The Feast of Purim Part 1 | David Jeremiah 2023

The book of Esther ends with a feast of celebration, so it’s only fitting that our series on Esther end with a healthy serving of that feast. Dr. David Jeremiah explains the traditions and details that are involved, and how they remind us of God’s faithfulness to His people.
Dear Lord,
Today…….I am asking all my prayer warriors to say a prayer that may help others. So many people are hurting right now. Many are struggling with finances and need jobs. Some are facing foreclosure and don’t even know how they are going to make it from week to week.. Many are lonely. . Many are heartbroken. . Many are facing sickness and health is fading. . Some are dealing with difficult family members. Many have lost HOPE.. Tonight, let us put our prayers and faith together decree and declare breakthrough over our families. Financial miracles WILL take place. Jobs WILL be found. Our Bodies WILL be made whole & sickness WILL flee. Marriages and relationships WILL be restored. Family members WILL find Jesus. Heartbreaks WILL be healed. JOY WILL be restored and HOPE WILL be found. In Jesus Name. Amen!!!!!! Keep God First…….

Generic.
Modern celebrations are certainly a far cry from ancient Hebrew feast days.
They were as rich in meaning as they were in food and festivity. Today.
On Turning point, Dr David Jeremiah shares from the book of Esther, the origin of one Jewish feast day that’s still observed even now from his series Esther for such a time as this.
Here’s David to introduce today’s message. The Feast of pure. Well, thank you for joining us friends.
We are down at the very end of our lessons from Esther today and tomorrow and we’ll be finished.
Uh on Thursday, we begin a new series called the God. You may not know on the attributes of God.
But let me just say to you, you know, turning point runs kind of in a routine where every month we have uh oftentimes a new study from the Word of God, uh always a new resource and new opportunities for you to add to your uh Bible library.
I wanna just say uh we have a few days left in the month of March for you to get your study guide for the Book of Esther and the CD package that goes with it for your own personal review or to teach and share with others.
Uh One of the things we’ve been encouraging people to do is to get study guides for the people in their small group.
The facilitator can get the CD package and listen to the lesson before uh they meet each week and have a wonderful study in God’s Word.
The study guides are built for that and will help you immensely to keep your focus on the scripture.
So um the Esther series is now front and center. Don’t miss the opportunity.
We also want to say the similar thing about the resource for the month, which is the book by Os Hawkins, the Promise Code 40 Bible promises, every believer should claim this beautiful hardback gift book is available for a gift of any size during the month of March.
But when March goes away, this offer goes away and we’ll have a new one for the month of April.
So I just want you to know your time to deal with these things is uh not as long as it was yesterday or when we started, we want you to take advantage of the opportunity we provide during the month of March.
Well, let’s get started with the first lesson on the Feast of Purum from Esther chapter nine.
If you have your Bibles, I want you to turn with me to the ninth chapter of the book of Esther.
And I want to read beginning at the 17th verse of the 19th chapter.
I’m not going to read the entire chapter, but I just want to read two or three verses that begin this section of God’s Word Esther chapter nine verse 17 on the 13th day of the month, Adare, on the 14th day of the sa rested day and made it a day of feasting and gladness.
But the Jews that were at Shushan assembled together on the 13th day thereof and on the 14th day thereof.
And on the 15th day of the same, and they rested and made it a day of feasting and gladness.
Therefore, the Jews of the village that dwelt in the un walled towns made the 14th day of the month of dare a day of gladness and feasting and a good day and of sending portions one to another.
And Mordecai wrote these things and sent letters to all the Jews that were in all the provinces of the king of Haas, both *** and far to establish this among them that they should keep the 14th day of the month, Adair and the 15th day of the same yearly as the days where the Jews rested from their enemies.
And the month which was turned into them from sorrow to joy and from mourning into a good day that they should make them days of feasting and joy and of sending portions one to another and gifts to the poor and the Jews undertook to do as they had begun.
And as Mordecai had written unto them, the book of Esther is a book about Anti Semitism.
I doubt if most of you were aware of that when we opened the book the first time that this is an Old Testament book.
That is literally a classic illustration of the anti Semitism that has been a part of Jewish history since its very beginning.
And we have learned as we have studied this book together that anti Semitism is a path that always leads to the destruction, not of the Jews, but of the perpetrators of anti Semitism.
The Heymans of history and the s of this very hour are many look back through history and others who were like Hayman men like a man that we don’t know very much about because the story of his life is in between the Old and the New Testament, but his name was Anias Epiphanes, literally known as The Mad Man.
What he did is beyond description, killing pigs and splattering the blood all over the synagogues of his day, taking portions of pig and stuffing it down the throats of the Jewish priests and rabbis taking a pig into the holy of Holies of the temple and sacrificing it on a Jewish altar.
And Tyus the Mad Man killed so many Jews in the Inter Testament period.
And of course, there has been Hitler and Nasser and Khoi and many others who have set out to curse Israel and curse God who is the God of Israel.
But the interesting thing about anti Semitism is that the only thing that ever is left when the Anti Semites are finished with their work is a new feast of celebration for the Jews.
Have you noticed that when Farrell got done, they had the Passover and they celebrated every year when an epiphanies got done, they had Hanukkah and they celebrated as their Christmas every year when Hitler was finished, the Nation of Israel was established as an entity in 1948.
And now every year they have a day of celebration for their independence.
And when Haman got finished with his treacherous acts, a brand new feast was inaugurated by the Jews called the Feast of P.
That’s what we’re going to talk about just briefly so that you understand what that feast is all about.
Now, the feast of P has to be understood in the significant history of this great book, Anti Semitism is based about the hatred of one group of people for the Jews.
In the book of Esther, Anti Semitism resides in two people, two key personalities in the book, a man by the name of Mordecai, who was a strong Hebrew and who was a distinguished son of Kish, a Benj according to Esther 25, from the exact same lineage as King Saul as we know.
And the other man in the story is a man by the name of Haman and Esther three verse one says Haman was, if you remember he was an, a, a descendant of a gag, the king of the Amala.
And in these two men is the history and the plot of the book of Esther.
And in these two men is the whole anti Semitic war that goes on from chapter one all the way through to the end of this book.
You see the Akis during Saul’s reign, back in first Samuel 15 were descendants of Ale, the grandson of Esau and they were bitter enemies of Israel.
I’ve mentioned before that they carried on the ancient strife that was resident between Jacob and Esau, between Israel and Esau and in the day of Moses and of Joshua, the Amala Ks attacked the Israelites when they were unarmed as they passed through the Sinai desert and the Lord never forgot what the Amala Ks had done and the Lord put a curse on them to block them out from remembrance under heaven, Deuteronomy 25 19.
And Saul had an opportunity back under the leadership of Samuel, the prophet to carry out that curse and to have the Malachite and done with once and for all, but he was disobedient.
And you remember that whole story of first Samuel 15 where Samuel came and said, if you finished what God has told you to do and he said the job is done.
And Samuel said, well, what mean then the bleeding of the sheep in mine ears.
And we found out when we studied that, that God considers incomplete obedience as disobedience.
And the result of Saul’s incomplete obedience was that descendants of a gag, the king were allowed to live.
And Haman was one of those descendants who continued to live until the time of Esther.
And now in the book of Esther, he plays out his anger toward Mordecai who was a descendant of Saul’s family.
And so we have Mordecai and Haman, literally two men living out in the platform of Old Testament history.
The continued war between Jacob and Esau literally the war between good and evil.
And as we have studied this book, you know that the book is a marvelous drama of how all of that had happened.
Back in the first chapter, we learned how the queen of Persia, a woman by the name of Vashti was summoned one day by her drunken husband to appear before all of his friends who had come in for a great palace party.
And she was supposed to display her beauty.
But as a Persian woman of dignity, she knew that to be unveiled in the presence of strangers was to deny her own reputation and she refused to do it and she was insubordinate, that was not a wise move on her part in terms of her future.
And when it was learned that she had been insubordinate to her husband, some of a ha or friends felt like if they didn’t deal with that, they would have massive massive rebellion in that male dominated society.
So Vashti was deposed, which means she lost her place as queen. She was out done finished over.
Now, that’s all chapter one. And that’s very important for us to know because if she hadn’t been deposed, there would have been no place for Esther.
When you come to chapter two, Esther is put into a contest given preferential treatment.
And through Mordecai, who was positioned in a very wonderful way, Esther comes before the king, she is inaugurated as the new queen.
She is placed in a position of great responsibility and she is now one of the many women to whom Xerxes the of Persia is related.
She was the only Jewish in the group, but nobody knew she was a Jewish and that wasn’t revealed until much later in the second chapter.
In the last part of the chapter, we learned that there was a very interesting incident that was inserted.
And at the time, we didn’t know why it was there.
But we found out later that there had been some intrigue in the court.
If you remember there had been some who had tried to usurp a coup over a Haas and Mordecai heard about it and he conveyed it to Esther and Esther went to the king and said, hey, you got a couple of guys in your chamberlains who are out after your head, you better deal with them and the king dealt with him and his life was spared.
And you don’t hear anything more about that.
It’s kind of stored in the book put in the computer and written in the chronicles by the way.
And you come to the third chapter and you discover that there has introduced a man into this story who is appointed as the prime Minister of Persia, a man by the name of Haman.
He weasel his way into the liking of the king and he is given major, major power and this power has been given to him in such a way that he is to be treated as a prince or as a God.
And folks are to bow down before him and everybody does except one little Jew by the name of Mordecai who won’t bow down before him.
And it’s just driving Haman crazy. He cannot stand the fact that Mordecai won’t bow down before him.
He is so overwhelmed by his jealousy and by his anger.
And so he finally decides that he will deal with Mordecai this Jew.
But in the process decides that if he’s going to deal with Mordecai, a Jew, and if Mordecai won’t bow down before him, there are probably other Jews who won’t bow down before him either.
So if he’s going to get one, he might as well get them all.
And so he gets into this whole thing to destroy all the Jews in Persia, determining to annihilate the Jewish people.
Haman casts lots to gain direction from the Persian gods so that he will know what will be the best date for the annihilation of the Jews.
Hang on to that fact, the casting of lots.
And Haman went to the king as you know, and he petitioned the king to obtain all of the authorization for his edict.
And as he presented his case, Haman outlined his solution, that he would have a massive extermination process go on throughout Persia and all of the Jews would be exterminated.
And in the process, the king would gain 10,000 talents of gold or more than 10 million ounces of silver if we use it that way in the royal treasury.
And of course, as we learned, the king had just come back from a very expensive war with the Greeks.
His treasury was somewhat depleted. And so the thought of getting all that money into his treasury blinded him to what was really going on and don’t forget he did not know that his favorite queen was a Jew.
And so the word went out to all the princes and to all of the provinces that all the Jews, both young and old Children and women in one day on the 13th day of the 12th month, which is the month of a dare to take the property of them for spoil.
3 13, a decree was made to exterminate the Jews.
Well, in chapters four and five of this book, we learned that Mordecai learned about this and he went to Esther and he told Esther that she was placed in this position of prominence within the Persian government and that God had put her there in the terms of the text for such a time as this.
And Mordecai said, Esther, you’re going to have to go before King as you were, you’re going to have to go before Xerxes and you’re going to have to plead the cause of our people.
And Esther was terrified by the thought because she had not been with the king for 30 days and to go before the king without being invited was sure death and she was not interested in dying.
Mordecai said, if you don’t go before the king and petition for our people, you can be dead.
Sure you’re not going to live long anyway.
Because if we don’t get this edict turned over and turned around, all of the Jews in the kingdom are going to die.
And when they find out you’re a Jewish, you’re dead, too, asked them to pray and they fasted and she decided that she would risk it.
And as you know, she went into the inner court of the king hopeful that the king would extend the se to her and allow her to come and make a petition, which of course he did.
And when she got before the king, what a sly and cunning woman.
She was, the king asked her what she wanted and she was a wise and very, very cunning woman.
She didn’t tell the king what she wanted.
When he asked her the first time, she said, in essence, what I’d really like is for you to come to a banquet with me tomorrow that I shall prepare both for you and for Haman.
You are prime minister, of course.
And when they got to the banquet, the king said, Esther, what do you want?
And Esther said, well, what I’d really like is for you to come to another banquet tomorrow.
At which time I will tell you what I want.
And we don’t understand these two banquets until we read the 6th and 7th chapter.
And we discovered that there was a very important purpose that probably Esther didn’t even know about.
And that is the night between the two banquets, we had that whole session on divine insomnia. Remember?
And King went back to his palace on that night and tried to sleep, but he couldn’t sleep.
And so he called one of his chamberlains and he said, go get the chronicles and bring them and read them to me.
Now, I think I said when we went through that session, that I thought the reason he did that was because there’s nothing more boring than reading the chronicles.
And maybe it would have an effect of putting you to sleep.
But I’ve since revised my opinion about that.
I think the king wanted to read the chronicles because he thought written in the chronicles would be all of the marvelous things that he had done.
And he thought that would be a great boost for his ego.
So he wanted to read all of his great accomplishments.
And so the chronicles were brought and they began to read them to him.
And of course, you know, that takes us back to that little story that’s inserted without any meaning whatsoever.
As he was reading the chronicles, he read the record of how Mordecai had saved him by telling him through Esther of the coup that had been planned against his life.
And X asked one of his associates, has anything been done to reward the man who saved my life?
And they looked through the records and found out that nothing had been done.
And he said, well, we’ve got to reward this person, we’ve got to do something to reward the person Mordecai who saved my life.
And as he’s pondering this the next day, he looks in the outer court and he sees his prime minister who happens to be Haman.
Haman who hates Mordecai. And he brings him in and he begins to talk about this man who is very important to me.
And he says to Haman, what should be done for a man who I truly want to honor.
And of course, Haman egos being what they are thought that surely the king was talking about him.
And so he rolled out the red carpet for himself.
In fact, what he suggested should be done was overwhelming.
He said, let the royal apparel be brought which the king is accustomed to wear.
And the horse that the king ride at the pond and the crown royal, which is set upon his head and bring him on horse back through the street of the city and proclaim before him, Esther 68 and nine, Haman was setting up his own royal tour through the city.
And when he got all done saying this is what should be done to such a man.
The king said, ok, Haman, go get Mordecai and take him through the city.
That had to be the most awful moment that man ever knew, perhaps even more painful than when they hung him up on his own gallows for Mordecai was his hated enemy.
And now he has to walk through the city saying hail Mordecai, hail Mordecai.
Oh, does the Lord have a sense of humor or not?
Well, at the second banquet, when the king finally asks Esther, what do you want?
Esther pleads for her people?
And she says to a haus that she and her people are in danger.
And that’s the first time that a Hazus knew that Esther was a Jewish.
And now he realizes that what has been signed in decree by Haman with the signet ring that Hau gave him has not only jeopardized all the Jewish people of the entire Persian kingdom, but has jeopardized his own wife, whom he loves.
And he is at a loss to know what to do.
And so he says to Esther, who is the person who is responsible for this.
And I always think about Nathan the prophet.
When I come to this point, you remember Nathan, when he confronted David, he stuck his bony finger in David’s nose and said, thou art the man.
Well, I think Esther turned at that second banquet and pointed to Haman and he said, there is the enemy of the Jews who is trying to kill all of us.
And I just love the drama of this story because it was such an awesome moment that king of Ha you didn’t know what to do.
He was beside himself in the scriptures as he got up and he walked out into the night air and he was trying to get control of his emotions.
He was so upset and so angry.
And as he’s out there in the night air, Haman knows this is his last shot at same in his own neck.
And so he begins to plead with Esther and he goes and he begins to talk to her and plead for his own life.
And Esther was stretched out on the couch having eaten the dinner.
She was in the normal position for a person who was eating a magnificent dinner.
She was on the couch and Haman went over and began to beg her.
And he got very involved and very much into his pleading for his life and literally began to get on the couch with Esther.
And just at that moment, King of Ha walks back in the room and he says, hey, isn’t it enough that you’re trying to get my wife killed?
And now you’re trying to force her or rape her right in my own house.
And that was it for Haman.
I mean, he was dead and the gallows that he had constructed the day before on which he had hoped to hang Mordecai became the death place for his own body and they hung him up 75 ft high for everybody to see that solved the problem of Haman.
But that didn’t solve the problem of the decree that had gone out for the Jews.
And so Mordecai is now elevated to even more power. Esther is given all of Haman’s property.
Mordecai is given the opportunity now to overturn the decree.
Well, not really overturn it but to sign a new decree that superseded the old one because you know how the law the meads and Persians is can’t change anything that’s been written.
So Mordecai and Esther put forth a new decree and that decree goes out to all the provinces that on the day when the Jews were supposed to be exterminated, they could defend themselves and did they defend themselves?
We learned that they put forth such an overwhelming attack upon the Anti Semites of the Persian Empire that the nationals who joined with them.
And the Jewish people of that day killed 75,000 Persians in two days.
And the enemies of the Jews were put to rest and the Jews were allowed to live and Esther kept her life and once again, God overturned the efforts of those who tried to destroy his people.
Remember, we are learning that God had promised to Abraham back in the 12th chapter of Genesis.
I will bless those that bless you and curse those, that curse you.
The only verses I know in the Bible that dictate national policy are those verses.
And I tell you my friends, if we don’t listen to those verses, we will be like Haman and all of the others before him who have paid a dear price to be on the wrong side of God’s people.
Israel. Amen. You know, I’ve been telling you that we are going to go to Israel in March of next year.
And one of the reasons I go to Israel is because when we go and we take a huge number of people with us, we bless Israel and that is a wonderful thing for us to do.
And hopefully we can continue to do it for many more years.
We’ll get you information about that tour as soon as we have it ourselves, but it’s coming.
And yes, we are, we’re going back to Israel in March, but before then we’re going to Alaska in July and I hope you can go with us July 15th to the 22nd.
We will be with James Brown and Tony Dungy from CBS Sports who are coming along to be a part of the cruise and they’re going to take a night and talk with my son Daniel from the NFL Network.
We’ll have um Michael Sanchez and Yuri Vega along with other musicians for times of great worship.
I’ll be teaching from the scripture.
We will have a very good crowd of people who have come to enjoy Alaska and to study the word of God.
I hope you’ll be among them. Please don’t wait till the last moment.
I believe this cruise will close out before we get too much further down the road.
So I encourage you to get your reservations in as soon as possible.
Join us tomorrow for part two of the Feast of Pure right here on Turning Point.
For more information on Dr Jeremiah’s series Esther.
For such a time as this. Please visit our website there.
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Join us tomorrow as we conclude Esther for such a time as this on turning point with Dr David Jeremiah.