1. For twenty years Isaac and Rebekah had no children, and it seemed to many that the Divine promise that in Isaac's seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed was about to fail. Isaac prayed to God, however, and God gave him not one, but two sons-twins. The elder was called Esau, which meant “hairy”; the younger Jacob, which meant “taken by the heel,” or “supplanter,” a name actually given to him in Genesis. It was the right name, for if ever a man tried to trip and supplant another, it was Jacob in dealing with his brother. From the very beginning he seems to have had either some inward presentiment of his destiny, or else some resentment against the fate which deprived him of the birthright by the seeming accident of his birth, which from his youth up put him on the alert to win by subtlety and craft what he could not claim by right.
2. There are two scenes in the drama of the stolen birthright.
(1) In the first scene we have the hungry hunter coming in from a hard day's chase upon the mountains, almost dying with exhaustion, and the crafty supplanter, quick to see his opportunity, and unscrupulous to press it home to the utmost. The fragrance of the pottage is a maddening incitement to the sensual appetite of Esau, and Esau's weakness is Jacob's opportunity. “And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright. And Esau said, Behold, I am at the point to die, and what profit shall this birthright do to me?” Can we not read the process of thought in Esau's mind? “The birthright, what good is it? It means no more money, or cattle, or land. It means only the barren honour of being priest, chaplain to the family. Jacob would make a better chaplain than I. What I want is pottage, not priesthood. Tangible food is better to a hungry man than the invisible possessions of honour.” So he ate the pottage, wondering in his heart what Jacob could see in the birthright that was worth so much envious diplomacy, and how any man could stoop to so mean a trick to gain his ambitious ends. He felt something of the clumsy man's impotence in the presence of a subtler intellect, and something of the strong man's brusque contempt for intellectual motives he could not understand. He felt also the strong man's healthy scorn for meanness; he was outwitted, and, says the record, “he despised Jacob.” So do we. Our sympathy goes inevitably with the wronged man, and if we censure the man who so flippantly bartered his birthright, it is clear we cannot admire the man who practically stole it.
Jacob was not only a traitor to his brother, he was also faithless towards his God. Had it not been distinctly whispered in his mother's ear that the elder of the brothers should serve the younger? Had not the realization of his loftiest ambition been pledged by One whose faithfulness had been the theme of repeated talks with Abraham, who had survived during the first eighteen years of his young life? He might have been well assured that what the God of Abraham had promised He was able also to perform; and would perform, without the aid of his own miserable schemes.
At a meeting which was held in his honour in the auditorium at the Northfield Conference, August 13, 1910, Dr. Pierson delivered a remarkable address in which he told of God's leading, and he repeated the rules and promises that had been tested in his own experience. In response to the tributes from William R. Moody, Dr. Edward Young, and Rev. J. Stuart Holden he merely said: “A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from above,” and he quoted the words of St. Paul, “It is not expedient for me to glory … but I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord.” He then mentioned four Scripture texts which had greatly influenced his life:-
1. “Psa_1:1-2 -‘Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.' This is the sole secret of prosperity and peace: Meditate in the Word of God and take delight in it. In more than fifty years of study I have only begun to understand it.
2. “Pro_3:6 -‘In all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy paths.' Since the time when my father first gave me that text when I was a boy leaving home, it has been a principle in my life-never to make a plan without first seeking God's guidance, and never to achieve a success without giving Him the praise.
3. “Mat_6:33 -‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.' This promise has been wonderfully fulfilled in my experience. Whenever I have taken a step on faith, and have sought to devote myself primarily to the advancement of God's interests, He has seen to it that I and my family have lacked nothing. I have made it a practice never to put a price on my services, and yet, even during the last twenty years, when I have received no stated salary, there has never been any lack. On the contrary, I have been able to give away more money than ever before.
4. “Joh_7:17 -‘If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.' There is no need of scepticism or unbelief or doubt. Any man who is willing to do God's will can know, and the only way to know is to will to do. After more than fifty years of closest study, observation, and experience, I can testify that it pays to be a follower of God.”
As he reached this climax, there was a note of assurance and of triumph in the voice that sent a thrill of conviction through his hearers. None who were present that morning will forget the power of his testimony to the faithfulness of God.1 [Note: D. L. Pierson, Arthur T. Pierson, 317.]
(2) The second scene, of the dying Isaac, half-incredulous before the deceit of Jacob, the triple lie of the supplanter, “I am Esau thy firstborn,” and then the exceeding bitter cry of Esau, “Bless me, even me also, O my father,” when the blessing has gone from him beyond retrieval, is one of the most pathetic in the literature of the world. That exceeding bitter cry of Esau rings along the centuries, and still sets the heart vibrating with genuine pity, and that pity deepens into scorn and loathing of the mother and son who could conspire in such a plot. It is true that, having I bought the birthright, the blessing had become Jacob's; but there was a manly way of claiming it, and a treacherous way of stealing it; and Jacob, always physically a coward, naturally preferred adroitness to straightforwardness. He first of all robbed Esau of his birthright. He now defrauds him of his blessing. The name “Supplanter” is therefore fairly earned by Jacob; and the character of a “supplanter” is to be regarded as representing, at this stage of his life at least, his character and disposition.
Few can contemplate Jacob's heartless and unprincipled conduct to his blind old father without feelings of disgust and indignation. For it reveals an abuse of age and infirmity; and again, a profligate persistence in falsehood, happily not common even among the least religious. To have said simply “I am Esau thy firstborn” might have been comparatively easy, but as the mistrustful old father put question after question, and test after test,-“How is it that thou hast found it so quickly, my son?”-“Come near, I pray thee, that I may feel thee, my son,”-and especially that plaintive appeal of conscious feebleness-“Art thou my very son Esau?”-still to meet each of these with the plausible excuse, or the steady affirmation, needed a cruelty and hardness of duplicity ordinarily to be found only among the most infamous of mankind.
If Jacob had been innocent and pure and wise, no one would have objected to God's preference of the younger over the elder brother, since that seems to have been the rule, rather than the exception, in His dealings with the elect family. It is Jacob's character, not his age, to which we object. He could not trust God to fulfil His own promise. Craftily, ungenerously, unrighteously, by driving hard bargains, by lying, by personation, he cozened his father and his brother into fulfilling the declared will of God. This was his offence, the offence for which we would have rejected him and think God should have rejected him too. Nevertheless, it is not necessary, with a view to cherishing a Christian hatred of sin, to heap opprobrious epithets upon a fallible man, whom the choice of God has rendered venerable in the eyes of believers. In the present case, Jacob was rewarded for his faith in God's promises, and for his appreciation of them, when they seemed to bring no immediate advantage; not for the deceit by which he tried to secure them. In this he showed not his faith, but his want of faith. Deceit did not gain him the promises-they had been his before. It gained him only twenty years of exile from the promised land. It forced him to flee in terror from his father's roof; it filled his return with fears at the wrath of a justly offended brother. Deceit was made the instrument of his punishment; it met him in Laban's house, disappointing him of the wife for whom he had served, defrauding him ten times, as he complained, of the wages for which he had bargained; and it well-nigh brought his grey hairs to the grave in sorrow for the supposed death of a living son. The Scripture narrative itself, then, teaches us that God's approbation was not given to the means which Jacob used to gain the promises, but only to this, that he really did value the promises of God, little fruit in this life though they seemed to bring-that he set his affections on them, and earnestly strove to obtain them.
Jacob indeed was mean, crafty, timid; and therefore he does not seem entirely fit to be the heir of the Covenant. But he gained nothing by his sins except a discipline of misery and shame which lasted nearly his whole life long, and by which he was at last purged from his sins. But with his faults and sins there were blended strange virtues-the capacity to sacrifice present gratification to future good, to prefer the spiritual to the sensuous; and, in fine, that faith which at once fitted and enabled him to see visions and to hear voices from Heaven, to learn what the will of God was and to conform himself to it. He had a forecast, a shrewdness, a persevering wisdom, an organizing power, that pointed him out as the statesman. And so he was selected, not because in every respect his disposition was the best, but because he was the best instrument to execute the purpose which God had in view.
It is true that Jacob's behaviour to his brother and father does not even suggest any realization of Divine guidance, any sense of dependence on God. We might suppose that Jacob was an ungodly man, determined to wrest for himself that of which he thought he had been cruelly deprived by nature. It is Bethel that reveals Jacob's piety. Dreams are, more often than not, indications of character; and that which Jacob saw on the first night after leaving home is no uncertain sign of what his mind had been busy with during the lonely walk towards Syria. As Dr. Davidson says: “God used the thoughts which had been working all day in his mind to attach His revelation to. This is the way in which revelation came, and perhaps still comes. It was made to fit into the circumstances and feelings of the man to whom it came.”1 [Note: G. H. S. Walpole, Personality and Power, 51.]
3. A dark cloud rested upon Jacob's after life to its close, when the joy of God's blessing seems again to have been fully restored. A solemn penitential colouring seems to pervade this patriarch's history; and the recorded prayers of Jacob, interspersed through the narrative, attest the faithful, praying, holy character of the man, against which his sins stand out in the most marked contrast. Jacob's first notion was like the notion of the heathen in all times, “My God has a special favour for me, therefore I may do what I like. He will prosper me in doing wrong; He will help me to cheat my father.” But God showed him that that was just what He would not do for him. He would help and protect him; but only while he was doing right. God would not alter His moral laws for him or any man. God would be just and righteous; and Jacob must be so likewise, till he learnt to trust not merely in a God who happened to have a special favour for him, but in the righteous God who loves justice, and wishes to make men righteous even as He is righteous, and will make them righteous, if they trust in Him.
Evil consists in living for self-that is to say, for one's own vanity, pride, sensuality, or even health. Righteousness consists in willingly accepting one's lot, in submitting to and espousing the destiny assigned to us, in willing what God commands, in renouncing what He forbids us, in consenting to what He takes from us or refuses us.2 [Note: Amiel's Journal (trans. by Mrs. Humphry Ward).]
