Genesis 25:27

Genesis 25:27

Esau was a huntsman. He belonged to the open air; he loved wild sports, and delighted to chase the wild beasts of the wilderness. Jacob, on the other hand, was more quiet, more self-restrained. There was a good deal of the underhanded and scheming about him a prudent, sharp dealer a typical Jew, who represented the mercantile spirit of the race. We see Esau strong, stalwart, impulsive, everything which we like about a man, and he occupies a large place in our hearts, and then passes away from us, a striking and solemn lesson.

I. He was a man of strong physical nature, a man of passion with little self-restraint. He is hungry, and he parts with his birthright. He goes into the desert and meets the daughters of the Hittites, and is led by them into entanglements which break up his relations at home. It is not the strongest physical natures which have always the greatest moral force.

II. He was a man of swift impulse. Impulsive men sometimes gain their ends with startling and complete effect. Impulse may achieve much, but it is not to be compared to the patient, quiet perseverance that sees its end and goes on to it till the victory is gained.

III. He was a man reckless of consequences. The present, the immediate, arrests him. There is a want of keen perceptive power about men of Esau's type. There is no purpose in their lives; they are tossed about like a barque without a helm, and their end will be shipwreck, and not a gallant entrance into haven.

IV. Esau had no sense of spiritual things. He was a man altogether nobler in character than Jacob, more generous, more forgetful of self; yet Jacob had a sense of spiritual things which Esau lacked. There was a Divine culture in Jacob which we do not find in Esau. Esau ended, as he began, a splendid, but a merely natural man; Jacob developed by God's grace into Israel, the Prince with God.

L. D. Bevan, Penny Pulpit,No. 574.

I. Esau was full of healthy vigour and the spirit of adventure, exulting in field sports, active, muscular, with the rough aspect and the bounding pulse of the free desert. Jacob was a harmless shepherd, pensive and tranquil, dwelling by the hearth and caring only for quiet occupations. Strength and speed and courage and endurance are blessings not lightly to be despised; but he who confines his ideal to them, as Esau did, chooses a low ideal, and one which can bring a man but little peace at the last. Esau reaches but half the blessing of a man, and that the meaner and temporal half; the other half seems seldom or never to have entered his thoughts. II. So side by side the boys grew up; and the next memorable scene of their history shows us that the great peril of animal life the peril lest it should forget God altogether and merge into mere uncontrolled, intemperate sensuality had happened to Esau! For the mess of pottage the sensual hunter sells in one moment the prophecy of the far future and the blessing of a thousand years. Esau's epitaph is the epitaph of a lifetime recording for ever the consummated carelessness of a moment. Esau, "a profane person," "who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright." Jacob, with all the contemptible faults which lay on the surface of his character, had deep within his soul the faith in the unseen, the sense of dependence on and love to God which Esau did not even comprehend. (1) Cultivate the whole of the nature which God has given you, and in doing so remember that the mind is of more moment than the body, and the soul than both. (2) Beware lest, in a moment of weakness and folly, you sell your birthright and barter your happy innocence for torment and fear and shame.

F. W. Farrar, The Fall of Man and other Sermons,p. 228.

References: Genesis 25:27. F. Langbridge, Sunday Magazine(1885), p. 673.Genesis 25:27. Expositor2nd series, vol. vii., p. 345; R. S. Candlish, Book of Genesis,vol. i., p. 441; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iii., p. 527; S. Leathes, Studies in Genesis,p. 129; Preacher's Monthly,vol. v., p. 75.