Chapter Fifteen/She Stood Up for God's People

 ESTHER tried to stay calm her hear as she approached the courtyard in the palace at Shushan. It was not easy. Everything about the castle was designed to inspire awe-it multicolored relief sculptors of winged bulls, archers, and lions of glazed brickwork, its fluted stone columns and imposing statues, even its position atop huge platforms near the snowcapped Zagros Mountains and overlooking pure waters of the river Choaspes. All of it was intended to remind each visitor of the immense power of the man whom Esther was going to see, the one who called himself "the great king." He was also her husband. 

Husband! How different Ahasuerus was from the kind of husband any faithful Jewish girl might have expected! He did not look so such examples as Abraham, a man who humbly accepted God's direction to listen to Sarah his wife. (Genesis 21:12) The king knew little or nothing of Esther's God, Jehovah, or of His Law. Ahasuerus knew Persian law, though, including a law forbidding the very thing that Esther was about to do. What was that? Well, the law said that anyone who appeared before the Persian monarch without first being summoned by the king was liable to death. Esther had not been summoned but she was going to the king anyway. As she drew near to the inner courtyard, where she would be visible from the king's throne, she may have felt that she was walking to her death. - Read Esther 4:11; 5:1. 

Why did she take such a risk? And what can we learn from the faith of this remarkable woman? First, let us see how Esther got into the unusual position of being queen in Persia.

Next time:  She Stood Up for God's People - Esther's Background

From the jw.org publication