to the third chapter of the book of Esther, and we continue to read there the whole of this third chapter. After these things, K. King Ezeuerus promoted Haman, the son of Famedaathah, the Aggite, and advanced him and set his seat above all the princes who were with him. And all the king servants who were within the king's gate bowed and paid homage to Haman, or so the king had commanded concerning him, but Mordekai would not bow or pay homage. Then the king's servants who were within the king's gate said to Mordekai, why do you transgress the king's commandment? Now it happened when they spoke to him in daily and he would not listen to them that they told it to Haman to see whether Mordekai's words would stand. Or Mordekai had told them that he was a Jew. When Haman saw that Mordekai did not bow or pay him, Haman was filled with wrath, but he distained to lay hands on Mordekai alone for they had told him of the people of Mordekai. Instead, Haman sought to destroy all the Jews who were throughout the whole kingdom of Ezeuerus, the people of Mordekai. And in the first month, which is the month of Nisan, in the twelfth year of King Ezeuerus, they cast poor. That is the lot before Haman to determine the day and the month until it fell on the twelfth month, which is the month of Adder. Then Haman said to King Ezeuerus, there is a certain people scattered and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of your kingdom. Their laws are different from all other peoples and they do not keep the king's law. Therefore it is not fitting for the king to let them remain. If it pleases the king, let a decree be written that they be destroyed. And I will pay 10,000 talents of silver into the hands of those who do the work to bring it into the king's treasuries. So the king took his signadring from his hand and he gave it to Haman, the son of Haman Defer, the agai, the enemy of the Jews. And the king said to Haman, the money and the people are given to you to do withers seems good to you. And then the king's scribes were called on the 13th day of the first month and a decree was written according to all of Haman's commands, to the king's satirops, to the governors who were over each province, to the officials of all peoples, to every province according to its script and to every people in their language. In the name of King Ezeuerus it was written and sealed with the king's signadring and the letters were sent by Korea into all the king's provinces to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate all the Jews, with the young and old little children and women in one day, on the 13th day of the 12th month, which is the month of Adar, and to plunder their possessions. A coffee of the document was to be issued as law in every province being published for all people that they should be ready for that day. The Korea's went out hastened by the king's command and the decree was proclaimed in Shushan the Citadel and so the king and Haman sat down to drink but the city of Shushan was perplexed. Haman and may the Lord bless to our understanding this portion of his word this evening. The scripture which I would draw your attention is found here in the 5th and the 6th verses of this rich chapter. When Haman saw that Mordecai did not bow or pay him homage, Mordecai Haman was filled with wrath. One reason that has been given throughout the whole of history for rejecting Esther as a book of the Old Testament inspired by God is that there have been scholars who have argued consistently that it is pro-Jewish in all that it says, far from being anti-Semitic, it is pro-Semitic and as a consequence, being a Jewish book it ought not to be included in the canon of Holy Scripture that the Christian community ought to share. And so I've gone further than that and taken the latter portion of the book of Esther and said here we see the Jews being particularly Jewish, demanding vengeance upon their enemies and extracting as a consequence of their triumph death to their enemies. It seems to me that here you have a mark of the honesty and authenticity of God's revelation in that it speaks, even of things of which we are not proud into a history, but it also speaks of the reality of God and its people at their place in his purpose. In the character of Haman, the prince elevated to be prime minister over the great empire of Persia, and we see the growth of hatred. A hatred that was focused upon Mordekai who sat at the gate who was his enemy because the king had ordered that everyone should bow down when Haman passed by, but Mordekai refused because he said, I am a Jew and it is not given that we should bow and pay homage to any sayable Lord our God. In flexibly this man stood for his truth for the God who had spoken to him and said, thou shalt have no other God's with for me. I am a jealous God, worship me and me alone and as a consequence, Mordekai I have refused to give anything that approached worship to Haman the prince and the princess he passed by was furious. For here was one who refused to pay homage to him and to exalt in his worth and power. And what happened is that the hatred that he conjured for Mordekai, the loading that he felt for this man that alone stood against him built, not simply for him, but for anybody like him and so his hatred we are told grew such that he desired to destroy not only Mordekai but every Jew in the Persian Empire because the Jews stood for one truth and that was the God a learn is worthy of worship. And we see in him the progression of a hatred. A hatred that poisoned his mind, that directed him to the abuse of his power and ultimately was to lead him to try and destroy the whole of the Jewish race. Now Haman was a powerful prince. He was the king's own appointed leader over the nation. He deserved a degree of important recognition. But we see in this man lessons that touch us even as this whole chapter is devoted to the recognition of a single based reality in Haman's life that is a part of ours too. It points to the poisoning of our relationship and capacity to talk to God. Well, we look at this book. We look at these verses and we see first of all demonstrated in these two verses five and six. The fact of the power of human pride. When Mordekai did not bow down before him when Haman saw it, he was filled with wrath. Now what happened is that this powerful prince saw a simple gatekeeper, one who was the guardian of the doors into the palace who refused to pay him homage and he became so angry he wanted to kill not only this man, but anybody that was like him. And you see the pride, the feet inside of this man's heart and we see in this chapter certain truths about the nature of pride that led to destruction. The first thing we see about the reality of pride is this that it is always the result of an overestimating of our own importance and powers and positions and dignity. Haman was a great prince, he had been elevated to the highest, but he was not only great, he saw himself as the greatest of all. And when someone refused to see him as he saw himself, he purposed their destruction. When Mordekai did not see Haman as the greatest prince in the nation, then Haman determined he would destroy him. That is pride. It's a result always of an over-emphasis upon our own personalities and powers and importance and it is not restricted to Haman. The sad reality is that there is a part of Haman and a part of Haman sin in every one of us that produces devastating result and enormous impact upon our lives together. For every one of us is convinced about our own worth. The importance of what we say, the importance of who we are and the right estimate that others ought to have of us. And as a consequence, when they do not understand us to be as we see ourselves, then immediately we become offended and angry and we fall off. Oh, maybe not their destruction, but how can we overturn their minds? How can we belittle what they say? How can we set aside the things that they hold to be true because they contradict what we hold to be true because we know ourselves in some way to be the greatest on the best and pride is always internal because Haman did not immediately go round and say, I am ashamed, Mordakai. It didn't immediately develop this instant scowl whenever he saw him. We aren't told that he appeared to look as though he was contorted with rage and with anger indeed the opposite is true because he went into the king and he stood before the king and his face, his countenance, how he looked, did not demonstrate that he was particularly filled with loathing for this one man and this one people. He hid the fact of how angry, how he hated one who was not going to bow down and worship him. The fact is, our faces don't always tell the truth about who we are, sometimes they do, but pride is as much a state of mind as it is an outward appearance. It is much the distorted thinking and functioning of our mind that we have elevated ourselves and lifted up our own importance that we begin to devalue others and plot their destruction and their overthrow and the overturning of where they are. You know that the sad reality about the lie to the pride of him and of all of us is that it is ultimately a lie for him and was not better than Mordekai. He was not better or more important than the ones over whom he triumphed. Ah, we say we all stand for that. We know it to be a self-evident truth. We are all equal after all. That is not true. Not even in this nation that is founded upon democratic principle. I told you last week that I had simply completed reading a biography of one of those notable industrialists of the turn of the century, JP Morgan, a man who did much to shape the financial basis of the United States. What I did not realize until I completed that biography is that he and the great powers of that day are number of the millionaires of his own generation when they were called to fight in the Northern Army in the Civil War. They paid other people to take their names and fight in their place and assume their role and risk their lives because they believe themselves to be more important, more significant, more useful, better than those who could be afforded as cannon fodder. Now, this is reality now. He was telling one scholar this and he said, ah, you should tell the congregation and remind them that it could only in the Northern armies in the Southern army there was no possibility of anybody doing that. He was a southerner, of course. And as it happened, he was right when I checked the history books. The truth of the matter is even in this history, we have seen that we saw others as less important, less to be valued, less to be esteemed than we ourselves. That's a lie. No, that says nothing about the rightness or the wrongness of views. Those are judged in other terms as to whether someone's views are right or wrong. They are judged by other criteria but the people are no better or no worse. It is a lie to have a false estimate of ourselves to raise ourselves beyond others and to set ourselves higher than someone else. It is fundamentally irreligious because what it does is to subordinate and to substitute self in place of God. It's a border next God and it's substitute self. We are ultimately the center of our religious experience and ask for a moment, what is the key factor in much of our Christian experience today? Even within the Evangelical Church and even within Fourth Church, it is not God. It's us. How we think. How we have experienced. How we have felt. How we really have known. And when we make an estimate of a worship service, when we go home and begin to think about what happened in any particular service, morning or evening, the key to it all is whether or not we have worshiped and felt good about what we have done in some religious sense. When the key truth is this, it matters at the end of the day what God says about what we have done here and it doesn't matter what, which whether we leave this century, this evening feeling good or feeling bad if God's word is ultimately to say I was not worshiped. It doesn't matter if you say, but I worshiped. If God says I was not worshiped or if you say, I didn't feel anything. And God says I was worshiped. I received the praise of your heart. What happens? We become obsessed with who we are, what we have done, how we've enjoyed it, how it has spoken to us, how it has done something to us, how the matter is ultimately and completely and all of this. But does God think? What does He say about what we do and we have done? What is His estimate of what we offer to Him in praise and erroration and worship? Does He say my people have offered to me a worship acceptable in my sight? Ah, but we become immediately caught up with but how is the impact upon my life? And the first question is, but what does God say? You see, our preoccupation, our obsession is always with us. It's with self. And self in this matter of pride is utterly satanic. First because it was the sin of Satan that caused him to fall from heaven in a rebellion against God and because it allies us with Satan when our pride lifts us above another. When our pride guides us to be able to slay somebody else, to cast them down. When our pride enables us to set ourselves higher and better and apart from some other. Then we have allied ourselves with Satan and we with Him have shared in that great glory of saying, I have a glory greater than God's. When a mighty apostle began to look at human history, he cried out with that anguish pain, left not a man to think, more highly of himself than you ought to think. And here is the heart, the tonic, to much of what we see as an inflated picture of who we are, to recognize that we are people who stand as preachers before the Creator, as those who have fallen, who are broken by sin, those who are stained by our earned divisions and our own choices and our earned deliberate actions that we have fallen short of the glory of God. To see ourselves as people who are utterly bankrupt of moral usefulness except God's grace comes to us. Until we are able to see ourselves as God's Caesus, until we are able to see ourselves as media and broken as humble and poor and as ultimately those pleading with Him for whatever He chooses to give. Our pride will say, not God's will alone, but God's way and mine. Not God's will alone, but God's will and my prejudice. Not God's way, but mine. Now that's what humans had. He saw Mordecai refuse to give worship to Him, to fall down and to fall over Him and to exhort Him. And He said that He was filled with wrath. He hated Him. As the first truth, the pride demonstrated in our life drives us away from God. We are all of us like Him and people filled with a sense of who we are, that is the wrong sense, a sense of our accomplishment of our wealth, of our position, our privilege, of all that we have and of all that we have achieved and the potential we may yet have. And God sees us only as bankrupt and helpless and needy. But there's a second thing that this text gives to us and it's this. We see the pride ultimately leads to hatred. Him and sought to destroy the Jews as our text. And the way in which He did it was to go to King Yeh as you are, and to say to Him, there is a people amongst all of your great empire who refuses to be obedient to you and refuses to be a part of this empire. Let me pay you this staggering fortune and I will eliminate them from your kingdom. We will send to every governor and to every ruler of a province that on a such and such a day, everyone may raise up their swords and may kill the Jews wherever they are and will be immune from any retribution under the law. Hey, Him and sought to destroy not only Madagai, but every Jew that lived in Persia and we see the pride begins to corrupt the very thought processes of Him and no sense of justice, no sense of proportion, no sense that here he was about to destroy a whole race for one man that he disliked, no sense that what he was doing was wrong, or even that it was unbalanced, but in his pride the obsession with himself and his suffered injury and the thought that he was the one against whom some sin and slight had been raised, it echoed into his heart and he says, whatever it takes I will be revenge. And if it is the destruction of a nation, it be whatever the cost that my pride has been slaughtered, whatever the cost, it will kill everyone, but bring that man to his knees. My name is Heyman the Prince, a rid of a race and pride in our hearts, inflation of who we are grows and we become incapable of seeing the perspectives that God gives to us. We become obsessed with that pain that growing need inside of ourselves that we should pacify us and needs be met and until our needs are met, until our way is given, until our desire is accomplished, then let the chips fall where they will, we will break, we will destroy, we will fight, we will cast down, and we will win. You see what pride unbridled and unchallenged does in our souls. Excess of people, oh, may be victorious, but automatically destroyed and dedicated. But there is a third thing that this verse teaches us as we come back to with it from the sixth verse. If or else it's this, the pride arises from arrogance in the presence of God and gives lead to apostasy from God. Heyman sought to describe the Jews, the people of Mordecai. He was ignorant that herein were the people of God's own chooses. Choosing pride drove him away from the fact that God had set this people before his own face that they may obey him. Pride drove him and to say it cannot be anything that is different than the way I think, anything that is of God, I want nothing to do with that, all the God who chose them and as a consequence, the people of Mordecai, the Jews guilty of this one thing that they bowed only before the Lord of Heaven and Earth, were a people who earned his hatred because he hated them and he hated the God that said, I will have no God set before me. My glory I will share when none other, I am a jealous God and Heyman will hear none of it. Pride will ultimately cause us to ignore God and where we choose to ignore him, ultimately to hate him, his way, his plan and his provision. And when it comes to the place of our own souls, when we are confronted by that word that says that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God that there is within each one of us that need that urgency, that we are called to repent and to see that in Jesus Christ alone is the way of salvation that our own souls are stained and guilty before him, that we can cling to his cross alone for our salvation. We say, no, not that. Oh, way, not that way. There is no other name given by where man may be saved, save the name Christ Jesus. We will find another way and we argue and we fight and we battle against God and his plan and ultimately we devise systems that cause us to glory, not in God, but in our own ways. The cure of pride within the Christian is given to us in many ways throughout the New Testament. It is given to us if that pride touches those of us who are in Jesus Christ, a pride that makes us arrogant and lifted up and would want ourselves against all others that we should learn again a deep sense of our own insignificance and dependence upon God. Radiate Kipling, when posed with the question of how it is that we should gain a due perspective of ourselves in all of human history, said, let a man take his hand and stoop into a bucket of water and take out the water that is the measure of his own self and see what has happened. There is other water to take the place of that which we left out. There is always another if we see ourselves as indispensable to recognize that we are ultimately insignificant in the place that God is sovereign and flawed that he can cast down as he can raise up but his will established will prevail. His kingdom will triumph. Learn a new that. And indeed for all of us, Christian or non-Christian and I, this night as we stand before the gaze of God, gain a due sense of unworthiness. Oh, we hear a great deal about self-esteem and the need to be able to reinforce who we are. The scripture says, learn that you are not worthy. That ultimately it was the grace and love of God that came for you not because you merited his love not because you are worthy of him to bat an eyelid toward any one of us but that God in his grace gave his son that we might know life. We are unworthy, not worthy. And it is when we know ourselves even as this that we are able to turn to God and say, all comes from your love and mercy. We laugh when the psalmist says, ah, I am a worm. But he saw himself in the sight of God, a creature degraded and fallen, a creature loving darkness rather than light, hiding from God rather than seeking him, and worthy we are. And when we come recognizing that we see the love of God for all its great worth in that by mercy he makes us aware of the glory of the cross of Christ and the majesty of the sacrifice and the enormity of the gift that God gave his own son. The worthy for the unworthy, the righteous for the unrighteous, the holy and the godly for the unholy, the ungodly that we, the sons of Adam, might be lifted into his presence with light and you. And we say, blessed be God. I am not worthy. And when we are there, we cling to the cross of Christ and nothing else. Not our efforts, our ideas, our strength, our work, our merit, our choice. We cling to Christ and his cross alone and holding that. We know the grace of God, manifest in our midst. To every one of us tonight comes the call and you. Who are you, creator of pride you certainly are, man, woman of Christ, abandoned everything else, and cling to his cross alone, see his pardon, his way and his grace. Let's pray. Our Father, we would learn to cling only to your mercy displayed in Calvary. For we see the glory of our God in the cross of our area. We abandon ourselves and would seek nothing but him. Bless us. We turn aside from our vanted superiority, real or imaginary. And we would humble ourselves before the mighty hand of God. And we would learn to esteem others better than ourselves. And we would seek first the kingdom of heaven, bless us in that pursuit, lead us in that way, and call us again to his cross, the heart, the sun, the substance of all the love of glory, for that for us in us, in Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.