When you find yourself in the middle of a predicament, a dilemma,

it is often hard to understand why exactly this trouble is happening. Often it's only in hindsight that we can see God's purposes.

Well, today on Truth For Life, we're discovering where to find comfort as we face fearful trials.

Alistair Begg is teaching from Esther, chapter 4. We're looking at verses 12 through 17, and as Alistair picks up, Mordecai is speaking to his cousin, Queen Esther.

You see what Mordecai is saying here? It seems to me that you're the person in the place for now, and I'm urging you to do something.

But don't think for a minute that God will not keep his promise to his people, to his covenant people that runs through the entire Old Testament. You need to understand that.

And then thirdly, who knows whether you've not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?

He doesn't say you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this, or I know the will of God. No, he says who knows?

And I like the fact that he says who knows, and I hope you do too. Why does he say who knows?

Because we can't know such things in advance. We only know them, looking back.

And the reason that the question is posed as it is posed is in part to teach us that lesson.

It really is too bad when some of us think that by using grandiose language about the will of God and our knowledge of the purpose of God, and what God has told us to do, and where God has told us to go, as if somehow or another.

This is an exemplification of a peculiar engagement that we enjoy with God when it may be nothing more than conjecture on our part.

If you had asked Joseph, for example, when he was stripped naked standing in the middle of the public square waiting for somebody to buy him, eventually purchased by Pautifer, if you had gone to him and said to him, hey, hey, Joseph, what's going on in what's going on?

What is God doing in your life? What do you think Joseph would have said? Who knows?

You see, it's only at the end through the rearview mirror when he finally discloses to his brothers, when he's able to look back down through the corner at a time, and to say, all the way, God has led me, all of these things, the good, the bad and the ugly, the bad choices, the wise choices.

You intended this, he says to his brothers, for evil, but God intended it for good. It's the same principle. That is what is being addressed, and that is what creates the dilemma for Esther herself.

What is happening is that she is confronted with a situation that is going to call for her to come clean about who she is, what she believes to whom she belongs.

So privately, she has an identity, publicly, she has an identity, and now she's going to have to determine, am I here or am I here?

Some of us are being confronted by that very same thing in our study of Esther. We've got a private little world, we believe certain things in our hearts, but there's no one in our office knows, there's no one in our street knows, there's no one around us knows.

Something will happen, someday something will happen that will cause you to have to say, this is who I am, and this is where I belong, and this is what I believe.

Who knows? But you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this. To this point, she's been passive. She's the girl that won the beauty pageant. She's the plaything of the king.

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