When Pride Prevails Series

ENGAGE

In his book, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote these insightful words:

There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.

What vice do you think Lewis is writing about here? [Wait for answers]

I’ll let Lewis answer that question himself:

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit….

TENSION

I could make a very good case that pride is the most dangerous sin of all because it is the root of all other sins. Most of us would probably say that the first sin was committed in the Garden by Adam and Eve, but the first recorded sin the Bible actually occurred when an angel called Lucifer in Isaiah 14, rebelled against God because of his pride. So it’s no wonder that pride was the weapon that he used to tempt Adam and Eve in the Garden and the tool that he uses most often against us still today.

It’s possible that there are some of you here this morning that may very well think you don’t need this message because you don’t have a problem with pride. But I can assure you that if you are thinking that, then you need this message much more than you imagine.

One of the main problems with pride is that it is so easy to spot in someone else, and yet so difficult to discern in our own lives. Pride is so insidious that we often take pride in the fact that we think we have overcome pride in our own lives.

TRUTH

This morning, as we continue in our series titled “Little Books with a Big Message” we’ll take a look at the shortest book in the Old Testament – the book of Obadiah, which contains only 21 verses.

We really don’t know a whole lot about Obadiah. Although we find 12 other people in the Old Testament with the that name, it is not clear that any of them can be connected with the author of this prophetical book. All we know for certain is the meaning of his name - “servant or worshipper of YHWH”.

According to the Jewish Talmud, Obadiah is said to have been a convert to Judaism from Edom, and a descendant of Eliphaz, the friend of Job. If that is true, it makes Obadiah’s message even more intriguing since he would be bringing his prophetic message to his own people.

There is nothing in the book that allows us to ascertain the date of its writing with any degree of certainty. There are two main possibilities – either around 845 BC during the reign of King Jehoram in Judah or around 586 BC after the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem. While I tend to favor the earlier date, the fact is that the main message of the book and its relevance to us is not dependent on when exactly it was written.

What we do know is that this message was delivered to the southern kingdom of Judah. As we’ll see, this is a message of hope to a people who have continually been subject to the attacks of their enemies, particularly those from Edom. And while this is a message of judgment for Edom, it is a message of hope for God’s people. And even today, it serves as both a message of warning and of hope for us.

[Read Obadiah 1a]

As I’ve already alluded to, we see right away that this message concerns Edom. So I want to take a moment to briefly review some important facts about Edom, But before I do that, I want to draw one important bit of information from the text here in Obadiah. I want you to look in verse 10 and again in verse 12 and see how God views the relationship between Edom and Judah. What key word do you find in both of those verse? [Wait for answer}]. That’s right – brother.

And if we trace this relationship between Edom and Judah back to its roots, we discover that this is essentially a family fight between two nations that should have been brothers, not enemies.