Verse 16
Profanity in the Home.
In Scripture there are few characters more profitable for study than Esau. Whether we look at his circumstances, or his temper, or the line along which the tragedy of his life developed, we get nearer to this man, and find in him more that resembles ourselves, more that resembles the pitiful facts and solemn possibilities of our own lives, than we do in connection with almost any other character in either of the two Testaments. Here is a man who was not an insane or a monstrous sinner, a Lucifer falling from heaven, but who came to sin, who came to fatal irredeemable sin, in the common human way: by birth into it; by the sins of others as well as his own; by everyday and sordid temptations; by carelessness and the sudden surprise of neglected passions. Esau is not a repulsive, but a lovable, man; and we know that if one is to learn from any character, one's love must be awake, and take her share in the learning too. There is everything about Esau to engage us in the study of him. The mystery that haunts all human sin, the pity that we feel for so wronged and so genial a nature, only make clear to us more fully the central want and blame of his life. Perhaps we may discover it to be the central want and blame of our own.
I. Hereditary sinfulness. First, then, Esau was sinned against from his birth. The problems of heredity and of a stress of temptation for which he was not responsible appear in his case from the very first. His father and mother were responsible for much of the character of their son. It has always seemed to me a strange thing that in the otherwise beautiful marriage service of the Church of England the example of Isaac and Rebecca should be invoked for each new-wedded pair; for Isaac and Rebecca's marriage was the spoiling of one of the most beautiful idylls that ever opened on this earth of ours. It began in a romance, and it ended in the sheerest vulgarity; it began with the most honourable plighting of troth, and it ended in the most sordid querulousness, and shiftiness, and falsehood. This was just because, with all its grace and all its wonder, the fear of God was not present, because, with all the romance, there was no religion, and, with all the giving of the one heart to the other, there had been no surrender of both to God. The Nemesis of picturesqueness without truth is always sordidness; the Nemesis of romance without religion is always vulgarity; and vulgarity and sordidness are the prevailing notes of Isaac and Rebecca's wedded life.
II. Evil home influence. Our text calls Esau "a profane person," and this predominant aspect of his character he got at home. The Greek word for "profane" means literally that which is trodden, which is not closed to anything, but may be passed over, used, and trodden by who will. It is equivalent to a word in a notice we often see in our own towns: "No Thoroughfare." "Profane" means "thoroughfare," and had a Greek been wanting to put up "No Thoroughfare" upon any street, he would have expressed it probably in the original word in this text: "Not Profane." It was first applied to the ground outside sacred enclosures or temples. It meant ground that was common and public profane. That which lay in front of the fane or temple is thus the adequate translation of the original Greek. Now such was the home Rebecca made for her sons, a home which was not walled in by reverence and truth, and the steadfast patience of father and mother. The falsehood was permitted in its most sacred relations; petulance, vulgar haste, foolishly strong language, and lies found free course across its holy of holies the mother's lips. Profane home, indeed, when a mother's temper spoiled the air, and her ambitions trampled down her elder son's rights, her younger's honour, and her poor blind husband's weakness. The mother who thus profaned her home could not be expected to do otherwise with the heart of her son. Esau's was an open heart, as far as we can see a naturally free and unreserved heart. You know the kind of man. He has fifty doors to the outer world, where the most of us have only two or three; and except angels be sent of God Himself to guard these, the peril and fatality of such a man are immense. Friends and foes alike get far into him; the citadel of his heart lies open to all who come near. But instead of angels poor Esau had by him only tempters a tempter in his brother and a tempter in his mother. Unguarded by loving presences, unfilled by worthy affections, his mind became a place across which everything was allowed to rush, across which his own mother's lips poured the infection of her waywardness, and across which the commonest passions, like hunger, ran riot, unawed by the presence of any commanding principle. That is what the text means by a "profane person" an open, common character, unfenced, unhallowed, no guardian angel at the door, no gracious company within, no heavenly music pealing through it, no fire upon the altar, but open to his dogs and his passions, to his mother's provocations, and his brothe's fatal wiles.
III. An impregnable heart. Finally, let us get back to this word "profane," for it is the centre of the whole evil. Be on your guard, then, against the little vices. It is they that first desecrate the soul. Take the virtue of truth. It seems to many an innocent thing to tell certain kinds of lies I am sure we have all fallen under the temptation society lies, business lies, rhetorical lies, lies prompted by pure selfishness, lies prompted by mistaken kindness. Now that is a fatal mistake, fatal for eternity. The character whose doors lie open to these visitors is the character that is open to anything, anything except what miserable fear and selfishness will in the end keep out, namely, the more rampant forms of vice. To everything else such a character lies open. Admit them, and you can keep nothing out. You are certain some day to be betrayed by them into larger and more fatal issues.
G. A. Smith, Christian World Pulpit, August 17th, 1892.
The Religious Standard of Value.
I. Esau's act was the act of one who had in him that disregard for the claims of things sacred which constitutes the essence of profaneness. Esau's temper was, like Saul's, of the earth, earthy, or, as we now say, purely secular. Both represent a type of character which may have many of the elements of popularity, many amiable or estimable qualities, but nothing of what Scripture calls faith, no real interest in the spiritual and the unseen. High spirits, good-nature, generosity, a fondness for manly exercises, a fearless gallant bearing, a frankness of speech which, at any rate, scorns all shyness these are well enough in their way, but are, after all, a poor outfit for a child of the great covenant, in which are gathered up the hopes of the world. They are ruined and rendered useless for any high purpose by fickleness, unsteadiness, want of faith and want of principle, wayward and selfish worldliness.
II. Esau does not always wear the goatskin raiment of the skilful Eastern hunter; he passes in society often enough as a finished English gentleman. Are there not baptized persons, calling themselves Christians with a certain degree of sincerity, who habitually despise a birthright still more august and precious than Esau's? They do not, we will suppose, reject Christianity as incredible, but they never allow it to be a power in their life. Their interests are all elsewhere, perhaps in a purely material region, perhaps in a higher, but still an unspiritual, sphere. A servant of Christ will make it his rule to test all weights in the balances of the sanctuary; he will honestly endeavour to call that good which Christ calls good and call that evil which Christ calls evil, he will regard nothing as really expedient or profitable which interferes, or which is even likely some time to interfere, with loyalty to that Master in whose service alone is true liberty and happiness.
W. Bright, Morality in Religion, p. 233.
Reference: Hebrews 12:16 . J. Thain Davidson, Forewarned Forearmed, p. 3.
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