In its 4,000 years of history only one woman became
Emperor of China with absolute power. She was Wu
tes-t'ien. She got to the throne of China for the same reason
Esther got to the throne of Persia. She was a startling
beauty. As a young girl she was renowned for her beauty,
and the Emperor made her his concubine. Ordinarily a
concubine like her would be relegated to secluded quarters,
after the death of the Emperor. She would live her life out in
quiet retirement. She was so beautiful, however, that the
son of the Emperor also desired her as a concubine. She was
not only beautiful, she was clever. She bore him several
sons, and then promoted them among the leaders as the
legitimate heirs to the throne. She gained many political
allies, and so maneuvered behind the scenes that when the
Emperor suffered a crippling stroke, she was made Empress
in 655 A.D. She was brilliant as well as beautiful, and was
excellent in administration. She cut taxes, won a war, and
had a united prosperous country under her long reign.
It is rare, but the fact is, there are many cases in history
of women doing an excellent job of leading a whole nation.
One thousand years before Esther, in 1520 B.C. Hatshepst
became the first woman Pharaoh of Egypt, for 21 years she
reigned, and glorious monuments exist to praise her success.
When Julius Caesar marched into Egypt in 48 B.C. there
was a vicious dispute going on as to who the next ruler
should be. Should it be Pothinius or his sister Cleopatra.
Cleopatra wanted to plead her case before Caesar, but she
knew if she tried to get to him her brother would have his
spies kill her. Nobody would dare interfere with a gift for
Caesar, however, and so a beautiful oriental carpet was sent
from her palace to Caesar. Imagine his surprise when the
carpet was unrolled and a 19 year old girl stepped out to
announce she was Cleopatra, the rightful Queen of Egypt.
Caesar fell in love with her beauty, and she did become the
Queen. If you want to read of how Denmark, Norway, Sweden,
Spain, England, and other nations, were all ruled by greatly
honored women, you can find these fascinating histories in
Mildred Boyds book, Rulers In Petticoats. My interest in
these stories for our study of Esther is that they confirm
what we see to be a major theme of this book, and that is,
there is power in beauty. Women know it, and that is why
one of the largest industries in the world is the beauty
industry. Billions are spent each year by women who know
their greatest asset is in looking beautiful. Brains and other
qualities are also vital, but it is beauty that opens the door
for these other gifts to get a chance to function.
Many modern women admit they use beauty to their
advantage in industry. They say they dress in a deliberate
attempt to win favor with those who have power, and
thereby they are raised to positions of power themselves. If
conflict is developing between them and a male boss, they
can calm the waters by coming on with some feminine
charm. In beauty contests there is nothing subtle and
hidden. They are on open display to win prizes, prestige,
and power by means of beauty. Many object to the whole
emphasis on beauty as pagan perversion. They feel nothing
is more secular than the parading of female bodies before the
world.
The book of Esther, however, forces us to focus on this
type of secular scene, for God in His providence uses just
such a beauty contest to save his people. It was Esther's
beauty that got her into the palace, and into a position of
power where she could be used to save her people. No other
quality but beauty could have gotten her there. King Xerxes
was not looking for a female genius, or the best woman
runner, or sports figure. He was looking for beauty. His
demand for beauty was far beyond what is demanded for a
Miss America or Miss Universe contest. His contestants had
to spend one solid year doing nothing but beautifying
themselves just to spend a night with him. After a year of
using oils, spices, and ointments, they would be as soft and
smooth as a baby.
Esther had to have been one of the most beautiful women
to ever live. Out of all the beautiful girls of the Empire, she
won the favor of Hegai, the keeper of the women. Verse 15
indicates she was also voted Miss Congeniality by the other
girls, for she was favored by all who saw her. Now this really
is a Cinderella story in that, aside from her beauty, Esther
had all sorts of disadvantages. She was a poor orphan in a
foreign land, and part of a minority group. Fortunately for
her she had a relative who took her in when her parents
died. Mordecai was her cousin, but he adopted her as his
daughter. Here is a rare case of cousins becoming father and
daughter.
Her Hebrew name was Hadassah. That is not a name
known to us, but the largest Jewish organization of women
in the world is called Hadassah, and they support the
Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Esther was her Persian
name and this has become more popular among Gentiles.
Esther means star. Estelle and Stella come from the same
root. Take female beauty out of this book, and the star is
gone. This poor adopted orphan would never have been
heard of in history had she not been blest with beauty. Even
with her beauty would she have won the contest with all her
competitors had she not spent a year using all of the beauty
aids available in her day?
The Bible puts you in a real bind if you are dogmatically
against beauty aids, for they were part of the providential
plan of God that saved the Jewish race. Dr. William Stidger,
one of the great American preachers, and author of over
forty books, comes on strong in favor or beauty aids. He
writes, "As far as I am concerned.....there is something
sacred in the everlasting passion women have for making
themselves more beautiful. I have no sympathy with these
reformers who find nothing more important to do than
harangue women for using rouge, powder, clothes, and what
have you, to make themselves more beautiful."
Certainly we can all agree, there is nothing spiritual or
superior about being unclean, unkempt, and unpresentable
for public viewing. All of us enjoy beauty, but like all good
things, this too is so easily perverted. Conrad Hilton, the
multimillionaire owner of the Hilton hotel's around the
world, was once married to Zsa Zsa Gabor. He discovered
that with her, beauty was a full time affair. She started at
ten in the morning before her dressing table. He says it was
a ritual with bottles, jars, and pots, both large and small.
It could have been the rite of ancient Aztex temple. After
lunch and shopping it was back to the dressing table for
more make-up, and agonizing decisions on furs and jewelry.
Hilton learned first hand about the idolatry of beauty, and of
how impossible it is to live with a woman who is obsessed
with vain-glory.
So what we have in the power of beauty is another
paradoxical power. It can drive you to the heights of virtue,
or plunge you to the depths of vice. It can lead to one
praising God for this gift, or it can lead to pride that
competes with God. It has the power to produce stories of
victory, or stories of vanity. One of the reasons women are
so effective in taking the Gospel into all the world is there
beauty. Beauty attracts, and if the attracter points to God,
her beauty is a stepping stone into the kingdom of beauty,
the kingdom of God. Many have the testimony of the poet-
The might of one fair face sublimes my love,
For it hath wean'd my heart from low desires;
Nor death I need, nor purgatorial fires.
Thy beauty-ante-past of joys above
Instructs me in the bliss that saints approve,
For Lo! How good, how beautiful must be
The God that made so good a thing as thee.
Is by the power of beauty that women have had their fair
share of the control of history. By beauty the weak can
master the strong, and Esther decides the course that the
absolute monarch will take. The Biblical ideal of female
beauty involves the mental as well as the physical. Brainless
beauty is a joke. Prov. 11:22 says, "Like a gold ring in a swine's
snout is a beautiful woman without discretion." In
other words, a beautiful woman has to use the inside of her
head as well as the outside to have any real power in her
beauty. Capito wrote, "Beauty alone, may please, not
captivate; If lacking grace, tis but a hookless bait."
Beauty can be superficial, and without depth, and this is
what has led to the saying that beauty is only skin deep.
Prov. 31:30 agrees when it says, "Charm is deceitful and
beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be
praised." So we come again to the paradoxical nature of
beauty. It can be vain, but it can also be a great value. It is
the paradoxical nature of reality that leads to so much
overreaction, and imbalance in our thinking. Because
everything that is good can also be bad, and perverted, so as
to become a source of evil, there is the constant temptation
of abandoning what is good to avoid that danger. All
through history Christians have abandoned what is good,
and left Satan free to use it as a tool for evil. Just as tanks
abandoned on the battlefield will be used by the enemy to
fight those who abandoned them, so beauty, when
abandoned by Christians, will be used by enemy forces
against Christians.
The value of studying the book of Esther is that it forces
us to reevaluate our views on the secular realm of life. It
forces us to look at beauty as a tool in the hands of God, and
it forces us to ask questions about beauty, as it did about
pleasure. What we find when we search the Scripture is that
beauty is no minor issue in God's plan. It is basic and vital to
the plan of God, and not just for the saving of Israel, but
for saving all men from the pit of hell. It is no surprise that
God is portrayed in the Bible as ultimate beauty. After all,
He is the author of all beauty. Someone said, "God is not
only the all-wise and all-powerful, but the all-beautiful." In
Psa. 27:4 all that David longs for is to dwell in the house of
the Lord and to behold the beauty of the Lord. The hope of
all believers is to see the King in His beauty. When that
great event takes place, we will all partake fully of His
beauty, and become perfected, and be like Him.
The goal of God is that all the redeemed might be like
Jesus. To be glorified is to be beautified with the beauty of
Jesus. But beauty is not just the goal, it is a powerful
element of the Christian life on the way to the goal. Three
times the palmist says we are to "Worship the Lord in the
beauty of holiness." The power of worship is in beauty.
Beauty runs through the Bible, and we are called upon to
behold it over and over. There is the beautiful robe,
beautiful women, a beautiful situation, a beautiful heaven, a
beautiful crown, a beautiful gate, and even the beautiful feet
of those who proclaim the Gospel. There are numerous
beauties in the temple, and there is the beauty of wisdom.
Jonathan Edwards, one of the greatest American
preachers, came to the conclusion, as he studied the Bible,
that beauty was really at the very heart of all theology. We
tend to think of beauty as a secular subject, but he made it
the heart of his sacred theology. This man changed the
course of history in America, and he made beauty the
unifying theme of theology. He could see what most
Christians never notice. God is beautiful, and all that He
does is beautiful, and so the good and the beautiful are one.
We could not love God if He was not beautiful. If He was
only powerful, He could force us to do His will, but He could
not force us to love Him. Love is a response we can only give
to beauty. If we had no revelation of God's beauty in
nature, or in the plan of redemption, we could not love God.
God could only win man's love by the power of beauty.
It works the other way also. Man is ugly in sin, and so it
would be hopeless for us to have fellowship with God, but
Jesus became a man, and by the beauty of His holiness, and
the beauty of His sacrifice, the way was opened for all to
become beautiful, and, thereby acceptable to God. Grasping
the loveliness and the supreme excellency of our Lord is the
beginning of the victorious Christian life. Those who do not
see the beauty of Christ will not have the motivating power
to follow Him. They will be sidetracked constantly by the
superficial beauties of worldliness. All the fruits of the spirit
are expressions of the beauty of Jesus in human life.
Edwards said, "God is the foundation and the fountain
of all being and all beauty." Sin is a deformity and lack of
beauty. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
That is, no one measures up to the beauty God intended for
them. They are all defective. To be saved is to be restored to
the place where you have the right to begin the process of
beautification. The doctrine of sanctification is really a
doctrine of beautification. To grow in Christlikeness is the
same as growing in beauty. Beauty is the measure of God's
presence, just as ugliness is the measure of God's absence. If
a man is insensitive to beauty, and can see no beauty in life,
or in people, he is alienated from God. The man who sees
most beauty, and is full of appreciation for it, is the man
closest to God.
When all beauty is gone, and all of life is ugly, that is
when people take their own life, for the loss of all beauty is
hell. In hell there will be no beauty, and in heaven there will
be nothing but beauty. One's relationship to beauty in this
life is the measure of the hell on earth, or the heaven on
earth, that one experiences. The only way to get heaven on
earth is to see the beauty of heavenly things, and the
loveliness of God's way. Only those captivated by the power
of beauty will be open to the working of God's Spirit.
Edwards says that in the hierarchy of values, first is
existence, and then excellence; first is being and then beauty.
Anything defective in beauty is defective in being.
The ability to discern what is truly beautiful from what is
only superficial beauty is the key to the abundant life. Jesus
only used the word beautiful once in the New Testament
record, and it was a warning about the danger of superficial
beauty. In Matt. 23:27-28 we read, "Woe to you, Scribes
and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed
tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they
are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. So you also
outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full
of hypocrisy and iniquity. Here is surface beauty. It has no
depth, and is mere veneer.
Superficial beauty is Satan's primary method of
deception. All men chose what they feel is beautiful. The
first sin of choosing the forbidden fruit was made very
attractive. All sin is made to seem beautiful. Satan does not
expect anybody to be tempted by the ugly. He knows God
made man in His image, and so He knows man is made to
select the beautiful, and shun the ugly. So he can only
attract men to evil by making it seem beautiful. People
chose folly for the same reason they chose wisdom. It looks
good, and seems like the best way to go. The liquor adds
portray the camaraderie of the bar. Sports and sex, and all
that seems adventurous is linked to this drug, for
drunkenness is not attractive or beautiful. They never show
the dead and twisted bodies of drunk drivers. They never
show the ugliness of the vomit, and the awful agony of
families ruined by drinking. Evil can only survive by using
the power of beauty to attract.
God wants us to chose beauty. We are made to do so,
and in Christ we are given the Holy Spirit, who will lead us
to chose the highest in beauty. Christian morality and ethics
are built around beauty. Whatever is truly beautiful, and by
truly beautiful I mean lasting beauty, is right. What is
wrong is that which may have temporary beauty, but which
leads to permanent ugliness. Christian maturity is growing
in your discernment so that you can see the whole, and not
just the part. Much of life is beautiful in part, but awful in
the whole. A poison snake is beautiful in part, as are poison
berries, but they are not wise choices, for as a whole they are
ugly and destructive. The power of evil lies in its use of
superficial and partial beauty to entice men to chose the way
of folly. Evil is a parasite which depends on what is good for
its existence.
This brings us back to Xerxes and Esther. It is because
Xerxes lives for beauty and pleasure that God was able to
use his choice for His own purpose. Pagan people, all
through history, have chosen what they feel is beautiful.
This does lead to great evil because of Satan's deception, but
let us remember, the world is full of true beauty as well, and
even evil men often chose what is good because of its beauty.
Esther was a beautiful and godly woman. Her beauty went
to the heart, and was not just skin deep. Her beauty would
be attractive to most all men in history, pagan or Christian.
The point is, Satan is not the only one in the beauty business.
God's providence also works through beauty. The beauty of
women is one of the key ways God has worked in history.
Esther in her day, and in our day, one of the great stories
is that of Mei-ling, better known as Madam Chaing
Kai-shek. Chaing Kai-shek was a Chinese war lord who was
very successful in battle. One of the Christian families of
China sent their daughter Mei-ling to America to be
educated. When she returned, she was active in the political
and social affairs of the nation. On one occasion Chaing
Kai-shek's path crossed that of Mei-ling, and for him it was
love at first sight. He could not resist the charm and beauty
of this Americanized daughter of the Orient. We cannot go
into the details of the long five year battle to win her hand in
marriage, but battle it was, for he was a godless immoral
warrior living with a concubine, and she was a beautiful
Christian. His love for her beauty changed his history, and
he became a Christian. He went on to become the
Generalissimo of China, and together they did great things
for the cause of Christ. It never would have happened
without beauty.
What all this means is that we need to keep a dual
perspective on life, and especially the secular life. Take
beauty contest for example. Yes there is lust and perversion
of beauty, but do not forget, God is not shut out of that
realm of life. God is working through beauty, and often the
winner of these contests is a dedicated Christian woman.
She goes on to touch many lives for Christ, and all because
she was beautiful.
Not all of us have the gift of beauty that attracts kings,
generals, and wide popularity, but all Christians have gifts
that are beautiful. All the gifts of the spirit are attractive,
and they are designed to attract others. Every Christian is
to be a light in a dark world attracting the lost to the Savior.
Nothing is really finished until it is fully beautiful, and that
includes us. God will never be done with us until we are
perfectly beautiful. Beauty is our goal, and beauty is what
we need to pray for. The more beautiful we are in every
aspect of life, the more likely the providence of God will
work through us to accomplish His purpose, for there is
power in beauty.
