Misread Passages of Scriptures

But the text does not touch upon these difficulties of Esau's history. It treats him broadly as the typical instance of the reprobate, the man who by his own base acts has cast himself out of the position for which he was born and trained; who by one decisive manifestation of his character and propensities has shut himself out from a high career which opened fairly before him, and who finds no means of reversing the decree which excludes him, though he seeks it carefully with tears. It opens a very terrible vision of the inexorable rigour with which deeds done, facts when they are once fairly established, react upon our lives. But the words are often perverted to yet darker meanings – suggesting visions of unpardonable sins, of fruitless agonies of personal repentance, – with which souls under strong conviction not seldom torment themselves, and with which the text has absolutely nothing whatever to do. A man seeking change of heart with an agony of tears, pleading with God to renew him, to restore him, and to cherish him to new life and hope, yet spurned from the gate of mercy, flung forth accursed from the arms of love, is a picture which, blessed be God, has no original in the Divine word. No! thus runs the gospel: "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." "For every one that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." "If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?" "Whoso cometh unto me I will in no wise cast him out." "This man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood; wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them."

If any who reads these words has ever made this text a stumbling-block, has ever suffered the devil to thrust the thought into his heart that he has sinned too deeply for repentance, and wandered too far for return – that he can but lie moaning and weeping like Esau, and pleading with anguished heart for repentance, to find his moans rained back in anathemas, and his tears with the fire of the wrath of the Lamb, – let him sweep back the thought as an unholy thing to the devil who inspired it, and cling to the outstretched hand of Him who "will not break the bruised reed, who will not quench the smoking flax, but will bring forth judgment unto truth."

The text has literally nothing to do with personal repentance before God. No man can spiritually seek a place of repentance carefully with tears, and fail to find it, for the very act is an act of repentance. I do not care to discuss the question whether the repentance here spoken of is a change in the mind of Isaac, or of Esau himself. In either case the meaning is substantially the same. He found no means of reversing the decree, of winning the blessing of the firstborn, of inducing his father to recall the benediction which had been treacherously diverted to the younger, though he sought it carefully with tears. If it were possible that this text, in all its dreadful meaning, could bear on personal repentance for sin, and frighten men from it lest after all it should be hopeless, it would deny the fundamental ideas and promises of the gospel; nay, it would itself "trample under foot the Son of God, and count the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified an unholy thing, and do despite to the Spirit of grace."

No! the text is a very solemn and even terrible warning of the irrevocable character of deeds done in folly or frenzy; the inexorable character of the fate which takes possession of them when once they have gone forth from us, and which makes by them, it may be in spite of our tears and prayers and desperate struggles, a complete revolution in our lives.

Esau's history is but the repetition of the history of the fall. And it is a history which we all constantly repeat in the critical moments of our lives. Esau fell as Adam fell, and fundamentally for the same reason. Adam despised his birthright, and thought that there was a readier way to the satisfaction of the desires of his heart. Esau by one act changed, not his own history and destiny only, but the destiny of a great nation; Adam changed, by his one sin, the destiny of a great world. "Wherefore," says the apostle, "as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men." (Rom. v. 12.) Adam, like Esau, saw through the eyes of Eve that the "tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise." What good shall my birth-right do to me, he said practically when he saw the forbidden fruit, and he sold it; and that moment's work for him, for you, for me, for all the myriad human generations, can never be recalled in time or in eternity. There is something very much nobler here than in Esau's profaneness. It was not in a moment of sensual lust that our first father sold his own birthright and ours. The desire of wisdom, or what he took for wisdom, had much to do with the force of the temptation; but the essence of the matter is the same: Adam and Esau both chose, in the place of the good which God had provided for them, a good which they provided for themselves. Bitterly Adam, like Esau, repented of his folly, and sought to undo his work. When the wilderness lay cold and bare before him, and the flaming sword of the cherubim guarded the backward path to the bright abodes which he had lost for ever, he measured for the first time the full significance of his transgression. And when the sun set angry and lurid on the wilderness, and the moaning winds swept hoarsely over the waste, while a shudder shook the breast of nature as the tempest clouds gathered in the sullen sky, Adam caught the infection of the tremor, and watched with quivering eye the awful conflict of the forces which had broken loose from his allegiance, and which seemed to come thundering on as the doomsmen of the death which his Judge had decreed. Think you that then his heart did not cling to the memories of the splendours and serenities of Eden with passionate longing; think you that he did not prostrate himself in an agony of frenzied supplication that the barred portal might be unclosed again, that the fiery sword might be sheathed, that the flowers of Eden might again spring beneath his footsteps, while the balmy breezes whispered a blessing as they played around the field of his labour and his bower of rest?

And what has been the long and bitter cry of man's sad history? O God, reverse the sentence, reopen the gate of paradise, revoke the curse, let the sunlight of Eden shine once more on a holy, peaceful, and happy world! This is the great burden of human literature in all its deeper and more sacred utterances; it is the meaning of all the world's great poems, the refrain of all its immortal hymns. Recall the curse! let life again become pure, peaceful, and blessed! Men, nations, ages have agonized, over the sentence; but they have found no place of repentance, no means to change the mind of the Judge or their own condition as the subjects of it, though they have sought it carefully with tears. Esau was the rejected of the birthright; you and I are the rejected of Eden. Sinners we are by nature and proclivity, with a sinner's burdens, a sinner's experience, and a sinner's doom. And there is no way to change the past, to rid us of the burden, to cancel the sentence, to mitigate the anguish of a life on which the devil has seared the shameful brand; no way to force the barred gates of paradise, even by the banded energies of a pain-racked, sin-tormented world.

And I suppose that the private experience of most men furnishes the key to this. Who has not known something of the agony with which one dark deed of passion, lust, falsehood, knavery, baseness, can torture a human heart? Look back. Is there nothing in the past, rising up at this moment in the full menace of its hateful form, clear as the ghost of Banquo before his murderer's sight, which you would give your wealth, nay, some of you would give worlds if they had them, to undo; if conscience might but recover its serenity, and life its brightness; if the leprous flesh of their experience might again become, like Naaman's, fair, pure, and sweet as the flesh of a little child. It is not every Gehazi whose leprosy comes out in his flesh, and makes him loathsome to his fellows. How many Gehazis move about among us, burying their leprosy within, but none the less plague-stricken and perilous! Happy those who have no dark chambers in their being, haunted by the skeletons of their dead lusts, sins, or crimes – skeletons which never fail to come forth at their banquets to scare them, choosing ruthlessly the hours of their festivity and triumph to murder all their joys. There may be some readers of these words who know this in all its horror, in whom the anguish of the irrevocable and irreparable has killed all the joy of life – a word spoken, a passion indulged, a deed done, which in one brief moment has drawn a brooding shadow over the once sunlit landscape of their lives. And you have wept and prayed, lying prostrate on the cold, ground, beseeching the merciful God that He would blot out the record from your memory and from the lives which it has embittered and cursed; but "the heaven has been as brass, the earth beneath has been as iron." The word "irrevocable" has forced its meaning upon you in all its terrible sternness, and you have needed no commentary to expound, or preacher to drive home, the meaning of the sentence, "Beware lest there be any fornicator, or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright. For ye know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears."

And if there may be some readers who know this experience in all its horror, there are a multitude who know it in its more modified forms, and who find it terrible enough even then. Who has not had forced upon him the misery of regrets or remorse, the causes of which remain unalterable, fixed as the stars in their orbits, and the fruits of which leave deep traces on the experience and the destiny through time, yes, and through eternity? Did David, think you, ever look coldly or carelessly on his bold soldier's bloody grave? Was there no sad shadow, to his eye, around the beauty of Bathsheba's child, which no murmured "Jedidiah" could chase away? Was his home ever free from the shadow, from the hour when Nathan's "Thou art the man" drove conviction home, and wrung from him the most bitter cry of a sinner's anguish which has found record in the literature of our world? Few things in the book of history are more terrible than the sorrow which entered David's home, the discord which rent his kingdom, the anguish which pierced his heart, from the hour of his great transgression. A sad, careworn, broken man, he finished his course and went down to his grave. Compare the David of 1 Kings i., ii., with the young shepherd in his early prime, if you would estimate the havoc which one great sin may make in a noble life. Ah! in a measure we all know it, in some form or other; words, deeds, outbursts of passion, which have wrung dear hearts with anguish, sundered precious bonds of love, have sullied reputation, clouded prospects, withered hopes, or blighted the promise of lives which we were bound to cherish, or of our own. And we would give worlds to blot out their record, and to repair the evil which has been wrought; but it remains engraven with an iron pen in the rock for ever: man cannot obliterate it, and God will not.

To complete the subject, let me ask you to consider two thoughts.

1. These dread seasons of crucial trial, on which the future of life, nay of eternity, is hanging, never come upon us in a moment.

It would appear from the text that one morsel of meat settled the question of the birthright; that one hard, hot morning's chase settled the destinies of peoples for all time. That is one side of it, the outside. But the real settlement of the question was made already; any trifle will serve to disclose what has already established itself as the permanent character within. Esau had nursed his contempt for the birthright by a thousand daily lustings and cravings; many a bitter scoff too he had flung at Jacob's pious and meditative mood. Things like this never stand alone. The life of the chosen family is described in words of wonderful beauty and power in Heb. xi. 8-14. "By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised. Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable. These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country." This life Jacob believed in profoundly; this life Esau as profoundly despised. He despised it all, and made his contempt abundantly apparent. "And Esau was forty years old when he took to wife Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Bashemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite. Which were a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah" (Gen. xxvi. 34, 35). This shows how thoroughly out of sympathy with the spirit of the chosen race he was from the first, and remained through life. All his sympathies and associations were with the pagans around him. Jacob was the true heir of the promise, for he believed in it; Esau its outcast, for he despised it, and had despised it from the first. His every act had expressed his contempt of it, and the sale of the birthright for a mess of pottage but completed the witness that he was a profane person, a pagan at heart. These moments mark the crises for which a long train of thought and habit has prepared. Many a secret sin, born of luxury and nursed by royal power and splendour, broke out into the daylight when David looked upon Bathsheba, and filled his life with unutterable sorrow and shame. God takes no man in a hasty moment and brands him reprobate. A thousand daily touches through long years have shaped the image which there reveals itself, and on which is moulded the everlasting destiny. The little sins of life are busily, hour by hour, creating the great sins. The small habits and actions, which we allow to pass unrebuked – they seem to be such trifles – soon pass away beyond the power of memory to recall; but they leave their ineffaceable trace on our constitution and character, and lay silently the train of some great outburst of lust, passion, or wickedness, like Esau's or David's. Then is written a record on our nature and destiny which one day we shall agonize to blot out; but the inexorable eye looks coldly down on the frenzied pleader, and the stony lips fashion themselves into a voiceless "Too late!" Meet sin, meet all the devil's seductions and enticements, sternly on the threshold, and the citadel remains for ever sure.

2. The irrevocable is not the irreparable, through the abounding mercy and grace of God.

Things cannot be obliterated or abolished. They remain, and their record remains, for ever. But, blessed be God, they may be transmuted, and wear Divine forms of beauty and joy. And this is what redemption means. Eden is closed for ever. To abolish the condition of man as a sinner, otherwise than by one grand sentence of doom which would abolish his existence as a creature, is beyond the power even of heaven. A sinner's lot you inherit, a sinner's experience you must know, a sinner's agony you must taste, a sinner's horror of darkness you must pass through – to the pit, if the birthright never again seems to you beautiful and glorious, a thing to be won by toil and tears and prayers; but if your soul pines in its rioting, if it sickens in its worldly wealth and splendour, if the question forces itself upon you as it never seems to have forced itself upon Esau, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul, or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" then the sinner's anguish, from which there is no escape for any one of us, may be made by Christ's dear love the strait gate to the splendour, the glory, the bliss of heaven. And this is Redemption. Divine love, love that could die, love that did die, that its beloved ones might not die, is the solvent which transmutes all the shame and pain of sin to heavenly glory and bliss. "Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound; that as sin had reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness, unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord." Here is no reversal, no obliteration of the past, mark you; the thing that was is and shall be; no power in the universe can blot out its trace. The experience of a sinner is part of your being, and in its transmuted form must remain part of your being, through eternity. These wounds and sores of sin, suffused by Christ's great love, become the lustrous pearls of heaven. Nothing in the past, I care not how dark or damning it may be, is irreparable by the love which "endured the cross and despised the shame," that it might win the right and the power to redeem. There is no sin whose stains may not be wept out at the Redeemer's feet. There is no life which may not win "She hath loved much, for she hath much forgiven" as its record, earnest of a rapture of eternal bliss. But dream not that the path can be an easy one, and that penitence can transmute the sorrow into joy by a word. You have done that whose issues could only be undone by the agony and bloody sweat of Gethsemane, the cross and passion of Calvary; and you too must die, die to sin, that you may live to God. The flesh, which has despised your birthright, must be mortified, crucified, by grace. "I am crucified with Christ" you must learn to say; you must know the fellowship of the sufferings of your Master, and taste the cup of which He drank the dregs, or the lost birthright is lost for ever, and the deed done on earth remains irreparable as well as irrevocable through eternity.

VII.

THE CURSE OF THE GROUND

"Cursed is the ground for thy sake." – Gen. iii. 17.

Are these words part of a curse, or part of a blessing? Are they a sentence on man, the doom of his transgression, or the first stage of a process destined to issue in the redemption of the heir of promise from sorrow and sin for ever? Few phrases are more frequently on our lips than "the curse of labour." Men, women, yea little children, overburdened and crushed by the stern toil which is the necessity of their existence, easily catch up the sentence, and submit to the necessity in the sullen bitter mood with which a slave accepts his chastisement, or a criminal the sentence of doom. Few things are more firmly fixed in our minds than that the toil and the strain of life are God's curse on transgression, having merciful bearings and issues no doubt for the man who lovingly submits to the discipline, but in themselves evil and hateful, born of sin, and a part of death.

I propose to examine this idea in the present discourse, and to endeavour to estimate this curse upon the ground in its bearings on man's development as a spiritual being, and his relations to his Redeemer, God. That toil, care, and pain spring out of the one great act of transgression which every life repeats is the plain and indisputable affirmation of the word of God. The dark tones of man's present life gloom against a background of radiant brightness and beauty; in the childhood of humanity, as in the life of every human child, Eden shines behind all the toil and sorrow of the world. There has been a grand cataclysm in man and in nature. The structure of the world has been rent and contorted, and the fractures and contortions repeat themselves in life. "Sin entered into the world, and death by sin;" "God made man upright, but he sought out many inventions," are the sentences of a sound philosophy, estimating the facts of consciousness and history, as well as statements of the word of God. There has been a fall, a rupture, by the sinful guilty action of the freewill of the creature, of the pristine perfect relation between man and God and man and the world. Transgression, the sinful exercise of freedom, is the fundamental fact of man's present nature and life; and the sentence on the transgressor, the inevitable sentence, "the soul that sinneth it shall die," lies at the root of all the bitter anguish of the world.

There are abundant signs of the action of terribly destructive and desolating forces in the physical structure of the world. The earth has been torn and convulsed as by the spasm of some great agony, and the signs of it lie thick around. Huge beds of rock, thousands of feet in thickness, have been cracked and shivered like potsherds; streams of molten metal have been injected into the fissures, and have surged through the rents and swept vast floods of burning lava over the smiling plains. There must have been times in the history of the development of this earth, fair and calm as it lies now under the sun, when its whole structure must have been shaken to the very centre; when there was dread peril lest, like some lost planet, it should be shattered into fragments and fill its orbit with a cloud of wreck. But some sure hand has helped earth's travail, and has brought forth out of the chaos of struggle and storm an orderly, smiling, serene, and beautiful world. The signs of past agony are there, to those whose eye can pierce the surface; but a loving hand has clothed it all with a glow of beauty and a robe of grace. The regions where the convulsion was fiercest, where the scars are deepest, are the regions of glorious mountain beauty, whither pilgrims wend as to nature's most sacred shrine. The rents and chasms, clothed with the most splendid forests, with streams leaping and sparkling through the emerald meadows to the hollows below, breathe nothing but beauty, and stir all hearts to joy and praise. The touch of the destroyer is everywhere masked by beauty; and out of the chaos of confusion God has drawn forth, what never could have been but for the chaos, the infinite variety, the grace, the splendour, the glory of the world.

This mystery of order and beauty, of cosmos, which reveals itself to us in nature, unveils itself too in man's spiritual world. Life, the life of the human, bears traces everywhere of kindred dislocation. A great convulsion has rent man's nature, has torn it away from God and from Eden, and scattered what, but for a redeeming restoring hand, would have been blasted wrecks, about the world. Toil, pain, care, anguish have chased the serenity and bliss of paradise from man's heart and from man's world. Earth is full of wailing, and life of misery. Looking at its surface aspects, we are tempted to call this life of man the abortion of freedom, and to cry with Job, with Jeremiah, Why did it not perish before it saw the sun? Look deeper. As in nature, so in man's life, a loving restoring hand has been working; the wastes of sin are already clothed with some tints of greenness; flowers of rare beauty and splendour spring up on what sin had made a dreary, blasted desert. The moral chaos, touched by the hand of the Divine love, the love of God the Redeemer, already puts on some dress of beauty; nay, it glows here and there with a nascent glory whose fountain is beyond the stars. Some vision of a grand and glorious purpose of redemption unveils itself as we search the secrets of man's sad history. "Where sin abounded," we read in the book of life as well as in the book of Scripture, "grace did much more abound: That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign, through righteousness unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord." (Rom. v. 20, 21.) What we see accomplished helps us to realize the visions of the prophetic word. "The wilderness and the solitary place, shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon; they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God." "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness: the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs, and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away." (Isa. xxxv. 1, 2, 5-10.) Sin, the sin of the first parent, which every child of Adam repeats, is the fundamental fact of man's being; no religion, no philosophy, which makes light of it can lay firm hold of man's conscience and heart. But, blessed be God, grace is the crowning fact; and it is the crown which will remain conspicuous through eternity.