NOTES for Est 4:12-14
We can live, as everyone knows, in different ways. And not only in regard to lifestyle or occupation. One and the same life, one and the same events, can be lived and experienced as if on different levels of awareness and understanding. And then, depending on the level of that awareness, the result can sometimes be very different lives, lives quite unlike one another. For example, a person ends up... let us say, in a royal palace. What does that mean? The favor of fate? Perhaps. Luck, a happy chance? Yes, one could say so. Although, of course, all kinds of things happen in life, and a royal palace is not always a cozy or safe place. But what is luck, what is the favor of fate? What is fate at all? The Bible knows no such concept as fate, doom, destiny, or anything like them. Nothing in the world is predetermined in advance.
But there is God's plan, and there is human freedom to follow or not follow that plan. Most of us, people living in a fallen world, do not choose even half the situations in which we find ourselves. But in any situation it depends only on us how we will act and what choice we will make when a choice has to be made. And our choice will depend on where we are looking at the situation from. From the inside, remaining an integral part of it, so to speak an element of the landscape or the interior? Or from the outside, where God is, who created that situation by His will or by His nonintervention?
If from the inside, then it is luck, a happy chance. Then take advantage of the opportunity and do nothing that can take it away from you. Do not be a fool and do not do foolish things. If from the outside, where God is, then what remains is God's will as the only inner imperative. An absolute imperative, against which one cannot act. Not because there is no choice, but because the choice is between your true self and what will destroy you.
Mordecai asks Esther the one question that matters in their situation: which life do you choose? God's or your own? The future of the Jewish community of Babylon depended on her answer. But above all, so did her own future. Would it be connected with God's great world, or with a small human world cut off from that great world? With a world where one can die physically but cannot perish spiritually, or with a little world where one loses even the life one appears to have managed to keep.