Automatic Transcript Generated:
Speaker 1
So oni. Ask which books in the Holy Bible don’t mention God our Lord?
Speaker 2
I mean, God or Lord, probably.
Speaker 3
And I can tell you one I know of off the top of my head. Guess that’s okay. Unless Jay, you want to go first?
Speaker 2
We’re probably thinking the same book, maybe on account of three we’ll both say at the same time 1233.
Speaker 3
I’m sorry, but yes, you’re right.
Speaker 2
It was a book with featuring a woman.
Speaker 3
Yes. Only two books, and I got them mixed up, so I’m sorry, Esther that does not ever once mention the name God or Lord in that book. So it’s a pretty cool trivia, which is kind of interesting. Jay, why do you think that is? Why do you think that in the Book of Esther, they never mentioned the word God or Lord?
Speaker 2
The reason I’ve heard attributed was perhaps that there was laws under the Persian Empire at that time that forbid mentioning other gods. And so it was very cleverly written to show the working of Providence without actually specifically mentioning God or Lord. Have you heard a different explanation?
Speaker 3
No, I haven’t, actually. I mean, I had one friend that was he wrote a sermon about the Book of Esther, and he called it Esther the Biggest Backslider. And I was like and everybody was kind of shocked by it, but he kind of went through Esther’s story and showed like, hey, she wasn’t that great as far as being a righteous person in some ways, but basically that God still used her and through this difficult experience that she went through, it brought her back to the true God. So I know that that’s an approach some people have taken. I still think Esther is probably a righteous person, but just like anybody, she’s not perfect.
Speaker 2
What’s really interesting is those who are interested in apocrypha, actually, some of the books in the Pacrapha are additional chapters or writings to the Book of Esther.
Speaker 3
Okay.
Speaker 2
And I personally went back and read them, and it’s interesting. A lot of what it does tries to add back mentions of God and Providence, acting like God gives a vision, god does this, God gives that. But I have to say, in my own opinion, it reads like a totally different book. It does not really mesh well with the rest of the Bible, and it totally changes the character of Esther, where Esther seems like a very strong female who’s bold to do what’s right for God. In those books. She goes in front of the King of Persia, and then it portrays him as just almost looking like a God himself, and then she faints before him, and then it has to be woken up again. Just things like that. It just becomes dramatic. Yeah, so dramatic. It really actually more demeaning of women than the Bible really is. I agree with a lot of experts who say, yeah, this really was not a part of the inspired scripture and maybe just like stories written by Jews later on to fulfill whatever agenda or message they wanted to say.
Speaker 3
Yeah. But I do think the Book of Esther is definitely inspired, and I do agree with your understanding, or that you brought up that it’s something that it was written in a way because it’s kind of like the Book of Revelation. It’s written in coding and secret, you know what I mean? It just brought up something to my mind that I just read in my daily devotion, the Book of Luke, chapter eight, when Jesus is talking about a parable and the people don’t really understand. In Luke chapter eight, verses nine and ten, this is talking about the parable of the solar and the seed. And it says, and his disciples asked him, saying, what might this parable be? And in verse ten, Jesus says, So, yeah, what does this parable mean? And so in verse ten, Jesus goes on to say, and he said to you, it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to the rest it is given in parables that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not hear. So sometimes there’s things in the Bible that are there, but they need to be spiritually discerned.
Speaker 3
Jesus says that spiritual things are spiritually discerned. And just like sometimes there’s things that are being said, and you only know what it is if you do your study, if you are close to God, if you’re living in his word, just like the Book of Revelation, it’s not going to make any sense to you. Like most of it, unless you know all the Bible, especially if you look back at the book of Isaiah and Daniel and all sorts of key things in the Old Testament, are how you decode the Book of Revelation. Because obviously John was in Patmus, in isolation, and he had to write this book of this prophecy, and it had to be written in a way that the Roman soldiers, if they read it, they would be like, what does this mean? They wouldn’t understand it. And so I think, too, like with the Book of Esther, it was written in a way that you knew what was being said without it flat verbatim being said. It wasn’t very blatant. It was a little bit covered there. So I think that to me, that’s a really good understanding of why Esther was kind of written that way, where it was overtly saying God or Lord, even though they all knew.
Speaker 2
Exactly. Especially to me, the most stand out part is the scene where Mordecai tells Esther for a time such as this, you were putting this position and referred to, yeah, God put you here to save God’s people. And if you refuse to do it, though, Marika says, there’ll still be a way where I believe the people will be saved, and referring to his sense that God will then use someone else.
Speaker 3
Yeah, definitely. And I’m going through the Bible right now, and I’m like, looking I looked up God and I just put it in and I’m going through it. I’m like, Yeah, that’s all the books for us. The only one I don’t see there. But, yeah, that’s pretty crazy. I think that’s what makes the Bible so interesting. There’s so many different pieces of history. There’s so many beautiful things about just the human experience that the Bible brings to the table. And I think that sometimes a beautiful lesson where it’s kind of the lesson of our faith is that there’s going to be situations. Like, I work in a public setting and I’m not allowed to speak the name of Jesus, but it’s in my actions, it’s in my life that I’ve had people come to me and be like, you’re a Christian, aren’t you? And I’m like, I don’t wear a cross necklace. I don’t have any I don’t wear Jesus T shirt or anything. But they’ve asked me, like, Are you a Christian? You’re a Christian, right? And I have to confess, yes. I’m not going to lie. And they’re like, there’s just something different about you.
Speaker 3
And it hasn’t happened a lot, but when it has happened, that has made my heart so joyful, because I think maybe that’s what the Book of Esther also is trying to teach us in such a time as this in Earth’s history, where sometimes maybe we don’t get to verbally say the name of Jesus. We can’t share the gospel openly, but in our lives, in our faithfulness, in our love to people and how we behave and the words we say, I think that that’s how we preach the gospel without a word ever being said. I don’t know. What do you guys think about that?
Speaker 1
Yeah, I think very much you can have someone who’s preaching with words all about Jesus and all about the gospel, but living and operating from a place is completely different.
Speaker 3
Absolutely.
Speaker 1
You can also have someone who’s operating and their actions are speaking and their values are speaking the gospel, and they aren’t using the words at all. They’re saying those actions speak louder than words. And sometimes that can be hard to hear because sometimes we want our actions to be speaking it, but they’re not. And there’s a work that we need to do with Jesus to work through that and to figure out why is that happening and work through whatever it is going on in our life and that we need to surrender or we need to process in a different way and let Jesus come into that part of us. Yeah, I know for me, when God worked in my life and after he told me, you are a Christian and I’m going to show you, and my story was so much like what you were saying, I was kind of like, Oh, my gosh, this is crazy. Be crazy because my experience is so similar that God then brought someone into my life who was Christian. And she wasn’t going around just preaching it with her words all the time. It was how she showed up every day in my life and how she carried herself and how she dealt with life’s challenges and how she loved people.
Speaker 1
And that is what showed me what it truly meant to be a Christian. And it made me say, I want to. Okay, yes I do. I am a Christian. God said, I’m a Christian and I want to be a Christian. And that’s how I want to be able to show up for other people now, Lord help me, I am a work in progress on that still. I don’t show up the way I want to all the time. It’s a lifelong journey, and there have certainly been times in my life where I thought I was, only to later find out I really wasn’t.
Speaker 3
Me too.
Speaker 1
And I’m more aware of that now. The more I have studied God’s word and God’s character, the more I realize how much work I need. Still, back in those earlier years, a lot of people were repulsed by me because they thought I was too good. And they would call me like goody two shoes and these kinds of things. They didn’t like that I was a good person. But when I look back on who I was then to what I now understand as Christ’s character, I really wasn’t a good person. And that’s how far that’s the difference. If we don’t know what goodness is, we can think we are God’s gift to humankind and really not be at all. We could be so far from the truth. And the thing is that the more we come into relationship with God, the more we see those faults, the more that becomes revealed to us. And you think about like when Moses saw God up close in his blinding light, there’s a reason why nobody else could be that close, because they literally could not handle it. And when we are overwhelmed with that gap, when we become that visible, that aware of that gap, it can be very hard to handle.
Speaker 1
And so God only lets us see it a little bit at a time so that we can keep working on it, keep having the strength, and not just be literally killed by.
Speaker 2
Yeah, and I think that’s a good point because I have come to the belief that if we were to actually see the face of God in its full glory, we would see the most loving face we’ve ever seen. I know we can’t even comprehend the amount of love we will see coming out of this face and then we will just immediately just want to kill ourselves wherever wanting to not be with God to ever disobey God. And I think there’s Bible proof of this because we have Isaiah, who’s in the presence of God sees God. And his first words out of my mouth, it’s like, Whoa, me. I am undone. He just wants to destroy Himself. I think he’s going to die because he’s in the presence of just such an amazing, loving God, and he realizes what a terrible person he is. And we’re talking about Isaiah, one of the greatest of the prophets.
Speaker 3
Exactly. That was exactly what came to my mind. And like Daniel, when he sees Jesus and he falls down as dead, and he says, and my comeliness, which was my glory, my goodness, turned into me, into corruption, everything good in Him was just filthy and disgusting because he realized there was nothing good in Him. All righteousness is a filthy rags. And that’s so the truth. The more I see Jesus, the less good I think of myself, because I see how perfect he is in his love and his goodness to us. And, yeah, 100% agree with that. And I’m just so grateful that God is so merciful with us in that process of working us into who he wants to be. And just like those, going back to the first question, there’s a part of our journey where we don’t know always the name of Jesus until that time. Then it’s another part of our journey with God. And so as long as we’re open and listening, I’m just so grateful. He’s a loving and patient God who wants to save each and every one of us. Oh, sure.
Speaker 2
Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No, go for it. I like Kelsey last comment. He always has great comments. Right. But even the latest one, I think really sums us up. Media. Me, too. I’m done being lukewarm.
Speaker 3
Amen to that.
Speaker 2
Sums up my sentiment, too. Amen.
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In His Service
BibleAsk Team
