All right, let's jump in, verse one. After these things, that always means a period of time has taken place and come to pass since the previous chapter.

King Ahazurus promoted Haman, the son of Hamadatha, the Agagite, and advanced him and set his seat above all the princes who were with him.

So chapter three begins by introducing us to this man by the name of Haman, who, as I'm sure you know, is a very evil man.

And as we'll see soon, he is going to be a very big problem for God's people,

specifically for Esther and Mordecai. But there's something here in this introduction

that maybe isn't so visible at first read, and it's a very important detail that I want to

point out. We're told that Haman was a descendant of Agag.

Agag was the king of the Amalekites.

And for those of you might remember our study in 1st Samuel,

the Amalekites in particular were the sworn enemies of the Israelites, so much so that God, through the prophet Samuel, had commanded King Saul to destroy every single Amalekite, and not just the Amalekites, all of their livestock, everything, to wipe them completely

off the face of the earth unless you think that this is disproportionate and even unjust to command God's people to wipe out an entire people.

Let me hasten to remind you that the Amalekites were so evil in how they would set out to

completely destroy and annihilate and eliminate and exterminate the entire Jewish people. And this is what we're

going to see here tonight. But here's the problem. Saul disobeys this command and says to Samuel in 1 Samuel 1520 this, when Samuel arrives and Saul says to him,

but I have obeyed the voice of the Lord and gone on the mission on which the Lord sent me and brought

back, listen to this, Agag, King of Amalic. I have utterly destroyed the Amalekites, except for the king. I brought the king back, the, the,

agag. Yeah, I know he's an Amalekite, and but I destroyed everything else. And then of course,

we read on that, oh, actually actually we did take some of the livestock.

We were supposed to eliminate them too, but we took them and Samuels like, I hear the bleeding of sheep.

And so, no, you did not obey the command of the Lord, and you did not do what you were to do,

and you did not completely destroy the Amalekites.

And if that weren't bad enough, you bring back this agag and, oh my goodness, we just read that this

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