Hey, my friends, it's Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and yesterday it was

kind of a reality check for me, maybe not for you, but run in the mental exercise as we

look here at the book of Esther and chapter 8, run in that mental exercise about what

would you do if you were in the position of Mordecai and Esther?

And this horrible genocidal edict had been issued in the name of the king, and now the

guy who was behind all of that, he's gone, he's out of the picture, and now you have

the ring.

You're the ones in charge of the king's words, and you get to decide their total blank

check, whatever you want to do, you can issue that edict to solve the problem, anything

other than something that directly counter-mands the king's order, you can't do that.

And so yesterday just gaming out a few of the different options for how you could unmake

this problem, it's like, I don't know, there are a ton of good options here.

This is a bit of a pickle, it's a tricky conundrum, and it's super easy, of course, from

across the millennia, sitting on my couch with food in front of me and climate control,

and everything's beautiful and easy to be like, how you ready to get you should do this

or this or that was wrong, I have modern moral sensibilities, I know how everything ought

to be, but just going through the exercise of thinking about what it would be like to

be there and have to make the choice and endure the consequences or benefits of that choice.

Now, a little more pressure, not as easy as it looks, not as easy as it looks.

So since we ran through a few of my less-than-stellar suggestions for what to do in their situation

yesterday, let's go through what they actually do here today.

So we're going to be comparing Esther 8 and Esther 3 because they are matching passages,

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