What is Mordecai's argument to Esther in Esther 4:14?

The highest man at the court of Ahasuerus, king of Persia, was Haman, whose seat the king had set above all the other princes. Officers of the court waited at the palace gate for the king's commands, and what they were ordered to give Haman was the reverence paid to a god — flat on the ground, hands and feet stretched out, the mouth in the dust — and the order for it came from the king. One of those officers would not do it. When the others asked why, Mordecai told them he was a Jew, and that was all the reason he gave. Worship of that kind belonged to God and not to a man. They told Haman, and he was furious. Punishing one man was too small a revenge for him, so he got an order under the king's seal to destroy every Jew in the empire, young and old, women and little children, on one day — the thirteenth day of the twelfth month. The queen was one of the condemned. Esther was a Jewess, her father and mother were both dead, and Mordecai, her cousin, had brought her up as his own daughter.

Mordecai tore his clothes when he heard the order, put on sackcloth and ashes, and went out through the middle of the city of Shushan with a loud and bitter cry, meant to be heard, so that every Jew in it would ask what the matter was. He came as far as the king's gate and no further, because nobody dressed for mourning was let in at that gate. Word got to the queen, and it distressed her; she sent clothes out for him and he would not take them. So she called one of the king's chamberlains, the man appointed to wait on her, and sent him out to ask what this was. The wives of the Persian kings were kept so close that there was no other way for the two of them to hold a conversation at all.

The chamberlain came back from him with a copy of the edict, and a charge: she was to go in to the king and plead for her nation. Haman had misinformed the king about her people, and she was to set the matter in a true light; Mordecai did not doubt that the king would cancel the decree once she had. By now he was not commanding her but pleading with her, for her own people and for her God. Her answer was to quote the law she lived under. Anybody who went in to the king in the inner court without being called was put to death, man or woman, unless the king held out his golden sceptre and let them live. And she had not been called in to the king for thirty days.

That law was made not so much for the king's safety as out of pride: he was to be seen seldom and with great difficulty, so that he might be adored like a little god. Even his favourite wife had no right of entry, and depended like anybody else on the king's indulgence. And those thirty days looked like a husband's affection cooling, which made going in more dangerous and the hope of success less.

Mordecai's reply began by shutting a door she had not asked about: "Think not with thyself that thou shalt escape in the king's house, more than all the Jews." Being queen would be no protection to her, and there was nowhere in the empire where the Jews had worse enemies than in that court. That much was an argument about the decree and nothing else: it did not except her, so if the rest were cut off she would be cut off too. On that argument she was choosing between two deaths rather than between death and safety — a conditional death from her husband, since the king might hold out the sceptre, against a certain death from her enemy; and the wisdom of it was to risk the first rather than wait for the second.

What he said next is the verse itself, and it has three things in it. The first took the weight of her people off her. If she holds her peace, enlargement and deliverance shall arise to the Jews from another place. He does not say what place. By some means or another the Jews would be delivered. He was confident it was coming, and he thought her the likeliest way for it to come. But whether it came at all was not the thing her answer would settle.

That is as far as the verse's own words go: they name no rescuer at all. What Mordecai was sure of is a different thing from what the sentence says: he spoke in the confidence of the faith that all God's children should have, which is that God will deliver his people though every worldly means fails. Instruments may fail; God's covenant will not.

The verse is not the only place in this book where the rescuer goes unnamed. The name of God is not found anywhere in the book of Esther, start to finish. Though the name of God is not in the book, the finger of God is, directing a great many small events towards one rescue.

The second of the three things is her house, and it turns on the same condition the verse opened with: if she holds her peace. "But thou and thy father's house shall be destroyed." That father had a name: Abihail, Mordecai's uncle. Their fathers were brothers, which made the two of them cousins — so the house in the warning was the family of the man giving the warning.

Who does the destroying is read two different ways, and it is better to say so than to choose. Both readings start from the same ground, which is neglect: God's people in distress, no pity shown them, and nothing done on their behalf that she might have done. From there, one reading leaves the destruction where the reply had begun: she and her family perish with the rest, so it was better to perish in a good cause than in a bad one. The other puts it in the opposite case: if she gave up her own people out of cowardice and unbelief, she had reason to fear that the ruin of her house would come from heaven, at the very time the rest of the Jewish families were preserved. The verse settles neither. It says the house would be destroyed, and stops there.

The third he does not assert at all. He asks it. "Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" He believed the providence of God had raised her to that position so that she might be an instrument of saving his people, and he said it to encourage her to make the attempt. Is it likely, the question runs, that she had been lifted out of complete obscurity for her own sake, and not for some public reason? And if she would not use the influence her position gave her, she was gravely at fault. And if God had designed her for it, he would bear her through it.

Her answer went back the same way, through the chamberlain; every word that passed between them passed through him. Gather every Jew in Shushan, she said, and let none of them eat or drink for three days, night or day — fast for me; she and her maids would fast too. Then Esther's own words: "And so will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish." The fast ran on until the third day came, and on the third day she went in, and she found favour with the king. At a banquet, with Haman at the table, she named him to the king as the man who had designed her ruin, and the king had him hanged on the gallows Haman had built for Mordecai. The decree was harder: an order once sealed by the king could not be called back, so instead of the cancellation Mordecai had counted on, a second order went out giving the Jews leave to defend themselves. The deliverance came, and it came through her.

Two of the three he had answered himself, before she said anything. The deliverance would come; which hand it would come by he could not say. The destruction of her house he stated flatly. Her own part was the only one of the three he put as a question — and it was the one that turned out as he had guessed. She was not told that the rescue of her people rested on her. She was told that it was coming, and asked what she was doing in the palace.