Hello, my friends, it's Matt, this is the 10 minute Bible Hour podcast, and we have been

looking at Esther, Chapter 5, this super dramatic scene where Esther puts on her royal

robes after three days of fasting.

She's got to go in and she's got to talk to her husband, and her husband is a very powerful

man who she hasn't talked to in a very long time.

She's got to go in, uninvited, which can be an instant death sentence if he's not in

the mood to see her.

She's got to go in there and not only gain access to him, but if she can gain access to

this king who's been pretty volatile about the access question in the past, then she's

also going to have to figure out a way to socially navigate a brutally difficult situation

to try to save her people.

From a human perspective, as we enter Esther, Chapter 5, it is a crazy long shot that she's

going to be able to pull this off and save the Jews from the threat of the evil Heyman.

But as we read yesterday, she clears the first hurdle.

She enters the royal courtroom, the royal throne room, and Xerxes extends the gold

scepter to receive her.

I think this is one of the places in the story of Esther where the gravity of the situation

is really difficult to understand, unless you've done the work that we've done together

over the last almost hundred episodes.

These ancient kingdoms, these ancient situations, I think we tend to underestimate them because

now they're gone.

So we imagine if we time travel back there, we just go around telling people what to do.

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