To sum up: Esau's character shows how many good points a man may have without being religious, and the futility of all without religion. There is much that is very attractive in Esau's character. His open, impulsive nature, his frank, generous, forgiving spirit, seems far more engaging than the shrewd sobriety of Jacob. If he is a little vindictive, yet at least he has heavy wrongs to avenge, he makes no secret of his hostile intentions: and in the hour when he might have exacted vengeance, he gives instead his full and free forgiveness. He deliberately disobeys his father: but over his father's grave he returns to filial duty. Esau in daily life is a most attractive character; he is never preoccupied; his time is at your disposal; his thoughts are always vacant and open to the impressions of the moment, and that makes him always good company; he is the very ideal of the old French nobleman, “always charming, always gay.”
1. He had none of those faults which attach themselves to timid and more thoughtful characters-the tendency to equivocate, and compass an end by somewhat doubtful means, to bargain, and finesse, and sail close to the wind. There was none of that irresolution about him which comes of over-calculation, and which so often robs an action of its force, and a kindness of its grace, nor any of that fear which tempts to untruthfulness. A lie was as repugnant to his mind as an act of cowardice. He had no idea of beating about the bush, or of reaching the goal by dint of stratagem. What he did he did openly, fearlessly, and in broad daylight. When he hated he hated without disguise, and when he loved it was with an equally open and unmistakable affection. A thoroughly natural man, a true son of the desert, restraint of every kind was intolerable to him, and he lived as if there were none.
In fact, we should say that he was a man possessing many natural virtues; and on account of this we should be inclined to think well of him, and perhaps to forget the other side of his character, or to set it down as of little importance when there was so much that impressed us favourably. And we should be the more inclined to think well of him from a sense of pity for the great and lasting injury he suffered at the hands of his brother. But the Word of God teaches us otherwise, and shows that the reverse side of his character outweighed, in the balance of God's judgment, the good that was in him. It is noticeable that he never names the Name of God. He never thinks of God at all. Even when he met his brother and forgave him, there was the prompting of a generous human heart, but there was apparently no religious feeling.
2. Esau's seems a miserable fate for one who had so many manly and noble qualities; but alas! it is the very curse of sin that it does degrade and pervert and destroy minds otherwise noble. It breaks the one weak link in a chain that otherwise may be strong and sound. That life, it has been said, must be reprobate indeed, in which sin is the narrative, and not the episode. A few fine natural qualities, like the meteoric flashes of a stormy midnight, serve but to enhance the general darkness. This is the very moral of it: Esau sets his affections upon the earth, and therefore loses even that; selling his soul for the animal pleasures of this life, he gets less even of those than his meaner brother. And why? Because Jacob, with all the contemptible faults which lay on the surface of his character, had deep within his soul the faith, the faith in the Unseen, the sense of dependence on and love to God, which Esau did not even comprehend.
It is natural to pity Esau; but one has no right to do more. One has no right to fancy for a moment that God was arbitrary or hard upon him. Esau is not the sort of man to be the father of a great nation, or of anything else great. Greedy, passionate, reckless people like him, without due feeling of religion or of the unseen world, are not the men to govern the world, or help it forward, or be of use to mankind, or train up their families in justice and wisdom and piety. If there had been no people in the world but people like Esau, we should be savages at this day, without religion or civilization of any kind. They are of the earth, earthy; dust they are, and unto dust they will return. It is men like Jacob whom God chooses-men who have a feeling of religion and of the unseen world; men who can look forward, and live by faith, and form plans for the future, and carry them out too, against disappointment and difficulty, till they succeed.
Life and character tend either upward or downward, but a single act or characteristic may not indicate the tendency of a life as a whole. You can make a saint out of the good qualities of bad men; you can make a devil out of the bad qualities of good men. Esau eclipsed Jacob at first, but his virtues were accidents, incidents, without roots, and they withered before the hot tests of life. Jacob outshone Esau at last. Day by day he fought his natural badness, and won in the hard struggle with himself. The mean supplanter Jacob became the hero Israel, a prince with God. Is it Thy will or my will be done? Are we living to please Christ or to please ourselves? Our answer to this question determines our life-current.1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 40.]
How God could have chosen such a man as Jacob for any special purpose of honour, to set him at the head of a nation, and give him a name above all kings, has puzzled many a reader. The lot has always fallen upon Esau, yet God chose Jacob for His special blessing. How is this? We can never find out, if we look at this case alone; but if we take a wide view of human history we shall discover that God has always chosen the weak and the lost as instruments of blessing in His wondrous ministry. He has never taken what would be generally considered the best specimens of humanity; He has often set the younger before the elder; He has left the ninety-and-nine sheep in the wilderness and gone after one that was lost; He has passed by Jerusalem, and set his love upon Nazareth; and when He elected a rock for His Church, it was not John, but Peter, to whom the revelation was made. All this is strange, and yet it is clearly God's method; and surely we may see the germ of the redemptive idea in this habit of working. If God had begun anywhere but at the very lowest depth, His work would have been incomplete; it would have been a kind of work which any man would have attempted; but to begin with the worst, to set Jacob above Esau, to prefer Peter to John, to select the bruised reed rather than the great, strong tree, was to adopt a method which never could have been conceived but by infinite wisdom and love.1 [Note: Joseph Parker.]
