Genesis 32.
IN the last book of the Old Testament you find this remarkable expression: “Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? saith the Lord; yet I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau” (Mal. 1:2, 3). I have no doubt that Esau was a much finer natural character than Jacob, and the wonderful thing is that God loved the man that clearly had not a fine natural character. I say “Thank God” as I see that, for there is hope for me; and you may say from the bottom of your heart, “Thank God, there is hope for me.” Yes, my friend, there is hope for you, whoever and whatever you may be.
I do not think many of us would like to have all our history told out in public. Would you? I should not. You would not like to have your life written, except some discriminative and gentle biographer would write to order, just putting in the nice bits―the good qualities, the amiable traits, the benevolent deeds, and the moral virtues that would please your friends, and that would please you, too; and leaving out all the unattractive side of your life. You would not like your whole history written, would you? No, you say, I should not.
Now, God is a great biographer, and with Him is no respect of persons, so He has written the history of Jacob as he was, and although his history was not at all a creditable one as a son, a brother, or a nephew, if we think of man, nor as a saint, if we think of God, yet before the tale ends I find God saying, “Yet I loved Jacob.” Thank God for these words, they are a great comfort to my heart.
In the chapter before us you will notice that when Jacob gets down on his knees, and turns to the Lord in prayer, he says, “O God of my father Abraham, and God of my father Isaac.” He does not use the expression “My God.” He does not like to use it. He feels so ashamed of himself, I think, and yet the title that God uses so plentifully in Scripture is― “The God of Jacob.” Read the Psalms, read the Old Testament, and you will be surprised at the number of times it occurs.
Jacob was a man whose heart was in the earth, yet a man on whom God had His eye for blessing. What a wonderful thing that God has His eye upon you for blessing, yet I daresay you have been able to manage like Jacob, and you have hitherto escaped His blessing. But this chapter takes us to the point, where all Jacob’s management came to naught—though there never was a finer manager in this scene than Jacob—and when he found himself a poor cripple, helpless, and needing to be sustained, he had his name changed, received the blessing of the Lord, who overcame his opposition, and then he got to know God.
The sovereignty of God, exercised in grace, is a grand thing. I know people object to it. I know sinners kick at it. They think God is very arbitrary. Well, supposing you were let alone to go your own way, friend, and supposing I had gone the whole length of my way, what would the end be? I will tell you. As far as I am concerned―and I may say the same about you-the path would have ended in hell, and eternal judgment would have been our portion. What then has happened? Gold has come in and arrested us. God has come in, put His hand upon us, and converted many of us. I believe if I were asking every converted man and woman in this hall to lift their arm, as a token that they were saved, I should get a good number lifted up, and if I said, Tell us how it was that you were turned to the Lord? every one here would reply: “It was sovereign grace that laid hold of me. I owe all to the Lord’s grace!”
But you might turn to me and say, What about the very scripture you have quoted, “I loved Jacob and I hated Esau” ―is not that very arbitrary? No, the ninth of Romans makes this plain. There I read: “For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth: it was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger. As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated. What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid” (verses 11-14). People often make a great outcry against God about this. But did you ever ponder it, or find out where this statement as to God’s love was written? It is found, as we have already seen, in the last book of the Old Testament―Malachi. God does not record these words until thirteen hundred years after the men named had passed out of the scene. The Lord then lets out the secret why He blessed Jacob, and it was―because He loved him.
Why then did He hate Esau? If you follow the history of Esau―though he was a nice, natural man― you will find this, that he and his descendants were at heart deeply, and perseveringly opposed to God. I do not doubt that Jacob was opposed to God in the beginning. So was I. So was every believer in this hall tonight. But there came a moment when God broke him thoroughly down-the night on which he was alone with God. From that time Jacob was a changed man; and though, in his life, he was not what we could call a bright and shining light, as a saint, still he died in faith very triumphantly, and went out of the scene very beautifully.
The inspired record of Jacob’s departure runs thus: “By faith Jacob, when he was a dying, blessed both the sons of Joseph; and worshipped, leaning upon the top of his staff” (Heb. 11:21). And why did he lean on the top of his staff? Because he could not hold himself up without support, he had learned to be dependent. He went off the scene worshipping, and his death was bright, if his life was not. We should all take a lesson from this, and seek to live brightly for Christ, and then, should the Lard call us away, we shall pretty surely die brightly. People sometimes say, “How did he die?” But I want to know, “How did he live?”
Jacob’s life up to this point in Genesis 32 was a sorrowful one. God had purposed to bless him before he was born, as you read in a previous chapter, where the Lord said unto Rebekah, “Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25:23). That is to say, God purposed to bless Jacob beyond Esau. In the end of that chapter, you recollect, Esau sells his birthright for a mess of lentil pottage. Esau was a worldly man, and he sells his birthright—that which belonged to him as the first-born. He comes in faint from the chase, and finds Jacob making pottage. Esau desires it, and Jacob says, “Sell me this day thy birthright”; and Esau replies, “Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me? And Jacob said, Swear to me this day; and he aware unto him: and he sold his birthright unto Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentils; and he did eat and drink, and rose up and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright” (25:31-34).
Esau starts his worldly history by flinging lightly back in the face of God that which His goodness had given him. No wonder his end was so bad, or that God calls him a “profane person” (Heb. 12:16). Do not forget this—that every sinner has, in a certain sense, a birthright. You have been born into a world to which the Saviour has come, and that Saviour came to save sinners, and if you do not receive that Saviour, but hold on in the ways of the world, deluded by Satan, and caring only for the things of this life, you simply follow the footsteps of Esau, and despise your birthright for a mess of pottage—that is, for the things that minister to the body, and give you comfort while you go through this world, from which you will have shortly to pass away. “Thus Esau despised his birthright,” is God’s comment, and the Holy Ghost bids us in our day beware, “lest there be any fornicator, or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright” (Heb. 12:16). Since that day many a soul has passed into eternity, who has sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. And what is that? A little bit of the world!
I do not admire the way in which Jacob got the birthright; nevertheless he prized what Esau despised. God meant him to have it; but Jacob schemed and bargained for it in an unworthy and unbrotherly way; and next you find in the twenty-seventh chapter that he schemes to get the blessing. God had already purposed that the blessing was to be his; but Jacob was not content to wait upon God for it; so he and his mother planned a scheme to attain it. The twenty-seventh chapter of Genesis presents a very humiliating spectacle, since it shows to what a low ebb of moral degradation even a saint may fall. Isaac loved “savory meat,” and bade Esau get him some, adding, “that my soul may bless thee before I die.” Rebekah prepares some before Esau could return, and then Jacob―the supplanter―for that is the meaning of his name―goes in and takes the venison that has been made ready, and surreptitiously, and with untruth on his lips, gets the blessing. Isaac pronounces over his head the blessing that God had designed for him, but Jacob did not get it in the right way, and we do well to note what is the result. What follows shows that where there is a wrong action it always brings its own reward even in this world.
Jacob never has earthly happiness from that day forth. He has to leave his home, and becomes a wanderer from that time. He has to fly in order to escape from Esau’s fury. He gets alongside of his uncle in a far-off land. His uncle deals hardly with him, and cheats him, as he had cheated everybody else. He is paid back in his own coin absolutely. The next thing is that he has to get away from Laban clandestinely, and then you find that his daughter is ruined, his sons become murderers, his old nurse dies, then Rachel his wife dies, and he comes home to find that his mother is dead. The next thing is, his own sons deceive him, and he has to mourn, for the supposed death of Joseph, for many, many years. At length he is obliged by famine to go into Egypt, and there he dies. That is what I call the natural side of the man’s history, and a striking illustration it is of the truth of the principle in Scripture, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Gal. 6:7).
God gives us the history of Jacob thus fully in order to show how His grace could meet a man of that kind, rise above all his failures, and bless him; and therein, I repeat, is the value of Scripture biography as compared with every other biography. If you take up the biographies of today you find all that is nice, and amiable, and kind about a man related in them. The biographer, however, throws the mantle of charity over those weaknesses, sins, and downfalls of his subject, of which he may be aware, and of course can say nothing of many more of which he is ignorant. What is the result? You have not the real man before you. The consequence of it is that many a young person takes up a book of this sort, reads the history—say—of some good, earnest, devoted Christian man, and then puts it down in despair, saying, “It is no use my trying to be a Christian, for I could not be like that. It is very doubtful if I am one at all.” Let me cheer you by just saying, That is not the man at all—it is only a bit of him; and what you are finding in yourself was most likely in him, only the uncomely bits of his life have been omitted. Now the Bible gives you the man as he is in absolute fact, and then tells you what God’s grace can do for such.
In the thirty-second chapter of Genesis we reach the moment in his history when this planning and scheming man Jacob is on his way back to his father’s house. As he goes back, with his family, and all that he has gathered in the land of Padanaram, the angels of God meet him. That was a good thing. They meet him, but carry him no message. He is, I think, uneasy, although he says, “This is God’s host.” The Lord’s eyes are upon him evidently, and he knows it. Whether God will support and sustain him is the question in his mind, for he has to meet Esau. He sends messengers to Esau, who are to say, “My Lord Esau; thy servant Jacob saith,” &c. (vs. 45). What a message to his brother! Esau, “My Lord”; and Jacob “thy servant.” Sin always brings its fruit, and wrong its recompense. The man is perfectly conscious of what ill he has done to Esau. He knows that full well, and now his conscience begins to work. It is a fine thing when the conscience begins to work, friend. Has your conscience begun to work before God about the evil of your life? Has your conscience yet got uneasy about your own conduct in the presence of God? Jacob’s was evidently very uneasy, for the messengers are told to go to Esau, and say, “Thy servant Jacob says” to “my Lord Esau.” Fancy this to his own brother. But what the English bard says, “Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” is perfectly true. Thank God for it. Do not stifle it! Take care that the devil does not sear yours with a hot iron, for we read of some “having a conscience seared with a hot iron” (1 Tim. 4:2). What does that mean? That you have resisted the pricks of conscience till it has ceased altogether to act. It is numb―lifeless. You have had a bad history. At first you were perfectly ashamed of it in the presence of God, and in the presence of man; but you got so “hardened through the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb. 3:13), and continuance in it, spite of the pricks of conscience that by-and-by―will, lust, and sin having got the upper hand entirely―conscience altogether ceased to act, being by the devil “seared with a hot iron.” Awful state! I pity the man that has got his conscience seared with a hot iron.
Jacob’s conscience, though dull enough for many a year, had not ceased to act. It is working now, you see, and is not in any sense relieved when the messengers return, saying: “We came to thy brother Esau, and also he cometh to meet thee, and four hundred men with him. Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed.” If your conscience is working before God, and you are greatly afraid and distressed, all I can say to you is, I am thankful. It is better for a man to be in that state, having his conscience exercised and in distress about his sins, than to wake up in eternity, and then to find that his whole life has been a huge mistake.
But now when “greatly afraid and distressed,” what does Jacob do? Ah he is Jacob still; trying to make the best of things. So again he makes his plans. To meet a supposedly angry brother coming with four hundred men, eager to avenge their master’s wrongs, is a terrible affair for Jacob. What can he do? He divides his company into two, next goes to prayer, and then sends a present to appease Esau. I have to meet him, is his thought, but how shall I do so? First, I think I had better put my party into two companies, so that if he smites the one, then the other will escape. Do you know what really happened when he met his offended brother? “Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him; and they wept” (chapter 33:4). Poor silly Jacob, he just illustrates the action of the guilty sinner.
Are you afraid to meet God, and are you trying to “appease him with a present”? What a mistake! “Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him!” Just as we read of the father in Luke 15, who, when he saw the returning prodigal “a great way off”― “ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.” Do you suppose that anything you could bring would affect the feelings of God towards you? Impossible! Understand clearly that nothing you can do―nothing you can bring―no present you may send, will touch the feelings of God towards you, my friend. Do you know what His feeling is towards you? Love! “God is love,” and He has proved it in the gift of His Son. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Again: “The Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world” (1 John 4:14). Further: “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:9, 10).
“Cease of fitness to be thinking;
Do not longer try to feel;
It is trusting, and not feeling;
That will bring the Spirit’s seal.”
W. T. P. W.