For Such A Time As This

Okay, so I was going to write something on shame since it’s been one of the things God has been leading me through these days, but then He took me one step further. Many of us struggle with shame for guilt that was once ours, sin that He has paid for on our behalf, but also a fair number of us carry shame for a guilt that was never ours to begin with. The Enemy is the “acuser of the brethren,” and those accusations are part of what divides the Body of Christ and assaults its members. A man of two minds is unstable in all his ways, and yet somehow we think we can be full of grace and His redemption and continue to carry and assign guilt where it does not belong. We are told that when one part of the Body suffers, all suffer together, and we believe it and teach it when it comes to “clean” suffering that is easy to explain—an illness, a death—suffering that does not involve sin. Once sin is involved, we are divided on the issue. We become like Jesus’ deciples when they asked Him why the man was born blind, “Was it his sin or that of his parents?” Essentially, they had fallen into the same stumbling block that often trips us today, the belief that not just sin, but GUILT, is the reason behind our pain.

This question was recently presented between friends, and it made me delve deeper with Him for answers. The question was if you are being taken advantage of under threat (the example in this case was a missionary threatened with deportation if he didn’t pay a bribe), is there guilt in not resisting? The bible forbids us from receiving a bribe, but it doesn’t say anything about not PAYING one. If you simply pay the price demanded of you in order to avoid the threat held over your head, are you an “accessory to sin”? Is there guilt that is now YOURS, because you have facilitated another’s sin? I took it one step further. Having several good friends that have suffered from various forms of abuse, having suffered years of verbal abuse myself, I asked if you are abused, and you do not resist because of a threat, suspected threat, or fear that the cost of that resistance will be greater, are you an accessory to sin? Do you carry your own guilt for letting it happen? Are you called upon to repent for facilitating the sin of your abuser?

A common passage from the bible came to mind a couple of days later, and with it, an entire story, an entire life—the answer to my question: Ester. The apostle Paul berated one of the churches he wrote to for continuing a diet of spiritual “milk” when they were ready to mature to the meat of the truth. So I’m not going to pull my punches in this account of biblical history. There are some subjects, some sins, some areas of suffering that makes us uncomfortable, so too often we simply don’t look too close; we soften them, clean them up, and then present them G-rated. Life isn’t G-rated, and fortunately for those of us with an intimate understanding of that, neither is the Bible.

The King of Persia had sent away his wife, because she refused to perform before his drunken buddies. Then, in want of a wife to replace her, he ordered that all of the virgins in his kingdom be rounded up and undergo a year of treatments to prepare them for him. He would take one per night until he came across one that caught his interest more than any of the others—the others not to be called upon again unless he “asked for them by name.” So the young women of the entire kingdom were gathered into his harem and forced to submit to the greatest, legalized, forced sexual assault in biblical record. There—I said it. This wasn’t the biblical story of Cinderella, minus the mice and a Fairy Godmother. We’re not in elementary school anymore. We can stop calling it “a beauty contest.”

Ester, or Hadassah I should say, was one of these young women. We are taught as children that she “wanted to win the beauty contest,” but if we look at this through adult eyes . . . it is much more complex than that. She was young, orphaned, and God-fearing. She was kidnapped from Mordecai, her only family, and forced into a year of preparation leading up to prostitution. According to her faith, the life she was being forced into was serious sin. She was to sleep with a pagan king. If he did not choose her, she would remain in his harem. If he did choose her, she would be forced to marry someone outside of her faith, also forbidden by God. There wasn’t a “lesser evil” to choose. We see her enter her year of preparation and find favor with those above her. She finally comes to the king’s bedroom and finds favor there. Nothing about that year leading up to that climactic night suggests that she resisted. Honestly, there is something that turns in my stomach to fully and completely acknowledge that. Something horrifying on her behalf, something disturbing at the same time. The question now, after laying it all out on the table, is this—was she in sin to not put her foot down clear at the beginning and refuse? For a man that opens this story with the act of sending his wife away for denying him and then later went on to sign the death degree of an entire race within his kingdom for suspected disobedience, I think it is fair to say that the consequences for her refusal would have been severe, to say the least.

“Stop looking at your life with regret and instead look at it all—all of it—as what brought you to where you are right now,” a friend of mine told me after we’d talked about some of the hard things I was trying to come to terms with. “Get used to it,” another friend jokingly said when I admitted I was emotionally tired from talking so many friends through pains I had experienced. “God’s not going to bring you through so much and then not use you.” I can just picture Mordecai and Ester having that conversation any of the times they spoke at the gate. I can picture them asking how God could allow this to happen to her, why He had allowed it, what good could possibly come from that trauma and suffering. I can picture the line of scripture, which answered my question by bringing this story to mind, coming on the heels of an ongoing conversation that scripture doesn’t record, “It could be that you have come to the palace for such a time as this.”

We see that line as full of inspiration, full of valor, an opportunity to speak up, to resist evil, a call to act out courageously . . . but there is even more to THAT than meets the eye. What had the palace been at the time that Ester was taken? It had been the location where her abuse was to take place. It was the location where she had submitted to one of the evils God abhores. She had not resisted the sin that had taken place with her in that palace. She had not resisted the abuse done against her. Mordecai was so sure that her life there had been so perfectly planned that he told her that even if she did not rise up as an advocate for her people, God would “rise up another.” Her time to resist evil would come when she spoke up to the king to spare her people’s lives, risking her own in the process—but she arrived at that moment, because she had submitted to sin and abuse without resistance. I guess we could say that God works all things together for good—that even in her sin of passive acceptance, her facilitating the king’s sexual immorality, her allowing herself to become an “accessory to sin,” He still brought good through her. The question is presented again—was her lack of resistance sin? Did Ester carry rightful guilt for the sin she allowed to happen to her, by her?

I find the answer to the question several books later in the gospels where Jesus pays the price for the sin the king of Persia committed against Ester. It says of Jesus that He did not resist. “Like a lamb, He opened not His mouth.” Jesus took it one step further than Ester. He had a power that no one else that has suffered abuse had at the time of their suffering—He could have stopped it. Plenty of times we wonder what would have happened if we had stood up for ourselves. Could we have stopped it if we had tried harder? Jesus could have. He even endured insults and mockery because of it--“If you are the Son of God, why doesn’t He save you? Why don’t you call on the angels?” He could have, and yet He didn’t. He submitted to the abuse, the grievous sin done against Him. The only reason His sacrifice meant anything for us was that He was the spottless lamb the sacrificial system required—without blemish. If He had harbored any sin in Him, any guilt, His death could have only paid His own debt. For our faith to have any weight to tip the scales in our favor before God, Jesus had to be COMPLETELY innocent—and yet He submitted. He did not resist the sin done against Him. He allowed His abusers free reign, because He had determined that the threat of our bondage and eternal separation from God through sin to be more devastating than His present suffering. Is it sinful of us to not resist the sin done against us?

. . . was it sinful of Jesus?