Verses 1-21
Unexpected Retribution
ALL these things have an explanation. The judgment of things does not lie upon the bare surface, nor is our life a quantity constituted between four visible and measurable points. Life is a mystery sometimes distant, shapeless and measureless as a cloud, and sometimes a veil so thin we can almost see through it, yet when we touch it, it is a hard wall built by hands invisible, and rising up with darkening height to the very clouds from which we expected revelations of morning and summer. Why do we whine and complain, and say we are ill-used and Edom is unkind and ungenerous, wanting in hospitality, and in all the tenderest attributes of human nature? It is an ill speech; it is as wanting in honesty and self-recognition as it is in sound reasoning. Israel was not the poor little innocent wanderer that it appeared to be from the plaintive, suppliant speech of Moses. Nothing is self-contained. We must go into yesterday to find the explanation of to-day. To-day! What is it? An up-gathering and sharp, yet transient, representation of things that happened in the centuries dead but never forgotten and never inoperative. Who pleads? Israel. To whom is the plea addressed? To a brother. How did the word brother come into the narrative? It came historically. We have here Jacob and Esau. Edom is the name by which Esau was known. Wherever we find the term Edom, our minds may instantly associate with it the history of Esau, and an action of divine sovereignty in relation to that history. Jacob supplanted Esau, ran away in the night time, met his brother at some distance of time afterwards, the brothers fell upon one another's necks, kissed each other, and seemed to sink the infinite outrage in grateful and perpetual oblivion. Nothing of the kind. Life cannot be managed thus; things do not lie between man and man only. Herein is the difference between crime and sin. Crime may be an affair open, visible, measurable, to which adequate penalty may be measured out; but sin hurts the heavens, insults and stains the sceptre of the universe pains the heart of God. Can men shake hands over it, sponge it out by some act of transient generosity, and say, Let it be forgotten, as though it had never been? We cannot treat our own sin. The answer to the sin of men must come from the God against whom the sin was committed. Do not let us imagine that sin is a breach of etiquette, a perversion of social custom, an eccentricity of personal taste, a mere outrage of a conventional kind. If we talk thus flippantly and superficially about sin, we shall be astounded when we behold the Cross that was erected for its obliteration and pardon. We must know the sinfulness of sin before we can know the compassionateness of mercy. So Jacob and Esau come face to face throughout the ages. The supplanter cannot sponge out his miserable cunning and selfish deceit and unpardonable fraud. Jacob the individual dies, Esau the individual dies: but Jacob and Esau, as representing a great controversy, can never die: to the end of the chapter Edom will encounter Israel with deep and lasting animosity. We cannot always explain the animosities which burn in our excited hearts; examined and cross-examined as to their history, we may be quite unable to give any exact account of genesis and growth and culmination. Man cannot explain himself to himself; he only knows that inexplicably he feels an animosity which cataracts cannot quench a burning, blazing scorn which seas cannot drown. There is a mystery in human development. Things are larger than they seem to be. Awkward, perplexing, distressing, is the fact we are bound to recognise, that we come up against ourselves day by day, and our ghostly history follows us from wedding to burial, from feast to battle, from day to night; and when we would be gladdest it thrusts in its sting the furthest. Let us take care of this life. The day is more than twelve hours long; invisible threadlets pass through the dark night and connect themselves with the next day. Our life is not a thread like a line; it is a web moving in various directions, and thickening itself into substance not always easy to handle, and sometimes wrapping itself round us like a robe that burns off our skin, and sometimes lifting itself above us to shut out the fire and blessing of the sun. Fools are they who live from hand to mouth, yea, fools inexplicable and unpardonable and wholly undesirable as to companionship, who live a flippant life, thinking that things are in no wise related, and forgetting that to-morrow brings the harvest of to-day.
Influence is not limited by personal action. What is a "person"? There is no such thing, in any narrow and limited sense of the term. A man stands Up and says, Am I not a man? ; and I say, No, you are not ; there need not be any long and wordy discussion about that. What is an "individual"? There is no such thing, in the sense of a quantity that can be measured, weighed, and set down in exact figures, and as having no relation whatever to anything past or to come. When the little child stands up, generations beat in his pulse. When a man asks if he is not a "person," an "individual," he forgets that all his forefathers gather up mysterious influences in his breathing, his attitude, and his action. We are more than we appear to be. We do not bury the past and shut it out as an operative factor in the daily ministry of being. This makes life solemn even to awfulness. When the young life coughs and heaves under the influence of internal pain, what is it that happens? Whole generations of weakness gather up in that sense of distress and powerlessness. When a young and apparently lovely character suddenly deflects from the straight line and goes away into forbidden places, what has happened? Generations of criminals have asserted their ascendency over the individual will, and the wanderer may have run off to meet in invisible council more than two or three generations of men.
Jacob must meet Esau again and again. There is no easy escape for wrongdoers. The eternal distrust which subsists between man and man, family and family, race and race, has a moral explanation. It is not all whim, fickleness, mere passion and selfish excitement. We must be philosophical in our quest for causes and motives. Far back in time almost immeasurable we shall find the seed was sown which comes up in unexpected places. The children must suffer for the fathers. We cannot help it We would complain of it were there not a supplemental and completing truth: for as certainly as the children suffer for their fathers, are they benefited by their fathers' nobleness and beneficence as certainly do they come to reap golden harvests because of the good seed sowed by the generations that are gone. The way of the Lord is equal. We perhaps cannot understand why we are not allowed to pass through this land, to have right of passage down this country, to navigate certain rivers, and to cross particular provinces; and we take offence: our sensibilities are easily wounded; we say, This is hard. But you cannot set aside the "divinity that shapes our ends" the Providence that looks now and again upon us with a face of solemn judgment and transfixes us with a look full of spiritual accusation. What then? Instead of complaining and moaning and reproaching other people, let us search into the reality of the case, and we shall find, perhaps to our surprise and our surprise may be turned to our instruction, that whatever occurs to us in the way of disappointment, humiliation, and subordination, is explained by sin done long ago. Is there any consolation in that explanation of the mystery? None; but there is what is better. Why do you always seek for consolation and soothing? Who are we that we should cry out in moaning terms for perpetual consolation? Stand up and say, This is God's law, and by it we will work; we suffer hurt, damage, loss, because of what went before us; we cannot remedy that, but, by the help of God, we will see that our posterity shall reap sweetness where we have gathered only bitterness. The lesson is before you; the application relates to those who are coming afterwards. We can make their burdens lighter; we can already open gates through kingdoms for men who are coming fifty and a hundred years and more after this very day; and as the gates fly open, and hospitality is offered in the time of their wandering, they will remember that this day good men sowed good seed, mighty men fought battles with Heaven, great suppliants won great answers which they will enjoy in the fulness of their noble fruition.
So Esau had his turn. We pitied the hairy man as he was driven away portionless, without a blessing, his great big heart full of sin no doubt, quivering with agony, for which there was no adequate expression in words; but in so far as he has been wronged he will see satisfaction and himself be satisfied. The supplanted family had a land when the supplanter's descendants had only a wilderness. This is the law of Providence. Events are not measured within the compasses of the little day. The cunning man or the strong man, the oppressor or the wrong-doer, may have his victory to-day, and may smile upon it, and regard it with complacency, and receive the incense of adulation from persons who only see between sunrise and sundown. But the heavens are against him; he has to encounter the eternities, long time after his victory shall wither, and in his descendants his humiliation shall be consummated. Suppose, however, that he should not care for his descendants? Then he is not a man to be trusted now. Have no companionship with him. Do not put your hand into his hand, for he will wrong you and you will come out of the grasp with a stain upon your palm. Do not laugh with the fool when he says that he cares not for his descendants. A man who does not care for his descendants, cannot care for you, cannot care for his contemporaries; he writes his own condemnation in his flippant neglect. My son, have nothing to do with such a man; he will take thee into dark places, strip thee, wrong thee, and to suit his purpose may kill thee. Is it not wonderful how the wheel goes round? "Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." Events translate themselves into punishment swiftly and suddenly. A shut gate means you are historically connected with a great wrong. Israel adopts the affectionate style of entreaty and says "thy brother Israel." But wrongs are not thus to be obliterated; complimentary speeches do not restore inheritances that have been turned away; eulogiums cannot repossess men of the blessings forfeited by the fraud of others. Live the larger life, the nobler life. Ye are not yourselves: you represent others, and you prepare for others to represent you; and he only handles life wisely who takes hold of both its ends and who remembers the law of cause and effect, seedtime and harvest, action and influence.
Here is the wrong-doer brought to his knees. That always happens. The wicked man has a short day. The deceiver must face his own deceits. Nothing prospers long in the bad man's hands. The money which he gets wrongfully he cannot spend to his own satisfaction: it is gone whilst he counts it; it vanishes as he admires it; there is no stay in the gold, no abiding in the substance; it is money put into bags with holes in them. If a bad man could succeed, in the large, deep vital sense of the term, he would by so much dethrone God. He cannot, therefore, succeed; with Heaven against him, with eternity against him, with God against him, when he apparently succeeds, it is but the flash of a little flame that dies in the effort which it makes.
Notice what is termed the solidarity of human life. The human family is one. If one member suffer, all the members suffer with it. The wrongs that were done ten generations ago are being re-asserted as to their moral claim to-day. The controversies of the world are not controversies which began this morning fights that surprise the combatants; their beginnings lie far back in the gone centuries, and in proportion to the distances from which they come may be the judgment which they will demand.
We live, then, in a scheme of Providence. Life is not atheistic. Our sufferings have an explanation; our weakness is not an accident, but the outcome of a series of processes often lying beyond the line of imagination. The lesson is that we should accept life solemnly, pass through all its processes circumspectly, do nothing at our own bidding or for the gratification of our own will or fancy, but should always say, My God, thy will be done. Let no man undertake to be God for himself; let him occupy his definite position as servant, errand-bearer, worker in the vineyard, and let his spirit express itself substantially thus: Lord, at thy bidding I would go, at thy bidding I would stay; give me understanding of my time; give me the noble Christly heart, and inspire me by thy Holy Spirit that I may be enabled so to succeed as to ripen into a harvest of satisfaction and gladness in the coming days. No man can live in that spirit without being in heaven as to all the substance and quality of heaven's meaning. That is what is meant by praying without ceasing namely, living in the prayerful spirit, always being in touch with God, ever having God's throne in view, God's law at heart, God's will the inspiration and direction of life.
Viewed from this altitude, what is sorrow? what is loss? what is disappointment? All these things may be sanctified: orphanage may come to have a special sanctity; loneliness may be surprised into fellowship by visitants bearing no earthly name; and difficulty in living may become the inspiration and enlargement of noble prayer. If we live within the day, if history be nothing but a series of unrelated anecdotes, if seedtime has no reference to harvest, then the joy of life is dead, the inspiration of labour has ceased, hope no longer plays its heavenly part in the movement of life and in all the gladness of being. "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Clever Jacob, designing Jacob, supplanter of the absent brother, stealer of blessings, will one day have to knock at that brother's gate and say, If it please thee, my lord, may I be permitted to hasten through thy land? and believe me I will touch nothing. Touch nothing! thou thief of the ages, thou simulator of honesty, nay, thou wilt touch nothing! How the thief can prate of honesty! How the designing supplanter can say he will "go by the king's high way," and no vine will he touch, and not a drop of water will he drink! We may have acquired such a reputation that people will not believe us even when we intend to be good for a moment. We may sin away our social standing; we may so act towards men that when we go before them, as it were, on bended knees and say we will touch nothing, hurt nothing, drink no water out of the wells but hasten through, they will laugh at us and say, Mocker! liar! thief! remember the past, and then ask if we can be foolish and trustful enough to believe thee. Take care of your character, take care of your soul's honesty; one day it will open gates, which will secure the hospitality of princes; and they who serve the Lord mightily labour for him, and put their whole trust in him, shall go through by the king's highway, and be permitted to eat of the vineyards and drink of the wells, and the longer they stay the more welcome will they be. Let me live the life of the righteous, let me die the death of the righteous, let me cast in my lot with the true and the wise and the divine I would live and move and have my being in God.
Prayer
Almighty God, in wrath thou dost remember mercy. What are thy judgments but calls upon the compassion of thy people? By thy threatening thou dost bring forth men who will pray. Behold, when thy judgments are abroad in the earth, men take censers and fill them, and pray more mightily unto God than before. Such is thy wondrous way. We, who will not pray in calm time when no wind is abroad shaking the forest, fall to and pray most vehemently when the tempest shakes the heavens and the earth seems to tremble. We, who will not wait upon thee at the altar or care for thy sanctuary in any way when all things flow serenely around us, hasten to the Lord's temple when the air is tainted with death. Thou wilt lay hold upon us either here or there, in this way or in that: but surely thine hand shall find us, and we must face the living God. Thou hast given us a Gospel which is a savour of life unto life, or of death unto death. We cannot escape it or deny it: behold, we must account with it; it is the Lord's voice, it is the testimony divine, and we have to make some answer to its great cry of pity and offer of redemption. Thou dost take away the preacher: but the Gospel remains; thou dost change the congregation: but the sanctuary abides for ever; other hands pile the altar fire: but the altar itself is of thy founding and cannot be removed: it is the Lord's appointed meeting-place; there his name is recorded and there his glory shines. Enable us to remember how little we are. We are but the creatures of yesterday and the victims of to-morrow, with a little time of tumult and anxiety between; and instead of attempting to solve the great mysteries of being to set up an answer to the awful problems of the universe, may we learn to pray, to love, to cry in penitential cries over our sin, and to hope in the living God, and thus may we be enabled to leave all mystery and great wonder and miracle of thought to be revealed and solved in the eternal world. Meanwhile, make us industrious in all things practical; give us a heart to feel for human want, a hand willing to help all human weakness; heighten our reverence for things divine; put into our voices the tone of noble solemnity; work in us the spirit of resignation; turn our eyes away from all saviours and redeemers but One; and, fixing our vision upon the central Cross, may we behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, and give ourselves to him, asking him to have mercy upon us and apply to us all the virtue of his priesthood. Prepare us for all events. We never know what shall be on the morrow: we will rest in God and trust in truth, and make a sanctuary of the divine righteousness, and would have God find for us a hole in the side of the rock in which we may stand in perfect security until all calamities be overpast Amen.
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