My wife and I were reading Esther last night–we had flipped around the Bible to see what stuck out to us and Esther was it, so we’ve been going through it a little bit every night. There’s a section in Esther where Xerxes of Babylon orders the death of every Jew, and Esther tells her Uncle and her Jewish community to fast and pray, and she prepares herself to confront the King and prepare for the possibility of Martyrdom.
It struck me–why is this whole event even documented? Why would God allow this to happen, let alone call us to remember it forever by including it in Holy Scripture?
God has a funny way of getting the last laugh out of the Bible’s villains. The Pharaoh of Exodus comes to mind: we really ought to be grateful for his hardness of heart, because it helped give us a beautiful, compelling, incredible demonstration of God’s love for us. Pharaoh, Xerxes, whoever persecuted the Maccabees (I am woefully poorly read on the Old Testament, something I really need to fix), Pontius Pilate–shoot, even us when we consider the Crucifixion–God has a way of taking the bad guys and enshrining their error in Gold and using it to save us. I bet each of those esteemed people (yes even us) hoped we would be remembered by history for something else. Maybe Pharaoh wanted to be remembered as a magnificent leader; maybe Xerxes as wealthy and as powerful as a god. Yet the thing that they will be remembered for in written history until the end of time is their big mistake.
So the Ann Barnhardt’s of the world–buckle up. If scripture is any lesson, your big mistake is going to be turned on its head and framed in Gold and all of Christendom will remember you forever for being wrong; and the fact that you were wrong will actually help preserve the Church even longer and stronger.
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 
I’ve thought of this same thing before regarding Pontius Pilate. He’s depicted as indifferent to the persecutions of Christ, and even tries to relinquish the responsibility of deciding what to do by continuously putting the ball in the Jews’ court. Yet we remember him in the creed: “Who suffered under Pontius Pilate.” He wouldn’t have wanted that! He was actively trying to avoid that! Ha!
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It’s all just flavors of this line from the exultet sung at Easter Vigil–“O Happy Fault of Adam, that earned us so great, so glorious a redeemer!”
It seems to be a theme. “Thank you for being wrong, so we can learn how deep the love of God really goes.”
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