When we read the Book of Esther, are we to think of Mordekayan

Esther as heroes? God used them to save his people, but what are we to make of some of their moral decisions?

Did God approve of their behavior? Well, here are the answers today on Truth for Life.

Alistair Begg is teaching from the Book of Esther. We are in chapter 2.

Verse 15 says that she was winning favor in the eyes of all who saw her. Clearly her looks were

significant in the providence of God. Okay? So let's just say a couple of things. Good looks open

doors. Good looks open doors. If you deny that, you're not living in the real world.

But all not all the doors that good looks open should be walked through. And good looks are the result of the creative

handy work of God. Therefore good looks can never must never be the occasion of self-celebration.

Because Psalm 139, 14 tells us that we are intricately wrought in the womb of our mothers. That means that God actually oversees not simply the creation of a person, but the creation of a personality, the creation of an identity, the creation of a physicality, the creation of it all.

And he has done so purposefully. So in the case of Esther, he is responsible for how she looks. That's what the Bible says. Now let me ask you, do you believe that?

And if you believe that, please stop comparing yourselves and same things like if only I was taller, if only I was fairer, if only I was darker, if only I was whatever I was.

You are what you are by the providential ruling of God. And he don't make no junk. Right? Now if you affirm that, realize that when you walk out into tomorrow, affirming that truth, believing it and standing by it, you walk out into a world that is increasingly opposed to that notion.

You don't have to go searching for this. You just have to pick up magazines and lay them down. Yesterday I had occasion to pick up Vogue magazine because there was nothing else there. So it was Vogue. I always have to have something to read. So it was there. I picked it up.

And I came upon an article by a lady, a famous fashion writer in Britain, Sarah Maurer. And she wrote an article concerning Casey Ledger, the Olympic swimmer for the United States, who has just been signed to the Ford modeling agency,

to the male Ford modeling agency. She is the first woman to be signed as a male model. Okay, that's the first thing you should know. In the article, this is what Ledger said. Ledger refuses to be pinned down by what she sees as old think categories of gender.

Now here we go. I happen to be a woman, sheer luck of the biological relit. Okay. Now what I'm trying to do myself and trying to help you to do is to realize that there is a direct connect between studying the story of 5th century Persia and walking back out into the environment in which we all live our lives.

And to learn how, as Mordekai had to learn, to be a good Christian in an environment that doesn't believe what we believe. So that we do not use such information as a battering ran, but we're not naive either.

And we realize that the story we have to tell, it's CS Lewis again, isn't it? I believe in Christianity as I believe in the rise of the sun, not simply because I can see it, but because by it, I can see everything else.

So that Christianity then says, no, when we come to the issue of the identity of an individual, that individual is not there as a result of biological roulette. No matter what they say, God made them this way with all of the pluses and all of the minuses and all of the challenges of human sexuality. If that is not true, then we're lost.

Now, my purpose is not to wag sell equipment on this or even try to, but let me give you a flavor as the article finishes. This is how the article finishes. It's quoting 1969, I was 17, some of you weren't even born. 1969, Mick Jagger appears on the stage in Hyde Park, wearing a frilly dress over his jeans. I don't know if you remember that. He looked absolutely ridiculous.

And everybody knew that he did, and there was a wholesale reaction to it in the British press. What is this fellow doing? This is absurd. This article, 2013 May 2013 says, technology says, listen, in the world of music and in the world of the arts, this frontier was being pushed back successfully 40 years ago.

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