Apparently Jacob was highly
favored by his mother, and she urged and helped him to cheat Esau out
of the blessing of the firstborn and his birthright. It is no
coincidence that Jacob means "Deceiver."
Esau teaches all of mankind a
sober lesson of how easily things we despise can be lost forever to
seemingly innocent, little and insignificant decisions.
One fateful day, Esau returned
from work just a little bit too hungry, and promptly sold his younger
brother his birthright for some stew. He figured, "What good is my
birthright if I die of starvation right now?" He probably didn't even
really "mean it," and might have said later, "I was just kidding," but
this crucial incident shows that there's no kidding around with God.
He's going to take you at your word, and I'm sure there are going to be
some things any of us will wish we hadn't said.
Words are apparently real
things in God's eyes; they have either creative or destructive power,
as evidenced by the fact that He created the world through His Words,
and on the other hand, the fall of man and the resulting curse,
including death, came into the world through the tempting words of
Satan.
So, "a deal's a deal" when it
comes to God, and He evidently took those words of Esau very seriously
when he swore to sell his birthright to Jacob for a meal (Gen.25:29-34).
Some would think it's odd that God should have preferred a liar, a
pretender, a cheater, a deceiver, over an apparently hard-working,
honest guy, but this just shows that God has a different standard for
sin and righteousness than we do. It's not that He is advocating lying,
and as we can clearly see from the years of Jacob's life that followed,
God evidently let him taste some of his own medicine when he fell into
the hands of his uncle Laban, who was an even greater crook than Jacob.
But in God's eyes, Esau's sin
was greater than Jacob's, and it is a very common one. It is that sin
of putting material and temporal matters before and above the spiritual
and eternal, giving greater importance to the physical, the creation,
than the Creator.
I've seen lots of people sell
their spiritual birthrights during my life-time, forfeiting the eternal
rewards promised for investing one's life in God's Kingdom and affairs
for temporal pleasures or benefits. Today's "messes of pottage" that
the Enemy of our souls offers us in exchange for our birthright is a
stew of more shiny temptations than have been in existence during any
previous moment in history. It may be something as seemingly
insignificant as a pack of cigarettes, or the favor of some person we
want to impress and thus act in a way that will open up a gateway to a
long, painful detour around the straight & narrow path of God's
will for us. Anything that we deem more important at any given moment
than what really counts & matters can be a substitute god in our
lives for as long as we allow that thing or person to usurp His throne
and place in our hearts. Of course, a favorite, and among the top 10 of
shiny temptations is security. By and large, people simply fail to
trust God, and doubt that He's able and willing to take care of us as
well as we can ourselves. That's why people who cannot take care of
themselves are sometimes happier than we are… They don't have that
pride to deal with. Esau apparently felt like he was going to starve,
or at least feel uncomfortably hungry for a longer amount of time than
he was seeing himself capable of, so he figured he had to do something
to save himself. If he would have been serious about anything else but
his own immediate need and desire, if he would have cared about his
future role as the heir of God's chosen, he would have hung on to that
heritage. But he didn't. And there's more, lots more people like that
around in the world right now than you know.
If God's greatest desire is
that we love Him, as seen in the greatest commandment of all being that
which commands us to do so (see Matt.22:37,38),
then the way we hurt Him most is evidently by despising Him and
constantly preferring other "gods" before Him. In Esau's case, it seems
he was one of those fellows about which Paul much later wrote, "…whose
god is their belly" (Phil.3:19).
His stomach was more important to Esau in that crucial moment than God,
and since Esau preferred something baser and lesser over God, God chose
to prefer Esau's lesser brother over him, who valued the spiritual
things more, and so much, in fact, that he was ready to sin for them.
The rest of Jacob's life is
almost like one perpetual atonement for that sin. He has to flee for
his life from Esau, falls in love with Rachel, the daughter of his
uncle Laban, who cheats him and sends the wrong bride into his wedding
bed, Rachel's older sister Leah, who is to become the mother of six of
Jacob's twelve sons, the patriarchs of the future tribes of Israel.
It's also interesting to note
that the name Israel was given to Jacob after a wrestling match against
a mysterious super-human opponent; some say an angel, while it seems
that Jacob must have thought it was the Lord Himself (Gen.32:24-31).
Evidently, Jacob was the weaker
party in that fight and it seems he came away from it with his thigh
bone out of joint (v.25,31,32), and yet - as another token of the type
of man he was - he clings to his superior opponent and refuses to let
him go "unless you bless me" (v.26). His medal and badge of honor for
having fought the divine is his new name, Israel, "Prince of God,"
In their book "The Enneagram - A Christian Perspective," Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert describe Jacob as one of the biblical examples of the Enneagram's personality type THREE,
the success seekers. While commonly this type of people is rather found
in the business world, it shows that there are also spiritually
oriented success junkies, as manifested so obviously in today's
"showbiz" type of Christianity, especially in the US.
