After reading this chapter, I have to wonder...is King Xerxes an idiot? incredibly greedy? or what? Just look at verse 9. "If it please the king, issue a decree that they be destroyed, and I will give 10,000 large sacks of silver to the government administrators to be deposited in the royal treasury."
Come on, now...does he not recognize bribery when he sees it? Even worse, when we look at previous verses, we see that Hamen isn't even giving the king all the details, like which race Hamen wants destroyed. Nor does the king ask for any details to understand the situation. It is in this that we can learn some lessons:
1. Don't make uninformed decisions. If you are familiar with this story, you will see that he king later decides this was a mistake. A hasty decision without all the facts rarely works out, unless you have the right advisor...
2. Choose advisors carefully. We don't really know how Herman was chosen, but it seems clear that the king was not aware of his biases. And furthermore, setting a decree for everyone to bow down to him just seems like you are asking for trouble. This kind of attention is going to go to the head of most people. In my opinion, he is lucky Hamen didn't decide he wanted to be king.
As we will see as we read through this book, God uses a serious of foolish actions on the part of the king and acts of obedience on the part of Esther to bless the Jews, but I think along the way we can learn a lot about wise choices verses foolish ones.
God has given us the capacity to think and to seek God's dicernmemt. We should use these gifts to become people of wisdom!
God bless you!
No comments:
Post a Comment