So yesterday I was freely acknowledging that I may be a little too hard on the Olympics and also freely acknowledging that maybe if I just paid attention to those sentimental little vignettes that they run before the otherwise unknown athletes go and compete, that I would

appreciate them more because I would appreciate how much they'd overcome and I could

celebrate with them more when they inevitably win a medal or hurt with them more when they

inevitably lose whichever way it works. I'm better off and I'm a better fan and I'm a

better Olympic enjoyer if I understand where they've been and what they've had to overcome.

Likewise yesterday and today we're considering what the original audience to the book of

Esther had to overcome and what their backstory was and how that

book particularly the epilogue of that book that we've been looking at over the

last week or so would come off to them in light of all of that. 586 BC, the Southern Kingdom is

hanging on by a thread, but along comes Nebuchinezer and he's just too big and some king

had already blurted out how much golden money they had in there and sure enough

comes back to bite him in the butt and Nebuchnez was like I need a W there's an easy one sitting right there

he lays siege to Jerusalem it's horrible The siege breaks mercifully. The text is a little

bit quiet about all the details of how that siege worked out because siege is, they're

always bad while they're going on and they're always worse when they're over.

But however it goes down, the city breaks, the city's defenses are shattered, and eventually brick by brick.

All the important buildings are pulled down and everybody's taken away into captivity in Babylon and Jerusalem and the temple and the southern kingdom the kingdom of Judah.

It's all gone.

And surely it would have seemed to the Jews of that time that with it went their connectedness

with God, with it went the hope that God's promises for their role in God's

Redemptive plan. They probably imagined that stuff was over or probably a lot of

them did. But as we read yesterday somewhere in there, Jeremiah the weeping

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