That I may Know HIM - A Devotional

Day 8: Invasion From the Past

If a person earns as little as N20,000 (or $150) a month, they would earn N240,000 (or $1,800) in a year.  Multiplying that by 3,000,000 years would make N720,000,000,000 (seven hundred and twenty billion naira) (or $5,400,000,000; five billion and four hundred million dollars).  That is how much, in contemporary currency, Haman would invest to see others killed, maimed, widowed, orphaned, dispossessed, refugeed. 

It takes much more than mere mortal wickedness but a certain Satanic enablement to be capable of plots of such unashamed devoted extreme cruelty. 

May all whom Satan has fortified with money to fight against God hang in their own gallows; may their talents fly in their faces; and may their wells of wicked wealth begin to dry up, in Jesus name.  Amen

The Timing of Haman’s Plot

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The timing of Haman’s plot to massacre the Jews in a single day reveals much.  After he had used his political connections, outright lies, and his financial power to influence an irreversible misinformed edict of death against all the Jews in the Kingdom of Persia (3:8), he proceeded to assemble diviners who would,  through casting lots, “find out the right day and month to carry out his plot” (3:7, Good News Bible).  By divination, “The thirteenth day of the twelfth month, the month of Adar, was decided on” for the extermination of the Jews  (3:7, Good News).  Haman lived by and fought with everything he could muster: money, power, position, witchcraft, sorcery.

Next, the letters expressing the decree, the  newspapers carrying the sad news of the decided Date of Death, the gazette authorizing this twelfth-month slaughter of the Jews, was dated, or published, on the 13th day of Nisan, the first month (v.12).  In other words, the year opened with the proclamation of their inevitable doom, and it was to close with the actualization of those New Year fears.  From the first month of the bad news to the twelfth month of the determined slaughter was to be a whole year of sadness and installmental dyings.

How could anyone start a new year on such a sad note, and live through it with the consciousness of an irrevocable slaughter  waiting obstinately at the end of the year!  That would be the saddest year, the shortest year, and the longest year; a year in which many would kill themselves before the appointed death came; a year in which all dreams simply died. After all, what was anyone going to labour for if they were all going to be dead at the end of the year?

In such a season, people would go about their previously enjoyable duties lifelessly.  Some would simply collapse in the streets and die, hunted down by a gloomy future blackened by smokes from a rebellious past.  Choristers would sing without mirth. Teachers would teach without interest.  Parents would make no effort to pay the fees of their children.  The death would have begun before it had come. 

With what sad news does Satan’s strongman intend to start the year for you?  With what colossal tragedy has he threatened to close the year for you, before the year has even begun?

May Hamans conspire and perfect their plots.  May they write their sponsored godless decrees against the Most High.  There shall yet come a voice from the gates and a cry from the maidens in the palace, and the Hamans shall be sacrificed upon their own fortified altars of wickedness.

 Un-Happy New Year

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According to the Jewish calendar, as  stated in Exodus 12:2 and 8, the Passover Feast was a kind of Happy New Year rite marking the passage from bondage in Egypt to liberty in the promised land of Canaan.  That feast was usually celebrated on the 14th day of the first Jewish month.  Imagine then Haman’s letters coming on the 13th day of the first month, on the eve of their New Year!  Imagine also that, according to Haman the Hitler, they were to be mercilessly slaughtered without helpers,  on the 13th day of the twelfth month, one night before the last full moon of the year, but early enough for the abundance of their carcases upon the mysterious altar of his wickedness by full moon the next night!