(Un)Hiding Your Face
Everyone is hiding something. Even God.
The Book of Esther is about a woman doing exactly that — hiding her identity just to survive. It's also about a God who hides. His name never appears in the book. Not once. And yet the whole story moves — quietly, without miracles, without anyone even saying his name — toward something that looks unmistakably like the hand of God.
And somehow, out of two people in hiding, an entire people gets saved.
(Un)Hiding Your Face is five weeks in the Book of Esther — learning to see God when you can't see him. And figuring out what that means for your own story.
Week 1: The Book of the Bible That's Missing God | Esther 1-2
There's a book in the middle of the Bible where God never shows up. Not once.
No miracles. No prayer. No divine intervention. Just a young woman hiding who she really is — her identity, her faith, her people — in order to survive in a world run by powerful, fragile, drunk men.
And somehow that made it into our Bible.
This week we open the Book of Esther. It's strange, morally complicated, and honestly a little unsettling. Which might be exactly why it's there.
Week 2: Lucky. Lucky. (un)Lucky. | Esther 2-3
Some people just seem to be born lucky. And some people don't.
Everything seemed to be falling into place for Esther and Mordecai. She "just happened" to be in the right place at the right time — and became queen. He "just happened" to overhear an assassination plot and saved the king's life.
Lucky. Lucky. Lucky. Until it wasn't.
Old wounds resurface. Old enemies reappear. And with the roll of the dice, God's People suddenly find themselves powerless to stop what's coming. Which raises a question that might sound familiar. And might make you uncomfortable.
If you've forgotten God, will He forget you too?
Week 3: The Version of You That Has to Die | Esther 4
Most of us never find out who we really are. Not until something forces the question.
This week we hit the turning point of Esther. For years she's hidden who she really is, her faith, her people, to survive at the top of a world that runs on power and appearances. Then the crisis comes, and she can't hide anymore. Speak up and she might die. Stay silent and she'll lose something worse.
Most of us know something about that. We all have a version of ourselves we've worked hard to protect. The one with the career. The one everyone likes. The one that finally got invited in. And we rarely ask who we really are underneath it, until something forces the question.
Esther 4 forces it.
Week 4: How (Not) to Self-Destruct | Esther 5-7
There's something in all of us that wants to destroy us. And the terrifying part is — it usually looks like a strength.
The Book of Esther introduces us to a man named Haman — one of the most psychologically precise portraits of pride in all of Scripture. He has everything: wealth, power, access, honor. And none of it is enough. Because one man won't bow. What follows is not just a story about an ancient villain. It's a mirror — a portrait of the particular kind of self-destruction that comes from needing to be unlike everyone else, above everyone else, feared by everyone else. Haman chases it all the way to a 75-foot monument he builds for someone else's execution. (You can probably guess how this is going to end.)
This is Week 4 of our series through Esther — a book that never once mentions God, and yet somehow can't stop pointing toward him.
Week 5: Was That God… or Did It "Just Happen?" | Esther 8-10
You prayed. Something happened. Then you wondered if that was really God... or coincidence... or just in your head. It's the same question Esther forces us to ask. And refuses to answer.
It's the one book in the Bible that never mentions God. No miracles, no prayers, no voice from heaven — just a hidden queen, a cousin named Mordecai climbing a pagan empire, a genocide plotted with a roll of the dice, and a rescue messy enough that by the end the people of God start to look uncomfortably like the villain they defeated. In this final message of our Esther series, we sit in the discomfort of a victory that doesn't feel clean and a festival named after random chance, and we ask the question running underneath the whole book: How do you learn to see God when, by every appearance, He isn't there?
