| It was not so in these days and the nation of Israel was preserved from His enemies because it was in the temporary phase of a special flesh revelation to prepare the world for the universal revelation. Today we have no enemies, for we now know everyone to be a form of God. We are all gods. That is why our human longing is for completion. We want to be completed, fulfilled, perfected, effective. We are human expressions of the divine Person. We may be distorted, prodigal sons, but we tend to major on the prodigal instead of the Son. We have no enemies when we see through everyone to the real person who is a son seeking to find the answer and thinking he will find it in self-distortion. Christ, representing the human race, took the whole distortion into death – that spirit of error which had captured humanity. Christ died for sin and to sin and we die to sins and to sin in Him. We participate in what He did for us and what He is now in us because faith always participates in that to which it attaches itself. We participate in that to which we are inwardly attached because inwardly we are universals, ground in our inner selves to Him in our fourth dimensional risen relationship. Now we are the human negatives expressing the positive to whom we have become re-attached. It is the same as the branch expressing the vine, the same as the body expressing its head. We become God expressers and because God is love, we become love expressers. But Israel did not know these things in these days. When they needed power they did not have it because they were inwardly attached to self interest, self resources, and self sufficiencies. It is easy to relate ourselves to some ally which is visible, not realizing it is just some empty thing which will be like a spear through your hand if you lean on it. When Israel’s leaders turned away to these allies, they found it was like a spear through their hand. What they relied on turned around and seized them. The Israelites who began to rely on the allies around them soon found that they became the captives of Nebuchadnezzar and then were an exiled nation. There were always some who knew the Living God and light shined here and there among them, but they were exiles. They were the possessions of Persia, a great world kingdom. They were exiles as a nation under this outer power until there could be a means by which God’s power could be manifested in delivering them. The king of this great nation was Ahasuerus, whose other name was Xerxes. The kingdom stretched all the way from India, through Babylon, over to Ethiopia and included the Promised Land. Though the Jews were exiles, they were not bondsmen in the same sense as the Egyptians had made them. Still, they had all the homesickness that an exile will have, especially when your home is the Promised Land and should be preserved as a free nation, delivered from her enemies as God had promised. This homesickness is expressed in Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song… How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” This great kingdom, and its king, was tremendously luxurious and full of self-display in ways we do not admire today. Once the king put on a magnificent feast which lasted 180 days. He had 127 provinces and he called these leaders together to this great feast. On the last two or three days of the feast he put on a special citywide feast in the palace grounds with all kinds of hangings of fine linen, purple and green, hung on silver rings on marble pillars. This was the feast to his own people, in the capital Shushan, which is like Washington. It was attended by many of the people who had some official attachment to this city which was the center of his empire. |
Esther
“We have been looking, in these sessions, to see how God manifests Himself in His human agencies, which are God in human form. In Old Testament days, when the time had not yet come for His final revelation of who He truly is – love and nothing else – He manifested Himself in holiness together with His presence in prosperity and mercy by which those who obeyed and trusted Him in a personal or national way could see the kind of Living God that He is. These men and women of the Old Testament were great because, in different ways, they were manifestors of the Living God in His greatness.
We now center our attention on one man, less known by name, Mordecai, the foster father of Esther. The book is given the title of Esther. It should have been given the title of Mordecai. Esther was wonderful, but God through Mordecai was more wonderful. However, that is only a detail.
The Jewish nation was going through one of their periods of seemingly external desertion by God. Actually it was the other way around because they had turned their backs on Him and sought earthly alliances, even to the point of having other gods. God’s power is always in operation but if we are utilizing another power we are linking our faith and cooperation to some apparently strong, but really weak, human resources. Then God leaves us in the power of those human resources until, once again, He comes through in deliverance when those concerned relate themselves back to Him in His love and power, which in those days were particularly centered on His own people.
God’s people today are universal people – the whole world is His people today, and all are conscious sons who have consciously received Jesus. In those days He had a special nation to whom He gave His first primary revelations of law and grace, a preparation by means of which a nation of the flesh was to be replaced by the nation of the Spirit. God’s Holy Nation today is people with Himself within them, the human spirit indwelt by the divine Spirit, as human manifestations of Him. That’s the Holy Nation!”