Esther 3 – Awful Action

Sometimes we don’t see the awfulness of our own ways. Such was the case with King Xerxes’ decree to kill all the Jews. Even if Haman was on the up-and-up it was an awful thing to do just at the word of another.

“Dispatches were sent by couriers to all the king's provinces with the order to destroy, kill and annihilate all the Jews—young and old, women and little children—on a single day, the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, the month of Adar, and to plunder their goods. A copy of the text of the edict was to be issued as law in every province and made known to the people of every nationality so they would be ready for that day.” – Esther 3:13-14

It’s hard for me to even comprehend the making of such a decree. While certainly it was another time, a barbaric one for sure, my mind simply cannot absorb such destruction. But it can absorb a lesson or two.

When our actions involve our authority over other people, it’s almost impossible for us to understand the impact it may have on that person. We can easily move on with our regular lives thinking all is well. The old saying “Out of sight. Out of mind.” certainly can ring true, at least for us. All the while leaving others more devastated than we ever imagined.

Not too long ago I went through a season of conviction in areas of my neglect of others. Mostly related to my leadership deficiencies and how I handled tough decisions with those under my authority. I'm not proud of it, but what I realized is that I failed to carry the burden that was due in understanding the gravity of the situation for the other person. And while the “what” may have been right, the “how” often fell short. The reality is that not dealing with the “messiness” of leadership is easier, especially when the “what” seems right. When we can justify our end actions we can easily reason away any means.

So I made some phone calls and had some conversations to try and make right what I felt I had done wrong. And here’s what I found: the wound of neglect was far greater than I imagined. And the apologies came with great victory… for both of us.

So the lessons for me are these:

• Whenever we see something in scripture that seems so terrible that we can’t relate with it, look deeper into the root of that action, and see if there’s something we can relate to.

• While to us the end (the what) might seem justified, make sure the means (the how) is justified as well. “Way” is God’s expertise.

• Just because we’ve moved on, doesn’t mean we’ve moved forward.

• It’s never too late to try and turn a “done wrong” into a “done right”. It might not be received, but an honest attempt is a Christ-like effort.

Psalm 36 – Comfortably Numb

At 6 and 10 years old, my boys are in a stage where they are dirty. Seriously. They are never clean. Within 5 minutes of putting on any clean shirt, it will have a mixture of dirt, sharpie, and ketchup from the wrist to the elbows. At any point in the day, the same combination of foreign substance can be found on each of their faces. And they are completely clueless. I don’t know how they miss it, but cleanliness is completely off their radar. Even after I point it out to them, I typically get a shrug of the shoulders and an “oh well” expression. It doesn’t bother them to be dirty. They are too busy playing and going on with their lives.

We can be the same way.

“For in his own eyes he flatters himself too much to detect or hate his sin.” – Palm 36:2

This verse really captured me today. I was thinking about sin as dirt. Sometimes we can have dirt on our sleeves and not even realize it. Someone might point it out to us, and if you’re anything like me, you hate that someone saw it. You’d rather go buy a new shirt than wear it the rest of the day. This has become my natural response to obvious sin. What we'll find, however, is that if we don’t do anything about it, we get used to it. The longer we do that, the more we become accustomed to it, and it’s only a matter of time before we just end up looking at it and shrugging like our kids. As Pink Floyd put it, we can become "Comfortably Numb".

But there’s an other kind of sin mentioned in scripture.

There’s the kind that is like dirt on our faces. We don’t even know it’s there. We walk around like we just got out of the shower, we think we’re clean, yet we’re not. Maybe this could be called our hidden sin. But I think it’s bigger than stuff “others” don’t’ know about, I think it’s the stuff that “we” don’t even know about.

So how do you deal with sin that you don’t know is there? I think first, we assume that it is there and go looking for it. Second, I think we should proactively put the things in our lives that scriptures say can help us avoid it. Some of the obvious are staying connected in biblical community, spending time in God’s Word, prayer, etc…

Both our kids and Verse 2 give us some interesting insight. When we’re so busy with “our” lives, when we’re so concerned with who “we” are, when we come to the point when we think to highly of “ourselves” than we ought to, it’s a danger zone. We should be careful not to “flatter” ourselves too much. If we do, we may slip into a place where we not only lose the ability to detect sin in our own lives, but also the desire to fight it.