Genesis 25:1-34

Genesis 25

(with Hebrews 12:16)

The chief use, apparently, of some men's lives is that they may serve as beacons, warning off those who come after them from quicksand or whirlpool. They flame amidst the track to bid us beware. Such use the apostle found in the story of Esau: he holds it up before the eyes of the wavering Hebrew Christians, to urge them back from the gulf of apostasy towards which they were inclining.

I. But the apostle says, "fornicator and profane person"; and is there not something of invective here? are the epithets really applicable to the man's behaviour? Notice (1) the term fornicator was applied, according to Jewish custom, to religious unfaithfulness or apostasy. Thus the Israelites incurred it at the mouth of their prophets whenever they forsook the worship of Jehovah to serve other gods. The son of Isaac was guilty of throwing away heedlessly, for a meal, a most sacred thing, that should have been dearer to him than his life; and this is the guilt which the apostle charges upon him in the word which he employs. (2) The force of the second word is pretty much the same. Our English "profane" is just "outside the fane," "without a temple." A profane man is a person who has nothing which he worships, to whom nothing is holy or worth guarding, in whom there is no tender awe, no pious delicacy of feeling, who can play lightly with what is solemn and scorn what claims to be revered. Esau, in bartering his birthright to feed his hunger, acted profanely, squandering, despising a sacred possession of which he should have been incapable of thinkingas marketable, which he should have cherished and set apart like a sanctuary.

II. In Esau's vain cry after the birthright at his father's bedside we have a picture of the irrevocable in life: of things done which no tempest of weeping can undo; of the awaking to the worth and sweetness of things that have been slighted, when it is impossible to have them ever within our reach again, wail and agonise for them as we may. It is not merely difficulties we create by our follies; like Esau we create also lamentable impossibilities,spilling what can be gathered up no more. "Afterward"when he would have inherited the blessing that had been slighted, he was rejected.

S. A. Tipple, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xiii., p. 139.

References: Genesis 25 F. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis,p. 71; R. S. Candlish, Book of Genesis,vol. i., p. 421.Genesis 25:1. Ibid.p. 416.