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.
