Sermon: Pride Before a Fall

Good evening. Good to see you all here. Thanks for being here tonight. Please take a Bible and open with me to the Book of Esther

and chapter five. Esther, chapter five.

We've been spending some of these winter and springtime Sunday evenings preaching through the Book of Esther, and tonight we come to chapter five, verses nine through 14.

Before we hear God's word read and preached, let's ask God's blessing upon it.

Father in heaven, as we open your holy word on our laps, we ask that your Holy Spirit would open our ears so that we hear your voice. And we pray for your grace. Your grace, so that we would not be hearers only, but we would be doers of it. Make us humble. Make us humble before you and before your word. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Esther chapter five, verses nine through 14. Listen carefully, for this is God's word.

"And Haman went out that day joyful and glad of heart. But when Haman saw Mordecai in the king's gate, that he neither rose nor trembled before him, he was filled with wrath against Mordecai. Nevertheless, Haman restrained himself and went home, and he sent and brought his friends and his wife Zeresh. And Haman recounted to them the splendor of his riches, the number of his sons, all the promotions with which the king had honored him, and how he had advanced him

above the officials and the servants of the king. Then Haman said, 'Even Queen Esther let no one but me come with the king to the feast she prepared. And tomorrow also I am invited by her together with the king. Yet all this is worth nothing to me, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate.' Then his wife Zeresh and all his friends said to him, 'Let a gallows 50 cubits high be made, and in the morning tell the king to have Mordecai hanged upon it.

Then go joyfully with the king to the feast.' This idea pleased Haman, and he had the gallows made."

The theme of tonight's sermon, or the main idea of tonight's sermon is this. It comes from Proverbs 16 verse 18. "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."

God, in his wisdom, has given wise, pithy, memorable sayings, statements, like this one that I just read to you from Proverbs, this one and many others, to make known to us pride's dead end. But God has also, in his wisdom, given us stories that illustrate this proverb. The folly of pride, just like this narrative we have just read. Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. That is a perfect synopsis

of this little section of Esther five. For Haman, destruction is coming. His fall is impending. But before we get there, before he falls, before we read of his inglorious demise later in the narrative, Haman's true character is revealed. Who is Haman, deep down? What is he really like? What does he love more than anything? Or who, you might say, does he love more than anything? What is it that drives him? What motivates him to

do what he does more than anything else? We find out here. Haman's heart of hearts is shown to us. Haman is self-absorbed. He is a proud man.

Why is it that the narrator wants us to know Haman's heart of hearts? Why is this little section here? What does God want you to learn from Haman's pride?The purpose of revealing Haman's true character is so that you will make a connection between Haman's character and Haman's collapse.

It is Haman's pride that causes his destruction. It is Haman's haughty, his arrogant, self-absorbed spirit that causes his fall. Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs 16 says this, and Haman's life shows this. So I'm going to walk us through the verses tonight of our text, and we're going to try to make some applications along the way. So you want to keep your Bibles open in front of you as we just move along through the text.

Before we do so, picking up in verse nine, let's just briefly orient ourselves once again with where we are in the narrative. If you look just above, we just saw in Chapter 5 that Esther had thrown a feast for King Ahasuerus, and she also invited Haman, the second in command, Ahasuerus' right-hand man, to also join them in the feast. And it was as the feast was winding down that King Ahasuerus allowed Esther to make a big,

bold request of him. And here it seems it would have been a perfect time for Esther to plead her case, to plead for favor for her people, the Jews. You remember, they were destined for destruction by Ahasuerus' decree.

But she doesn't make that request. Instead of making that request, Esther requests that King Ahasuerus and Haman join her tomorrow for another feast, an encore, if you will. Now, Esther is a book, but if it was a movie, if the Book of Esther was a movie, this is where and this is when you would begin to hear slowly intensifying music.

Slowly intensifying, and the suspense that you would be feeling inside of you would build and build and build.

The suspense is building, but our story, the narrative, is slowing down, and so are we as University Reformed Church reading through this part of the narrative. Okay? The suspense is building, but we're really slowing down. Notice that the first feast that Esther shared with King Ahasuerus and Haman ends in chapter 5 verse 8. You see it there right above where we begin. The second feast on the next day doesn't begin until chapter 7 verse 1.

So the king and Haman went in to feast with Queen Esther, and on the second day, et cetera. We're slowing down. But the suspense is building because a lot happens between one day and the next. A lot. And the suspense of what will happen tomorrow, the question that we're all wondering, will Esther save her people? Will she make that big request? We have to wait.

How did Haman feel about being invited to that feast? How did Haman feel after leaving the feast? We're told at the beginning of our passage in verse nine. He left the feast with a full belly and a full heart. Sometimes, you probably know this, sometimes the best way to fill someone's heart with gladness and joy is to fill their belly with good food and good drink. That was Esther's aim for throwing this feast. She wanted to make the king happy, so

happy that he would be amenable to her request. And it worked.

King Ahasuerus agreed to attend a second feast the following day. But it did not only work for her on the king, it also worked on Haman. He left the feast, verse nine says, "Joyful and glad of heart."

But his satisfaction did not last long. Long at all. On his way out of the feast, as he was leaving the king's presence, he saw a man, Mordecai, a Jew who persistently refused to show him honor.

Mordecai will not rise before him. He will not bow down before him. And Mordecai will not tremble in his presence either.He has no honor for Haman. He has no fear of Haman.

And this triggers Haman. His joyful heart, verse nine says, "became full of wrath against Mordecai." He's hot

with anger. You can almost hear what his face looked like. You know what it feels like sometimes when you get really angry, and all of a sudden it feels like blood is in your head, and it's just filling your head up red. That's what happened to Haman. He is hot with anger, and it's the sort of anger, this variety of anger is the kind of anger that is usually acted upon. In three verse five, chapter three verse five, if you look on the other

page there, it says that Haman was filled with fury. It's the same Hebrew word. When Mordecai didn't bow down, and then what did he do? It led him, Haman, to seek to destroy all the Jews, chapter three verse six. It's the same word we find here in verse nine in chapter one verse 12, and the same hot fury that filled and burned within King Ahasuerus when Vashti refused to play the beauty queen among all his friends. And what did he do?

"Be gone with you." He acted in his anger. When Haman doesn't get the honor from Mordecai that he desires, he fills up, hot with anger. But unlike last time, when he sought to destroy all the Jews, this time

Haman restrains himself. He restrains himself from acting on his anger, at least immediately anyways. Now, we've learned very little about Haman at this point, but it is already clear, it should already be clear to us that Haman is a proud, self-absorbed man. He wants to be honored so badly, so desperately, that it drives him mad when he doesn't get it, and that's a sign of pride. When you don't get something you want or you feel like you deserve,

you want to be honored so badly that when you don't get it, you're driven mad. C.S. Lewis offers a very simple test in the form of a question. He says, "If you want to find out how proud you are, the easiest way is to ask yourself, 'How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or patronize me, or show off?'"

If we apply this test to Haman, how much did he dislike being snubbed by Mordecai? A lot. Mordecai's snub offends Haman's pride, and Haman becomes angry.

We know what that's like. We know what it's like to become angry, angry even in a moment. And I wonder, what is it that makes you angry?

Generally speaking, as you assess your own life, isn't your anger triggered most often by not getting what you want?

Or similarly, is your anger triggered by someone else getting what you want?

Anger is a response. It's a reaction to something that is going on deeper inside of you.

It's a symptom. Your anger is a symptom of something else happening. In Haman's case, anger is the symptom of his pride, not getting what he wanted. Haman's outward anger reveals his inner pride. His heart was proud. His heart. That's where his pride was nurtured, where his anger was born.

Jerry Bridges points out in his book, which is entitled "Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate," he points out that one of the problems with pride, quote, "is that we can see it in others, but not in ourselves."Why is it that pride is so easy to spot in someone else, but it's so hard to spot in yourself? I think one of the reasons why that is, is because pride lies within the heart. It lies within our hearts,

and our hearts are difficult to understand. They can be very difficult to assess. And if we're going to, as Jerry Bridges would want us to do, as his book is entitled, if we are to confront the sins we tolerate, if we are to confront pride in our own life, we need to know firstly where our sin is born, where our pride is nurtured, where our pride lives. And as we see with Haman's pride, so it is with all human pride. Pride is born, it is nurtured, and it dwells

in our hearts.

We can commend Haman for exercising restraint and not acting upon his anger. That's good. But we should not commend him, and we should not follow him in the way he dealt with his hurt pride. You see what he did in verse 10. He gathered his friends and his wife close to himself. Now, that's not wrong. If you're hurting, if you're sad, it's natural to want your loved ones to come close by to receive their care, receive their comfort.

But Haman is a pitiful fellow.

Why does he call them in? He calls them in to throw a pity party for himself. "You're all invited to my pity party."

Nothing hurts a proud man more than being humbled.

Haman wants their pity. He wants them to acknowledge his greatness. And what he wants from them is for them to stroke his ego even as he strokes it himself. Listen to how he rehearses his resume of greatness in verse 11.

"He recounted to them the splendor of his riches, the number of his sons, all the promotions, how he had advanced above all the others." He says in essence, "I am rich. I have many sons."

The book will tell us later he had 10 sons. That's a lot of sons. A sign of blessing. "I am successful in my work."

I want to point this out to you here, where Haman is speaking about all of his promotions with which the king had honored him. I want to point this out to you because the English doesn't capture it in quite the same way as it is in the Hebrew. The way the Hebrew expresses Haman's promotions is to say that the king made him great, or the king made him large, larger than the others, greater than the others. He promoted him above the others.

That Hebrew gets at what's going on inside of Haman's heart, what he thinks of himself. "The king thinks I'm great, and I think I am great." And then he says, "I am highly respected by my boss, and he's the king. I have many people that are under me, that work for me." And then he says in verse 12, "And I, I have received a special, a very exclusive invitation from the queen to dine at her table with royalty." How do you think our world would assess

Haman's success?

By every measure, Haman is a success.

I think you could find some people in our day and age, I would say, of all the people that could be proud and deserve to be proud, certainly it's Haman. And that's what Haman thinks, too. "I need to be recognized. I must be recognized." And you see that Haman's achievements are a means to that end, of being recognized by others, to be great, not only in his own eyes, which he is, but to be great in the eyes of others.

Here's some more questions, some more test questions to diagnose whether pride is dwelling in your heart. Are your achievements a means to an end of becoming great?

Are your achievements a means to an end of becoming great, and in whose eyes? Whose eyes are you seeking to be great in?We see that a proud, self-absorbed person desires to be lifted up above others by whatever means possible, whatever achievements possible. I want to be great and the greatest. And let me also suggest, if you're maybe wrestling in your heart or in your mind, "I feel like I've got to make it known to others how great I

am when they don't recognize my greatness, or who I am, or what I've done." If that's your impulse, then pride is almost certainly living in your heart.

In verse 13, we see in Haman another result of pride. Unrestrained pride gives way to discontentment and madness.

Haman says, "All this, all these things are worth nothing to me."

Really?

Clearly, it's worth something to him. He wants his wife and his friends to know about it. We understand what he means, right?

It's not enough to satisfy him. It means something to him, but it's not enough to satisfy him.

I want you to observe here in Haman that a proud heart is rarely content. A proud heart is rarely content.

Quoted C.S. Lewis earlier, he says again in his book "Mere Christianity," "Pride is essentially competitive. It is competitive by its very nature. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich or clever or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer or cleverer or better-looking than others." And here's Lewis' point that we can see here in Haman.

Our pride is insatiable. Our pride always wants more. It needs more.

Haman could be the greatest thing since sliced bread,

but if just one person won't acknowledge that he's the greatest thing since sliced bread,

he loses it. He becomes miserable and insufferable. That is madness. So C.S. Lewis says again, "Pride is a spiritual cancer. It eats up the very possibility of love or contentment or even common sense." Pride is a spiritual cancer.

It's an effective analogy. Unfortunately, right now, URC, we know something about cancer, what it does.

Cancer left untreated will eventually kill a person,

and pride left untreated eventually results in destruction.

That's what Proverbs 16 says, and that's what Haman's life will show us.

In the final verse of our text, verse 14, Haman's wife and his friends seek to relieve his misery and satisfy his unmet desire by proposing an idea that will put Mordecai in his place. Haman, you know what you should do? You should have gallows made, and you should have them made high and tall, 75 feet high.

And Haman, since the king listens to you, here's what you should do. Have the gallows made, and then in the morning, go tell him, "You see those gallows? Have Mordecai hung on them."

And your enemy,

he will be humiliated. And then you, Haman, you can go on with your life. You can be happy once again, feasting with joy, being glad of heart.

This is where the suspense is building. It's really building because this idea of theirs sounded great to Haman, and so we see the last sentence, "Haman had the gallows made."Here's the heart of the suspense. Here's the heart of the suspense as it's building. Whose idea will win out? Whose request will get to the king first?

In our passage, an idea is conceived that Haman will bring to the king first thing in the morning. What is Haman's request? Hang Mordecai.

But in verse eight, we saw that Esther also has a request that she also plans to present to the king the next day. And what's Esther's request? Stop Haman.

So the question is this: Will Haman reach King Ahasuerus first? Will his idea prevail with the king?

I want you to consider further with me, though, first what Haman's friends do for him. What is it that Haman's friends really do for him here in verse 14? All they're really doing is treating the symptoms, treating Haman's symptoms of misery, of anger, of dissatisfaction. And you know what they're doing while they're treating those symptoms? Over here, they're pouring gasoline on his pride. If we treat those symptoms, they think, we

can have a happy Haman again. He can go on joyfully with the king to the feast. But if they really wanted Haman to be happy again, what they really should be doing is treating the source of the symptoms. And what's the source? His proud, haughty heart. What Haman really needs more than anything else is for his pride to be treated, because then his symptoms would go away. They would resolve, too.

And dear friends, that's what we all need.

You don't need your symptoms soothed. What you need is for your sin to be stopped at the source.

You may have heard or be familiar with that famous quote of John Owen, "Kill sin or it will be killing you."

We can tweak his warning tonight,

"Destroy pride or it will destroy you."

So with our time remaining, just a couple minutes, how do you destroy pride in your own heart? How do you stop that sin at its source? Can't say everything, but here's a few things for you to think about tonight. To begin, you must destroy your pride through humility. Through humility. And to be more specific, you must humble yourself before the Lord by repenting of your pride and then by trusting in the atoning work of humiliation completed by the humble

Savior, Jesus Christ.

We're going to remember this week that Jesus Christ was humbled to the point of death, even death on a cross. Jesus was hung on an instrument that was intended to humiliate him, just like these gallows were erected to humiliate Mordecai. But there was an irony with Haman's plan, and there's an irony in the plan of those who sought to hang Jesus upon the cross. And here's the irony. As they sought to bring Jesus low,

they raised him up.

They put him up for all to see. Jesus said in John chapter 12, verses 32 and 33, "When I am lifted up from this earth, I will draw all people to myself." And John adds for us, "He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die." They sought to bring him low, but Jesus was lifted up. And why did Jesus die? He died for sin. He died for pride and for proud people. He died to save you from sin's end, which is death,

and he died to save you from pride's dead end, destruction, utter destruction. And so you must destroy your pride through humility by believing that Christ's atoning death, his atoning death alone can forgive you and give you life. So you make Jesus your SaviorAnd you also must make Jesus your Lord. Your Lord.

There's really only two ways to live, dear people of God. There's really only two ways to live. One is to live with you on the throne of your life.

That's how Haman lived his life. When you are on the throne of your life, pride, self-exaltation, pride will thrive. You'll be a lover of self, you'll be self-absorbed. You will be a self-exalter. When, and not if, when you get knocked down a rung, you will be miserable, discontent,

because you,

who are supposed to be on the throne of your life, has been knocked down, disrespected. That's one way to live. But there's another way to live, and that's with Christ on the throne of your life. The way to destroy pride is to dethrone self. You dethrone self through faith and repentance, ongoing. Dethrone self, enthrone Christ. Dethrone self, enthrone Christ. And you see, dear people of God, when Christ is on the throne of your life,

pride will die, humility will grow in its place. You'll be a lover of God. You'll be God-absorbed. You will be a God-exalter. And when you get knocked down a rung,

you'll be able to be content even then, because life isn't about you. Even your own life is not about you. It is about God.

I want you to listen with me a moment. Listen with me a moment to another resume of greatness that you can find in the Bible. There's another one, and it's the Apostle Paul's resume in Philippians 3. And I want you to notice what is similar and different in Haman's resume of greatness and Paul's resume of greatness. So reading from Philippians 3, Paul says, "We are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and

glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh, though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had,

I counted it as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may

know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead." Do you hear the difference in these two resumes? For Paul, everything he had was worth nothing to him, so long as he had Christ, and so long as Christ was exalted in his heart and in his life. For Haman, everything he had was worth nothing to him,

unless he was exalted above Mordecai.

And here's the tragedy.

Haman would be lifted up. Haman would be highly exalted above all people, for everyone to see, for everyone to know.

But it would not be in the way that he desired. Haman's pride sets up his destruction. Haman's haughty spirit sets up his fall. His life shows us what Proverbs 16 says is true. "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." Dear friends, heed the warning of Haman's life. Heed the warning of Proverbs 16. Destroy your pride, or it will destroy you. Let's pray.

Oh, God, we

ask you, we plead with you that you would have mercy upon us. Oh, our pride is so insidious, and it is so hard to kill, and it's so easy to love. We are so prone to put ourselves on the throne of our own lives, and to want recognition from everyone else, even including you. We even desire that you would think we are great. Oh, God, how backwards, how sinful, how prideful we are. Would you please forgive us for our pride?

Would you wash us anew in the blood of Christ? Renew our hearts, oh, God. Make us humble before you. Make us humble before others. And in your mercy, would you please, oh, God, save us from Haman's tragedy, being proud until we reach utter destruction. Have mercy upon us. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.