You might already have picked up that I am fond of studying the meaning of words. It is with some embarrassment that I have to admit that I made a mistake with the origin of a word I referred to in a previous Day Share. It is the word 'providence.' [See Day Share entitled God's Providence * (Psalms) 15/04/2020] I did not get it totally wrong but I did not look up the origin of the word "providence" and simply took it to mean the provision which God makes for His people. In other words, I was looking at it from the word 'providence' as associated with the word 'provide.' There is a link between the two words but both have a different root which I did not realise. They both come from two Latin words - I spent 6 years at school studying Latin so I should have known this - the words are 'pro' = 'before' and 'video' meaning 'I see.' So the real meaning of providence is that God sees the events of the future and takes action to accomplish His will. There is a link with the activity associated with His foresight or foreknowledge and what he provides for us.
If all this is a bit confusing, can I add an example which I talked about in the Day Share in 2020. In Psalm 147 there are examples of what a gracious and beneficent God provides for His own people - healing for emotional and psychological wounds, justice, protection, rain!, snow!, extreme weather, restitution and peace. But the important point is that God knows in advance what His people would need and when they would need it. It is because He is able to see the future before it happens that He is able to provide what His people need. Only God is provident because only God knows the future and so we can trust a God who is provident - seeing what is going to happen before it happens and making the necessary provision for that event.
Although the name of God is not mentioned and there are no recorded miracles in the book of Esther, here are some examples of God's providence. It is clear that He is in control even though his power is invisible to those Persians living in Shushan.
God planned for King Xerxes to be so drunk that he forgot the usual etiquette and protocol and commanded his wife Vashti to flaunt herself before his inebriated and lustful male guests.
The King's decision to repudiate Vashti was not an accident - it was part of God's providential plan for His people.
King Xerxes choice of a Jewess was also part of the divine plan - some scholars have pointed out that Persian rulers chose their wives from respectable aristocratic families - and it would have been unlikely for Esther to be chosen as she did not qualify. But God made Xerxes overthrow tradition and custom and choose a young beautiful Jewess.
God placed Mordecai (Esther's uncle) in a place of influence in the palace - even though he was vulnerable to criticism and hatred from those who hated the Jews. He is described as 'sitting at the king's gate' (See Esther 2:19,21). This would suggest that Mordecai was employed as a royal servant in the King's palace.
God allowed Haman to gain power and influence over the King and to make plans to wipe out the people of God who were in captivity in Persia (previously Babylon).
In chapter 6 of the book of Esther, there is the climax of the drama and it looks as if Esther's uncle Mordecai is about to be hanged. The gallows are prepared and Haman has royal authority to exterminate the Jews in Persia. But the tables are turned due to God's intervention and Haman is hanged and Mordecai is promoted to a position of power in the Persian empire.
God caused Xerxes (Ahasuerus) to have a sleepless night and to cope with his insomnia, he sends for the palace chronicles to give him some reading matter. This would have been a diary account of events in the palace. As he reads, he discovers that there was an incident when Mordecai acted to preserve the King and he had not been rewarded for his actions. The timing of this is all in God's providence. Xerxes decides to ensure that Mordecai is given a just reward for saving the King's life just at a time when all the Jews, including Mordecai are in extreme danger due to the scheming of Haman who hated the Jews.
Esther's intervention when she was following the advice from her uncle was also guided by divine providence. King Xerxes was unpredictable - he had made an instant decision to punish his previous wife and to banish her or maybe worse. He had made an impulsive decision to grant Haman the authority to exterminate the Jews. But God ensured that when Esther presented herself before the King, she was greeted with affection and welcome and not with a sudden fit of anger. He agrees to her plan for a banquet. All of this in the provident will of the God who is not once mentioned in the text of the book of Esther.
Sidlow Baxter highlights the overarching message of the book of Esther:
the central spiritual message of the book, namely, that amid the shadows God stands, keeping watch upon His own. He sees and knows and cares for His own. He may be out of their sight: but they are never out of His sight. “He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.” [Baxter, J. Sidlow. Baxter's Explore the Book (p. 530). Zondervan Academic. Kindle Edition.]
Our God is still the same. He sometimes acts miraculously and his intervention defies the scientific laws or the natural course of events. In the book of Esther there are no such miracles in the normal sense of the word. There is no water gushing from a rock or 5,000 plus fed with five loaves and two fishes. There is no raising of a dead corpse to life again. But in the ordinary every day history of the palace of Shushan, our God is clearly at work preserving and protecting His own people. Have there been times in your life and mine when we have known the hand of God in a providential way even though others did not recognise or acknowledge His presence or His intervention? I can think of many such incidents without a great deal of effort - sometimes I did not realise His presence at the time and it was not until later that I could see the hand that guided in a providential way.
I also find it telling that the Bible does not comment in detail nor judge Esther for what it would have meant for her duties to be one of many 'wives' in the king's harem. The writer focuses on her great achievement of rescue and not on the petty moralities that we often get distracted by.