God’s Promises in Dark Days

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Transcript:

Go ahead and turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Obadiah. Obadiah there in the Old Testament. We’re going to finish up the book of Obadiah tonight, and I hope that you’ve gotten something out of this series.

If nothing else, I hope that you’ve gotten out of this series that these minor prophets are not beyond our ability to read them and understand them. They’re not insurmountable. Sometimes those books there at the end of the Old Testament, but we look at them and we might wonder why are they even there?

Who would read such a thing? What are they there for? I had a friend in college called me and asked me one night what I was doing.

I said, I’m reading Habakkuk. And they said, well, why in the world would you read Habakkuk? Because it’s in the Bible.

But we’ve taken about three weeks to go through the book of Obadiah. And like I said, on the very first night, I wanted to start with the book of Obadiah because I thought it might have been the first of the minor profits that was written. I’ve since come to the conclusion that it probably was not.

But even so, it is the shortest of them. And I kind of looked at it like Dave Ramsey in his debt snowball. He always says, pay off the smallest debt first to give yourself some momentum and make yourself feel like you can do this.

And I said, if we’re going to tackle some of these minor profits, and we may not go all the way through the minor profits. We may study a minor prophet and then do something else, come back and study another one. But I figured if we’re going to study some minor prophets, it’d be good to start with the smallest and show ourselves that we can understand this.

As we’ve read through the book of Obadiah, we’ve looked at the three major parts of this book. The first section, as I’ve told you, verses 1 through 9, It explains the judgment that God was pronouncing on the nation of Edom. The things that they could expect were going to happen to them for being on the wrong side of God and his will.

Now as we get to the second section, which we did last time, The second section from verses 10 through 16 explain to us God’s reasons why Edom had incurred such judgment. And we see it basically what got God so upset more than anything else was their mistreatment of the Israelites. We know that these are not the only things the Edomites did wrong, but what really sealed their fate was their mistreatment of the Israelites.

in particular during that time at 586 B. C. when the Babylonians were overrunning the city of Jerusalem.

It was one of the darkest days in Israel’s history up to that time, and the Edomites just had a party about it. They just rejoiced. I mean, in their hearts, they were glad, they were excited to see the Israelites being killed, being plundered, being driven from their homes.

They were excited. I don’t know what kind of sick person you have to be to take pleasure in seeing that kind of calamity befall somebody. There are people in my world that I don’t like.

Maybe I’m not supposed to admit that as a preacher. But there are people I don’t like. None of them are in this room.

So you can, you know, I’ll take that worry off of your minds. None of them are in this room. But there are people I don’t like.

As a friend of mine used to say, you can’t like everybody. All right? Love them all.

You can love them all, yeah. Sometimes it’s easier to love them from a distance. But there are people that I don’t like, and yet I can’t think of anybody that I would want to see go through the things that the Israelites were going through.

I can’t think of anybody that I dislike so much that if pagan armies were knocking down the gates of their city and killing their people and carrying their children back into captivity and plundering everything, I can’t think of anybody that I dislike so much that I’d be having a party in the street over what was taking place. But God saw how the Edomites rejoiced and how they celebrated and how they joined in with what was going on. And that for God was it.

God had not overlooked their sin, but God had had a lot of patience with the Edomites. But after a thousand years, God saw what they did during the fall of Jerusalem, and he was done. And that’s why he sent the message of judgment that we see in the first nine verses of the things that were going to happen to them.

And it basically turned out that the things that were going to happen to Edom were the things that they had either caused or rejoiced in that had happened to Israel. But as I’ve been studying through the book of Obadiah, it’s not just a message of judgment. If we left it there, we’d be ending unnecessarily on a sour note.

But what we’re going to look at tonight in this third section of the book, the final five verses, five or six verses, what we’re going to see in these verses is that God says all is not lost. Now, for Edom, Edom is definitely doomed. But even in the midst of this message of judgment, there’s a message of hope to God’s people. And so we’re going to pick up at Obadiah verse 17 and go through verse 21.

And we’re going to do that a little bit at a time. But just to remind you, just to set the scene, what’s happened here? Israel has suffered a number of invasions by Babylon, a number of incursions.

There had been three major ones where they carried off people from Judah. And this is the third and final one, the one that I believe is talked about throughout the book of Obadiah, the one where Nebuchadnezzar finally broke in. They destroyed the walls.

They destroyed the temple. all these things needed to be rebuilt 70 years later under Nehemiah, or 70 plus years. So this final major invasion, and the Israelites faced one of their darkest days in history.

The city was in ruins. Most of the people were gone. All that were left were a few farmers and herders that most of the people had been carried off elsewhere.

All of their belongings had been taken. and it was just a dark, desperate situation for them. And when you’re in a situation like that, some of us, I doubt any of us have been through an actual situation like that where pagan armies have come in and kidnapped our children and taken all of our food and all of our money, torn our house down.

I doubt any of us have ever been in a circumstance like that. But I know we’ve all been in dark times. This would have been one of those times for them where it would have looked like all hope was lost for the Israelites after the Babylonians marched through and after the Edomites came in and added insult to injury.

We’ve all been in times, I’m sure, where we thought all hope was lost. And what we’re going to see tonight in the book of Obadiah and the way it finishes is that all hope is never lost for God’s children. There’s never a time for God’s children where we can look and say there’s no more hope. There’s no chance of rescue here.

There’s nothing good left for me that’s going to come for this. When it comes to God’s people, there’s always hope. Because God is a God who remembers his promises in our darkest days.

Now, I want to be very clear that the things God promises Israel are not always the same things, are not always promises that apply to us. We have to be very careful as we read the scriptures, if we want to interpret them correctly, to learn from context what things apply to us and what things apply to somebody else. There’s a promise in Scripture.

I’ll make your children as numerous as the sand on the seashore. Is that a promise to everyone at all places and all times? No, thank goodness, because it’s hard enough to afford to feed four of them at this point.

I can’t afford children like the sand on the seashore. That was a promise for Abraham. How do we know that?

from reading the passage and looking at the context. So be very careful. Not every promise in Scripture is given to us, but I think we can learn something from every promise given in Scripture.

And so we go to Obadiah, verse 17. Obadiah, verse 17, says, Here’s where all of the things that God has said in the book of Obadiah, they all hinge, they all turn on this one word at the beginning of verse 17, But, okay, we’ve been here talking about judgment and talking about how there’s no hope left for the Edomites, and then verse 17 starts, but, and everything changes. But, there will be a deliverance on Mount Zion, and it will be holy.

The house of Jacob will dispossess those who dispossessed them. And I’m just going to take this a verse at a time and break it down for you. Now, if you recall from the last time we met together, there was some discussion in verse 16 about the Edomites drinking on God’s holy mountain.

They were there on the Temple Mount. They were there in Jerusalem, and they were drinking. They were toasting and celebrating their destruction of the Israelites.

And immediately after talking about what they drank, what they thought was their cup of celebration, God said, you’re really drinking the cup of my wrath, and you’re gulping it down. and you’re going to drink your fill here. He goes from saying, you’re drinking and celebrating on my holy mountain, to in verse 17, telling the Israelites that there will be deliverance on Mount Zion.

That there on that mountain, there in Jerusalem, there will be deliverance, he says. There will be deliverance on Mount Zion, and it will be holy. I want to look at some of the reasons tonight why the Israelites could continue to hope in God, even in the midst of such a dark period of their history.

And it really circles around God remembering his promises and God being the kind of God who will carry out the things that he’s promised. And so what are some of these promises that God remembers? First of all, we see in verse 17 that God intended to deliver his people.

God’s intention to deliver them went back to his promises. He didn’t decide to deliver them suddenly after the Babylonians came in and God thought, well, wow, I didn’t see that coming. Maybe I should deliver them.

No, God always knew the Babylonians were coming. God allowed the Babylonians to come as a last-ditch effort to get Israel’s attention and make them knock off the idolatry that they had been struggling with for centuries. God allowed the Babylonians to come in.

It was part of God’s plan. God foretold through the prophets, like Jeremiah, that the Babylonians were going to come in. But even before the Babylonians came in, as God was telling them, you’re going to be taken captive by the Babylonians, and you’re going to be held in captivity for 70 years, even back then when God was foretelling the captivity, God was also foretelling that he was going to deliver his people.

It was God’s intention all along that he would deliver the people of Israel. So why did they have reason for hope? because of God’s promises and because God intended to deliver his people.

He wasn’t going to let the Babylonians stand in his way. As a matter of fact, some of them asked the question, well, why did we get punished with God using the Babylonians? We got punished for our wickedness, and God used the Babylonians to punish us.

The Babylonians are worse. And that’s part of what the book of Habakkuk deals with. The Babylonians are worse, and God said, don’t worry, the Babylonians are going to get worse.

As a matter of fact, the Babylonians didn’t last too long into their captivity until the Persians came in and overtook them. And it was eventually the Persians that God used to send the Israelites back to their homeland. But we need to understand that they had reason for hope, even in the midst of this dark circumstance, because it was God’s intention to deliver his people.

God always has a plan to deliver his people. It may not look exactly like we think it should look, if we had taken a poll on the streets of Jerusalem just before Nebuchadnezzar and his armies marched through and said, what do you think God’s deliverance of your city ought to look like? Probably the people would have said, well, God could send a giant meteor or something and wipe out all the Babylonians.

That’d be great. That’s not how God intended to deliver them. God intended to deliver them by first letting them be taken captive, but by putting somebody then on the throne who was going to send them back after they’d learned their lesson.

And for you and me, Our deliverance from God may not take the form that we think it ought to take. God, can’t you get me out of this situation unscathed? And sometimes God will get us out of a situation unscathed.

Sometimes God will deliver us by bringing us through the situation rather than around it. And as much as we don’t like that, that’s just reality. But God always has a plan to deliver his people.

And we may say, well, what about the martyrs in other countries? What about people who even today are giving their lives just for the offense of loving Jesus Christ? What about those people?

Some of them die every day. Doesn’t God have a plan to deliver them? Oh yeah, it’s the same plan he had for the Apostle Paul.

That some people he delivers from the chains and the sword, and some people he delivers through the chains and the sword directly into heaven. That’s where I’m saying, and I don’t mean to take this lightly, because you and I don’t face that persecution. But my point is, God always has a plan to deliver his people.

Sometimes it’s from the sword, and sometimes it’s through the sword that God will deliver his people. But even as the Israelites were captive by the Babylonians, if they really knew God, those who really knew him and trusted him, believed that he had a plan to deliver them because he had promised it so many times. Let’s look at the rest of verse 17 and into verse 18.

It says, Israel. A lot of times there’s poetic language in these Old Testament prophets, and when it says Jacob, it doesn’t necessarily mean Jacob, because Jacob was long since dead. It’s talking about the descendants of Jacob.

It’s talking about Israel here. It says Israel will come and dispossess those who dispossessed them. God was promising a day that the wrong that had been done to Israel would be righted, when Israel would come back into the land that had been stolen from them.

And we move into verse 18, and it says this about the blazing fire, I had some trouble with this. And I tell you all the time, context, context, context. And sometimes I break my own rules and end up realizing how dumb I can be.

But verse 18, I struggled with for a little bit this week. When he says, the house of Jacob will be a blazing fire, and the house of Joseph a burning flame, I stopped right there at that period and thought, gee, I wonder what that means. And I immediately went into detective mode, Because I thought that’s kind of an interesting phrase, that he’s going to make them like a burning flame and a blazing fire.

What does that mean? And so I did some digging, and I spent several minutes looking into it, and I just couldn’t find an answer. I said, okay, I’m going to move on to the next thing.

Well, you know, if I’d moved on to the next thing immediately, God put the answer right there. What does that mean? He said, the house of Jacob will be a blazing fire, and the house of Joseph a burning flame, but the house of Esau, that’s the Edomites, will be stubble.

Stubble is all that little stuff left over that gets burned up. I’ve seen people clear their fields and they’ve cleared brush out before and what they couldn’t chop up or, you know, they’ve piled up and eventually they have a big bonfire. They just burn up all that stuff.

He says the house of Esau, the Edomites, are going to be like stubble in the field and the house of Jacob, even the house of Joseph, That’s all a description of the Israelites. They’re going to be like the burning fire. So they’re going to be the ones that God uses to destroy the Edomites.

And Jacob will set them on fire and consume Edom. So there’s the answer to my question. What does that mean that they’re going to be a burning flame?

It means that God’s going to use them to right these wrongs that have been done against them. And no survivor will remain of the house of Esau. Now this is not God encouraging genocide.

I feel like I have to explain this all the time throughout the Old Testament because there are so many examples of Israel going to battle and God saying, just destroy this nation. Just get rid of them. And people say God in the Old Testament was so bloodthirsty.

There are even people who reject God altogether because of what they see in the Old Testament. But what we have to understand is that in these battles in the Old Testament, God never said after the first thing they did, hey, just go get them and wipe them off the map. God never did that.

When God gave those orders, it was usually after thousands of years, at least hundreds of years, of trying to get these other countries to stop it. And what we’re dealing with were enemies that were so bloodthirsty and so violent that God said, you’ve got to go wipe them out. even the upcoming generation, because if you don’t, the madness is never going to stop.

The bloodshed is never going to stop. And so it’s not a, you know, God doesn’t endorse genocide here. God is patient and giving every opportunity for repentance.

And yet God in his justice has to at some point draw the line and say, the madness has to stop. It’s got to stop. And he says, for the Lord has spoken.

This wasn’t Israel’s idea. Let’s go wipe them off the map because it’s convenient. We get into a lot of trouble when one country decides they hate the people from another country, and so let’s just go wipe them out.

Bad things come from that. In this case, it was God who, after a thousand years, said it’s enough. The Lord has spoken.

And when the Lord speaks, when the Lord has spoken, you can take it to the bank. You can rest assured in that. And so why else, not that they were looking forward to the bloodshed, but why else did Israel have reason for hope in the midst of this difficulty?

Because God intended to avenge his people. He intended to avenge his people. His plan all along was to avenge them, to right the wrongs that had been done to his people.

You go back all the way to the time of Abraham, and God told Abraham in the book of Genesis, I will bless those that bless you and curse those that curse you. Now the Edomites were descendants of Abraham too, but God sent Balaam in the book of Numbers to apply that promise specifically to Israel. That’s who he was talking about with the child of promise, was the nation of Israel.

And he said, I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. God said, I’m keeping a record of what’s been done to you. And there will come a day when all the rights, when all the wrongs will be righted.

and sometimes we are in dark times and we’re suffering because people are doing things to us that they ought not to be doing and we’re treated in terrible ways sometimes and we wonder is there any justice will it ever be fixed does god even notice folks we have a reminder that god notices the wrongs that are done to his people and and he will avenge those again the this doesn’t mean that he’s going to go wipe your neighbor out and you’re going to be the burning flame and they’re going to be the stubble. That’s not how this works. That’s not always how this works.

All right. Because ultimately what we want from God is not justice. We want mercy, right?

I do not want what I deserve from God. But God in his justice will work all those things out. So we go on to verse 19.

And he says, people from the Negev will possess the hill country of Esau. Those from the Judean foothills will possess the land of the Philistines. They will possess the territories of Ephraim and Samaria, while Benjamin will possess Gilead.

The exiles of the Israelites who are in Hala, and who are among the Canaanites as far as Zarephath, as well as the exiles of Jerusalem who are in Sephiroth, will possess the cities of the Negev. Now, I don’t want to give you too much of a geography lesson tonight. But I do want to kind of explain what some of that means.

The people from the Negev. The Negev is the southern part of Israel. If you look at a map today, it’s the pointy part at the bottom that goes down to the tip of the Red Sea.

And it’s mostly desert. And there were people in Israel who were left behind in the desert. There were people who had been driven into the desert.

And God was saying that the people in the Negev, down there in the desert in the far south, they would possess the hill country of Esau. Now, the Edomites were in the southern part of what’s now Jordan that we know of. What God was saying was that the people who have been driven down into the desert are going to come back, and they’re going to possess their land, and they’re going to possess the Edomites’ land, who have posed such a problem to them.

And he says the people from the Judean foothills, that would be the area kind of around Jerusalem, they’re going to possess the land of the Philistines. Now, if you’ve looked at a map of Israel, the area along the coast is what belonged to the Philistines. They were evidently related to the Phoenicians, who were a seafaring people.

They lived along the seacoast, and the Philistines had been a thorn in the side of the Israelites for years. We’re familiar usually with the Philistines from the story of David and Goliath. Goliath was a Philistine.

That story pretty well sums up the relationship that Israel and the Philistines always had. But God said these people who are stuck in the middle of Israel, they’re going to spill out onto the coast in a good way. They’re going to spread out.

God’s going to give them that land along the coast that belonged to them. They’ll possess the territories of Ephraim and Samaria. You go north from Jerusalem and that land is Samaria.

And across the Jordan River is Ephraim. He said, I’m going to give them that land too. Now all of that land had been taken by pagan countries, some by the Babylonians, some by the Assyrians, some by the Edomites, some by the Philistines.

While Benjamin will possess Gilead, he’s talking about each of the tribes getting back their rightful land. And the exiles of the Israelites who are in Hala and who are among the Canaanites as far as Zarephath, as well as the exiles of Jerusalem who are in Sepharad will possess the cities of the Negev. What he’s talking about there, those who are in exile among the Canaanites are probably those who were carried off from the 10 northern tribes by the Assyrians over 100 years earlier.

And they’re all mixed in with the other countries, but God said, guess what, I’m going to bring them back. And you’ve got these who’ve been carried captive from Jerusalem to Babylon, and God says, I’m going to bring them back as well. So what we have here, I know that’s a lot of geography, and it’d be really helpful if I had a big map behind me, but I don’t.

The point here is that God says there’s coming a time where I’m going to restore you not only to the land that you had before. I mean, that would be good enough. I’m going to bring you out of captivity.

I’m going to bring you out of hiding. I’m going to bring you out of exile. And I’m going to bring you not only back into the land that you had before, but I’m actually going to give you the land of the people who have driven you out as well.

You are going to fill up the land that you had, and you’re going to spill over into all the land that I’ve given you. God was going to bless them to where they were running over their borders. And he was going to bring people back.

People who, some of them were gone into captivity with the Babylonians or exiled with the Assyrians. Some of them had been gone for generations. And God said, I’m going to bring you back.

That’s a promise that God had made well before the captivity. So why did they have reason for hope even in this darkest time? It’s because God always intended to restore his people.

God had a plan to restore his people. That’s what he didn’t. God’s plan was not to send them into captivity in Babylon so they’d learn their lesson and just leave them there.

He sent them into captivity so they could learn their lesson and so that he could bring them back into the land and restore them to serve him. That was his plan. And then we look at verse 21, the final verse of the book.

It says, A couple of things that this might mean, that word saviors, is not referring to Jesus in the historical context. It could talk about deliverers in the sense of those who are returning, who will once again put Israelite territory under Israelite control, especially there in the city of Jerusalem. I think more likely in the Hebrew, it sounds like it means those who have been delivered.

And it may just be that there’s not a good way to phrase this. There’s not an exact translation in English, so they went with saviors. I think it means those who have been delivered.

When God begins to restore his people, all of them come back. And those who’ve been delivered, those who God has set free from these things, God is going to raise them up and he’s going to send them to Mount Zion. There they’re going to worship him.

And eventually we know under Ezra they restored the temple. Under Nehemiah they restored the walls. They’re going to worship him and they’re going to rule over their own land and they’re going to rule over the hill country of Esau.

In other words, Israel is going to be back in charge of its own country. But I love the last sentence of the book. But the kingdom will be the Lord’s.

Yes, those who have been delivered are going to come back into authority and they’re going to rule over their own people. But don’t forget the authority and the power that brought you here. Don’t forget who actually rules over you and reigns over you.

And that’s the problem that Israel had had all along. We see the whining in the desert when Moses led them through in the wilderness. The whining was because they forgot that God delivered them from slavery.

They forgot about how God had parted the Red Sea so they could escape Pharaoh’s army. All they were thinking about in the moment was, we’re tired, we’re thirsty, are we there yet? And God did things to remind them, hey, I’m here, I’ve got this, I’ve got you, I’m ruling over you.

We see this in the book of Judges all the time. that this just this ugly cycle of them walking away from God and doing whatever they wanted to and God saying no you can’t do that oh yes we can oh really and so God sends in a pagan country to take them over and after a few years they get tired of that and say wait a minute God we’re sorry we we want you back so God would raise up a judge and use him to kick them out and then they’d worship him for a little while and then they’d forget about him again we saw that in the time of the kings where so many of the kings thought they were large and in charge and seemed to forget that it was God who actually had the authority in Israel. So God reminds them that, yes, I’m going to put my people back in charge of their own country, but really I’ll rule over them.

So why could they have hope in a desperate time? Because God intended to rule over his people. As a matter of fact, God never stopped ruling over his people.

And that’s what we need to remember when we get in those dark days where we feel like everything’s out of control. I love the phrase, and I’ve told you this many times, the phrase that Brother Tim uses, that God did not wake up this morning and say, oops, I didn’t see that coming. Okay?

I love that. I’ve called him before needing to whine about something going on, and we’ve prayed, and he has prayed that and said, Lord, we thank you that you didn’t wake up this morning and say, oops, I didn’t see that coming. That’s great.

God was not taken by surprise when his people were carried off into captivity. It was his plan. He was in charge of that.

He allowed it to happen. If God hadn’t allowed it, the Babylonians couldn’t have gotten through the walls of Jerusalem. At no point was God off of his throne.

But this was a reminder to them, when you come back in and you set back up your kingdom, you remember that I rule over you. You remember that you’re mine. You remember that you belong to me.

And that’s what they were missing so many times. Now, what does this have to do with us today? We go through difficult circumstances, just like they did.

Maybe not as difficult as they did. Probably not as difficult as they did, but we go through difficult circumstances too. And we get in those situations where we feel like there’s no hope.

We feel like there’s no way out of this. We feel like God’s forgotten us. But we see his track record all throughout history, including here in the story of Obadiah, where God promises to take care of his people.

Now, in this case, it was Israel, but where God makes promises to his people and God always fulfills them. God always has a plan. God’s always at work, even in these dark times where we can’t see it and don’t notice it.

He’s always at work and there’s always a reason for hope because God remembers his promises even in those dark times. In those times where it feels like God’s forgotten us, he hasn’t and he never will. Now, ultimately, his plans for his people center around Jesus Christ. We can’t ever forget that.

Even when we’re looking at these Old Testament books, it’s always got to come back to Jesus Christ. God’s plans for his people today center around Jesus Christ. God’s plans for us are that we would come to faith in Christ, and so that we would be given eternal life, we’d be given that future hope. But God’s plans are also that we would become more like Jesus Christ, and that we’d walk with him, and we’d grow in that relationship. God has plans for us and God has made promises to us and God will never forget those promises.

Even when we get in difficult circumstances, even when it seems like there’s no hope, we can look for the hand of God and see that he has saved us and we see the evidence of him saving us because we see the evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit in us. We can see him using even those circumstances to change us to be more like Jesus Christ. We can see him working in us so that we can be the hands and feet of Christ in difficult circumstances. And folks, we look around and we see all these things and we realize that the same God who didn’t forget his people in their darkest day in 586 BC is the same God who doesn’t forget his people in

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