The Fortress That Couldn't Save Itself

In 1453, the defenders of Constantinople trusted their walls. For over a thousand years, those triple-layered fortifications had repelled every siege — Arabs, Bulgars, Vikings, Crusaders. The walls stood sixty feet high in places, thick enough to drive a chariot across their tops. Residents called them "the walls God built." When Sultan Mehmed II encamped his army outside the city, many inside barely glanced up from their routines. They had heard it all before. Who could bring them down?

But Mehmed had commissioned a Hungarian engineer named Orban to cast a bronze cannon twenty-seven feet long. On April 12, the first stone ball struck those ancient walls, and dust rose like a funeral shroud. Within weeks, the unbreachable was breached. The city that had whispered "We are untouchable" fell in a single morning.

Obadiah speaks to Edom with the same warning. Perched in the rose-red cliffs of Petra, carved into rock faces hundreds of feet above the desert floor, Edom looked down on the world and said, "Who will bring me down to the ground?" The pride of their heart had deceived them. But the Almighty does not measure strength by altitude. No cliff is too high, no nest set too far among the stars, for the hand of the Lord to reach. The God who sculpted those very mountains can just as easily bring them low.