Esther 9:17, commentary and pictures

The verse records the deliverance of the Jews from their enemies under the Persian king Ahasuerus during Medo-Persian rule. The danger was Haman's decree and plot to destroy and exterminate all the Jewish people, the people of God, threatening their very lives. Deliverance came when that decree was reversed by a counter decree through the efforts and prayers of Mordecai, Esther, and their people. That counter decree brought the complete overthrow of their enemies and preserved the godly line.

Satan worked through Haman as the devil's agent under Medo-Persia, the second head of the beast system of church-and-state government, to destroy God's people as the woman through whom the Man Child should come. God frustrated that purpose, vindicated His people, and brought utter and absolute defeat on Haman. The account is a lesson about conflict between God's way of worship and human commands, including persecution of those who refuse to comply. The rest and feasting and gladness on the fourteenth of Adar, after fighting on the thirteenth, mark that deliverance, with joy following great danger and trouble. That rest gives the origin of the Jewish feast of Purim.

Prophetically, the two days before that rest are two thousand years under Rome in its imperial, kingly and papal form, beginning with the league the Jews made with the Romans when Grecian rule ceased in 158 B.C., reckoned by one day with the Lord as a thousand years, after God's people were torn and smitten under oppressive rule. The rest itself is the third day, the thousand years when the saints are revived, healed, raised up and made to live in His sight in the first resurrection to live and reign with Christ. That third thousand years begins in 1843 as its first year, following two thousand years under the patriarchs and two thousand years under Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia and Greece.