The Penthouse That Couldn't Save Him

In 2008, executives at Lehman Brothers worked from the thirty-first floor of their Midtown Manhattan headquarters, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass that made the city look small beneath them. Dick Fuld, the firm's CEO, was known internally as "the Gorilla" — a man so confident in his position that he dismissed every warning about the firm's overleveraged mortgage portfolio. When junior analysts raised concerns, he waved them off. When competitors began pulling back, he doubled down. He had built his fortress. He had climbed higher than anyone. Who could bring him down?

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in American history — $639 billion in assets, gone. The man who had gazed down from his glass tower found himself escorted from the building by security, his name synonymous with catastrophic failure.

Obadiah speaks to a nation gripped by the same delusion. Edom had carved its dwellings into the rose-red cliffs of Petra, hundreds of feet above the desert floor, and whispered to itself, "Who will bring me down?" But the Lord answered from heaven: "From there I will bring you down."

Pride does not merely go before a fall — it blinds us to the cliff edge we are already standing on. No altitude, no fortress, no portfolio of achievements places us beyond the reach of the Almighty. The only safe dwelling is humility before God, who sets up and brings low according to His purposes.