The Jews had a massive problem. An insolvable problem. Mordecai would not bow down and give honor to Haman, so Haman despised Mordecai and he manipulated King Xerxes to get him to issue an edict that all of the Jews would be killed. Haman had even offered the king a large amount of money to do it, even though the king had not accepted.
So now, it seemed that Esther was their only hope. She was the only one with the access to the king such that she would be able to persuade him to relent and not carry out his plan to exterminate the Jews. Esther and Mordecai exchange messages between them, but in the end, Esther decides that they must move with God’s help. She decides that she will go to the king and she will ask him to relent, but she calls on Mordecai and all of the Jews to fast with her and her attendants for three days. Before she did anything, they would collectively go to God to ask him to save them.
The result of this is that Esther decides on a plan that will not only persuade the king, but ends up humiliating Haman as well. Because Mordecai had helped the king without any recompense previously, the king decided to honor Mordecai and used Haman to do it.
Afterward Mordecai returned to the king’s gate. But Haman rushed home, with his head covered in grief, and told Zeresh his wife and all his friends everything that had happened to him.
His advisers and his wife Zeresh said to him, “Since Mordecai, before whom your downfall has started, is of Jewish origin, you cannot stand against him—you will surely come to ruin!” While they were still talking with him, the king’s eunuchs arrived and hurried Haman away to the banquet Esther had prepared.
Esther 6:12-14
Even further, Haman constructed a pole, upon which he had intended to have Mordecai impaled in a public spectacle of his killing, but that ended up being exactly the pole upon which Haman would die.
Who could have possibly foreseen the series of circumstances that played out in this scenario? Yes, Esther acted, and we must act. But first, Esther went to God. She called upon the Lord for him to act, sitting before him in prayer and fasting. It is clear that this series of events happened in such a way that God himself was moving in their midst. We could have imagined many tears and wailing and begging before the king to not carry out his plan, but instead, we see that the very thing that Haman had plotted to do to Mordecai was what happened instead to Haman.
So as we face problems, we must go to God. We must sit and ask him to lead us, to guide us, to teach us, to help us. Only in this way can we see a solution come about that will bring the problem to the resolution that the Lord would like to carry out instead of rushing in to create our own solutions, and likely even creating bigger problems.
I remembered a song that I heard in the middle of a video called Sheep Among Wolves Volume II. It talks about how Satan has, and will, hang himself on his own gallows. Here is the whole video, although I’m embedding it directly at the song that connects to the story of Esther: