all the way down and reversing places with us at infinite cost to himself, because on the one hand, to know he had to die for you humbles you.

To know he was glad to die for you affirms you infinitely.

Jesus Christ was strong enough to be weak. He was so strong he didn’t care what people thought. He was so strong he was able to do the right thing. If you see him doing that for you, you will be strong enough to be weak.

You’ll be strong enough to learn from your mistakes, strong enough to take jobs and have relationships that don’t just make you feel good about yourself, but they’re the right things to do.

Finally you won’t be snubbed all the time, and you won’t always be looking at yourself and always being down on yourself or up on yourself or anything about yourself.

Don’t you want that? Here’s how it will start.

C.S. Lewis = “If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.”

Let’s pray. Our Father, we thank you for assuring us that Jesus Christ is the ultimate King who clothes us in his robes but at cost to himself. Once we know we are loved by the ultimate King, we have the praise of the ultimate praiseworthy One, we have your delight, we are men and women you delight to honor, that will heal us. So heal us. We want it. We ask for it through Jesus. In his name we pray, amen