Hebrews 12:16-17 Lest there be any fornicator, or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright.… Esau was, undoubtedly, sensual, or addicted to gross carnal pleasures. His wild, roving character prepares us to find in him imperious passions and an unscrupulous will. The steady tradition of the Jews is that he was an abandoned profligate; and this is sufficiently borne out by what we read (Genesis 26:34, 35). Again, Esau was profane; as, in truth, all sensual persons are. Show me a rake, and though an oath may never be heard to escape his lips, I will pronounce that man profane; for his sins belong to that class which, more than any other, eat out all fear of God from the human heart, and harden and petrify it into the most reckless godlessness. Esau's profanity sufficiently appears in the brief account of it we have in Genesis 25:32-34, and in the flippant levity with which he sold his birthright, clinching the transaction with an oath which he never meant to keep — thus consistently blending blasphemy and fraud. And the chartered treasure he sold was no commonplace one. It was a birthright not only to Canaan, but to all the privileges and distinguished honours of the Messianic people. It was a birthright, therefore, in which the spiritual interests of Esau's children, and children's children, were most vitally implicated. Of this matchless and marvellous honour, Esau flippantly said, under a passing sensation of hunger, "Behold I am at the point to die (which, as we have already said, was not true), and what profit shall this birthright do to me?" Well might the inspired historian add, "Thus Esau despised his birthright." A passing sense of hunger, which any common soldier would scorn or forget in the pursuit of honour; which the pettiest trader can forget in the eager pursuit of gain; which Esau himself would often despise in the keen urgency of the chase, was now, in his spiritual balance, to make the proudest birthright the world ever saw to kick the beam! What mattered it to profane Esau whether the blood of the chosen holy seed, or of a heathen predatory tribe, was at the time flowing in his veins? Thus the inspired writer has only too good reasons for affirming that Esau was both sensual and profane; and that it was these bad qualities that led him to barter away his birthright, yea, and to pour the utmost contempt upon it by weighing against it a paltry mess of lentile pottage. (T. Guthrie, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Lest there be any fornicator, or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright. |
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