Obadiah 1:2-6
No Enemy Too Great

"See, I will make you small among the nations;
      you will be utterly despised.

The pride of your heart has deceived you,
      you who live in the clefts of the rocks
      and make your home on the heights,
you who say to yourself,
      'Who can bring me down to the ground?'

Though you soar like the eagle
      and make your nest among the stars,
from there I will bring you down,"
      declares the LORD.

"If thieves came to you,
      if robbers in the night--
Oh, what a disaster awaits you--
      would they not steal only as much as they wanted?
If grape pickers came to you,
      would they not leave a few grapes?
But how Esau will be ransacked,
      his hidden treasures pillaged!

New International Version

Sometimes we think far too small when we think about God. We don't want to bother God with the little problems in our lives because we assume God is "too busy" to be concerned with the small stuff. We bargain ourselves down to less than what we need when we approach God with our big problems because we assume that what is gigantic to us will still be big to God. We are constrained by our finite minds in how we perceive the world, so we make the foolish assumption that God, too, is finite.

Obadiah's prophesy came to finite thinkers in Israel, as they recovered from punishing attacks on their nation. The Israelites occasionally faced military threats from large countries like Syria and Assyria who wanted to control the highways through Palestine to Egypt. But the Israelites faced a constant threat from the Edomites, the descendants of Esau, since Edom was a neighbor nation with an ancient grudge against the descendants of Jacob. The capital city of Edom, named Sela, was placed in an ideal defensive position in the cliffs above the Dead Sea, unassailable by attackers from any direction. From this ideal command post, the Edomites could assault Israel at will, striving to achieve the total destruction of their ancestral rival.

The weakened nation of Israel might have prayed that God would delay the expected attacks from Edom while they recovered from their defeat. God through Obadiah promised something much greater. Instead of delay, God promised elimination of Edom. Instead of trying to neutralize their fortress city, God promised complete destruction. "But that's impossible!" the Hebrew skeptics might have responded, but that is exactly the point God wants us to understand. We worship a God for whom nothing is impossible!

The first set of skeptics might have been swayed by Obadiah's persuasive message that God was more powerful than the feared Edomites. The second set of skeptics would have gestured at the destroyed walls of Jerusalem and asked, "If God is so powerful, why were we just defeated?"

Should we wonder if God might not be finite after all? While God could defeat Edom, maybe God could not stop Moab, or Assyria, or Babylon, or the other nations that marched across Old Testament Palestine. Are we to conclude that God can heal "easy" diseases, but can't stop the damage of chronic conditions like diabetes?

Should we settle for a fatalistic balance, that with the good must come the bad? Maybe God is incapable of stopping the bad, and can only trade out some bad here for some good there. Shouldn't we stop complaining about the bad and just be happy things aren't worse?

What kinds of rationalizations have you devised? Our logical minds try to make sense out of the apparent absence of God in circumstances where we thought God would act. How could it not have been in God's plan for me to succeed, to win, to defeat that enemy?

Sometimes we think we know more about God's goals than we really do. We make assumptions that God wants what we want, or we place what we think are innocent qualifications to the strong messages in the scriptures. For just one example, no one of us wants to be poor, and certainly we can do a wider range of work for God's Kingdom if we have money. But we dare not ignore or explain away the directive Jesus gave the rich young seeker in Mark 10:21 to sell all that he had so he could be a disciple, because Jesus still calls us to discard what separates us from following Him.

Too often we, like the Hebrews, don't recognize our real "enemies". The Hebrew people believed the Edomites and the Moabites were serious threats, when their most serious threat was their own rejection of God. God's desire was not that Israel would be the largest nation or the wealthiest nation, but the holiest nation. The kings of Israel and Judah encouraged praying to the gods of the surrounding tribes in addition to the God of Abraham in order to be diplomatically prudent, but that goal conflicted with God's primary goal. Surely God wanted Israel to live in peace with its neighbors--but not at the cost of their faithfulness to and dependence upon God.

I sometimes realize, in those times when God isn't doing what I want, that I am wanting the wrong things. I prayed to be offered that "safe" job, then recognized that God is the only reliable source for my economic security. I prayed for that visible, public opportunity, when God's goal for me was to grow in humility. I prayed for healing to be strong again, but I needed instead to stop trusting in my own strength and skill. I always must be cautious when I pray to overcome my enemies, since that so often means to overcome myself!

Let us praise our loving Father for being so much greater than we are! Nothing foolish that I do, and no confused logic that I construct, can prevent God from working out good in my life. I am not required to understand what God is doing to help me grow and mature into whom God wants me to be. I don't need to have a holy vision of the "end product" God wants for my life; in fact, I tend to stumble when I take my attention away from trusting God one step by one step along the Way God has for me.

This may be best expressed in the words of the hymn writer Edwin Hatch:

Breathe on me, Breath of God, fill me with life anew,
That I may love what Thou dost love, and do what Thou wouldst do.
Breathe on me, Breath of God, until my heart is pure,
Until with Thee I will one will, to do and to endure.
Breathe on me, Breath of God, till I am wholly Thine,
Till all this earthly part of me glows with Thy fire divine.