So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then was the king’s wrath pacified. — Esther 7:10
I will never forget a specific situation at one of my previous jobs. I was working alongside someone who did something unethical. What they did directly harmed the person we were supposed to be serving, even though that person never knew it. I spoke out. I said what needed to be said about what had happened. And I fully expected that doing the right thing would be recognized for what it was.
Instead, it set off a barrage of attacks against me. The person I had spoken out against turned their full attention toward making my situation as difficult as possible. It was not a comfortable season. Doing the right thing had produced exactly the wrong response from the people around me, and there were moments when I wondered whether speaking up had been worth the cost.
And then something shifted. The same person committed another ethical violation, one that someone else caught. They lost their position of seniority. And the attacks against me stopped almost immediately. The thing they had been using against me became the very thing that undid them.
Haman understood that outcome, though not until it was too late. He had built the gallows himself. Fifty cubits high, tall enough to be seen across the entire city. He constructed them specifically for Mordecai, so consumed by hatred and pride that he built the instrument of what he believed would be Mordecai’s destruction before he had even secured permission from the king to use it. He was so certain of the outcome that he built the ending before the story was finished.
And then he was hanged on it himself. Not a different gallows. Not a similar fate somewhere else. The exact same structure, built by his own hands, erected for his own purpose, became the instrument of his own end. The reversal is so complete and so precise that it could only have been orchestrated by something beyond human planning. The unseen hand had been moving the entire time. And the most stunning evidence of that movement was watching the thing Haman built become the thing that destroyed him.
This principle runs throughout the entire Bible. The pit Joseph’s brothers dug became the pit of their own desperate need years later. The furnace Nebuchadnezzar heated for three faithful men consumed the soldiers who threw them in. The den of lions prepared for Daniel destroyed his accusers instead. The cross intended to silence the Son of God became the instrument of the world’s redemption.
What the enemy intends for destruction, God has a way of turning into the instrument of justice and deliverance. That is not a promise that life will always feel fair in the moment. It is not a guarantee that every attack will be immediately reversed or that doing the right thing will always be immediately recognized. There are seasons, as I experienced, where the cost of integrity is real, and the vindication is slow in coming.
But the unseen hand is always working. And no weapon formed against the people of God has the final word. The gallows Haman built were always going to be his. He just did not know it yet.
Whatever has been built against you, whatever attack, whatever injustice, whatever instrument of harm someone has erected with your name on it, it does not have the final word either.
The same hand that turned Haman’s gallows is still turning things today. What the enemy builds for your destruction is never the final word. The unseen hand has a way of turning it around.
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