Everyone’s Heart Is In The Hand Of The Lord

Everyone's heart is in the hand of the Lord:
Esther 5:1-13
Esther spent three days fasting and preparing for this day. Fasting in the Bible is a means of expressing your dependence upon God. Though she fasted for three days, no angel was sent to assure her of success in her mission and no other sign was given to her. On the third day, Esther decided to go to the king. When she did, King Ahasuerus extended the golden scepter to her as a sign of welcome. God made Ahasuerus do that. The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He will (Prov. 21:1)
When the king asked Esther what her request was, she only gives him and Haman an invitation to a feast. It looks like a golden opportunity lost. The Bible does not tell us why Esther invited Haman to the feast.
During the feast, the king asked about her request again, promising to give her even half of his kingdom. Again Esther let the opportunity go and invited the king and Haman for another feast. The Bible does not tell us why Esther delayed asking her request. It appears she was given wisdom from above.
Any number of things could have gone wrong in the interval between the two feasts. But, the God who had been at work through her feeble faith and moral compromises was working now through her boldness and shrewdness. In the intervening period between the two feasts, Mordecai would be saved from death and honoured, while God would cause Haman great disappointment, and shame.
Like Esther, we may not know what awaits us or exactly how things will turn out. Just because we do not see God’s providence with our eyes, does not mean that we cannot trust it.
Haman was proud to have been invited to the feasts, but his happiness turned to anger when Mordecai did not respect him. When Hamen went home, he recounted everything to his wife and friends.
When Esther, Ahasuerus, Haman and Mordecai nudged each other, they reacted according to their own desires and temperaments. They were not compelled to act contrary to their wills. They were at times sinful, proud and foolish. God’s sovereignty operates in such a way that their freedom and responsibility to act are not compromised, yet at the same time they did exactly what God had decreed and the end result is exactly what God had purposed from the beginning.
We have seen so far that Esther had a change of heart, when God pushed her into a situation where there was no other way out. We also notice that Ahasuerus had a change of heart in a different way. Though He was a proud and ruthless man who had not called for Esther for many days, he extended his sceptre when Esther entered his court and seemed willing to do whatever Esther asked of him. God had intervened in his life too.
However we do not see any change in Haman. He continued to be a very proud man. He was filled with rage. Human life was nothing to him. He had no qualms about sentencing a whole race to death. Left to our own devices, we too would be like Haman going from bad to worse. Psalm 81:12 So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own counsels. Romans 1:24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity.
Why didn’t God change Haman’s heart? What God told Moses and what is repeated by Paul in Romans 9:15,16 is that God will have mercy on whom He will have mercy. God's mercy is absolutely independent of whether someone deserves it or not, because nobody deserves it. We do not know why God chooses to show mercy to some and not to others. The mystery is not that God has mercy upon some and not on others but that He has mercy upon anybody at all, and especially that He has mercy upon us.