Discover the powerful parallels between the destruction of Edom and modern society’s detachment from spirituality. Dr. McGee exposits how the ‘pride of life’ as described by Obadiah is a gateway to deeper moral decay, leading to cynicism, atheism, and an overall deterioration of human values. This episode enriches listeners with thought-provoking reflections and encourages a return to humility and divine reliance.
How firm a foundation, ye saints, of the Lord is laid for your faith.
SPEAKER 03 :
What are the dangers of prideful and godless living? Well, the answers are probably evident, but just in case there is any uncertainty in your mind, our teacher, Dr. J. Vernon McGee, is going to make it very clear in today’s study of the Old Testament book of Obadiah. Welcome to Through the Bible. I’m Steve Schwartz. So grateful that you’re here with us as we continue our never-ending five-year journey through all 66 books of the Bible. Now, our time in Obadiah is nearly finished. So next time, we’re going to travel ahead in the Old Testament book of Jonah. And then after that, we head back to the New Testament study of 1 John. By joining us on the journey, you know that you’re jumping on board what Dr. McGee affectionately called the Bible bus. And every day, I’m committed to saving you a seat. So go ahead and grab your copy of God’s Word and get comfortable. And while you do that, here’s an introduction by Dr. McGee.
SPEAKER 01 :
I want to take a few moments before we get back into the text to look at what Obadiah is saying and its effect upon us. Because we’ve come to the most important and subtle factor that is eroding the quality of human life in our contemporary culture, that we need to pause here for a moment to view its consequences in our lives, both private and public. Obadiah puts the microscope down on humanity and we see the disease that is destroying modern man. These germs are so small that they escape our attention and we ignore them. Pride is the name of the germ and virus that is more deadly than cancer or Legionnaire’s disease. Let me define pride again according to Obadiah. It’s an attitude of a life that declares its ability to live without God. It’s a conceit of vanity. And the New Testament confirms that. John, in his first epistle, the second chapter at verse 15, says this, Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that’s in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, the lust thereof. But he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” So you see that the little book of Obadiah is confirmed. Now, we have seen that this is the great sin actually in America today. Now, that may seem strange to you, but humanism has been taught in our country for years. And humanism says that man is sufficient unto himself. He needs to… be free to express himself. He needs no disciplines or fetters to hinder his progress onward and upward. He does not need God. God was taken to the edge of his universe and bowed out, and the door was shut in his face. And that’s the world that I came into many years ago. And you find that expressed today in men like Heinrich Heine, who says, I’m no child. I do not want a heavenly father anymore. And then James Martineau, he says, we ask comte. to lift the veil from the Holy of Holies and show us the all-perfect object of worship. He produces a looking glass and shows us ourselves. And in our day, in fact, recently here in Southern California, a Christian psychologist gave this advice. He says, when you get up of a morning, go look in the mirror and look at the person there and say, I love you. I can’t think of anything that is more humanistic than that, and certainly that’s not what the Word of God has to say. But notice, pride of life has affected us individually and nationally. Individually, it’s led to skepticism, cynicism, atheism, insolence, and pessimism, and all restraints removed. The new morality and situation ethics, selfishness is evident today, and vanity. Now, what has happened? Well, this gross immorality has led actually to a pessimism. And that pessimism has led to suicide. And today, suicide is in epidemic stages in this country. The quality of life has deteriorated. Music has become louder. Dancing more frantic and frenzied. Confusion and despair are the end results. May I say to you, pride has brought us about.
SPEAKER 03 :
We’ll have to stop at this point. But in our next study, we’re going to hear more from Dr. McGee as he tells us additional consequences of pride and independence from God. And then the only answer that is to invite, of course, God back into our lives. So let’s pray for each other as we open his word together. Heavenly Father, we bow our heads and humble our hearts before you. Let the words that we hear penetrate our resistance and then help us to lay aside our pride at the foot of the cross. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. Now let’s dive into our study of Obadiah 4 on Through the Bible with Dr. J. Vernon McGee.
SPEAKER 01 :
Now friends, we come back to this little prophecy of Obadiah. And we saw last time that the great sin… of the nation Edom, the thing that caused God to say, I hate Esau, was the pride of his life, pride of his heart, a pride that we define as an attitude of a life that declares its ability to live without God. God says in verse 4, though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, that is, become deity, puts himself in the place of God, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, and that was the sin of Satan, that he would exalt his throne above the stars. God says, thence will I bring thee down, saith the Lord. God said, I intend to bring you down. We left off. with another look in the microscope. And Esau now has been magnified to the nation Edom. What was one man now is probably 100, 200,000. And we see here a human animal. Animalism in the raw. Terrifying ugliness. This is the opposite. And I’m sure that there are many people saying to me, well, I thought we descended from animals. And now you say that men act like animals. And that’s exactly what I’m saying, is that we didn’t descend up, we descended downward. There’s been no ascension, there’s been a descension. May I repeat again, the teaching of evolution is a fact of science. I think it’s the greatest delusion of the 20th century. And I believe we’ll come out of the fog and move to another, that is, the unbelievable, move to another explanation for the origin of things. And actually, evolution does not give the origin of things at all. It’s been accepted by the average man as truth, gospel truth, because today on television, radio, in our schools, in publications, we’re brainwashed that evolution is a fact, a proven fact, and it’s absolutely not. The strong and intelligent objections that have been given by reliable scientists are entirely ignored today. Now, I’m not going to discuss the pros and cons of evolution. That’s not my thought. But this is something that I became interested in even before I began studying for the ministry. When I was 16 years of age, I had a great desire to read and study. And I appealed to the wrong man, a minister who was a liberal at that time. And he urged me to read Darwin. And when I was 16 years old, I had read The Origin of Species. I’d read The Descent of Man and other miscellaneous papers. And I studied it, of course, later in college. I studied it again in a denominational seminary, and there it was theistic evolution, which I think is probably the most absurd interpretation of the origin of things of all. But I want to say to you that as far as I’m concerned, I totally reject The godless propaganda of evolution. This idea that it’s from mud to man, from protoplasm to personality, from amoeba to animation. I’d like to dismiss the argument with the quotation I gave last time from Dr. Edwin Conklin, the great biologist. And he said, The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop. And that, my friend, is pretty far-fetched, is it not? And that’s good enough for me. Now, the chief difficulty with the theory of evolution is its end results. Evolution leads to an awful, fatal pessimism. It leads man to believe that he has arrived, that he’s something, that he is actually up at the top. Well, that has led really to a fatalism today. A fatal pessimism. And it’s in our colleges. And it came to an alarming rate several years ago of suicides among young people. I attribute it to the teaching of evolution and Dr. Albert Einstein. made this statement, and I think many would consider him an authority. He says, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate, but almost disqualified for life. That’s a good statement. And if you want to know how this has affected men, listen to the poetry of a man that died not long ago. Why stand Hugh Auden? The British poet, however, he came to this country and became a citizen of this country, or else he would have been the poet laureate of Great Britain. And listen to this pessimism of this man. “‘Were all the stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky and feel its total dark sublime, though this might take me a little time.'” How pessimistic. And then he added this. Looking up at the stars, I know quite well that for all they care, I can go to hell. Now, I say to you, that’s pessimism. And that is the teaching that evolution has led to. But wait just a minute. The frightful thing that you have here in Obadiah and the startling thing and the amazing thing is this. The little book of Obadiah is God’s trenchant answer to evolution. And this is the reason that he said what he did about Edom. Now, let me illustrate this. Out on Wilshire Boulevard here in Los Angeles, there are what are known as the La Brea Tar Pits. And they built a museum, which is, I understand, a great museum. I haven’t been there. But it’s a tourist attraction in Southern California to go to the La Brea Tar Pits and then to go to this museum. Now, I went there when it was just a small museum. When I came out here first time as a tourist. And they showed us how man lived. That is, now that’s according to the… scientists out here, how he lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago in California. And they show him, and he lived like an animal because he looked like an animal according to the picture that they have of him. And by the way, they didn’t get a photograph. The fellow turned around before they got the picture, and they don’t have the photograph, but they drew on their imagination. Now, God has something to say to us today. Will you hear me carefully? Why go back 100,000 years? Go ahead and ride out Wilshire Boulevard right now at this moment. Out there at this moment, there are men and women that are living like animals. They don’t look like animals. Some of them are called beautiful people, but they’re living like animals. And the fact is that they’ve come down from a high plane where God had created them. And they’ve come down to the plane where they do not depend on God. And they live not only like animals, they live lower than animals. No animal gets drunk and beats his wife or shoots his children or murders or is homosexual. Only man does that. Man lives lower than animals in Southern California. And they were living like that yonder in Edom and Obadiah’s day. I wonder if you’ve ever heard about the pig up here in Kentucky that He got out of his pig pen and he went out in the woods and he found a still where they were making corn whiskey. And the still was leaking. And he began to eat some of the mash and drink the liquid. And he got drunk. And for two days he was lying stretched out there drunk. Finally, when he sobered up, Well, the pig got up and started to walk away. And when he did, running along, they thought they heard him say, I’ll never play the man again. Or someone has put it like this. And this is a poem I want to pass on to you. And I put the parenthesis around it. Here I begin. How well do I remember was in the bleak December as I was strolling down the street in manly pride when my heart began to flutter and I fell into a gutter and a pig came up and lay down by my side. As I lay there in the gutter with my heart still all aflutter, a man passing by did chance to say, you can tell a man that boozes by the company that he chooses. And the pig got up and slowly walked away. May I say to you, friends, man can go lower than an animal in his living down here when he determines that he’s going to live without God. A man didn’t come from an animal. Man was created on a high plane and he fell. He didn’t fall up. They fell down. He can go down to the very gutter of life. Now, will you notice verse 5? He says, if thieves came to thee, if robbers by night, how art thou cut off? Would they not have stolen till they had enough? If the grape gatherers came to thee, would they not leave some grapes? What he’s saying is this, even if a thief came to you, he’d just get all he wanted. He wouldn’t take everything. And it would be true also of a grape gatherer. He would leave some grapes. There’d be some he wouldn’t take. But God says, when I judge you, this is what I’m going to do. Notice verse 6. How are the things of Esau searched out? And Dr. Ginsberg translates that word search out as stripped bare. And this was our key verse. How are the things of Esau stripped bare? Or as we have put it, God’s put him under the microscope. And God says, come look, look through the word of God and look here at this man. And God says, I hate him. Why do I hate him? It’s because of pride of life. He’s turned his back on me, and he has declared his ability to live without God. That’s the pride of life. Now, how are his hidden things sought up? Now, frankly… I read the story back in Genesis of Esau, and I don’t quite get that. I’m a little slow about getting things, but I miss that in Genesis. Well, I sure don’t miss it here. And I can take now the microscope and go back and look at Esau and see why he wanted to trade in his birthright for a bowl of soup for the very simple reason It meant that he’d be the priest in the family. It meant a relationship to God. And frankly, he would rather have a bowl of soup than to have a relationship with God. And when you reach that place, friends, you’re down on the level of the pig that got down in the gutter. Now, I want to say that kindly, but it’s not my idea. I didn’t originate it. It’s in Obadiah, and God has said this. Now, will you notice, and I read on. All the men of thy confederacy have brought thee even to the border. The men that were at peace with thee have deceived thee and prevailed against thee. They that eat thy bread have laid a wound under thee. There is none understanding any.” Now, Edom was a nation that all the enemies of that day just passed by because they just couldn’t spend time with him holed up in the rock-hewn city of Petra. But Nebuchadnezzar was able to get spies inside the city. And through them, he was able to take the city. And it was taken. Just as God used Nebuchadnezzar to destroy Jerusalem, Jacob’s sons would turn from God. He uses Nebuchadnezzar also to reach in and take Edom, Esau’s sons. Now, will you notice verse 8, “…shall I not in that day, saith the Lord, even destroy the wise men out of Edom, and understanding out of the mount of Esau?” Now, they were not only noted for the fact that they were well protected in their Rocky Mountain fast, and that beautiful city it is even to this good day. And they were living there in a false security. But they had developed a wisdom and learning and actually superstition. They found the altars, the bloody altars that are up on top of the mountains round about there where they offered sacrifices. And they were given over to that. And peoples from all nations came there for the wisdom of these people, you see. They couldn’t get wisdom from God. When man can’t get wisdom from God, he’ll always turn to the netherworld. And they did that here. And this city was noted for it. Verse 9, “…and thy mighty man, O Teman,” and that’s another name for the Edomites, shall be dismayed to the end that every one of the mount of Esau may be cut off by slaughter. Now, he’s going to list here from verse 10 through 14, he’s going to give a list, a catalog of the reasons that God’s going to destroy them. That is, he’s going to spell it out. The pride of life, we said, is the great sin. But as we’ve already indicated, it leads to the committing of other sins. You see, your philosophy of life, friends, is going to gradually work its way down into your fingers and your feet and your eyes and all of your senses. And you’re going to express that philosophy in some way. And if you’re godless, you’re going to lead a godless life. If you are godly, you’re going to lead a godly life. That naturally follows. Now, God mentions here, actually, five different reasons of why he judges them. They committed certain acts, and five acts are mentioned here, and he spells it out. Now, as you can see by the clock, we’re going to have to reserve that till next time. But God was to punish them, and he was to punish them in two different ways. He was to send them into captivity, just as he did the nation Israel. But with this exception, that the nation Israel would return and be a people as they are today. But there would come a time when the Edomites would cease being a nation, and they would never become a nation again. Never again. Now, somebody’s going to raise the question, do you think that there are any Edomites around today? No, they’re not around today. They intermarried with the Ishmaelites and the others there of the desert, and that would be part of the Arab world today. There’s a difference in Arabs, by the way. And that would explain that difference. You’d find them over there among the Arabs today. And again, still the enemy of the nation Israel. We’ll look at that next time. Until then, may God richly bless you, my beloved.
SPEAKER 03 :
Pride and godless living led to Edom’s destruction. And it seems like that will be true for all who will continue in their pride and reject God. You know, but we do have hope in Jesus Christ, don’t we? If you’d like to know more about what it means to live a life that pleases God, we’ve got an entire online library of resources that we think will help you out over at ttb.org. So while you’re there, be sure to check out the booklet titled The Not-So-Bad Sin and How It’s Keeping You From God. It’s really good. It’s a favorite teaching from Dr. McGee, and it’s perfect for anyone who really wants to understand how to get closer to God. You know, God’s Word says that He’s near to the humble and listens to their prayer and helps them. But the proud? Well, that’s a completely different story. God stiff-arms the proud. He ignores them. You don’t want to be proud. Yet, that so-called polite sin is where we all fall short. Find out more when you download the booklet, The Not-So-Bad Sin. And it’s just one, really, of more than 100 booklets from Dr. McGee that are available for free download. Why don’t you check them all out over at ttb.org. Or call us at 1-800-65-BIBLE if we can help you find one in particular. Now, as you’ve probably heard, it is Letter Month here at Through the Bible. And in case you don’t know, that’s a time that we set aside to celebrate letters from our listening family. So this is really a special and personal invitation just for you. If you’re loving and learning from these studies in Obadiah or any other book in our journey through the whole Word of God, please share how God’s using it in your life. 1-800-65-BIBLE Now, as we continue our study of Obadiah next time, we’re going to hear more about pride, and it’s number one on God’s hate parade. I’m Steve Schwetz, and I’ll meet you here next time.
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Sin had left the prince unsaved. He washed it white as snow. As always, we’d love to know what’s God teaching you.
