Esau's Bitter Bargain
Hebrews 12:15-17
Genesis 25:21-34; 27:1-35
 By Dave Redick

Introduction

"See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled; that there be no immoral or godless person like Esau, who sold his own birthright for a single meal. For you know that even afterwards, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no place for repentance, though he sought for it with tears." (Hebrews 12:15-17)

This is a very important New Testament passage. It describes the actions of a man who made a bitter bargain. He sold his birthright for a single meal. Let me take a few moments to introduce you Esau.

The New American Standard Version says that Esau was a "godless" person. What a name to leave for a legacy! The King James Translation renders this same word, "profane." One who is profane has little or no regard for sacred things. Esau didn’t care much for the things of God. They were not important to him when compared to the other things he loved in life. Like many today he preferred what he could smell and taste and touch and physically enjoy.

There is much to identify with in Esau. He was a man of the earth - an outdoorsman. Some today might call him a "man's man." He could burp and grunt and scratch with the best of them. He loved the wide-open spaces. His father surely identified with him. Esau was Isaac’s favorite son. He was a skilled hunter - probably able to slice a hair with his bow at fifty paces. No soft, delicate lifestyle for him! The smell of the field was on him. He seems to have been a very practical man. He relied heavily upon what he knew best - the physical world and his ability to move about in it. He was a man who lived by his wits. He could make things happen in the earthly realm by his own strength and determination. His name means "the hairy one." Whether this has any greater significance than enhancing "mountain man" image, I don’t know.

There is nothing wrong with being rugged. Esau's problem wasn't that he was a hunter. Neither was it that he didn’t live a softer life in tents like his brother Jacob. His problem stems from a foolish choice he made in perhaps a "weaker moment." Or was it? The event he is remembered for probably took less than an hour to complete, yet it haunted him for the rest of his life. To Bible believers his name is synonymous with "profane." The name "Esau" stands as a beacon on the rocky reef of undervaluing spiritual things.

Perhaps not all of us know the details of Esau’s story, so in this message I’d like to share them with you. Turn with me, please, to Genesis 25. We’ll be looking at verses 21-34, then we’ll also look at a few verses from chapter 27. Beginning in chapter 25, we read about two individuals whom, for now, I will just call:

1. The Boys

(Read v. 21)

The man "Isaac" mentioned here was Esau’s father. Isaac was the son of the Patriarch, Abraham. The time was about 1900 years before Christ. Like his parents, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and his wife, Rebekah, were having trouble conceiving children. But God intervened and there was a conception of not one, but two boys.

Apparently it was a difficult pregnancy for Rebekah. There was a real rumble going on in her tummy. It got so bad that she went to God with a question.

(Read v. 22)

Rebekah was puzzled about something modern believers get puzzled about sometimes. "If this is the Lord’s will, why am I having difficulty?" Isn’t that how we often think? Doing God’s will ought to smooth things out in my life! Doing God’s will often does smooth things out for us – but not always, because sometimes other purposes are afoot.

God gave Rebekah the answer to her question in the next verse:

(Read v. 23)

I’ve heard pregnant women say, in about the end of the last month of their term, that the felt like two nations in their womb! This was more that discomfort, though. There was a prophetic reason for her discomfort. God told Rebekah something of the future. These unborn twin boys would be the progenitors of two nations of people. From Jacob would come the Israelites. From Esau would come the Edomites. The Edomites would later be enemies of Israel, so this inter-uterine struggle was only the beginning of what would continue for many years into the future.

God can do that, by the way. He can foretell the future accurately before it happens. In the Bible its called prophecy and it is a very interesting topic to study. It is beyond our scope here though, so I’ll reign myself in.

(Read v. 24-26)

So these are the boys: Esau, the hairy one, the older of the two by probably a half-hour or less, and Jacob, the heel grabber or "Supplanter" as his name means. Just as God predicted, the younger boy would ultimately "supplant" or usurp the position of the older.

What comes next requires knowledge of a few of the customs of these people to fully understand. It requires knowledge of:

2. The Birthright

The birthright was a precious possession among these ancient people. In nearly all cases it was the possession of the firstborn son of the family upon the death of his father. It contained both a financial component and, among the descendants of Abraham, a spiritual element. Financially, the firstborn, through the birthright, received a double portion of his father’s assets when his father died. Spiritually, the birthright made the oldest male of the family, upon the death of his father, the Patriarch (ruler) of the entire family. He became the spiritual leader.

Later, under the Law of Moses, the birthright became legally the possession of the firstborn son. No longer would it be just a custom. It would be a law. It could not be taken away, even by the father (1), unless there was some moral or ethical reason to do so.(2)

It was a high honor to possess the birthright, not only for the financial component, which, in this family’s case, would have been sizable, but also for the spiritual component. That is the point to understand here, especially in the family of Jacob and Esau. God made a promise to Abraham, the grandfather of these boys, many years before this. He told Abraham that He would give his descendants the land of Canaan (later to be known as Israel) as an inheritance. He also told him that through his descendants all the nations of the earth would be blessed.(3) These same promises were repeated to the boys’ father, Isaac, and would be repeated to the possessor of the birthright in their generation. As the story of the Bible develops, we learn that this special blessing would include the birth of Jesus, who would be the Savior of the world. The birthright in this family was a precious possession indeed!

To fully understand what comes next, keep these things in mind.

We come now to:

3. The Bargain

(Read v. 27)

I might interject here that the chosen occupation and of these men is not the issue. If you recall, the disciples of Jesus came from various walks of life including fishing and tax collecting. God can work through all kinds of people from many walks of life, provided they value spiritual things. Each man’s occupation is described here simply to set the stage for what happens next.

(Read v. 28)

Favoritism within the family is nothing new. We see it sometimes today. Isaac favored Esau, the outdoorsman. Rebekah favored Jacob, the gentler one. We’ll soon see that each parent acted out his or her respective favoritism.

That does raise the possibility that Rebekah’s intentions may have been somewhere lurking in the background of what is about to happen here. Since God had already told her that the older of her two sons would serve the younger, she may have decided she needed to help things along a bit toward that goal. She may have been the one suggesting that Jacob do what he did next. I say that because we know that later, in chapter 27, she was behind Jacob’s deception of his father when he tricked him into giving him the Patriarchal blessing that was intended for Esau. However, since the verses before us don’t actually say that Rebekah was behind Jacob’s actions, I’ll have to leave it in the realm of speculation.

One more thing… Jacob’s actions in these passages are not defensible by decent standards of right and wrong. It was not proper for him to take advantage of his brother. Neither was it proper for him to deceive his father, as we will see him do in chapter 27. God doesn’t need help in making things happen according to His predictions. I won’t spend time on Jacob this morning, however, due to our time restraints. I just wanted you to know that I know and have considered it.

(Read v. 29)

I can relate to Esau here. Some of the best meals I remember eating while growing up were served, not on china with doilies on the table in an atmosphere of soft lighting, but on a Coleman stove from a single pot after a long hard day of hunting or fishing. Outdoorsmen develop a huge appetite!

Whether Jacob actually planned this event, strategically cooking such a tempting meal as a ploy to get the birthright or he was simply cooking dinner and took advantage of the situation when Esau came in, I don’t know. I tend toward the first possibility, that is, that Jacob had actually baited a trap for his brother.

(Read v. 30)

The word Edom means "red," so we have a bit of a double play on words here. The "red and hairy hunter" was dying for some "red" stew.

(Read v. 31)

You would expect for words like that, spoken so suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, to sort of hang in the air as each man sized the other up. You would think that Esau would say something like, "What? You want my birthright? What are you trying to do to me, little brother? Are you out of your mind? Surely you jest. No bowl of stew is worth my birthright!" If there was such a pause, or there were such words, there is no indication of it. It appears that Esau didn’t miss a beat in answering Jacob’s audacious question.

(Read v. 32)

Esau wasn’t going to die! He was hungry, yes, but he was in no danger of losing his life. He’s trifling here. He’s not taking a serious subject seriously. Perhaps he thought his brother was joking. If he did though, this next verse should have brought him to reality.

(Read v. 33a)

Swearing by an oath was a serious, binding thing. It was something on which you staked your honor and reputation. Again, Esau is not taking this serious business seriously.

(Read v. 33b-34)

I see two things wrong with Esau’s act here.

First, he was indifferent to sacred things. A man of the earth, he loved the things of the earth. He loved the outdoors, the thrill of the hunt, the smell of the campfire, and all things attached to it. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem was that while he loved all these things, he cared nothing for spiritual things. The birthright, which should have been a precious possession, didn’t mean much to him. He was trifling with the sacred. He looked upon this high-stakes bargain as no big deal. He even joked about it. "If I’m about to die of hunger, what good is a birthright?" He made the deal, swore an oath to his younger brother, left the tent with his belly full, and probably went to bed and slept soundly all night. Perhaps he thought to himself that there was nothing Jacob could do to get the birthright anyway, no matter what he tried.

Trifling with the sacred - indifference to spiritual things - toying around with things we should never toy around with. A person who isn’t concerned with the spiritual wonders what all the hubbub is about. Why are you Christians so serious? Lighten up! Have some fun! You only go around once!

Yeah, we know.

The Bible says in verse 34 of all this trifling and indifference that Esau "despised his birthright." In other words, if people don’t take the things of God seriously, what it really means from God’s perspective is that they despise them. Neutrality is the same as rejection in God’s eyes.

Secondly, he was indifferent to the future. Esau wasn’t thinking beyond his next meal. In the prime of his youth, skilled and agile, to him it was like the bumper sticker we see here in the Northwest from time to time: "Eat, Sleep, Go fishing," only in his case it was "Eat, Sleep, Go Hunting." He wasn’t thinking of a time when he might need the provisions of the birthright. He didn’t need to be concerned about that stuff now. He had everything he needed for the moment. Today was what counted. Have a good time! Fill up your belly. Get a good night’s sleep. Get up and do it again. He acted like there was no tomorrow – no day of reckoning.

But there was. We come now to:

4. The Bitter Outcome

If you read on in Genesis, into chapter 27, you will learn that the time came for Isaac, the boys’ father, to die. Whether Isaac knew about the little deal Jacob had made with Esau, I don’t know. But now, nearing the end, it was time to make preparations for the blessing.

The custom was that as a father neared death, he would call in his firstborn and pronounce the blessing of his inheritance upon him. Accordingly, Isaac told Esau that the time had arrived. In order to make the time special, he sent the older boy out to get some fresh game so they could have a meal together. After the dinner, Isaac would give him the blessing.

Rebekah, the boys’ mother, overheard the whole thing and quickly sent for Jacob. They couldn’t let this happen! So they hatched a plan to fool old Isaac who, by this time, was nearly blind and deaf.

Jacob dressed himself in animal skins so that he would smell and feel like his hairy brother. Then he went in and deceived his father into thinking he was actually Esau. Rebekah prepared the meal. The two men ate. Then Isaac, who thought something strange was up a couple of times during the meeting, went ahead and blessed Jacob. The transition was complete. Jacob, the heel grabber, the "Supplanter," now possessed the blessing.

A little while later, Esau came in with his kill for the day. "I’m ready to cook your meal, father," he said. Old Isaac nearly bought the farm at that point! The New American Standard says in Genesis 27:33 that he "trembled violently."

Let’s pick up the story there.

(Read 27:33-35)

This is the point where, as we read in Hebrews 12:17 at the beginning of this message, "afterwards, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no place for repentance, though he sought for it with tears."

Herbert Lockyer pointed out something very important in his description of Esau in his classic book, All the Men of the Bible. Here are his words:

"Esau lifted up his voice and cried, ‘Bless me, even me also, O my father!’ But his repentant prayer was directed not to God, but to Isaac. In the whole of Genesis Esau does not mention the name of God. Had Esau’s repentance been Godward, what a different story we would have had! Esau repented of his bargain, not his sin."(4)

Conclusion

Dave Redick is Minister of the Hwy 20 Church of Christ in Sweet Home, Oregon and Editor of The Preacher's Study. He may be reached at pstudysupport@comcast.net.

Copyright © 1996-2008 by The Preacher's Study. Permission is granted to subscribers to use this document in total or in sermon preparation in the context of the local congregation only. Publishing it in a book, on the Internet, or anyplace beyond the local congregation is prohibited.

All Scripture quotations and references are from the New American Standard Version unless otherwise stated.

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