I still remember where I was when I read The Hunger Games for the first time (by a pool, on vacation with my family, who was having plenty of fun without me). It felt so new, so exhilarating, and I couldn’t get enough.
This past spring, several of our students experienced something similar when we studied the Book of Esther.
To be clear, I’m not saying that the guys in my small group devoured Esther quite like 13-year-old me binge-reading The Hunger Games for the first time. Still, there was something exciting about the newness of the story for nearly all of the guys in the group. And not unlike a dystopian novel, Esther’s journey is full of messy, shocking, and exciting twists. Nestled deep within the historical books of the OT, the book of Esther often lives—like many of the heroes of the story—in the shadows. Thanks to children’s ministry and Veggie Tales, a few students had some vague familiarity with Esther, but her story felt so distant and far away that it seemed like we were all coming to the story with fresh eyes.
Of course, it is a very good thing to study the familiar parts of Scripture. But there’s something extra special about exploring the more hidden depths of the Bible, drawing out gospel truths for our students thousands of years later. With that in mind, here are three reasons to study the Book of Esther with the teenagers in your youth ministry:
Relatable, Complicated Heroes
A running gag throughout our study was one student who (over)confidently turned his Bible to Ruth every single week and was hopelessly lost as soon as we started to read the passage. While this always brought a good (and distracting) laugh to the group, the story also highlights one benefit of studying Esther: there aren’t many books of the Bible with a leading woman at the center of the story! For girls and guys alike, Esther provides a unique opportunity to study the ways God uses all kinds of people for his glory and his kingdom.
More than just Esther’s gender, however, we find that Esther and her uncle Mordecai are incredibly complicated people. Like most Bible characters, we see a mix of both good and bad, but these two are especially murky. Esther rides an incredible rags-to-riches arc, but at what moral cost? Mordecai vacillates between faithful and frantic, and his actions endanger not only Esther, but the entire nation of Israel. Like so many teenagers today, Esther repeatedly grapples with complicated questions about her identity and pressures to conform to the culture around her.
Living in a specific time and circumstance along God’s timeline of redemption, Esther is not the role model that we might wish her to be, but this makes her incredibly relatable, even for a Persian Queen. We see that God does not cast her aside because of her flaws. Instead, he works alongside her even as he calls her to be courageous. More than anything, Esther points us beyond herself and invites us to look ahead to Jesus, the One who will lose everything to save his people, and who continues to intercede on our behalf.
Real, Complicated Life in Exile
Not only is Esther a complicated heroine, but throughout the story, our characters (and by extension, our students) are forced to wrestle with many difficult decisions. As Jewish people living in pagan Persia, Esther and Mordecai knew that living faithfully is rarely black-and-white. While still a teenager, Esther faced an unimaginable dilemma about whether (and how) to earn the king’s favor (ch.r 2), and the circumstances of her time forced her into a number of lose-lose scenarios (chs. 4-7).
Faithfulness in a secular society is often blurrier than we might think. Esther gives adults and leaders an entry point into conversations about the gray areas in which teenagers spend so much of their lives. Certainly, there are times to draw a hard line in the sand (1 Cor. 5-6; Gal. 4:16-26), but conversations about alcohol or social media or relationships must go beyond a simple “don’t.” Our job is not to modify behavior, but to help students learn how to lean on and follow Jesus when they find themselves in difficult circumstances.
The Sovereign, Unseen Work of God
One of the most unique aspects of the Book of Esther is the apparent absence of God anywhere in the story. It is the only book of the Bible where God’s name is not explicitly mentioned, and the author gives little indication that the story’s characters are particularly pious. And yet…the pages of Esther are dripping with God’s providential work. It may be hard for us to see at first glance, and harder for our heroes to notice in the moment, but God is constantly at work in the shadows. In fact, it almost feels like the author uses God’s apparent silence to lure us in to look for him even more closely.
Students and leaders alike can so easily become discouraged when we don’t see God’s presence in our lives. Stories like Esther’s remind us that even when it may look like God has abandoned us, he is sovereign over every situation, and he is always at work for his glory and our good. Particularly during seasons of raging hormones, friendship upheavals, and family struggles, the security of God’s sovereignty provides a steadying anchor for our teenagers. And even though Esther lived in a vastly different time and place from ours, her willingness to lay aside her own life on behalf of her people is a remarkable foretaste of Christ’s love for his church.
Esther is one of the most unique books of the Bible, but also one of the most exciting. Filled with suspenseful scenes and dramatic twists, this underrated book is well worth studying with your students.
If you’d like more help teaching through the Book of Esther this year, consider Rooted Reservoir’s newest Bible-based curriculum package on Israel’s restoration period, including the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and Zechariah.
