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The Old Testament is the story of God's promises to his people. Below its somewhat obscure surface is hidden magnificent truth about the love and power of God. Throughout its pages the reader can find promise after promise from God, all of which are fulfilled in the New Testament—in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Author Mark Dever introduces readers to the Old Testament as a glorious whole so that they are able to see the big picture of the majesty of God and the wonder of his promises.

Does God have enemies? How would you answer this question?

If you are one kind of Muslim, you might answer that question, "Yes, God's enemies are the Americans and Israelis!"

If you are a Hindu nationalist, you might say, "Yes, it's the Muslims and the Christians!"

If you are like most Americans, you probably find the whole question strange, maybe to the point of being absurd: "God? Have enemies?" Perhaps the last time most Americans would have said yes to this question would have been in the 1950s, when God's enemies were "those godless communists"! But these days, the whole idea of God having enemies seems to go against the whole definition of God. Having "enemies" is not something God does, right? People have enemies, sure, but not God!

Well, it is true that people do have enemies. Our lives confirm it daily. Everything, from the personal trials we face to the terrible actions of September 11, 2001, reminds us that humans simply make enemies of one another. Faced with the "ubiquity of conflict" in this world, Samuel Huntingdon has observed, "It is human to hate." Most of us can agree with this much.

But the idea of God hating? That sounds more alien. Another observer of international affairs, Bernard Lewis, reflecting on the phrase "enemies of God" in the context of the Iranian government, said that such phrases "seem very strange to the modern outsider, whether religious or secular. The idea that God has enemies, and needs human help in order to identify and dispose of them, is a little difficult to assimilate."

So, does God have enemies? I am not asking whether there are political or religious organizations that use such language to emotionally intimidate and bully people; we know that there are. I am asking whether the God who exists actually has enemies. If he does, surely we want to know who they are. We know how implacable some humans become once they turn against us; we can scarcely imagine what having the Almighty himself as an enemy would be like!

As I have reflected on the book of Obadiah, it has occurred to me that this book, perhaps uniquely among the prophets of the Old Testament, speaks more directly to a time like our own. Most of the other prophets speak to Old Testament believers—and to Christians in churches. But Obadiah proclaimed a vision from the sovereign God to a people who knew no theology and who had no place for the knowledge of God in their lives. Unlike the audience of the other prophets, Obadiah's audience made no pretence of acknowledging God. In other words, he spoke to a society much like our own.

In this little book, God teaches us about who he is, who his friends are, and who his enemies are.

First, then, who are God's enemies?

In the first few verses of the book, we immediately observe one answer to that question: the proud.

Historically, Obadiah appears to have been written sometime after the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in 587 b.c. Amid this terrible plight among God's people, their next-door neighbors to the southeast, the Edomites, did nothing to help (to put it mildly!). The Edomites were the descendants of Jacob's brother Esau (see Genesis 36).

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May (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51