If Obadiah wrote after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, his message came at a time when God’s people needed to know that they were not forgotten.  After a time a bitter violence and cruelty by the hands of their own neighboring family, God’s people must’ve wondered if God had turned away from them completely.  But Obadiah rose up to deliver his blistering message to those cruel neighbors that God would not stand by and watch when such things go on.  He will act.  The judgment of God was about to fall, and Obadiah was the messenger of hope to God’s beleaguered people. 

But how did we get here?  How did it come the point where even family members could act so cruelly and celebrate the hardship their neighboring family had to endure?  Answering that question requires a journey, and not just through Obadiah’s day.  Over a thousand years and through many generations, a general hatred had risen between the people of Judah and of Edom.  That family breakdown went all the way back to two brothers you may know well, Jacob and Esau.  But did it have to be this way?