“Happy are you, O Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord!” (Deut 33:29).
“An English lord once rudely asked His valet if he knew One single act or fact that proved the Bible true; The art of disputation he had not learned to use, But, pointing to a passer-by, He said, ‘My lord, the Jews’” (Anon). Yes, the Jews have stood at the grave of every nation that has sought their annihilation. So it will be at the end, when our Lord Jesus, strange as it seems to our Christian ears, “treads the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God” (Rev 19:15). When asked, “Why is Your apparel red” (Isa 63:2), He will answer, “I have trodden them in My anger, and trampled them in My fury; their blood is sprinkled upon My garments, and I have stained all My robes” (v 3). Just as surely as the Jews determined to defend themselves from the hellish plot, so “the Lord God of Hosts has set a day of tumult and trampling” (22:5, BSB). Christ’s role as Goel is not only to be Israel’s Redeemer but also their Avenger. But soon the victory was complete and the celebration began: “on the fifteenth of the month they rested, and made it a day of feasting and gladness” (Est 9:18). “And Mordecai wrote these things and sent letters to all the Jews, near and far,…to establish among them that they should celebrate yearly the fourteenth and fifteenth days of the month of Adar” (vv 20-21). In sweet irony, they called it Purim, showing there was nothing random about the way the lot turned for their good. It would be known as “the month which was turned from sorrow to joy for them, and from mourning to a holiday; that they should make them days of feasting and joy, of sending presents to one another and gifts to the poor” (v 22). This is God’s specialty, “beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (Isa 61:3).