Day 8: Invasion From the Past
=======================
Foreword
-------------
A Past ignored against Divine counsel often becomes a ferocious Future. A Today untamed often grows into a wild Tomorrow. God does not always explain the Future when He insists so much on the Present. It is dangerous foolishness therefore, to argue with a seeing Omniscient God towering infinitely above our mortal dwarfness with its circumscribed vision of earthly here-and-nows.
A Wasted Commission
---------------------------------
Perhaps the first specific divine military assignment that Saul received after being anointed king of Israel was the campaign on which he got sent against the Amalekites.
2 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt.
3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass (1 Samuel 15:2-3).
King Saul went out on this military campaign, but failed to carry out his marching orders explicitly. He spared what appeared to him the best-looking of the abominations that he had been ordered to destroy completely. He could not see Amalek with the eyes of God. In his own eyes, there was nothing wrong with Amalek after all. God was simply asking for too much, so he unilaterally spared some of the ‘finest’ sheep, ostensibly for sacrifice to God, whereas he actually might have been intending them for the traditional after-sacrifice feast, in celebration of ‘his’ victory, by which he would have been taking the glory for a battle that was the Lord’s.
Saul spared not only animals but also some of the people of Amalek, notable among whom was the king himself, Agag, who otherwise should have been the first to go down (vv. 7-9, 15). The Prophet Samuel had to take it upon himself therefore to execute upon that king the divine sentence of death that, in the rebellious comradely spirit of kings, Saul had meant to avert.
The Sword of Samuel
-------------------------------
May prophets prepare their swords in the coming season, to slay surviving remnants from previous generations of rebellious indecision and indifference by the throne. Prophets may not only preach and prophesy. They may also slay; like Samuel, like Elijah (1 Kings 18:40). Prophets may not only carry the scroll. Generations of disobedience will confront them with an imperial anti-Godness that their swords shall slay. The time is near for prophets to begin to judge the thrones with their sword, that a lingering sentence might come to pass. And if also the word of the Lord be the sword of the Spirit, then may they speak the sentences of death upon those whom compromising kings have spared. Amen.
Saul’s Unilateral Amnesty
----------------------------------
Samuel slew Agag whom Saul brought back home in disobedience to God’s clear instructions. But what about the others whom Saul had spared back in Amalek; the others whom, unlike Agag the king, he had not brought along to display as a trophy of his victory? Those were to linger to become, in future, a pernicious thorn in the sides of subsequent generations of Israelites, as the rest of this story would show.
As Samuel slew Agag, he announced that the king’s mother was thereafter going to be childless just as Agag’s sword had made other women childless (1 Samuel 15:33). That might suggest a prophetic insight that the aged king-mother had also been spared, but might have been too old for the journey to, and triumphal parade back in, Israel.
Inherited Liabilities
--------------------------
David, in later years, began to battle with some of those remnant Amalekites (1 Samuel 27:8), but even this anointed, mighty king and warrior could no more exterminate them, because the best person to have done that, who was anointed to have done it, was Saul; and the best time to have done it was in the days of Saul. Sadly, all that was an opportunity wasted.
Years before, the tribe of Simeon, during the time of the judges, had also made attempts at the Amalekites, but they had not totally wiped them out, because that was a breakthrough awaiting the anointing upon Saul (1 Chronicles 4:42-43). The limitations of the Simeonites looked hopefully ahead to Saul’s manifestation; the limitations of David looked sadly back to Saul’s failure.
Many years after Saul, a surviving seed of the Amalekites grew into a great monster that threatened the whole Jewish race. That seed was called “Haman the Agagite,” alias “the great enemy of all the Jews” (Esther 8:3; 9:24).
Haman the Agagite Who was this Haman?
-----------------------------------------------------------
According to Smith’s Bible Dictionary, “the Jews considered him as a descendant of Agag the Amalekite” (“Agag” 22). According to the same Bible dictionary, “Agag” was the title of the kings of Amalek, just as “Pharaoh” was the royal designation of the kings of Egypt.
As far back as in Numbers 24:7, about 250 years before King Saul, an Agag, a king, was cited in the prophecy of Balaam. Then in 1 Samuel 15, Saul spares an Agag, a king of the Amalekites. We may conclude therefore, firstly, that “Agag” was a title for the kings of Amalek, and secondly, that Haman the Agagite was a surviving royal seed, a prince, of Amalek.
The Rich Terrorist Politician
-------------------------------------
Haman the Agagite was a shrewd Machiavellian, a political strategist. He was a prominent pillar in the corridors of power. He had unhindered access to the courts of the king, even at odd hours when decent men kept their beds (Esther 6:4-6). He wielded enormous wealth by which he easily bought the death of those whose philosophy fortified them against his notorious intimidations; those whose faith forbad them to bow before the god that was Himself and his growing influence.
For his project of genocide against the Jews, he lobbied the king with as much as 10,000 talents of silver which, according to the Living Bible, was about two million dollars in contemporary terms (3:9).
Haman; his name meant “magnificent,” or “the well disposed”; and so he was: the magnificently affluent well connected and well disposed patron of officialized terrorism against God’s people.
Forex
--------
In the currency of the United States, Canada, and a few other countries, 100 cents make a dollar. In Nigeria, a hundred kobo make one naira. One hundred Ghanaian pasewas make a cedi. In Bible-time currency, 3,000 shekels made one talent.
When one considers that a person’s modest annual wage, as far back as in Judges 17:10, was only 10 shekels of silver, and that 3,000 shekels made one talent, the ‘aid’ of 10,000 talents of silver, which Haman offered to give into the nation’s treasury for his pet project of genocide against the Jews, would be 10,000 (talents) x 3,000 (shekels) = 30,000,000 (shekels) ÷ 10 (shekels, the annual wage) = 3,000,000. In other words, Haman’s 10,000 talents of silver represented somebody’s wages for 3,000,000 (three million) years, or, the other way round, a whole year’s wages for three million people. How much would that be? Let’s find out.
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
--------------------------------------
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
-----------------------------
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!
According to Haman’s plans, therefore, this was to be one year of troubles that the Jews would never survive. Sorcery had had to be summoned to join with money and power to ensure that this did not fail. It was a failure-proof voodoo-programming of God’s people to close woefully with a year. All their dreams of an after-exile era of restoration to, and bliss back in, Judah were to be terminated rudely with a gruesome ruthless extermination. In vain had they endured the temporary shame of exile. Their past years, with all the attendant pains and shame, would be their best years. An evil hand had suddenly wiped the horizon clean of all the promises they had hopefully read until the moment. Those promises had made their miseries of exile light. Now the eastern sky blazed with terrifying letters of shame. The future growled menacingly close. Their peace had come to an abrupt end. A year of death loomed monstrously. Happy New Year? No more for them. It was to be trouble now till death came mercifully for them, no matter how violently it came.
May God arise now to attack the calendar of Satan against the people of the Most High, and may the princes of darkness pay for it. May their places in the palace spew them out. May they be cast out, no matter how deep their roots have gone, so that the righteous remnant may yet rejoice in the Lord in the land. Amen.
The Jewish Calendar
----------------------------
The first month in the Jewish calendar was the month Abib, as it was called before the Exile (Exodus 12:2; 13:4; 23:15) or Nisan, as it was known after the Exile or Captivity (Nehemiah 2:1; Esther 3:7). That was the Passover month, when the angel of death passed over the blood-marked houses of the Jews and stopped over at the houses of the Egyptians, killing the first borns of animals and humans. The annual commemorative feast was usually celebrated on the 14th day of that month. Now on the 13th day, just one day before that commemoration of Yesterday’s Divine intervention, they receive a sponsored death sentence from the government of their immigrant country. What Passover were they going to celebrate when the death that had always ‘passed-over’ them to visit their enemies was now going to ‘passover’ their enemies and ‘stopover’ in their own houses?
Haman was attempting to change the times, and he was not doing all of that without the backing of Satan.
“Nisan” means “the month of the ripening ears”; it was one month before Zif (or Ziv) the month of the barley harvest. Therefore, Nisan was the gateway month of the year; the month that opened the door and led into the barley harvest. It was the month of hopes; the month in which a new year was ‘harvested.’ But alas, the news with which Nisan opened in the days of Haman was the news of an inevitable harvest of death, not of barley. It threatened to be the month of the harvest of Saul’s ancient seed of disobedience.
By sorcery, Haman decided on the day just before the Passover, the 13th day of the first month, one day before the first full moon of the year, to publish his death-news; and the 13th day of the twelfth month, one day before the last full moon of the year, to slaughter the Jews.
The twelfth month, the month of Adar, was the month of the blossoming almond. The almond, according to Jeremiah 1:11-12, meant that God would hasten His word to perform it; that He would do a quick work. It was in the same month that Satan sought to do a quick work of death against the people of God. Haman was really being inspired to change the times and seasons of God; to replace the joyous feasts with moanful episodes, the memorials of Divine intervention with memorable outbreaks of Satanic interruptions.
May we pray and guard against the Christmas season in 2005. Some Haman has his eyes on the date.
Haman did not happen on those dates by chance. He had the very Devil behind him, and he worked with the “monthly prognosticators,” the stargazers or astrologers, the Satanic priests of sorcery. It was they who, according to theological opinions, officiated for him in the lots “from day to day, and from month to month” (3:7). (See notes “k” and “l’ on Esther 3:7 in the Dakes Study Bible). Haman believed in and read the signs and ordinances in the stars.
The envisaged onslaught against the Jews appeared to have been such a crucial battle for Haman that he mobilized everything in his evil arsenal that he had always lived by: money, political power, bribes, blackmail, lies, propaganda, connections, even sorcery.
My times are in Thine Hands, O God!
Elders at the Gate
------------------------
Thank God for the Mordecais, the sack- clothed elders at the gate, who would not be distracted in this season by the privileges of office and the purple robes of affluent indifference that sincere but short-sighted cousins would seek to short-circuit them with (4:1-4).
Had Mordecai never stirred, Esther might never have been stirred. Had Esther never stirred, her maidens might never have been stirred. Had those remained comfortably indifferent in their insulated palace of pleasure while the rest of the land mourned (3:15), the king might never have been stirred, even though they had been strategically positioned by God to influence him through anointed prayer-fasted food to change the course of Haman’s schemes.
Everyone would be very important in the coming season. Those who hear, those who know, those who can report, those who have access to the courts of the king, those who can fast, those who can urge others to also fast, those who can invite the king to a dinner; everyone shall be needed to perform their role. But above all, may the elders, the mourning, perceptive, watchmen-elders, not abandon their strategic place at the palace gates. Amen.
The Attempt to Abort Esther
------------------------------------
Queen Esther was supposed shortly to be manifested to the world, but Haman had begun to manifest himself before she would be revealed, as if to abort her manifestation. But behold the great wisdom of the Almighty God: the very Haman whom Satan unleashed upon the Jews to frustrate the manifestation of Esther and Mordecai, was the same instrument that facilitated the very promotion of Mordecai and the manifestation of Esther, which he sought feverishly to frustrate.
Had the princes of Haman known, they would not have threatened to crucify Mordecai (1 Corinthians 2:7-8).
Your God shall turn around the plots of your haters and use them as the catalysts for your speedy promotion. Just as God arranged it for Joseph, in spite of the dream-aborting plots of his brothers, your haters shall bring to pass the very promotions they fight so desperately to abort from your future. Amen.
God is always wiser than the devil; God is always ahead of Satan’s plots.
Ahead of Haman
----------------------
Haman began his plots in the twelfth year of the reign of King Ahasuerus (3:7). Esther came on the throne as queen in the third year of this king’s reign (1:3). Therefore, about nine years before Haman was manifested, God had already planted His joker firmly in the palace. God is always ahead of the devil.
Fear Not! God has ordained and concealed an Esther ahead of your Hamans.
They shall manifest whom God has strategically placed for Himself in the palaces. But may they not be distracted by the convenience and comforts of their office when the days come for them to say, “If I perish, I perish!” Usually, those who say so never perish. Death fears those who do not fear it. Death never threatens those it cannot terrify. Death does not quickly kill those who have dared it. Nobody dies twice. Dead men never fear death (John 12:25).
For Such a Time as This
---------------------------------
Why has God placed you where you are now? What Kingdom purpose is being served by your status, your office, your job, your residence, your gifts? Don’t be a blind Esther.
13 Don’t imagine that you are safer than any other Jew just because you are in the royal palace. 14 If you keep quiet at a time like this, help will come from heaven to the Jews, and they will be saved, but you will die and your father’s family will come to an end. Yet who knows – maybe it was for a time like this that you were made queen (4:13-14, Good News).
If Hamans would employ their office so effectively for their gods of arrogant affluence and cruel bloodiness, then may Esthers and Mordecais be shamed who know not why they are where they are, who mind their comfort, not the Kingdom.
A Throne of Violence
----------------------------
Agag (in the Hebrew, aghagh) is said probably to mean “violent.” If it does, then Adolf Haman the Agagite lived true to his name and his type. He hated the Jews with a passionate hatred originating from Satan himself, as attested to by the diabolic resources of divination which he also exploited in his campaign against those people of God (Esther 3:7). He sought with devotion to frustrate the advancement of any Jew, and he committed his resources generously to their terrorist extermination. He was “the magnificent one,” the prince, the lord of the house, the stinkingly rich “well disposed” anti-Christ man descended from the ancestral throne of violence. What a profile!
Under Moses, Israel had a conflict with Amalek. Under the judges, the Simeonites had a conflict with the Amalekites. At the time of Samuel was the memorable conflict with Amalek, which Saul blundered. David also fought against the same aghagh throne of violence. At last, it appeared, Haman was manifested to revenge all the years of conflict with, and ‘oppression’ from, Israel.
Does this make any sense to a discerning Nigerian ear?
The Mystery of Disobedience
--------------------------------------
Notice Haman’s plot:
To destroy, to kill, and to cause to perish, ALL JEWS, both young and old, little children and women, in one day… (3:13).
Compare that to the marching orders that God had issued to King Saul in 1 Samuel 15:3:
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy ALL that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
The enemy you spare today will not spare you tomorrow (1 Kings 20:39-42). Had Saul been obedient to God and done to Amalek as God had instructed him to, there would not have been a Haman, over 540 years later, to pose this much danger to this generation of Jews. Haman was the seed of Saul’s disobedience, the present political consequence of an ancient religious rebellion. That is the mystery of disobedience. The iniquity you excuse today will condemn you tomorrow. The sin you conceal now will expose you some time.
It is common with Christians, at the beginning of a year, to confront the Almighty with a list of things He should do in the new year. But very few mind God’s own list of the ‘Agags’ He has been waiting for them to slay; ‘Agags’ that they have sadly allowed to linger so long under every religious pretext, often in the name of some bogus ‘sacrifice’ that they would make to God.
That vice you call a “weakness” today will gradually grow so strong, tomorrow it will conquer, enshackle, enslave and destroy you. It is better to address it while it is still a weakness, before it becomes a conquering master. The enemy you spare today will not spare you tomorrow when he has his turn, and has become strong.
Costly Foolishness
--------------------------
Thank God for the stimulations from the perceptive elder at the gate. Thank God for the response of the fasting maidens in the palace, with their anointed hands that cooked the dinner that turned around the head of the ruler for good (5:4-6). Thank God for you.
Through Mordecai’s intervention of an alarm sent to Esther in the palace, the queen with her maids was stirred into three decisive days of prayer and fasting, to which God responded so speedily that Haman made foolish mistakes and was destroyed by the plots he had perfected against Mordecai (7:7-10).
Haman took too much liberty with his closeness to the throne; he went too close to the king’s bride in his desperation. His own wife and wise men had earlier cautioned him with a strange tragic prophecy:
If Mordecai be of the seed of the Jews, before whom thou hast begun to fall, thou shalt NOT PREVAIL against him, but shalt SURELY Fall before him (6:13).
But Haman was too far gone to hear, being driven by the death that should kill him. The invitation to the fatal feast of Esther even seemed to him a promotion, and an honour. He was deceived by it. He did not realize that God was laying a snare for him.
May God, in this decisive season, lay fanciful snares for powerful Hamans. May He cause His enemies to make great and terrible foolish mistakes that will remove them from before us forever. May He cause their counsels of wickedness against His purposes to begin to consume they themselves. May their voices arise in prophecy against themselves. As Zeresh prophesied against her own husband, may they begin to curse and prophesy against themselves. Amen.
The Harvest of the Wicked
------------------------------------
Haman’s children suffered the fate that their father had perfected against others (9:10, 7:10), and Zeresh his wife, who had initially counselled him to devise gallows of assassination against another’s husband, herself became the widow. Their table was furnished from the gains of his wickedness, and they had grown fat from his spoils, so they had to pay their fatal VATs (or ‘commissions’) when the day of reckoning came for their grand patron. The food they had enjoyed yesterday had begun to purge them today.
Mind the tables from which you dine, so that you do not become a partaker of their idols and their judgment.
The Two Enemies
-------------------------
There were two forces poised against the people of God. One was the wicked man Haman himself. The other was the decree of death that Haman had given birth to. Operation Food, through Esther, had taken care of the first threat. Haman was dead. But the more dangerous force was the decree of death which Haman had set into motion before his promising sun had suddenly set.
In the Divine cabinet shake-up that followed Haman’s demise, Mordecai assumed the late Haman’s office. (We shall outlive and succeed our persecutors.) He was given the king’s signet ring to write a new decree that should eclipse the previous decree of Haman, since the laws of the land could never be altered once made. Only a superior new decree could check the old decree of Haman.
It is one thing for a wicked man to die, it is a different thing for the wickedness or curses that he has generated to be neutralized. If you kill a Haman without also dealing with his legacies of evil, any celebration of his demise would be merely a wishful party. Contemporary experience bears eloquent witness, that wicked people have not always died with all their wickedness, but have usually left behind an inheritance of trouble to those who come after them.
May you not live to inherit troubles.
A New Decree
-------------------
Again, the scribes were called together. Again, a new law went out; and whereas the first decree had sent the city into mourning (3:15), joy broke out wherever the new decree went, that the Jews were to vehemently defend themselves against anyone who should wish to effect against them the heinous old decree of Haman (8:15-17).
The old decree had said that all the Jews were to be killed on the 13th day of the twelfth month. The new decree empowered the Jews against the old decree; empowered them to confront, conquer and destroy the old sentence of death on the same date. That was exactly what happened, and the very date of death became the day of celebration for them and death for their haters (8:12).
The angels of death that Haman had dispatched against the Jews ‘passed over’ them and rather ‘stopped over’ to feast on Haman’s own people. The same Date of Death turned into a day of Divine vengeance for God’s people, and judgment for the enemy. God turned the date against the enemy; He turned their sadness of His people into joy. Many turned Jews by force.
May your God reverse every sentence of death that any Haman has set in motion to catch up with you at a future time. Pray now; rewrite the decree, like Mordecai, in your own favour. The King of Heaven has empowered you to do so. The blood of Jesus is your signet ring.
Happy New Year
----------------------
Haman’s decree did not survive the first quarter of its twelve-month calendar. Help came to the Jews in the third month (8:9). Life returned. The surviving Amalekites, with all the royal seed of Haman, were killed (7:10; 9:10). At last it was Happy New Year, in spite of Haman.
Not Like Saul
------------------
It is instructive to note that this time, however, unlike King Saul in the first campaign against the Amalekites, these exile Jews in Persia did not loot the property of those they killed: “on the spoil laid they not their hand” (9:10). They had become wiser, and would spare no fattened sheep for themselves, not even on the pretext of some justifiable ‘sacrifice’ to God (1 Samuel 15:7-9). They had learned from Saul, and were themselves not going to sow another seed of rebellion.
A Call to Fast
------------------
With what bad news has the enemy sought to start one year for you? With what disaster has he threatened to close the year? Begin to call upon the God of Esther to provoke your Hamans to make disastrous mistakes. Call forth the prophetic sword of Samuel, and begin with it to slay.
I sense that Christian households should this year pick any three days to fast and pray, with their children, even if those are able to fast only from 6 – 7 o’clock.
Remember Amalek
--------------------------
God said to Samuel, “I remember that which Amalek did” (1 Samuel 15:2). In this season, may the Lord recall all the sins of the wicked and bring them forth to judgment. He might have been silent, but He has not forgotten.
May we begin to remind Him. May we pray, “Remember Amalek, O God!” Amen.
Securing the Future
---------------------------
Haman was an invasion from an ignored past. He was the harvest of Saul’s seed of rebellion sown over five centuries before. In time, he grew to become a monster that it took so much to contain. The “delicate” Agag of yesterday (1 Samuel 15:32) became the terrible Haman today.
King Saul sold his future, yea, the future of his children and the whole nation of Israel, when he spared Agag and the other Amalekites.
Your future begins today. Who, what, and where are the Agagites and Amalekites over whom God has had a prolonged controversy with you? Do not sow Agags today that your children will harvest as Hamans tomorrow. If the Future should not be invaded by the Past, then may you begin to deal with the Present as totally as God has commanded that you should.
Postscript
==========
All you have is Today, not Tomorrow, to make a change. The Tomorrow you do not begin to confront Today will slip by unnoticed into Yesterday. Tomorrow comes like a thief that you hardly notice until he is far gone unapprehendably into Yesterday. It is commonly said: Today is the tomorrow you expected yesterday.
The direction in which you’re turned gives a hint of your destination. The tomorrow for which you do not plan today will always conquer you.
God does not have to explain Agag before we obey. While you have the sword, may you do as He says. When the Haman your spare today takes the sword tomorrow, he will never spare you. The future partially awaits your next move today. The tomorrow for which you do not plan today will always conquer you. The past shall not invade those who prepare today against the future.