The Pride of Edom and the Kingdom of the LORD
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Scripture: Obadiah (with Genesis 25:19–34 and Revelation 11:15)
Before this session, read the single chapter of Obadiah, the shortest book in the Old Testament, and worth reading twice. To feel the weight of the quarrel behind it, recall the story of the twin brothers Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25:19–34; 27), from whom Israel and Edom descended. Then glance ahead to Revelation 11:15, where the kingdom of the world becomes the kingdom of our Lord. Keep your Bible open, and ask: what does a brief oracle against one ancient enemy have to teach us about the pride that destroys, and the kingdom that endures?
Those who have been delivered will go up on Mount Zion in order to rule over Esau’s mountain. Then the LORD will reign as King!
(Obadiah 21)
An Ancient Quarrel
To read the shortest book in the Old Testament well, we have to begin long before it, in a tent where two brothers were born minutes apart and spent the rest of their lives at war. Obadiah is a single chapter, twenty-one verses, one sustained oracle against the nation of Edom; and Edom was the people descended from Esau, the twin brother of Jacob. The quarrel Obadiah addresses was already a thousand years old when he wrote, and it had begun in the womb. But the children struggled inside her, Genesis tells us of Rebekah’s twins, and the LORD said to her, Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples will be separated from within you. One people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger (Genesis 25:22–23). Jacob and Esau came out fighting, and their descendants, Israel and Edom, never stopped.
We know nothing about the man who wrote this book, nothing but his name. Obadiah means servant of the LORD, or worshiper of the LORD, and there were many men by that name in Israel; which one this was, when he lived, where he came from, the Scripture does not say. He steps onto the page with a single oracle and steps off again, and we never learn another thing about him. There is a quiet lesson in that anonymity. The messenger is forgotten; the message endures, lodged forever in the canon of God’s word. It is a useful corrective for an age obsessed with the personality and the platform of the preacher: the word does not depend for its authority on the fame of the one who brings it. A nameless servant of the LORD spoke, and his twenty-one verses have outlasted the proud kingdom they were spoken against by twenty-five centuries and counting.
The story of those two brothers is one we must hold in view, because the whole book turns on it. Esau was the firstborn, the rugged hunter, his father’s favorite; Jacob was the younger, the quiet schemer, his mother’s. And in two famous transactions the order was overturned: Esau, coming in famished from the field, sold his birthright (the firstborn’s sacred inheritance and place in the line of promise) to Jacob for a single bowl of red lentil stew, despising what he could not be bothered to value; and Jacob, later, with his mother’s help, stole from the blind old Isaac the blessing that should have gone to the elder. The Scripture is blunt about Esau: he was an immoral or godless person … who sold his own birthright for a single meal (Hebrews 12:16). He held the promise of God so cheaply that he traded it for soup. From that day the two brothers, and the two nations, were locked in enmity, and the red stew gave the red man his name: Feed me some of the red stuff, he said, and that is why he was also called Edom (Genesis 25:30). Edom means red.
We should be honest that neither brother was admirable. Jacob was a grasper and a deceiver, and we spent time in Hosea watching the LORD hold up his crookedness as a mirror. The promise did not run through Jacob because Jacob was the better man; it ran through him by sheer grace, the unmerited choosing of the unworthy younger over the equally unworthy elder, a grace that would later make the apostle marvel, quoting the prophet, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated (Romans 9:13), and insist that it was so not by works but by his calling (9:11). That is hard language, and we will meet it again when we come to Malachi; for now it is enough to see that Edom’s quarrel was never merely with Israel. It was, underneath, a quarrel with the God who had chosen by grace and not by natural right: a centuries-long resentment of a brother who had what Esau had thrown away. Obadiah is the verdict, at last, on that long resentment.
And there is a chilling postscript to the feud that Obadiah’s first hearers could never have foreseen. When the promised Son of Jacob’s line was at last born in Bethlehem, the king on the throne in Jerusalem who sought to murder Him was Herod the Great, an Idumean, of Edomite descent on his father’s side. Scripture does not draw the connection for us, but it is hard not to see in it a picture of the old enmity: Esau once more, as it were, striking at the heir of the promise he had despised, in the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem. But the Edomite king could not reach the Child; the holy family was already away into Egypt, and out of Egypt God would call His Son (Matthew 2:15). The last grasp of Esau’s hand closed on empty air. The brother who sold his birthright could not, in the end, murder his way back into the inheritance; the kingdom would be the LORD’s, and the Son of Jacob’s line would reign.
Your Presumptuous Heart Has Deceived You
The oracle opens by naming the precise sin that has doomed Edom, and it is not first their violence but their pride. Your presumptuous heart has deceived you, you who reside in the safety of the rocky cliffs, whose home is high in the mountains. You think to yourself, “No one can bring me down to the ground!” (v. 3). The Hebrew word behind “presumptuous” (zadon) is the ordinary word for pride and arrogance, and Edom’s inner boast is, literally, a question: “Who will bring me down to the ground?” Edom’s homeland was a fortress of stone, a high country of crags and ravines, with strongholds perched among the rose-red cliffs, all but unassailable, reachable only through narrow gorges a handful of men could hold against an army. Living up there among the eagles, Edom felt untouchable, and the feeling became a creed: Who will bring me down? It is the motto of the proud heart in every age: the serene confidence that one’s defenses are too high, one’s position too secure, for any reckoning ever to reach.
But notice what Obadiah says pride does: it deceives. Your presumptuous heart has deceived you. This is the peculiar danger of pride, that it is not only a sin but a liar; it whispers to a man that he is safe when he is not, that he stands when he is about to fall, that the rules which bind other men do not bind him. Pride blinds the very eyes that might have seen the danger coming. And the LORD answers Edom’s boast with terrible calm: Even if you were to soar high like an eagle, even if you were to make your nest among the stars, I can bring you down even from there! (v. 4). Make your nest among the stars if you like; build higher than any siege can reach; it will not matter, for the God who made the stars can pluck the nest from among them with a finger. There is no altitude that escapes Him.
Christian ears should hear an older echo in that boast. You said to yourself, “I will climb up to the sky. Above the stars of El I will set up my throne … I will make myself like the Most High!” (Isaiah 14:13–14). The taunt is aimed first at the king of Babylon (14:4), but much of the church has long heard behind it the voice of the devil himself, whose original sin was precisely this: the will to climb, to exalt the self, to be as God. Edom’s nest among the stars is the same ancient lie in a smaller mouth. For pride is the root sin, the first sin, the sin beneath all the others: the creature’s refusal to be a creature, the insistence on its own height, the who will bring me down? that is finally a fist shaken at heaven. And it is always self-deceived, always sure of a security it does not have, always one verse away from I can bring you down even from there.
And we must not imagine this is a sin only of fortified nations and arrogant kings. Pride wears its most dangerous clothes in the religious heart, where it is hardest to see. There is a spiritual pride that builds its nest among the stars of its own piety, that trusts in its doctrine, its decency, its long church membership, its record of good behavior, and asks, in a quieter voice than Edom’s but with the same meaning, who will bring me down? It was not the prostitutes and the tax collectors who plotted the death of the Lord of glory; it was the most religious men of their day, serene in their own height. The pride that destroyed Edom is the pride that can flourish in a pew, and it is deadlier there, because there it can hide behind a hymnal. The only cure is the one Obadiah’s whole book is driving toward: to be brought down low enough to receive everything as a gift, which is precisely the one thing the proud heart cannot bear to do.
How Esau Will Be Plundered
Having named the pride, Obadiah describes the ruin, and he dwells on its sheer completeness. If thieves came to rob you during the night, they would steal only as much as they wanted! If grape pickers came to harvest your vineyards, they would leave some behind for the poor! But you will be totally destroyed! (v. 5). Even a thief takes only what he wants and leaves the rest; even a grape-picker leaves gleanings on the vine for the poor. But Edom’s destruction will be total, scoured to nothing: How the people of Esau will be thoroughly plundered! Their hidden valuables will be ransacked! (v. 6). Every hidden treasure, every secret cache in the rocks, will be dug out and carried off. Nothing will remain.
And the LORD strips away, one by one, every prop on which Edom’s confidence had leaned. Her allies will betray her: Your treaty partners will deceive you and overpower you. Your trusted friends will set an ambush for you (v. 7); the Hebrew calls them, literally, those who eat your bread, and the friends she trusted will turn at the hour of need. And her famed wisdom will fail her: At that time, says the LORD, I will destroy the wise sages of Edom, the advisers from Esau’s mountain. (v. 8). Edom was renowned in the ancient world for its sages; Teman, one of its districts, was a byword for wisdom. But the cleverness that could not see its own pride will be no help at all when the day comes. Height, wealth, alliance, wisdom: Edom had trusted in all of them, and Obadiah watches the LORD knock each prop away. This is what becomes, in the end, of every security a man builds in place of God. The theology of glory (the confidence that climbs and accumulates and fortifies itself against all comers) collapses at a touch, because it was never resting on anything but its own height.
Luther had a name for the way of thinking Edom embodies: in the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 he called it a theology of glory, the conviction that God and the good are to be found in strength, success, height, and visible power. Over against it he set the theology of the cross: the scandalous truth that the living God hides Himself precisely where the theologian of glory would never think to look, in weakness, in suffering, in lowliness, in a criminal’s death on a hill outside the city wall. Edom is the theology of glory carved into rock. It trusted what could be seen and measured and fortified, and it could not conceive of a God who saves by being brought low. But that is the only God there is. The same instinct that made Edom sure of its mountain makes the natural heart sure that God must be met in triumph and never in a manger or on a cross. And so the theology of glory always misses Him, scanning the stars for greatness while He is found down in the dust, dying for the proud who despised Him.
Your Violence Against Your Brother
Now Obadiah names the crime that brought the pride to its reckoning, and the word that tolls through these verses is brother. The NET renders it “relatives,” but the Hebrew word is the plain word for brother. Because you violently slaughtered your relatives, the people of Jacob, shame will cover you, and you will be destroyed forever (v. 10). The ancient family feud had come to its blackest hour on the day Jerusalem fell to Babylon. While the holy city burned and her people were slaughtered and dragged into exile, Edom, the brother nation, did not merely stand aside. You stood aloof while strangers took his army captive, and foreigners advanced to his gates. When they cast lots over Jerusalem, you behaved as though you were in league with them (v. 11). Edom watched, and gloated, and joined in.
That black day was the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon, when the city was burned and the temple thrown down and the people dragged into exile: the deepest wound in Israel’s history. And the exiles did not forget who had cheered. Far away by the rivers of Babylon, weeping when they remembered Zion, they prayed a bitter prayer that named Edom aloud: Remember, O LORD, what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell. They said, “Tear it down, tear it down, right to its very foundation!” (Psalm 137:7). Edom had stood among the rubble and shouted tear it down, tear it down, egging on the destroyers of its own brother. Obadiah is, in part, the LORD’s answer to that exilic prayer: the divine I have remembered spoken at last over the Edomites. The God who hears His people weep beside foreign rivers does not forget who stood by and laughed.
Obadiah lays out the catalog of Edom’s conduct on that day with a series of mounting prohibitions, the things a brother should never have done. You should not have gloated when your relatives suffered calamity. You should not have rejoiced over the people of Judah when they were destroyed … You should not have entered the city of my people when they experienced distress … You should not have looted their wealth when they endured distress. You should not have stood at the fork in the road to slaughter those trying to escape (vv. 12–14). Read that slowly, for it is a portrait of evil that needs no weapon. Edom gloated at a brother’s funeral, looted the corpse, and then, worst of all, stood at the forks in the mountain roads to catch the fleeing refugees and hand them over to the enemy. The sin of Edom was the sin of the bystander who becomes a predator: not the one who lit the fire, but the one who warmed himself at it and cut down those who ran from the flames.
There is a searching word here for every heart, because the sin of Edom is one we commit in miniature far more often than we commit murder. It is the sin of the secret satisfaction we feel when a rival stumbles, the quiet pleasure at the downfall of someone we envied, the looking-on at a brother’s calamity with something other than grief. Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, Proverbs warns, and when he stumbles do not let your heart rejoice, lest the LORD see it, and be displeased (Proverbs 24:17–18). Edom’s gloating was displeasing to the LORD, and it brought down the whole weight of His judgment. We do well to examine where we, too, have stood aloof and watched a brother’s bad day with a flicker of satisfaction we would be ashamed to name aloud. The God who saw Edom gloat sees us.
As You Have Done
At the center of the book Obadiah lifts his eyes from Edom alone to the whole horizon, and the volume’s great connecting phrase sounds again. For the day of the LORD is approaching for all the nations! Just as you have done, so it will be done to you. You will get exactly what your deeds deserve (v. 15). Edom is not a special case; Edom is a sample. The day of the LORD is approaching for all the nations, and the principle that governs it is exact and even: just as you have done, so it will be done to you. The measure Edom meted out to its brother is the measure that will be meted back. The one who stood at the fork in the road to cut off fugitives will find every way of escape cut off from himself.
And we should mark how the day of the LORD works here exactly as it has worked all through the Twelve: with two edges. The same Day that comes upon all the nations as the reaping of their own deeds comes upon the LORD’s people as their vindication and rescue. Just as you have done, so it will be done to you: to the proud who sowed violence, the Day is the harvest of violence reaped back; to the wronged who waited on the LORD, the very same Day is the righting of every wrong. One Day, two outcomes, divided by nothing but the pride that will not bow and the faith that clings to the LORD. It is the pattern Joel taught us and Amos confirmed and every one of the Twelve repeats: the day of the LORD is terror to the impenitent and salvation to those who shelter in Him, and a man’s whole eternity turns on which side of it he is standing when it dawns.
This is the law’s perfect symmetry, and we must let it be both sobering and clarifying. Sobering, because the measure we use on others is the measure that hangs over us; the Lord Jesus would teach the same in plain words: by the standard we judge, we will be judged (Matthew 7:2). But clarifying, too, because it tells us whose business this judgment is. The repaying of Edom is the day of the LORD; it is God’s act, not Israel’s. Obadiah does not call the people of Judah to take up arms and avenge themselves on Edom; he announces that the LORD will do it. And that is a mercy to the wronged, for it lifts the unbearable burden of revenge off their shoulders and lays it where it belongs. Do not avenge yourselves, dear friends, but give place to God’s wrath, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord, the apostle writes (Romans 12:19), quoting the law; and the comfort hidden in that hard sentence is that we need not, and must not, become Edom in order to answer Edom. The accounts will be settled, perfectly and justly, by the Judge of all the earth. We may leave them in His hands and keep ours clean.
Deliverance on Mount Zion
And now, in a book that has been almost wholly judgment, the light breaks. Obadiah lifts his eyes from the doomed mountain of Esau to another mountain, and everything changes. But on Mount Zion there will be a remnant of those who escape, and it will be a holy place once again (v. 17). The Hebrew word behind “a remnant of those who escape” (peletah) means both escape and deliverance: on Zion there will be deliverance, and a delivered people. Two mountains stand against each other in this little book: the mountain of Esau, high and proud and about to be brought down, and Mount Zion, the hill of the LORD, where deliverance and holiness are found. On the one, the pride of man; on the other, the salvation of God. And the contrast is the whole story of the Bible in miniature: every height the proud heart builds for itself will be brought low, and the only safety in the universe is the mountain the LORD has chosen for His own dwelling.
Two mountains, then, stand over against each other in this little book, and the contrast is not accidental, for two mountains stand over against each other in the whole of Scripture. There is the mountain of self-exaltation and the mountain of God’s dwelling; the height a man climbs for himself, and the hill the LORD has chosen. The writer to the Hebrews draws the same two-mountain picture in another key: the mountain of a burning fire and darkness and gloom and a whirlwind, the Sinai of the law, so terrifying that Moses said, “I shudder with fear”; and over against it Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the place of grace and welcome and the sprinkled blood that speaks of something better than Abel’s does (Hebrews 12:18–24). The mountain of Esau and Mount Zion are law and gospel set on two hills. On the one, man’s pride climbing toward a heaven it can never reach, and being cast down; on the other, God’s grace coming down to a people who could never climb, and lifting them up. We are saved on the second mountain, and never on the first.
The reversal is complete. The descendants of Jacob will conquer those who had conquered them (v. 17). The traditional Hebrew text reads, literally, “the house of Jacob will possess their possessions”; the NET follows an ancient variant reading. Either way, the house of Jacob, so lately the victim, will receive back, and more, what Edom had looted; and the descendants of Jacob will be a fire … the descendants of Esau will be like stubble (v. 18). The exiles will come home, the dispossessed will inherit, and the very territory of Edom and the surrounding nations will be folded into the restored people of God. We must read this the way we learned to read Amos’s booth of David and Joel’s restored land: not as a real-estate program for a future ethnic kingdom, but as the prophetic picture of the LORD gathering and vindicating His people, fulfilled in the kingdom of His Son and the ingathering of the nations into the Church. The grace that chose unworthy Jacob in the womb runs on to its end: the people who had nothing but the promise come at last into their full inheritance, while the people who had everything but despised the promise come to nothing. The first transaction is reversed forever; the birthright Esau sold for a single meal turns out to have been worth the whole world.
And the Kingdom Will Be the LORD’s
The book ends on a single line that lifts the whole Book of the Twelve toward its goal, and it is worth weighing every word. Those who have been delivered will go up on Mount Zion in order to rule over Esau’s mountain. Then the LORD will reign as King! (v. 21). Here the NET follows the ancient Greek translation, which reads “those who have been delivered.” The traditional Hebrew text reads moshi’im, “saviors” or “deliverers,” a plural: deliverers raised up on Zion to set right what Edom’s pride had wronged. Both readings belong to the gospel: the LORD raises up deliverers, and He gathers a delivered people. Through the history of Israel the LORD had raised up many such deliverers, judges and kings who rescued His people in their hour of need. But every one of them was a small, temporary, flawed savior pointing beyond himself; and read canonically, the line fittingly directs us, at last, to the one Savior who came up on Mount Zion, the Lord Jesus, who entered the holy city not to loot it like Edom but to die for it, and who is even now gathering His delivered people on the true Zion, the city of the living God.
For the writer to the Hebrews tells us that we who believe have already come to that Zion: not the trembling mountain of the law, but Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant (Hebrews 12:22–24). The deliverance Obadiah saw promised on Mount Zion is the deliverance the Church already enjoys in Christ, and into which she gathers the nations. And then the final clause, the goal of the whole prophecy and indeed of all prophecy: Then the LORD will reign as King! The Hebrew says it more literally still: “and the kingdom will be the LORD’s.” After every proud nation has made its nest among the stars and been brought down, after every Edom and every Babylon and every empire that ever shook its fist at heaven has crumbled to stubble, one kingdom remains standing, and it is the LORD’s. The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever (Revelation 11:15). Obadiah’s last word and the Revelation’s great hymn are the same word: the kingdom belongs to God, and it is the only kingdom that will be left.
There is great comfort for ordinary, harried believers in that last clause, and Luther drew it out in the Small Catechism. When we pray Your kingdom come, he taught, we are not asking God to do something doubtful, or to begin something that might yet fail; God’s kingdom comes on its own, even without our prayer. We pray the petition only that it may come to us also, and that we may be made part of what is already certain to triumph. The kingdom will be the LORD’s is no hope hanging in the balance, waiting on the strength of the Church or the turning of the times. It is a settled fact, as sure as the throne of God. Every proud empire that ever made its nest among the stars has fallen or will fall; the kingdoms of this world are passing away; and one kingdom, the LORD’s, stands and will stand forever. We do not build that kingdom by our striving; we are gathered into it by grace, and our whole part is simply to belong to the side that cannot lose.
And here the deepest gospel of this little book comes into view, in the contrast between two ways of being in the world. Edom is the way of the proud, the way that climbs and grasps and exalts itself (who will bring me down?) and is brought down. The Lord Jesus is the opposite way, the way the apostle sings: He who though he existed in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, as Edom grasped at the stars, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave, and humbled himself, by becoming obedient to the point of death … As a result God exalted him (Philippians 2:6–9). Edom exalted itself and was abased; the Lord Jesus abased Himself and was exalted. The mountain of Esau goes down; Mount Zion is lifted up. The way up, in the kingdom that belongs to the LORD, has always been down; and the proud heart that cannot bear to descend will find, like Edom, that there is no nest high enough to escape the God who has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up those of lowly position (Luke 1:52).
Gathering the Threads
Twenty-one verses, and a whole theology of pride and grace. Obadiah takes up the oldest family quarrel in the Bible, the twin brothers Jacob and Esau and the nations Israel and Edom that carried their enmity for a thousand years, and pronounces the LORD’s verdict on Edom’s pride. That pride had deceived her, whispering that her rock-fortress was too high for any reckoning to reach; and the LORD answers that no nest among the stars is beyond His hand. He strips away every prop (height, wealth, allies, wisdom) on which the theology of glory had leaned, and names the crime beneath the pride: that in the day of his brother’s calamity Edom stood aloof, gloated, looted, and cut down the fugitives. The day of the LORD is approaching for all such nations, and its principle is exact: just as you have done, so it will be done to you. The vengeance is the LORD’s, and we may leave it in His hands. There is deep rest in that for every soul that has been wronged and aches to set the score right: the accounts are not ours to balance, and the God who saw every gloating glance and every fugitive cut off at the fork in the road will settle them with a justice ours could never approach, and a patience we are too small to fathom.
But the book does not end on the mountain of Esau; it ends on Mount Zion, where there is deliverance and holiness, where the dispossessed receive their inheritance, and where deliverers come up at last to set all things right. And every small deliverer points to the one Savior, the Lord Jesus, who came up on Zion not to loot but to die, who took the way down that Edom would not take, and who was therefore exalted to the throne of a kingdom that will outlast every proud empire on earth. The kingdom will be the LORD’s: that is Obadiah’s last word and the gospel’s settled confidence. The birthright Esau sold for a single meal was the whole inheritance of God; and in Christ, that inheritance is held out freely to proud sinners, whom the LORD Himself brings down off the mountain to receive it as a gift. The way up is down, and the kingdom, in the end, is His.
For Discussion
These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.
Obadiah’s oracle rests on a thousand-year quarrel that began in the womb (Genesis 25:22–23), and on Esau’s despising of his birthright for a bowl of stew. What does it mean that the promise ran through Jacob by grace and not by merit, and that Edom’s real quarrel was with the God who chooses by grace rather than by natural right?
Your presumptuous heart has deceived you (v. 3). Why does Obadiah say pride deceives? How is pride not only a sin but a liar that whispers we are safe when we are not? Where do we hear Edom’s who will bring me down? in our own hearts?
The LORD strips away Edom’s every security: height, wealth, allies, wisdom (vv. 4–8). How is this the collapse of the “theology of glory,” the confidence that fortifies itself against all comers? What securities do we build in place of God, and how do they fare on the day of the LORD?
Edom’s sin was the sin of the gloating bystander who became a predator (vv. 11–14). Why is the secret satisfaction at a rival’s downfall so displeasing to God (Proverbs 24:17–18)? Where have we “stood aloof” and watched a brother’s calamity with a flicker of satisfaction?
Just as you have done, so it will be done to you (v. 15), and “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord (Romans 12:19). How is it both sobering and freeing that judgment belongs to the LORD and not to us? Why must the wronged not become Edom in order to answer Edom?
Then the LORD will reign as King! (v. 21), and the Lord Jesus reached the throne by the way down, not the way up (Philippians 2:6–9). How does the contrast between self-exalting Edom and the self-humbling Christ reveal the deepest logic of God’s kingdom? What does it look like to be brought down off the mountain and receive the inheritance as a gift?
Looking Ahead
From an oracle against an old enemy we turn to one of the best-known and most-misunderstood stories in all the Bible. In the next session we open Jonah, and we open it as real history, exactly as the Lord Jesus did. We will follow the prophet in his flight from the call of God, into the storm, and down into the deep and the belly of the great fish, and we will hear his prayer rise up from the very gates of death. And we will hear the Lord Jesus Himself make Jonah’s three days in the deep the one sign He would give a sign-seeking generation: For just as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish for three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights (Matthew 12:40). The reluctant prophet swallowed alive and given back becomes a God-appointed sign of the willing Savior who truly died, was buried, and was raised. We will not get bogged down defending the fish; the weight is all on the rising.
Before the next session, read Jonah 1–2: the call and the flight, the storm and the sailors, the great fish, and Jonah’s prayer from the deep. Then read Matthew 12:38–41, where the Lord Jesus makes the sign of Jonah the sign of His own death and resurrection. Read Jonah as the real history He treats it as. Ask what it means that a disobedient prophet, swallowed and given back after three days and three nights, becomes a sign pointing straight to the empty tomb.
Closing Prayer
Almighty God, You bring down the proud who make their nest among the stars, and You lift up the lowly who have nothing but Your promise. We confess that the pride of our own hearts has often deceived us, that we have trusted in our own heights and securities and asked in secret who could ever bring us down, and that we have too often stood aloof and watched a brother’s calamity with a satisfaction we would be ashamed to name. We have no rock to hide in, and no wisdom that can save us.
We bless You that on Mount Zion there is deliverance and holiness, and that You have raised up for us the one Savior, our Lord Jesus, who took the way down that we would not take, who did not grasp at glory as Edom grasped at the stars, but humbled Himself to the death of the cross, and was therefore exalted to a throne that will outlast every proud kingdom of this world. Bring us down off our mountains, and teach us to receive Your inheritance as the gift it is. Leave the settling of all accounts in Your just hands, that ours may be kept clean; and keep us in the one kingdom that will be left standing when all others are stubble, the kingdom that belongs to You; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.