bad advice

Sometimes I get worried at the amount of power that men and women have, especially men and women who don’t honor, or in fact act against, the word of God. It’s easy to fall prey to the idea that the thing we need to advance God’s kingdom is worldly power.

That’s why it’s comforting to know that God isn’t a bit worried by these people. In fact, there are a lot of ways he manipulates even those who claim to oppose him. One of those ways is to sabotage them with bad advice. He did it to Absalom when he claimed the throne of David, and he did it to King Xerxes. Faced with the defiance of his wife the queen, look who he went to, in Esther 1:13-14:

“Since it was customary for the king to consult experts in matters of law and justice, he spoke with the wise men who understood the times and were closest to the king—Karshena, Shethar, Admatha, Tarshish, Meres, Marsena and Memukan, the seven nobles of Persia and Media who had special access to the king and were highest in the kingdom.”

This hand-picked group of the smartest people in the whole kingdom gave him really bad advice. As a result, he banished Vashti and picked a young Jewess to be queen. No way that was an upgrade in terms of statecraft and palace protocol.

But God wanted Esther in the palace, because he knew what was coming. A genocidal plot was afoot, and God’s people had no friends among the powerful in that land. We’re going to see, as we read through Esther, that God doesn’t need a king, or even a prince or a knight, to stop evil planned at the highest levels. All he needs is a teenage girl.

That’s comforting as I consider who rules nations and has control of nukes, or who runs businesses and leads or teaches in our universities. There isn’t enough power in this world to prevent the smallest part of God’s will from coming to pass.