Obadiah 1:15 - Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible

For the day of the Lord is near upon all the pagan - The prophet once more enforces his warning by preaching judgment to come. “The day of the Lord” was already known Joel 1:15; Joel 2:1, Joel 2:31, as a day of judgment upon “all nations,” in which God would “judge all the pagan,” especially for their outrages against His people. Edom might hope to escape, were it alone threatened. The prophet announces one great law of God’s retribution, one rule of His righteous judgment. “As thou hast done, it shall be done unto thee.” Pagan justice owned this to be just, and placed it in the mouth of their ideal of justice. “Blessed he,” says the Psalmist Psalms 137:8, “that recompenses unto thee the deed which thou didst to us.” “Blessed,” because he was the instrument of God. Having laid down the rule of God’s’ judgment, he resumes his sentence to Edom, and speaks to all in him. In the day of Judahs calamity Edom made itself as “one of them.” It, Jacob’s brother, had ranked itself among the enemies of God’s people. It then too should be swept away in one universal destruction. It takes its place with them, undistinguished in its doom as in its guilt, or it stands out as their representa tive, having the greater guilt, because it had the greater light. Obadiah, in adopting Joel’s words Joel 3:7, “thy reward shall return upon thine own head,” pronounces therewith on Edom all those terrible judgments contained in the sentence of retribution as they had been expanded by Joel.