Women of the Bible: Esther understood there is no authority except from God
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Submission to authority is perhaps the least popular concept in America today.
Students are more ready to believe in a man rising from the dead than they are to believe that God wants them to actually submit to the authority of the teacher who doesn't respect them back. You should see the looks on their faces. Actually, you can. Go to the mirror and say, 'I will pray for, respect and even submit to the authority of the president elected next month, even if he or she is not the person I voted for.' I'll bet you make the exact same face. But what do you expect from a country born from rebellion? It's part of our DNA.
My own relationship with authority is not something I ever spent much time thinking about until I had some. First, I became a husband. Then I became a ministry leader. Then I became a father. Then I became a pastor. All the while, I remained accountable to someone else's authority. I had multiple jobs and therefore multiple bosses. I had the leaders in my church. There's always God himself. Someone once said we should 'Treat others the same way you want them to treat you' (Luke 6:31). Having authority myself, I finally understood why submitting to it is so important.
Then I found Esther.
The book of Esther recounts a gripping political story with a use of dramatic irony could even teach Shakespeare a thing or two. In short, through a series of apparent coincidences, it falls to the king's new wife — a young Jew — to persuade the king to reverse his irreversible decree that all the Jews living in the Persian Empire should die.
Often, Bible teachers like to focus on God's providence when they teach the book of Esther, and it is indeed an important theme in the story of Esther. Others focus on themes like the fate of the wicked or the importance of faith or the courage to speak up for what's right. These are all good themes to explore in Esther's story, but we rarely focus on another theme because we hate it: submission to authority.
But at every turn of the story, we see some aspect of the righteous person's relationship with human authority explored. The king divorced his queen because he abused his authority and she rebelled against it. Esther — heretofore called Hadassah — was taken from her home against her will into the service of the king to potentially become his wife. She obeyed her uncle — who raised her — by only using her Persian name and keeping her ethnicity a secret. She submitted to the king's authority by respecting and treating his steward well to such a degree that she 'found favor with him' (Esther 2:9). She seems to have worked hard to win the approval of the king, having been ordered to do so, because of her submission to authority — even pagan, ungodly authority. Mordecai acts to save the life of the king who basically kidnapped his niece because of submission to authority. But Mordecai later rejected Haman's authority by refusing to bow to him because it is an act of submission reserved for God alone. Then Esther struggles to reconcile Mordecai's authority in her life with that of the king when Mordecai's instructions contradict the king's standing rules about etiquette in court. Even the climactic confrontation with the story's main antagonist was done in submission to authority. Esther did not accuse Haman — whose authority exceeded Esther's before Chapter 7 — until after the king effectively elevated Esther to at least an equal position when he promised to grant her request 'even to half of the kingdom' (Esther 7:2).
To be sure, the circumstances of the Book of Esther would not have worked out without God's divine providence and his sovereign protection of his covenant people Israel. Mordecai understood this when he said, 'If you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place' (Esther 4:14). But Esther's part depended on her understanding of and submission to authority. She accomplished more by carefully submitting to all the authority figures in her life — the good and the bad — than she ever could have achieved through rebellion and contention. As the proverbial wisdom goes, she caught more flies with honey than with vinegar. As biblical wisdom goes, she understood that 'Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God' (Romans 13:1).