Nowhere to Hide

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Transcript:

We like to feel safe, and so we’ll go to great lengths to try to protect ourselves and our properties from all sorts of threats, won’t we? We’ll pay for an alarm company to monitor our homes, to watch over our families when we’re there, and to watch over our property when we’re not there. We’ll pay insurance premiums so that things like a fire or a car wreck or an illness hopefully won’t lead us into financial ruin.

And in this part of the country, it’s not unusual to build safe rooms or even better an underground shelter to protect us from tornadoes. It’s also not unusual in this part of the country for people to carry weapons to defend themselves and their families from those who would do them harm. Those things are not unusual. We want to feel protected.

We want to feel like nothing can get us, right? But no matter how secure we feel, no matter how well we’ve prepared, some things are just outside of our control. And that lesson was learned the hard way by a group of people called the Edomites.

Now, they’re mentioned throughout the Old Testament, but they feature most prominently in the book of Obadiah, if you’ll turn there with me. The book of Obadiah. It’s about halfway through your Bibles between the books of Amos and Jonah.

And for a while, I’ve wanted us to study the minor prophets. And these 12 books at the end of the New Testament are called the Minor Prophets because they’re short, not because they’re unimportant. And I wanted to start with the first of the Minor Prophets, at least chronologically speaking, in the order that they wrote, not the order that we find them in the Bible.

And Obadiah was either the very first of the Minor Prophets to write, or he was one of the last. We’re not entirely sure where his writing falls because his message doesn’t tell us anything about him or his background or the time that he lived in, any of that. He simply focused on God’s message to the Edomites. So we don’t know a whole lot about Obadiah himself.

Now, for a long time, I’ve held to the theory, for years I’ve held to the theory, that he wrote sometime in the 840s BC, which would make him the very first of the minor prophets. But others make good arguments that he wrote in the 580s BC, which would make him one of the last. I still think that he wrote in the 840s, but people make good, compelling cases that it was the 580s. We just don’t know for sure.

He may or may not have been the first, but we’re going to start with him anyway to kind of get a running start on the minor prophets. It’s like a snowball can start small and pick up size and speed as it rolls downhill. See, the minor prophets are often imitating, intimidating.

It’s a totally different word. They’re often intimidating to people, but Obadiah is the shortest book in the entire Old Testament. And so it’s a manageable book to try to work through and try to understand in just a few messages.

And I think it’ll prepare us for the other minor prophets by helping us to realize that these books are not insurmountable to try to understand. We can understand God’s truth even from these books. So the whole book of Obadiah is about God’s judgment on the Edomites.

The Edomites were the descendants of Esau. Esau was the brother of Jacob from whom the Israelites were descended. And so the Israelites and the Edomites were cousins.

They were related nations that lived right next door to each other, sort of like the Choctaws and Chickasaws or the Americans and the Canadians. They’re related and they live right next to each other. But unlike those, they didn’t have such a good relationship.

The Edomites and the Israelites had been in a state of nearly constant warfare, nearly constant conflict for about a thousand years, depending on when Obadiah wrote. Their problems went all the way back to the bickering between Jacob and Esau. And since then, the Edomites refused to let the Israelites pass through their territory when they were escaping Egypt and heading to the Promised Land.

The Edomites wouldn’t let them pass through. They had gone to war with Israel during the times of Saul and David. They had attacked Solomon’s trade caravans.

They constantly harassed the Israelites. They betrayed their trust. they sided with their enemies and anytime Israel suffered the Edomites rejoiced they were happy about it they would dance in the streets over over the pain that was inflicted on Israel and and so their wickedness and their hostility toward God and his people had gone on for a thousand years and in that time God had given them numerous opportunities to to repent but they refused and eventually God had had enough. And that’s when he sent the prophet Obadiah to announce his coming judgment on Edom.

They thought they had protected their country. They thought they’d protected their country so well that it was invincible. But they were about to learn that there’s no escape from the judgment of God.

And so we’re going to start tonight with Obadiah 1 through 9. There’s only one chapter. We’re going to look at the first nine verses.

Now verse 1 says, a vision of Obadiah. This is what the Lord God has said about Edom. We have heard a message from the Lord.

An envoy has been sent among the nations. Rise up and let us go to war against her. Now, some of your Bibles may say they’d heard a rumor from the Lord, which is an interesting way to phrase it.

That word meant something a little different 400 years ago than it means now. So that word, when it says they’d heard a rumor from the Lord, that word doesn’t necessarily have the connotation that we would give it today of being questionable gossip. What it’s talking about is a message that God had entrusted to Obadiah.

God had told Obadiah that he had sent an envoy or an ambassador out among the nations calling them to rise up and do battle against Edom. See the her that’s described in verse 1 is Edom. It’s the Edomites.

Now, this verse 1, the Bible commentator Matthew Henry called it a declaration of war by God. But even in this declaration of war, I think that’s a good way to summarize it, but even in this declaration of war, we still see God’s mercy at work. Because think about this, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.

When they attacked Pearl Harbor, it was a declaration of war against the United States, and our government responded with its own declaration of war the very next day. Didn’t waste any time in responding. But remember the history of Israel and Edom that I just kind of went over with you.

Edom had been at war with God and his people for a thousand years up to this time. They’d been at war with God and his people for a thousand years before God ever responded in this way. And what that tells us is that God is unbelievably patient.

God is unbelievably merciful. But eventually, even he had had enough. Even God was done.

Obadiah said that God sent an envoy among the nations. Now, was it a literal person? We don’t know.

It’s possible that God literally sent somebody like Obadiah out to all these nations. It’s possible. It’s also possible that the envoy was an angel.

It’s possible, maybe even more likely, that it was God’s way of describing the spirit of God working in the hearts of kings and generals to lead them into war against the Edomites. God can do that without sending a physical person if he wants. Proverbs says a king’s heart is like channeled water in the Lord’s hand.

He directs it wherever he chooses. So if God wanted to change their hearts just by his spirit, he could do that. Changing their hearts was easy for God no matter how he chose to do it, whether he sent a human envoy or an angel or his own spirit.

So he called the surrounding nations to go to war against Edom. Now verse 2 says, Look, I will make you insignificant among the nations. You will be deeply despised.

Until that point, the Edomites had had great relationships with some of the other countries in the region. They had close relationships. They had close ties to the Egyptians at times.

They had close ties to the Assyrians at times. Now, sometimes they were subjects of those countries, and sometimes they were equals. They were allies.

But either way, they had close relationships with some of these other countries. And they thought their partnerships with their stronger neighbors would help them out if they got into a bind. But God said he would make them insignificant in their neighbor’s eyes.

See, what that means is their neighbors would no longer see them as valuable partners to work with. Instead, they would look at the Edomites as a nuisance. And they would treat them like working with them wasn’t even worth the trouble.

And so the Edomites were going to be cut off from the influence that they had enjoyed with these other countries. But God also said that they would be despised. See, their neighbor’s attitudes toward the Edomites was going to devolve rapidly from friendship to ambivalence and then to outright hostility.

They were going to go down this ladder. And the irony here is that the Edomites would find themselves hated by their neighbors just like they had hated Israel and made sure they were hated by their neighbors. By the way, so much of what we see God saying, I’m going to do this to Edom, is stuff that Edom had done to Israel.

And this is just Edom’s chickens coming home to roost. So in verse 3, God said, Your arrogant heart has deceived you, you who live in clefts of the rock in your home on the heights, who say to yourself, who can bring me down to the ground? The Edomites lived high in the mountains, and they carved their settlements into the face of the rock. Some of you have seen photos of Petra, the ancient city of Petra.

It’s a city that was carved into the rock in Jordan, modern-day Jordan. The exterior of Petra’s treasury building, called Al-Kazna, is familiar to a lot of people from the ending of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We see the outside of the building there.

that treasury was actually built later on by Nabataean Arabs but the city where it originally stands and where where the settlement was first carved out of the rock that was built originally as an Edomite settlement and they were the first to go there and dig their homes out of the rock now by living in such an inaccessible area high up in the mountains with their homes and their fortresses carved right out of the rock, the Edomites felt safe. They felt safe. And God said that because of where they lived on the heights and in the cleft of the rock, they believed that they were safer than they actually were.

Sometimes we can feel safer than we actually are. And he told them, your arrogant heart has deceived you in verse 3. It had deceived them to the point where they were actually saying, they were asking, who can bring me down to the ground?

They thought they were invincible because of where they lived. In their pride, they had placed their trust in the defenses that they had made. And they had convinced themselves that they were invincible up in the mountains.

Nobody can get us. But God said that would not be enough to rescue them from His judgment. That wouldn’t be enough.

Now verse 4 says, though you seem to soar like an eagle and make your nest among the stars, even from there I will bring you down. This is the Lord’s declaration. I did a little reading about this this week, and birds of prey like the golden eagle that’s common to Israel, common to that part of the world, they prefer to build their nests high up on the sides of cliffs.

They like that because that provides them with protection for their families and it provides them with a clear view. So they like it up there. They prefer to be up there in the nest on the side of the cliff where they feel safe because they can keep their nests safe as well as keep a watch out for any kind of prey down there in the lower lands.

Keeps them safe and makes their enemies vulnerable. That’s how the Edomites felt. We’re safe and our enemies are vulnerable.

But God told the Edomites here that although they thought they were as secure as those eagles nesting up in the cliffs, that he could still defeat them. He could still get to them. And the addition at the end of verse 4, the addition of the phrase, this is the Lord’s declaration, that was a reminder to the Edomites that this message was coming straight from God and that he means business.

Let me be a little more specific. That was a reminder to them when he said the Lord, and that’s not just a title, that’s usually the way the English versions translate the name of God in Hebrew. So it was saying this is a message coming directly from the God of Israel, and he means business.

See, no matter how high their arrogance took them, God could still bring them down. In an instant, God could bring them down. So verse 5 says, if thieves came to you, if marauders by night, how ravaged you would be.

Wouldn’t they steal only what they wanted? If grape pickers came to you, wouldn’t they leave some grapes? Now this is a warning from God.

I like the way he did this. Here God started warning them of how drastically these invading armies, remember God’s judgment was going to come in the form of him sending these armies to make war against them. He warned them how drastically these invading armies would affect every aspect of life in Edom.

Now thieves don’t usually take everything you own, right? Sometimes they might, but usually if they break into your house, they take what they came for. They came for something specific and they take that.

Or if it’s just a crime of opportunity, they take what they can find and they get out. They get out quickly. They usually, usually leave more stuff than they take, right?

I can’t imagine how many fleets of moving trucks it would take to rob us of everything we At my house. Yeah. They usually leave more than they take.

And yet, if somebody came in and took one thing and left everything else, wouldn’t you feel victimized? We’d feel victimized, and rightly so. Now, God was pointing that out here, that thieves would take a little.

He told the Edomites that they would feel ravaged if someone stole from their homes and their vineyards, even if they only took a little bit and left. He’s telling the Edomites, think of how victimized you would feel. And so God compared the sorrow that the homeowner feels over losing a little bit of his property to the devastation that the nation of Edom would experience when these barauding armies came through.

Because God planned to judge Edom for all these centuries of wickedness by allowing these armies to invade. And when they did, they would take everything. They were going to take everything.

And so God compares it. You would feel devastated if a thief came in and took a little bit. How devastated are you going to be when they take everything?

That’s what verse 5 tells us. We see this in verse 6 where God said, How Esau will be pillaged, his hidden treasures searched out. Now, ordinary thieves, like I said, they’ll take a little bit and they’ll leave you able to recover eventually, most of the time.

You’ll eventually recover from the loss of what was stolen. But these armies would absolutely pillage Edom. They would devastate Edom.

They would take everything. There would be nothing left for the Edomites to try to recover with. Now, the Edomites probably thought, well, yeah, but they don’t know about our secret.

Oh, yeah, they did know about your secret. See, even their hidden treasures, which they thought would be safe, would be pillaged. The Edomites were known to dig these secret vaults into the sides of the mountains, just like they built their houses.

and there they could hide their riches and they would assume they’d never be found. Sometimes you can pull this off. I watch Unsolved Mysteries from years and years ago and there are people that have been hunting for treasure in the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico for decades and they still have no clue where it is.

So things can be hidden in the mountains and you can assume it’ll never be found, but God warned the Edomites that those vaults were going to be pillaged as well. He said the invading armies knew the tricks of the Edomites and they were going to leave no stone unturned until they had found and stolen absolutely everything. He said they’re coming for your secret treasure vaults.

And at the end of it all, once absolutely everything was stolen, Edom would be broke. So now look at verse 7. Everyone who has a treaty with you will drive you to the border.

Everyone at peace with you will deceive and conquer you. Those who eat your bread will set a trap for you. He will be unaware of it.

Like I said earlier, Edom had a lot of powerful friends. But God said these friends were going to turn on them. Edom had made treaties with a lot of countries.

And usually these treaties were made for them to gang up on Israel together. It’s part of why God’s mad at Edom. These treaties were made so that they could gang up on Israel together, but now these countries were going to break their treaties and gang up on the Edomites.

God said that Edom would find itself invaded by its former friends. See, while they felt like they were safe and at peace, their neighbors were laying a trap for them that Edom would never see coming. It’s all the more incredible they’d never see it coming, because God is telling them it’s coming, and they’re still not going to see it.

And this verse talks about a trap being set by those who’ve eaten the bread of Edom. What that means is when the time was right, even those who had benefited from their relationship with Edom would quickly betray the Edomites. Edom was going to have nobody left to turn to.

Even the ones that they had been good friends with, even the ones they had been generous with, they’d have nobody left. Now verse 8 says, In that day, this is the Lord’s declaration. Will I not eliminate the wise ones of Edom and those who understand from the hill country of Esau?

Edom had some wise elder statesmen, people who up until that time had been able to maneuver the kingdom through any kind of trouble. And the people of Edom felt safe with these people, with these leaders in charge. And they probably thought that they could still somehow avoid all these other calamities that God was talking about as long as their wise men were still taking care of them.

But God said these wise men wouldn’t be available to help them because they would be eliminated as well. Diplomacy was not going to save them, and neither was their military. Look at verse 9.

It says, Taman, your warriors will be terrified so that everyone from the hill country of Esau will be destroyed by slaughter. Now, Taman was an important settlement. It was an important stronghold for the Edomites.

But God said that even in Taman, the Edomite warriors would be overcome by their fear of the invading armies. The army that made Edom feel so secure. The army that made Edom feel so secure would be powerless to resist these invasions because terror was going to paralyze them.

Think of how scared they would have to be as these trained military men that they were going to be so terrified that they couldn’t move, they couldn’t fight back, they didn’t do anything but run. And this would allow the invading troops to rampage through the countryside. It would allow them to pillage and murder at will, And the nation was going to be absolutely brought to its knees before this was all said and done.

Now this is what God said was going to happen. And someone might ask just, they might ask how a just God could allow this to happen or even cause it to happen. But again, don’t forget that Edom had been doing the same things to Israel for a thousand years.

And the God of Israel had been patient with the Edomites through that time, giving them every opportunity to repent. But after a millennium of bloodshed, he was now going to use these foreign armies as his sword of justice. And the violence of the Edomites had to be punished.

How could God let this go on? See, we tend to ask, how could God let these bad things happen to these people and it be unpunished? And then we ask, how could God punish these people?

Folks, we cannot question the justice of God when he allows the aggressor one more opportunity to repent and then question the goodness of God when his judgment prevents them from shedding any more innocent blood. We can’t have it both ways. Now, the Edomite kingdom was, it was bloodthirsty, it was wicked, it was hostile, And God gave them ample opportunities to repent, but they repeatedly shook their collective fist in the face of God, in the face of the God of Israel, and finally he had enough.

And when he had enough, their party was over. God’s judgment was coming. And throughout these nine verses, we see that Edom, they thought they were untouchable, but God made it clear that all of their preparation provided no refuge at all from his judgment.

There was nowhere to hide. There was nowhere to hide when the judgment of God finally came. Still, they foolishly counted on six things that we see in the text here to protect them.

Now, in verses 1 and 2, the Edomites thought that they could find refuge from God’s judgment in the power of their influence. They couldn’t imagine somebody attacking a country like theirs with its prestige and its good reputation, but their influence couldn’t save them. In verses 3 and 4, the Edomites thought that they could find refuge from God’s judgment in the power of their fortifications.

See, they didn’t believe anybody could harm them because their country was literally carved out of solid rock up in the hills. They thought nobody could hurt them, but their fortifications couldn’t save them. In verses 5 and 6, we see the Edomites thought that they could find refuge from God’s judgment in the power of their wealth.

Money is a valuable tool. There’s no doubt about that. It’s a valuable tool to buy weapons, to shore up your defenses, and even hire more soldiers.

But their money couldn’t save them. In verse 7, the Edomites thought they could find refuge from God’s judgment in the power of their alliances. No one was going to pick on Edom if it meant taking on their powerful friends.

But their alliances couldn’t save them. In verse 8, the Edomites thought they could find refuge from God’s judgment in the power of their wisdom. after all their leaders were skilled at avoiding trouble but their wisdom couldn’t save them and in verse 9 the Edomites thought that they could find refuge from God’s judgment and in the power of their military strength see they had these well-trained well-equipped soldiers that they thought they could count on to fight to defend Edom to the last man but their strength couldn’t save them see God’s judgment for a thousand years of wickedness was now imminent now in Obadiah’s prophecy, God didn’t offer an ultimatum.

He didn’t say, repent or these things will happen. He just said, these things are going to happen. But you know, Jonah’s prophecy was the same way, and the Ninevites repented, and God forgave them.

And so I wonder what would have happened if the Edomites had sought refuge from God’s judgment in God’s mercy, like the Ninevites did. But we don’t know, because they didn’t. They thought their own power would protect them, and so they continued to seek refuge and hide from God’s judgment behind these defenses of their own making.

And because of that, they were destroyed. Now what does all this have to do with us, this stuff about the Edomites from thousands of years ago? Here’s where it applies to us.

You see, the same God, the God of Israel who judged the sin of Edom, is the same holy God who judges sin today. And as terrible as the judgment of Edom sounds, there’s a worse, there’s a final and far more frightening judgment coming. Read about it in the book of Revelation.

It’s scarier than this. And just like the Edomites, people today want to try to hide from the wrath of God everywhere they can, but in the mercy of God. Let me say that again.

People today want to hide from the wrath of God anywhere they can, other than in the mercy of God. The book of Revelation even describes people crying out for the mountains to fall on them and hide them from the wrath of God. But there’s only one refuge.

There’s only one place to hide from the judgment of God, and that’s in the mercy of God. And for us, that mercy is only available in Jesus Christ. Just like the Edomites, we’re not going to find refuge in our prestige or what we’ve built, our wealth, our friends, our wisdom, our strength. We’re not going to find refuge from God’s judgment in any of those things.

The only place that we’ll find refuge is Jesus Christ. Only in Jesus Christ will we find refuge from God’s righteous judgment of sin. He’s the only hiding place. They were looking for all these hiding places.

Jesus is the only hiding place from God’s certain judgment. He’s the only refuge from God’s wrath because He has already experienced the wrath of God for us. That’s wonderful.

He’s already experienced the wrath of God for us. The Bible says he took our sins on himself. According to 2 Corinthians, God made the one who did not know sin, meaning he had no sin of his own, the one who did not know sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

He took our sin on himself. And when our sin was nailed to the cross with Christ, the prophet Isaiah called Jesus our guilt offering and said the Lord was pleased to crush him severely. Now folks, that doesn’t mean that the Father enjoyed hurting Jesus.

What that means is that the justice of God was satisfied by pouring out His wrath towards sin on Jesus. So Jesus Christ already bore the full weight of God’s wrath toward our sin. And He took the judgment that we deserved.

What He did on the cross rescued us from the eternal consequences of sin. And the Apostle Paul said that Jesus rescues us from the coming wrath. We read about that last month in 1 Thessalonians.

He rescues us from the coming wrath and that now our life is hidden with Christ in God. See, our only refuge from the judgment that we deserve, the judgment that we deserve for our sin, the only refuge from that is in Jesus Christ. He’s the only hope for those who are barreling through time toward the certain judgment of God. And as the Edomites learned, there’s no other defense.

There’s no other defense we can build that will withstand the weight of judgment. There’s no place to hide but in Jesus Christ. Now, if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior before tonight, I’d like to invite you to do so. In just a moment, we’ll stand and have a time of invitation.

And if you’d like to come talk with me, I’d be glad to tell you more about what Jesus did for you. But in a Sunday night crowd like this, I expect most, if not all, of the people here have put their trust in Christ at some point. So this is a reminder to us that our hope in the future is not in what we build.

It’s not in what we’ve put together, not the defenses that we’ve constructed around us. Our hope in the face of God’s judgment is only in God’s mercy and for us. That’s in Jesus Christ. And the hope for our neighbors and our family members and our friends and our co-workers is not in the kingdoms they’re building around themselves.

Those will fall just like the Edomites did. Their hope for refuge, their place to hide from the wrath of God, is in the mercy of God, right there in Jesus Christ. And like Obadiah was sent to tell the Edomites about judgment, we need to tell people about the Savior who died to save them from the wrath of God and show them His mercy.

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