It was by pain, anxiety, and almost dismay, that Rebekah received

intimation that her prayer was answered. In this she is the type of many

whom God hears. Inward strife, miserable forebodings, deep dejection,

are often the first intimations that God is listening to our prayer and

is beginning to work within us. You have prayed that God would make you

more a blessing to those about you, more useful in your place, more

answerable to His ends: and when your prayer has risen to its highest

point of confidence and expectation, you are thrown into what seems a

worse state than ever, your heart is broken within you, you say, Is this

the answer to my prayer, is this God's blessing; if it be so, why am I

thus? For things that make a man serious, happen when God takes him in

hand, and they that yield themselves to His service will not find that

that service is all honour and enjoyment. Its first steps will often

land us in a position we can make nothing of, and our attempts to aid

others will get us into difficulties with them; and especially will our

desire that Christ be formed in us bring into such lively action the

evil nature that is in us, that we are torn by the conflict, and our

heart lies like the ground of a fierce struggle, seamed and furrowed,

tossed and confused. As soon as there is a movement within us in one

direction, immediately there is an opposing movement: as soon as one of

the natures says, Do this; the other says, Do it not. The better nature

is gaining slightly the upper hand, and by a long, steady strain, seems

to be wearying out the other, when suddenly there is one quick stroke

and the evil nature conquers. And every movement of the parties is with

pain to ourselves; either conscience is wronged, and gives out its cry

of shame, or our natural desires are trodden down, and that also is

pain. And so disconnected and connected are we, so entirely one with

both parties, and yet so able to contemplate both that Rebekah's

distress seems aptly enough to symbolize our own. And whether the symbol

be apt or no, there can be no question that he who enquires of the Lord

as she did, will receive a similar assurance that there are two natures

within him, and that "the elder shall serve the younger," the nature

last formed, and that seems to give least promise of life, shall master

the original, eldest born child of the flesh.

The children whose birth and destinies were thus predicted, at once gave

evidence of a difference even greater than that which will often strike

one as existing between two brothers, though rarely between twins. The

first was born, all over like a hairy garment, presenting the appearance

of being rolled up in a fur cloak or the skin of an animal--an

appearance which did not pass away in childhood, but so obstinately

adhered to him through life, that an imitation of his hands could be

produced with the hairy skin of a kid. This was by his parents

considered ominous. The want of the hairy covering which the lower

animals have, is one of the signs marking out man as destined for a

higher and more refined life than they; and when their son appeared in

this guise, they could not but fear it prognosticated his sensual,

animal career. So they called him Esau. And so did the younger son from

the first show his nature, catching the heel of his brother, as if he

were striving to be firstborn; and so they called him Jacob, the

heel-catcher or supplanter--as Esau afterwards bitterly observed, a name

which precisely suited his crafty, plotting nature, shown in his twice

over tripping up and overthrowing his elder brother. The name which Esau

handed down to his people was, however, not his original name, but one

derived from the colour of that for which he sold his birthright. It was

in that exclamation of his, "Feed me with that same _red_," that he

disclosed his character.

So different in appearance at birth, they grew up of very different

character; and as was natural, he who had the quiet nature of his father

was beloved by the mother, and he who had the bold, practical skill of

the mother was clung to by the father. It seems unlikely that Rebekah

was influenced in her affection by anything but natural motives, though

the fact that Jacob was to be the heir must have been much on her mind,

and may have produced the partiality which maternal pride sometimes

begets. But before we condemn Isaac, or think the historian has not

given a full account of his love for Esau, let us ask what we have

noticed about the growth and decay of our own affections. We are ashamed

of Isaac; but have we not also been sometimes ashamed of ourselves on

seeing that our affections are powerfully influenced by the

gratification of tastes almost or quite as low as this of Isaac's? He

who cunningly panders to our taste for applause, he who purveys for us

some sweet morsel of scandal, he who flatters or amuses us, straightway

takes a place in our affections which we do not accord to men of much

finer parts, but who do not so minister to our sordid appetites.

The character of Jacob is easily understood. It has frequently been

remarked of him that he is thoroughly a Jew, that in him you find the

good and bad features of the Jewish character very prominent and

conspicuous. He has that mingling of craft and endurance which has

enabled his descendants to use for their own ends those who have wronged

and persecuted them. The Jew has, with some justice and some injustice,

been credited with an obstinate and unscrupulous resolution to forward

his own interests, and there can be no question that in this respect

Jacob is the typical Jew--ruthlessly taking advantage of his brother,

watching and waiting till he was sure of his victim; deceiving his blind

father, and robbing him of what he had intended for his favourite son;

outwitting the grasping Laban, and making at least his own out of all

attempts to rob him; unable to meet his brother without stratagem; not

forgetting prudence even when the honour of his family is stained; and

not thrown off his guard even by his true and deep affection for Joseph.

Yet, while one recoils from this craftiness and management, one cannot

but admire the quiet force of character, the indomitable tenacity, and,

above all, the capacity for warm affection and lasting attachments, that

he showed throughout.

But the quality which chiefly distinguished Jacob from his hunting and

marauding brother was his desire for the friendship of God and

sensibility to spiritual influences. It may have been Jacob's

consciousness of his own meanness that led him to crave connection with

some Being or with some prospect that might ennoble his nature and lift

him above his innate disposition. It is an old, old truth that not many

noble are called; and, seeing quite as plainly as others see their

feebleness and meanness, the ignoble conceive a self-loathing which is

sometimes the beginning of an unquenchable thirst for the high and holy

God. The consciousness of your bad, poor nature may revive within you

day by day, as the remembrance of physical weakness returns to the

invalid with every morning's light; but to what else can God so

effectively appeal when he offers you present fellowship with Himself

and eventual conformity to His own nature?

It has been pointed out that the weakness in Esau's character which

makes him so striking a contrast to his brother is his inconstancy.

"That one error

Fills him with faults; makes him run through all the sins."

Constancy, persistence, dogged tenacity is certainly the striking

feature of Jacob's character. He could wait and bide his time; he could

retain one purpose year after year till it was accomplished. The very

motto of his life was, "I will not let Thee go except Thou bless me." He

watched for Esau's weak moment, and took advantage of it. He served

fourteen years for the woman he loved, and no hardship quenched his

love. Nay, when a whole lifetime intervened, and he lay dying in Egypt,

his constant heart still turned to Rachel, as if he had parted with her

but yesterday. In contrast with this tenacious, constant character

stands Esau, led by impulse, betrayed by appetite, everything by turns

and nothing long. To-day despising his birthright, to-morrow breaking

his heart for its loss; to-day vowing he will murder his brother,

to-morrow falling on his neck and kissing him; a man you cannot reckon

upon, and of too shallow a nature for anything to root itself deeply in.

The event in which the contrasted characters of the twin brothers were

most decisively shown, so decisively shown that their destinies were

fixed by it, was an incident which, in its external circumstances, was

of the most ordinary and trivial kind. Esau came in hungry from hunting:

from dawn to dusk he had been taxing his strength to the utmost, too

eagerly absorbed to notice either his distance from home or his hunger;

it is only when he begins to return depressed by the ill-luck of the

day, and with nothing now to stimulate him, that he feels faint; and

when at last he reaches his father's tents, and the savoury smell of

Jacob's lentiles greets him, his ravenous appetite becomes an

intolerable craving, and he begs Jacob to give him some of his food. Had

Jacob done so with brotherly feeling there would have been nothing to

record. But Jacob had long been watching for an opportunity to win his

brother's birthright, and though no one could have supposed that an heir

to even a little property would sell it in order to get a meal five

minutes sooner than he could otherwise get it, Jacob had taken his

brother's measure to a nicety, and was confident that present appetite

would in Esau completely extinguish every other thought.

It is perhaps worth noticing that the birthright in Ishmael's line, the

guardianship of the temple at Mecca, passed from one branch of the

family to another in a precisely similar way. We read that when the

guardianship of the temple and the governorship of the town "fell into

the hands of Abu Gabshan, a weak and silly man, Cosa, one of Mohammed's

ancestors, circumvented him while in a drunken humour, and bought of

him the keys of the temple, and with them the presidency of it, for a

bottle of wine. But Abu Gabshan being gotten out of his drunken fit,

sufficiently repented of his foolish bargain; from whence grew these

proverbs among the Arabs: More vexed with late repentance than Abu

Gabshan; and, More silly than Abu Gabshan--which are usually said of

those who part with a thing of great moment for a small matter."

Which brother presents the more repulsive spectacle of the two in this

selling of the birthright it is hard to say. Who does not feel contempt

for the great, strong man, declaring he will die if he is required to

wait five minutes till his own supper is prepared; forgetting, in the

craving of his appetite, every consideration of a worthy kind; oblivious

of everything but his hunger and his food; crying, like a great baby,

Feed me with that _red_! So it is always with the man who has fallen

under the power of sensual appetite. He is always going to die if it is

not immediately gratified. He _must_ have his appetite satisfied. No

consideration of consequences can be listened to or thought of; the man

is helpless in the hands of his appetite--it rules and drives him on,

and he is utterly without self-control; nothing but physical compulsion

can restrain him.

But the treacherous and self-seeking craft of the other brother is as

repulsive; the cold-blooded, calculating spirit that can hold every

appetite in check, that can cleave to one purpose for a life-time, and,

without scruple, take advantage of a twin-brother's weakness. Jacob

knows his brother thoroughly, and all his knowledge he uses to betray

him. He knows he will speedily repent of his bargain, so he makes him

swear he will abide by it. It is a relentless purpose he carries

out--he deliberately and unhesitatingly sacrifices his brother to

himself.

Still, in two respects, Jacob is the superior man. He can appreciate the

birthright in his father's family, and he has constancy. Esau might be a

pleasant companion, far brighter and more vivacious than Jacob on a

day's hunting; free and open-handed, and not implacable; and yet such

people are not satisfactory friends. Often the most attractive people

have similar inconstancy; they have a superficial vivacity, and

brilliance, and charm, and good-nature, which invite a friendship they

do not deserve.

Parents frequently make the mistake of Isaac, and think more highly of

the gay, sparkling, but shallow child, than of the child who cannot be

always smiling, but broods over what he conceives to be his wrongs.

Sulkiness is itself not a pleasing feature in a child's character, but

it may only be the childish expression of constancy, and of a depth of

character which is slow to let go any impression made upon it. On the

other hand, frankness and a quick throwing aside of passion and

resentment are pleasing features in a child, but often these are only

the expressions of a fickle character, rapidly changing from sun to

shower like an April day, and not to be trusted for retaining affection

or good impressions any longer than it retains resentment.

But Esau's despising of his birthright is that which stamps the man and

makes him interesting to each generation. No one can read the simple

account of his reckless act without feeling how justly we are called

upon to "look diligently lest there be among us any profane person as

Esau, who, for one morsel of meat, sold his birthright." Had the

birthright been something to eat, Esau would not have sold it. What an

exhibition of human nature! What an exposure of our childish folly and

the infatuation of appetite! For Esau has company in his fall. We are

all stricken by his shame. We are conscious that if God had made

provision for the flesh we should have listened to Him more readily.

"But what will this birthright profit us?" We do not see the good it

does: were it something to keep us from disease, to give us long unsated

days of pleasure, to bring us the fruits of labour without the weariness

of it, to make money for us, where is the man who would not value

it--where is the man who would lightly give it up? But because it is

only the favour of God that is offered, His endless love, His holiness

made ours, this we will imperil or resign for every idle desire, for

every lust that bids us serve it a little longer. Born the sons of God,

made in His image, introduced to a birthright angels might covet, we yet

prefer to rank with the beasts of the field, and let our souls starve if

only our bodies be well tended and cared for.

There is in Esau's conduct and after-experience so much to stir serious

thought, that one always feels reluctant to pass from it, and as if much

more ought to be made of it. It reflects so many features of our own

conduct, and so clearly shows us what we are from day to day liable to,

that we would wish to take it with us through life as a perpetual

admonition. Who does not know of those moments of weakness, when we are

fagged with work, and with our physical energy our moral tone has become

relaxed? Who does not know how, in hours of reaction from keen and

exciting engagements, sensual appetite asserts itself, and with what

petulance we inwardly cry, We shall die if we do not get this or that

paltry gratification? We are, for the most part, inconstant as Esau,

full of good resolves to-day, and to-morrow throwing them to the

winds--to-day proud of the arduousness of our calling, and girding

ourselves to self-control and self-denial, to-morrow sinking back to

softness and self-indulgence. Not once as Esau, but again and again we

barter peace of conscience and fellowship with God and the hope of

holiness, for what is, in simple fact, no more than a bowl of pottage.

Even after recognising our weakness and the lowness of our tastes, and

after repenting with self-loathing and misery, some slight pleasure is

enough to upset our steadfast mind, and make us as plastic as clay in

the hand of circumstances. It is with positive dismay one considers the

weakness and blindness of our hours of appetite and passion: how one

goes then like an ox to the slaughter, all unconscious of the pitfalls

that betray and destroy men, and how at any moment we ourselves may

truly sell our birthright.

XXI.

_JACOB'S FRAUD._

GENESIS xxvii.

"The counsel of the Lord standeth for ever."--PSALM xxxiii. 11.

There are some families whose miserable existence is almost entirely

made up of malicious plottings and counter-plottings, little mischievous

designs, and spiteful triumphs of one member or party in the family over

the other. It is not pleasant to have the veil withdrawn, and to see

that where love and eager self-sacrifice might be expected their places

are occupied by an eager assertion of rights, and a cold, proud, and

always petty and stupid, nursing of some supposed injury. In the story

told us so graphically in this page, we see the family whom God has

blessed sunk to this low level, and betrayed by family jealousies into

unseemly strife on the most sacred ground. Each member of the family

plans his own wicked device, and God by the evil of one defeats the evil

of another, and saves His own purpose to bless the race from being

frittered away and lost. And it is told us in order that, amidst all

this mess of human craft and selfishness, the righteousness and

stability of God's word of promise may be more vividly seen. Let us look

at the sin of each of the parties in order, and the punishment of each.

In the Epistle to the Hebrews Isaac is commended for his faith in

blessing his sons. It was commendable in him that, in great bodily

weakness, he still believed himself to be the guardian of God's

blessing, and recognised that he had a great inheritance to bequeath to

his sons. But, in unaccountable and inconsistent contempt of God's

expressed purpose, he proposes to hand over this blessing to Esau. Many

things had occurred to fix his attention upon the fact that Esau was not

to be his heir. Esau had sold his birthright, and had married Hittite

women, and his whole conduct was, no doubt, of a piece with this, and

showed that, in his hands, any spiritual inheritance would be both

unsafe and unappreciated. That Isaac had some notion he was doing wrong

in giving to Esau what belonged to God, and what God meant to give to

Jacob, is shown from his precipitation in bestowing the blessing. He has

no feeling that he is authorized by God, and therefore he cannot wait

calmly till God should intimate, by unmistakable signs, that he is near

his end; but, seized with a panic lest his favourite should somehow be

left unblessed, he feels, in his nervous alarm, as if he were at the

point of death, and, though destined to live for forty-three years

longer, he calls Esau that he may hand over to him his dying testament.

How different is the nerve of a man when he knows he is doing God's

will, and when he is but fulfilling his own device. For the same reason,

he has to stimulate his spirit by artificial means. The prophetic

ecstasy is not felt by him; he must be exhilarated by venison and wine,

that, strengthened and revived in body, and having his gratitude aroused

afresh towards Esau, he may bless him with all the greater vigour. The

final stimulus is given when he smells the garments of Esau on Jacob,

and when that fresh earthy smell which so revives us in spring, as if

our life were renewed with the year, and which hangs about one who has

been in the open air, entered into Isaac's blood, and lent him fresh

vigour.

It is a strange and, in some respects, perplexing spectacle that is here

presented to us--the organ of the Divine blessing represented by a blind

old man, laid on a "couch of skins," stimulated by meat and wine, and

trying to cheat God by bestowing the family blessing on the son of his

own choice to the exclusion of the divinely-appointed heir. Out of such

beginnings had God to educate a people worthy of Himself, and through

such hazards had He to guide the spiritual blessing He designed to

convey to us all.

Isaac laid a net for his own feet. By his unrighteous and timorous haste

he secured the defeat of his own long-cherished scheme. It was his

hasting to bless Esau which drove Rebekah to checkmate him by winning

the blessing for her favourite. The shock which Isaac felt when Esau

came in and the fraud was discovered is easily understood. The

mortification of the old man must have been extreme when he found that

he had so completely taken himself in. He was reclining in the satisfied

reflection that for once he had overreached his astute Rebekah and her

astute son, and in the comfortable feeling that, at last, he had

accomplished his one remaining desire, when he learns from the exceeding

bitter cry of Esau that he has himself been duped. It was enough to

rouse the anger of the mildest and godliest of men, but Isaac does not

storm and protest--"he trembles exceedingly." He recognises, by a

spiritual insight quite unknown to Esau, that this is God's hand, and

deliberately confirms, with his eyes open, what he had done in

blindness: "I have blessed him: _Yea_, and he shall be blessed." Had he

wished to deny the validity of the blessing, he had ground enough for

doing so. He had not really given it: it had been stolen from him. An

act must be judged by its intention, and he had been far from intending

to bless Jacob. Was he to consider himself bound by what he had done

under a misapprehension? He had given a blessing to one person under the

impression that he was a different person; must not the blessing go to

him for whom it was designed? But Isaac unhesitatingly yielded.

This clear recognition of God's hand in the matter, and quick submission

to Him, reveals a habit of reflection, and a spiritual thoughtfulness,

which are the good qualities in Isaac's otherwise unsatisfactory

character. Before he finished his answer to Esau, he felt he was a poor

feeble creature in the hand of a true and just God, who had used even

his infirmity and sin to forward righteous and gracious ends. It was his

sudden recognition of the frightful way in which he had been tampering

with God's will, and of the grace with which God had prevented him from

accomplishing a wrong destination of the inheritance, that made Isaac

tremble very exceedingly.

In this humble acceptance of the disappointment of his life's love and

hope, Isaac shows us the manner in which we ought to bear the

consequences of our wrong-doing. The punishment of our sin often comes

through the persons with whom we have to do, unintentionally on their

part, and yet we are tempted to hate them because they pain and punish

us, father, mother, wife, child, or whoever else. Isaac and Esau were

alike disappointed. Esau only saw the supplanter, and vowed to be

revenged. Isaac saw God in the matter, and trembled. So when Shimei

cursed David, and his loyal retainers would have cut off his head for so

doing, David said, "Let him alone, and let him curse: it may be that the

Lord hath bidden him." We can bear the pain inflicted on us by men when

we see that they are merely the instruments of a divine chastisement.

The persons who thwart us and make our life bitter, the persons who

stand between us and our dearest hopes, the persons whom we are most

disposed to speak angrily and bitterly to, are often thorns planted in

our path by God to keep us on the right way.

Isaac's sin propagated itself with the rapid multiplication of all sin.

Rebekah overheard what passed between Isaac and Esau, and although she

might have been able to wait until by fair means Jacob received the

blessing, yet when she sees Isaac actually preparing to pass Jacob by

and bless Esau, her fears are so excited that she cannot any longer

quietly leave the matter in God's hand, but must lend her own more

skilful management. It may have crossed her mind that she was justified

in forwarding what she knew to be God's purpose. She saw no other way of

saving God's purpose and Jacob's rights than by her interference. The

emergency might have unnerved many a woman, but Rebekah is equal to the

occasion. She makes the threatened exclusion of Jacob the very means for

at last finally settling the inheritance upon him. She braves the

indignation of Isaac and the rage of Esau, and fearless herself, and

confident of success, she soon quiets the timorous and cautious

objections of Jacob. She knows that for straightforward lying and acting

a part she was sure of good support in Jacob. Luther says, "Had it been

me, I'd have dropped the dish." But Jacob had no such tremors--could

submit his hands and face to the touch of Isaac, and repeat his lie as

often as needful.

An old man bedridden like Isaac becomes the subject of a number of

little deceptions which may seem, and which may be, very unimportant in

themselves, but which are seen to wear down the reverence due to the

father of a family, and which imperceptibly sap the guileless sincerity

and truthfulness of those who practise them. This overreaching of Isaac

by dressing Jacob in Esau's clothes, might come in naturally as one of

those daily deceptions which Rebekah was accustomed to practise on the

old man whom she kept quite in her own hand, giving him as much or as

little insight into the doings of the family as seemed advisable to her.

It would never occur to her that she was taking God in hand; it would

seem only as if she were making such use of Isaac's infirmity as she was

in the daily practice of doing.

But to account for an act is not to excuse it. Underlying the conduct of

Rebekah and Jacob was the conviction that they would come better speed

by a little deceit of their own than by suffering God to further them in

His own way--that though God would certainly not practise deception

Himself, He might not object to others doing so--that in this emergency

holiness was a hampering thing which might just for a little be laid

aside that they might be more holy afterwards--that though no doubt in

ordinary circumstances, and as a normal habit, deceit is not to be

commended, yet in cases of difficulty, which call for ready wit, a

prompt seizure, and delicate handling, men must be allowed to secure

their ends in their own way. Their unbelief thus directly produced

immorality--immorality of a very revolting kind, the defrauding of

their relatives, and repulsive also because practised as if on God's

side, or, as we should now say, "in the interests of religion."

To this day the method of Rebekah and Jacob is largely adopted by

religious persons. It is notorious that persons whose ends are good

frequently become thoroughly unscrupulous about the means they use to

accomplish them. They dare not say in so many words that they may do

evil that good may come, nor do they think it a tenable position in

morals that the end sanctifies the means; and yet their consciousness of

a justifiable and desirable end undoubtedly does blunt their

sensitiveness regarding the legitimacy of the means they employ. For

example, Protestant controversialists, persuaded that vehement

opposition to Popery is good, and filled with the idea of accomplishing

its downfall, are often guilty of gross misrepresentation, because they

do not sufficiently inform themselves of the actual tenets and practices

of the Church of Rome. In all controversy, religious and political, it

is the same. It is always dishonest to circulate reports that you have

no means of authenticating: yet how freely are such reports circulated

to blacken the character of an opponent, and to prove his opinions to be

dangerous. It is always dishonest to condemn opinions we have not

inquired into, merely because of some fancied consequence which these

opinions carry in them: yet how freely are opinions condemned by men who

have never been at the trouble carefully to inquire into their truth.

They do not feel the dishonesty of their position, because they have a

general consciousness that they are on the side of religion, and of what

has generally passed for truth. All keeping back of facts which are

supposed to have an unsettling effect is but a repetition of this sin.

There is no sin more hateful. Under the appearance of serving God, and

maintaining His cause in the world, it insults Him by assuming that if

the whole bare, undisguised truth were spoken, His cause would suffer.

The fate of all such attempts to manage God's matters by keeping things

dark, and misrepresenting fact, is written for all who care to

understand in the results of this scheme of Rebekah's and Jacob's. They

gained nothing, and they lost a great deal, by their wicked

interference. They gained nothing; for God had promised that the

birthright would be Jacob's, and would have given it him in some way

redounding to his credit and not to his shame. And they lost a great

deal. The mother lost her son; Jacob had to flee for his life, and, for

all we know, Rebekah never saw him more. And Jacob lost all the comforts

of home, and all those possessions his father had accumulated. He had to

flee with nothing but his staff, an outcast to begin the world for

himself. From this first false step onwards to his death, he was pursued

by misfortune, until his own verdict on his life was, "Few and evil have

been the days of the years of my life."

Thus severely was the sin of Rebekah and Jacob punished. It coloured

their whole after-life with a deep sombre hue. It was marked thus,

because it was a sin by all means to be avoided. It was virtually the

sin of blaming God for forgetting His promise, or of accusing Him of

being unable to perform it: so that they, Rebekah and Jacob, had,

forsooth, to take God's work out of His hands, and show Him how it ought

to be done. The announcement of God's purpose, instead of enabling them

quietly to wait for a blessing they knew to be certain, became in their

unrighteous and impatient hearts actually an inducement to sin. Abraham

was so bold and confident in his faith, at least latterly, that again

and again he refused to take as a gift from men, and on the most

honourable terms, what God had promised to give him: his grandson is so

little sure of God's truth, that he will rather trust his own falsehood;

and what he thinks God may forget to give him, he will steal from his

own father. Some persons have especial need to consider this sin--they

are tempted to play the part of Providence, to intermeddle where they

ought to refrain. Sometimes just a little thing is needed to make

everything go to our liking--the keeping back of one small fact, a

slight variation in the way of stating the matter, is enough--things

want just a little push in the right direction; it is wrong but very

slightly so. And so they are encouraged to close for a moment their eyes

and put to their hand.

Of all the parties in this transaction none is more to blame than Esau.

He shows now how selfish and untruthful the sensual man really is, and

how worthless is the generosity which is merely of impulse and not

bottomed on principle. While he so furiously and bitterly blamed Jacob

for supplanting him, it might surely have occurred to him that it was

really he who was supplanting Jacob. He had no right, divine or human,

to the inheritance. God had never said that His possession should go to

the oldest, and had in this case said the express opposite. Besides,

inconstant as Esau was, he could scarcely have forgotten the bargain

that so pleased him at the time, and by which he had sold to his younger

brother all title to his father's blessings. Jacob was to blame for

seeking to win his own by craft, but Esau was more to blame for

endeavouring furtively to recover what he knew to be no longer his. His

bitter cry was the cry of a disappointed and enraged child, what Hosea

calls the "howl" of those who seem to seek the Lord, but are really

merely crying out, like animals, for corn and wine. Many that care very

little for God's love will seek His favours; and every wicked wretch who

has in his prosperity spurned God's offers, will, when he sees how he

has cheated himself, turn to God's gifts, though not to God, with a cry.

Esau would now very gladly have given a mess of pottage for the blessing

that secured to its receiver "the dew of heaven, the fatness of the

earth, and plenty of corn and wine." Like many another sinner, he wanted

both to eat his cake and have it. He wanted to spend his youth sowing to

the flesh, and have the harvest which those only can have who have sown

to the spirit. He wished both of two irreconcilable things--both the red

pottage and the birth right. He is a type of those who think very

lightly of spiritual blessings while their appetites are strong, but

afterwards bitterly complain that their whole life is filled with the

results of sowing to the flesh and not to the spirit.

"We barter life for pottage; sell true bliss

For wealth or power, for pleasure or renown;

Thus, Esau-like, our Father's blessing miss,

Then wash with fruitless tears our faded crown."

The words of the New Testament, in which it is said that Esau "found no

place for repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears," are

sometimes misunderstood. They do not mean that he sought what we

ordinarily call repentance, a change of mind about the value of the

birthright. He _had_ that; it was this that made him weep. What he

sought now was some means of undoing what he had done, of cancelling

the deed of which he repented. His experience does not tell us that a

man once sinning as Esau sinned becomes a hardened reprobate whom no

good influence can impress or bring to repentance, but it says that the

sin so committed leaves irreparable consequences--that no man can live a

youth of folly and yet find as much in manhood and maturer years as if

he had lived a careful and God-fearing youth. Esau had irrecoverably

lost that which he would now have given all he had to possess; and in

this, I suppose, he represents half the men who pass through this world.

He warns us that it is very possible, by careless yielding to appetite

and passing whim, to entangle ourselves irrecoverably for this life, if

not to weaken and maim ourselves for eternity. At the time, your act may

seem a very small and secular one, a mere bargain in the ordinary

course, a little transaction such as one would enter into carelessly

after the day's work is over, in the quiet of a summer evening or in the

midst of the family circle; or it may seem so necessary that you never

think of its moral qualities, as little as you question whether you are

justified in breathing; but you are warned that if there be in that act

a crushing out of spiritual hopes to make way for the free enjoyment of

the pleasures of sense--if there be a deliberate preference of the good

things of this life to the love of God--if, knowingly, you make light of

spiritual blessings, and count them unreal when weighed against obvious

worldly advantages--then the consequences of that act will in this life

bring to you great discomfort and uneasiness, great loss and vexation,

an agony of remorse, and a life-long repentance. You are warned of this,

and most touchingly, by the moving entreaties, the bitter cries and

tears of Esau.

But even when our life is spoiled irreparably, a hope remains for our

character and ourselves--not certainly if our misfortunes embitter us,

not if resentment is the chief result of our suffering; but if, subduing

resentment, and taking blame to ourselves instead of trying to fix it on

others, we take revenge upon the real source of our undoing, and

extirpate from our own character the root of bitterness. Painful and

difficult is such schooling. It calls for simplicity, and humility, and

truthfulness--qualities not of frequent occurrence. It calls for abiding

patience; for he who begins thus to sow to the spirit late in life, must

be content with inward fruits, with peace of conscience, increase of

righteousness and humility, and must learn to live without much of what

all men naturally desire.

While each member of Isaac's family has thus his own plan, and is

striving to fulfil his private intention, the result is, that God's

purpose is fulfilled. In the human agency, such faith in God as existed

was overlaid with misunderstanding and distrust of God. But

notwithstanding the petty and mean devices, the short-sighted slyness,

the blundering unbelief, the profane worldliness of the human parties in

the transaction, the truth and mercy of God still find a way for

themselves. Were matters left in our hands, we should make shipwreck

even of the salvation with which we are provided. We carry into our

dealings with it the same selfishness, and inconstancy, and worldliness

which made it necessary: and had not God patience to bear with, as well

as mercy to invite us; had He not wisdom to govern us in the use of His

grace, as well as wisdom to contrive its first bestowal, we should

perish with the water of life at our lips.

XXII.

_JACOB'S FLIGHT AND DREAM._

GENESIS xxvii. 41-xxviii.

"So foolish was I, and ignorant: I was as a beast before Thee.

Nevertheless I am continually with Thee."--PSALM lxxiii. 22.

It is so commonly observed as to be scarcely worth again remarking, that

persons who employ a great deal of craft in the management of their

affairs are invariably entrapped in their own net. Life is so

complicated, and every matter of conduct has so many issues, that no

human brain can possibly foresee every contingency. Rebekah was a clever

woman, and quite competent to outwit men like Isaac and Esau, but she

had in her scheming neglected to take account of Laban, a man true

brother to herself in cunning. She had calculated on Esau's resentment,

and knew it would last only a few days, and this brief period she was

prepared to utilize by sending Jacob out of Esau's reach to her own kith

and kin, from among whom he might get a suitable wife. But she did not

reckon on Laban's making her son serve fourteen years for his wife, nor

upon Jacob's falling so deeply in love with Rachel as to make him

apparently forget his mother.

In the first part of her scheme she feels herself at home. She is a

woman who knows exactly how much of her mind to disclose, so as

effectually to lead her husband to adopt her view and plan. She did not

bluntly advise Isaac to send Jacob to Padan-aram, but she sowed in his

apprehensive mind fears which she knew would make him send Jacob there;

she suggested the possibility of Jacob's taking a wife of the daughters

of Heth. She felt sure that _Isaac_ did not need to be told where to

send his son to find a suitable wife. So Isaac called Jacob, and said,

Go to Padan-aram, to the house of thy mother's father, and take thee a

wife thence. And he gave him the family blessing--God Almighty give thee

the blessing of Abraham, to thee, and to thy seed with thee--so

constituting him his heir, the representative of Abraham.

The effect this had on Esau is very noticeable. He sees, as the

narrative tells us, a great many things, and his dull mind tries to make

some meaning out of all that is passing before him. The historian seems

intentionally to satirise Esau's attempt at reasoning, and the foolish

simplicity of the device he fell upon. He had an idea that Jacob's

obedience in going to seek a wife of another stock than he had connected

himself with would be pleasing to his parents; and perhaps he had an

idea that it would be possible to steal a march upon Jacob in his

absence, and by a more speedily effected obedience to his parents'

desire, win their preference, and perhaps move Isaac to alter his will

and reverse the blessing. Though living in the chosen family, he seems

to have had not the slightest idea that there was any higher will than

his father's being fulfilled in their doings. He does not yet see why he

himself should not be as blessed as Jacob; he cannot grasp at all the

distinction that grace makes; cannot take in the idea that God has

chosen a people to Himself, and that no natural advantage or force or

endowment can set a man among that people, but only God's choice.

Accordingly, he does not see any difference between Ishmael's family and

the chosen family; they are both sprung from Abraham, both are naturally

the same, and the fact that God expressly gave His inheritance past

Ishmael is nothing to Esau--an act of _God_ has no meaning to him. He

merely sees that he has not pleased his parents as well as he might by

his marriage, and his easy and yielding disposition prompts him to

remedy this.

This is a fine specimen of the hazy views men have of what will bring

them to a level with God's chosen. Through their crass insensibility to

the high righteousness of God, there still does penetrate a perception

that if they are to please Him there are certain means to be used for

doing so. There are, they see, certain occupations and ways pursued by

Christians, and if by themselves adopting these they can please God,

they are quite willing to humour Him in this. Like Esau, they do not see

their way to drop their old connections, but if by making some little

additions to their habits, or forming some new connection, they can

quiet this controversy that has somehow grown up between God and His

children,--though, so far as they see, it is a very unmeaning

controversy,--they will very gladly enter into any little arrangement

for the purpose. We will not, of course, divorce the world, will not

dismiss from our homes and hearts what God hates and means to destroy,

will not accept God's will as our sole and absolute law, but we will so

far meet God's wishes as to add to what we have adopted something that

is almost as good as what God enjoins: we will make any little

alterations which will not quite upset our present ways. Much commoner

than hypocrisy is this dim-sighted, blundering stupidity of the really

profane worldly man, who thinks he can take rank with men whose natures

God has changed, by the mere imitation of some of their ways; who

thinks, that as he cannot without great labour, and without too

seriously endangering his hold on the world, do precisely what God

requires, God may be expected to be satisfied with a something like it.

Are we not aware of endeavouring at times to cloak a sin with some easy

virtue, to adopt some new and apparently good habit, instead of

destroying the sin we know God hates; or to offer to God, and palm upon

our own conscience, a mere imitation of what God is pleased with? Do you

attend Church, do you come and decorously submit to a service? That is

not at all what God enjoins, though it is like it. What He means is,

that you worship Him, which is a quite different employment. Do you

render to God some outward respect, have you adopted some habits in

deference to Him, do you even attempt some private devotion and

discipline of the spirit? Still what He requires is something that goes

much deeper than all that; namely, that you love Him. To conform to one

or two habits of godly people is not what is required of us; but to be

at heart godly.

As Jacob journeyed northwards, he came, on the second or third evening

of his flight, to the hills of Bethel. As the sun was sinking he found

himself toiling up the rough path which Abraham may have described to

him as looking like a great staircase of rock and crag reaching from

earth to sky. Slabs of rock, piled one upon another, form the whole

hill-side, and to Jacob's eye, accustomed to the rolling pastures of

Beersheba, they would appear almost like a structure built for

superhuman uses, well founded in the valley below, and intended to

reach to unknown heights. Overtaken by darkness on this rugged path, he

readily finds as soft a bed and as good shelter as his shepherd-habits

require, and with his head on a stone and a corner of his dress thrown

over his face to preserve him from the moon, he is soon fast asleep. But

in his dreams the massive staircase is still before his eyes, and it is

no longer himself that is toiling up it as it leads to an unexplored

hill-top above him, but the angels of God are ascending and descending

upon it, and at its top is Jehovah Himself.

Thus simply does God meet the thoughts of Jacob, and lead him to the

encouragement he needed. What was probably Jacob's state of mind when he

lay down on that hill-side? In the first place, and as he would have

said to any man he chanced to meet, he wondered what he would see when

he got to the top of this hill; and still more, as he may have said to

Rebekah, he wondered what reception he would meet with from Laban, and

whether he would ever again see his father's tents. This vision shows

him that his path leads to God, that it is He who occupies the future;

and, in his dream, a voice comes to him: "I am with thee, and will keep

thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into

this land." He had, no doubt, wondered much whether the blessing of his

father was, after all, so valuable a possession, whether it might not

have been wiser to take a share with Esau than to be driven out homeless

thus. God has never spoken to him; he has heard his father speak of

assurances coming to him from God, but as for him, through all the long

years of his life he has never heard what he could speak of as a voice

of God. But this night these doubts were silenced--there came to his

soul an assurance that never departed from it. He could have affirmed

he heard God saying to him: "I am the Lord God of thy father Abraham,

and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give

it." And lastly, all these thoughts probably centred in one deep

feeling, that he was an outcast, a fugitive from justice. He was glad he

was in so solitary a place, he was glad he was so far from Esau and from

every human eye; and yet--what desolation of spirit accompanied this

feeling: there was no one he could bid good-night to, no one he could

spend the evening hour with in quiet talk; he was a banished man,

whatever fine gloss Rebekah might put upon it, and deep down in his

conscience there was that which told him he was not banished without

cause. Might not God also forsake him--might not God banish him, and

might he not find a curse pursuing him, preventing man or woman from

ever again looking in his face with pleasure? Such fears are met by the

vision. This desolate spot, unvisited by sheep or bird, has become busy

with life, angels thronging the ample staircase. Here, where he thought

himself lonely and outcast, he finds he has come to the very gate of

heaven. His fond mother might, at that hour, have been visiting his

silent tent and shedding ineffectual tears on his abandoned bed, but he

finds himself in the very house of God, cared for by angels. As the

darkness had revealed to him the stars shining overhead, so when the

deceptive glare of waking life was dulled by sleep, he saw the actual

realities which before were hidden.

No wonder that a vision which so graphically showed the open

communication between earth and heaven should have deeply impressed

itself on Jacob's descendants. What more effectual consolation could any

poor outcast, who felt he had spoiled his life, require than the memory

of this staircase reaching from the pillow of the lonely fugitive from

justice up into the very heart of heaven? How could any most desolate

soul feel quite abandoned so long as the memory retained the vision of

the angels thronging up and down with swift service to the needy? How

could it be even in the darkest hour believed that all hope was gone,

and that men might but curse God and die, when the mind turned to this

bridging of the interval between earth and heaven?

In the New Testament we meet with an instance of the familiarity with

this vision which true Israelites enjoyed. Our Lord, in addressing

Nathanael, makes use of it in a way that proves this familiarity. Under

his fig-tree, whose broad leaves were used in every Jewish garden as a

screen from observation, and whose branches were trained down so as to

form an open-air oratory, where secret prayer might be indulged in

undisturbed, Nathanael had been declaring to the Father his ways, his

weaknesses, his hopes. And scarcely more astonished was Jacob when he

found himself the object of this angelic ministry on the lonely

hill-side, than was Nathanael when he found how one eye penetrated the

leafy screen, and had read his thoughts and wishes. Apparently he had

been encouraging himself with this vision, for our Lord, reading his

thoughts, says: "Because I said unto thee, When thou wast under the

fig-tree I saw thee, believest thou? Thou shalt see greater things than

these--thou shalt see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and

descending upon the Son of man."

This, then, is a vision for us even more than for Jacob. It has its

fulfilment in the times after the Incarnation more manifestly than in

previous times. The true staircase by which heavenly messengers ascend

and descend is the Son of man. It is He who really bridges the interval

between heaven and earth, God and man. In His person these two are

united. You cannot tell whether Christ is more Divine or human, more God

or man--solidly based on earth, as this massive staircase, by His real

humanity, by His thirty-three years' engagement in all human functions

and all experiences of this life, He is yet familiar with eternity, His

name is "He that came down from heaven," and if your eye follows step by

step to the heights of His person, it rests at last on what you

recognise as Divine. His love it is that is wide enough to embrace God

on the one hand, and the lowest sinner on the other. Truly He is the

way, the stair, leading from the lowest depth of earth to the highest

height of heaven. In Him you find a love that embraces you as you are,

in whatever condition, however cast down and defeated, however

embittered and polluted--a love that stoops tenderly to you and

hopefully, and gives you once more a hold upon holiness and life, and in

that very love unfolds to you the highest glory of heaven and of God.

When this comes home to a man in the hour of his need, it becomes the

most arousing revelation. He springs from the troubled slumber we call

life, and all earth wears a new glory and awe to him. He exclaims with

Jacob, "How dreadful is this place. Surely the Lord is in this place,

and I knew it not." The world that had been so bleak and empty to him,

is filled with a majestic vital presence. Jacob is no longer a mere

fugitive from the results of his own sin, a shepherd in search of

employment, a man setting out in the world to try his fortune; he is the

partner with God in the fulfilment of a Divine purpose. And such is the

change that passes on every man who believes in the Incarnation, who

feels himself to be connected with God by Jesus Christ; he recognises

the Divine intention to uplift his life, and to fill it with new hopes

and purposes. He feels that humanity is consecrated by the entrance of

the Son of God into it: he feels that all human life is holy ground

since the Lord Himself has passed through it. Having once had this

vision of God and man united in Christ, life cannot any more be to him

the poor, dreary, commonplace, wretched round of secular duties and

short-lived joys and terribly punished sins it was before: but it truly

becomes the very gate of heaven; from each part of it he knows there is

a staircase rising to the presence of God, and that out of the region of

pure holiness and justice there flow to him heavenly aids, tender

guidance, and encouragement.

Do you think the idea of the Incarnation too aerial and speculative to

carry with you for help in rough, practical matters? The Incarnation is

not a mere idea, but a fact as substantial and solidly rooted in life as

anything you have to do with. Even the shadow of it Jacob saw carried in

it so much of what was real that when he was broad awake he trusted it

and acted on it. It was not scattered by the chill of the morning air,

nor by that fixed staring reality which external nature assumes in the

gray dawn as one object after another shows itself in the same spot and

form in which night had fallen upon it. There were no angels visible

when he opened his eyes; the staircase was there, but it was of no

heavenly substance, and if it had any secret to tell, it coldly and

darkly kept it. There was no retreat for the runaway from the poor

common facts of yesterday. The sky seemed as far from earth as it did

yesterday, his track over the hill as lonely, his brother's wrath as

real;--but other things also had become real; and as he looked back from

the top of the hill on the stone he had set up, he felt the words, "I am

with thee in all places whither thou goest," graven on his heart, and

giving him new courage; and he knew that every footfall of his was

making a Bethel, and that as he went he was carrying God through the

world. The bleakest rains that swept across the hills of Bethel could

never wash out of his mind the vision of bright-winged angels, as little

as they could wash off the oil or wear down the stone he had set up. The

brightest glare of this world's heyday of real life could not outshine

and cause them to disappear; and the vision on which we hope is not one

that vanishes at cock-crow, nor is He who connects us with God shy of

human handling, but substantial as ourselves. He offered Himself to

every kind of test, so that those who knew Him for years could say, with

the most absolute confidence, "That which we have heard, which we have

seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have

handled of the Word of Life ... declare we unto you, that ye also may

have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father,

and with His Son Jesus Christ."

Jacob obeyed a good instinct when he set up as a monumental stone that

which had served as his pillow while he dreamt and saw this inspiring

vision. He felt that, vivid as the impression on his mind then was, it

would tend to fade, and he erected this stone that in after days he

might have a witness that would testify to his present assurance. One

great secret in the growth of character is the art of prolonging the

quickening power of right ideas, of perpetuating just and inspiring

impressions. And he who despises the aid of all external helps for the

accomplishment of this object is not likely to succeed. Religion, some

men say, is an inward thing: it does not consist of public worship,

ordinances, and so forth, but it is a state of spirit. Very true; but he

knows little of human nature who fancies a state of spirit can be

maintained without the aid of external reminders, presentations to eye

and ear of central religious truths and facts. We have all of us had

such views of truth, and such corresponding desires and purposes, as

would transform us were they only permanent. But what a night has

settled on our past, how little have we found skill to prolong the

benefit arising from particular events or occasions. Some parts of our

life, indeed, require no monument, there is nothing _there_ we would

ever again think of, if possible; but, alas! these, for the most part,

have erected monuments of their own, to which, as with a sad

fascination, our eyes are ever turning--persons we have injured, or who,

somehow, so remind us of sin, that we shrink from meeting them--places

to which sins of ours have attached a reproachful meaning. And these

natural monuments must be imitated in the life of grace. By fixed hours

of worship, by rules and habits of devotion, by public worship, and

especially by the monumental ordinance of the Lord's Supper, must we

cherish the memory of known truth, and deepen former impressions.

To the monument Jacob attached a vow, so that when he returned to that

spot the stone might remind him of the dependence on God he now felt, of

the precarious situation he was in when this vision appeared, and of all

the help God had afterwards given him. He seems to have taken up the

meaning of that endless chain of angels ceaselessly coming down full of

blessing, and going up empty of all but desires, requests, aspirations.

And if we are to live with clean conscience and with heart open to God,

we must so live that the messengers who bring God's blessings to us

shall not have an evil report to take back of the manner in which we

have received and spent His bounty.

This whole incident makes a special appeal to those who are starting in

life. Jacob was no longer a young man, but he was unmarried, and he was

going to seek employment with nothing to begin the world with but his

shepherd's staff, the symbol of his knowledge of a profession. Many must

see in him a very exact reproduction of their own position. They have

left home, and it may be they have left it not altogether with pleasant

memories, and they are now launched on the world for themselves, with

nothing but their staff, their knowledge of some business. The spot they

have reached may seem as desolate as the rock where Jacob lay, their

prospects as doubtful as his. For such an one there is absolutely no

security but that which is given in the vision of Jacob--in the belief

that God will be with you in all places, and that even now on that life

which you are perhaps already wishing to seclude from all holy

influences, the angels of God are descending to bless and restrain you

from sin. Happy the man who, at the outset, can heartily welcome such a

connection of his life with God: unhappy he who welcomes whatever blots

out the thought of heaven, and who separates himself from all that

reminds him of the good influences that throng his path. The desire of

the young heart to see life and know the world is natural and innocent,

but how many fancy that in seeing the lowest and poorest perversions of

life they see life--how many forget that unless they keep their hearts

pure they can never enter into the best and richest and most enduring of

the uses and joys of human life. Even from a selfish motive and the mere

desire to succeed in the world, every one starting in life would do well

to consider whether he really has Jacob's blessing and is making his

vow. And certainly every one who has any honour, who is governed by any

of those sentiments that lead men to noble and worthy actions, will

frankly meet God's offers and joyfully accept a heavenly guidance and a

permanent connection with God.

Before we dismiss this vision, it may be well to look at one instance of

its fulfilment, that we may understand the manner in which God fulfils

His promises. Jacob's experience in Haran was not so brilliant and

unexceptionable as he might perhaps expect. He did, indeed, at once find

a woman he could love, but he had to purchase her with seven years'

toil, which ultimately became fourteen years. He did not grudge this;

because it was customary, because his affections were strong, and

because he was too independent to send to his father for money to buy a

wife. But the bitterest disappointment awaited him. With the burning

humiliation of one who has been cheated in so cruel a way, he finds

himself married to Leah. He protests, but he cannot insist on his

protest, nor divorce Leah; for, in point of fact, he is conscious that

he is only being paid in his own coin, foiled with his own weapons. In

this veiled bride brought in to him on false pretences, he sees the just

retribution of his own disguise when with the hands of Esau he went in

and received his father's blessing. His mouth is shut by the remembrance

of his own past. But submitting to this chastisement, and recognising

in it not only the craft of his uncle, but the stroke of God, that which

he at first thought of as a cruel curse became a blessing. It was Leah

much more than Rachel that built up the house of Israel. To this

despised wife six of the tribes traced their origin, and among these was

the tribe of Judah. Thus he learned the fruitfulness of God's

retribution--that to be humbled by God is really to be built up, and to

be punished by Him the richest blessing. Through such an experience are

many persons led: when we would embrace the fruit of years of toil God

thrusts into our arms something quite different from our

expectation--something that not only disappoints, but that at first

repels us, reminding us of acts of our own we had striven to forget. Is

it with resentment you still look back on some such experience, when the

reward of years of toil evaded your grasp, and you found yourself bound

to what you would not have worked a day to obtain?--do you find yourself

disheartened and discouraged by the way in which you seem regularly to

miss the fruit of your labour? If so, no doubt it were useless to assure

you that the disappointment may be more fruitful than the hope

fulfilled, but it can scarcely be useless to ask you to consider whether

it is not the fact that in Jacob's case what was thrust upon him _was_

more fruitful than what he strove to win.

XXIII.

_JACOB AT PENIEL._

GENESIS xxxii.

"Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He shall lift you

up."--JAMES iv. 10.

Jacob had a double reason for wishing to leave Padan-aram. He believed

in the promise of God to give him Canaan; and he saw that Laban was a

man with whom he could never be on a thoroughly good understanding. He

saw plainly that Laban was resolved to make what he could out of his

skill at as cheap a rate as possible--the characteristic of a selfish,

greedy, ungrateful, and therefore, in the end, ill-served master. Laban

and Esau were the two men who had hitherto chiefly influenced Jacob's

life. But they were very different in character. Esau could never see

that there was any important difference between himself and

Jacob--except that his brother was trickier. Esau was the type of those

who honestly think that there is not much in religion, and that saints

are but white-washed sinners. Laban, on the contrary, is almost

superstitiously impressed by the distinction between God's people and

others. But the chief practical issue of this impression is, not that he

seeks God's friendship for himself, but that he tries to make a

profitable use of God's friends. He seeks to get God's blessing, as it

were, at second-hand. If men could be related to God indirectly, as if

in law and not by blood, that would suit Laban. If God would admit men

to his inheritance on any other terms than being sons in the direct

line, if there were some relationship once removed, a kind of

sons-in-law, so that mere connection with the godly, though not with

God, would win His blessing, this would suit Laban.

Laban is the man who appreciates the social value of virtue,

truthfulness, fidelity, temperance, godliness, but wishes to enjoy their

fruits without the pain of cultivating the qualities themselves. He is

scrupulous as to the character of those he takes into his employment,

and seeks to connect himself in business with good men. In his domestic

life, he acts on the idea which his experience has suggested to him,

that persons really godly will make his home more peaceful, better

regulated, safer than otherwise it might be. If he holds a position of

authority, he knows how to make use, for the preservation of order and

for the promotion of his own ends, of the voluntary efforts of Christian

societies, of the trustworthiness of Christian officials, and of the

support of the Christian community. But with all this recognition of the

reality and influence of godliness, he never for one moment entertains

the idea of himself becoming a godly man. In all ages there are Labans,

who clearly recognise the utility and worth of a connection with God,

who have been much mixed up with persons in whom that worth was very

conspicuous, and who yet, at the last, "depart and return unto their

place," like Jacob's father-in-law, without having themselves entered

into any affectionate relations with God.

From Laban, then, Jacob was resolved to escape. And though to escape

with large droves of slow-moving sheep and cattle, as well as with many

women and children, seemed hopeless, the cleverness of Jacob did not

fail him here. He did not get beyond reach of pursuit; he could never

have expected to do so. But he stole away to such a distance from Haran

as made it much easier for him to come to terms with Laban, and much

more difficult for Laban to try any further device for detaining him.

But, delivered as he was from Laban, he had an even more formidable

person to deal with. As soon as Laban's company disappear on the

northern horizon, Jacob sends messengers south to sound Esau. His

message is so contrived as to beget the idea in Esau's mind that his

younger brother is a person of some importance, and yet is prepared to

show greater deference to himself than formerly. But the answer brought

back by the messengers is the curt and haughty despatch of the man of

war to the man of peace. No notice is taken of Jacob's vaunted wealth.

No proposal of terms as if Esau had an equal to deal with, is carried

back. There is only the startling announcement: "Esau cometh to meet

thee, and four hundred men with him." Jacob at once recognises the

significance of this armed advance on Esau's part. Esau has not

forgotten the wrong he suffered at Jacob's hands, and he means to show

him that he is entirely in his power.

Therefore was Jacob "greatly afraid and distressed." The joy with which,

a few days ago, he had greeted the host of God, was quite overcast by

the tidings brought him regarding the host of Esau. Things heavenly do

always look so like a mere show; visits of angels seem so delusive and

fleeting; the exhibition of the powers of heaven seems so often but as a

tournament painted on the sky, and so unavailable for the stern

encounters that await us on earth, that one seems, even after the most

impressive of such displays, to be left to fight on alone. No wonder

Jacob is disturbed. His wives and dependants gather round him in dismay;

the children, catching the infectious panic, cower with cries and

weeping about their mothers; the whole camp is rudely shaken out of its

brief truce by the news of this rough Esau, whose impetuosity and

warlike ways they had all heard of and were now to experience. The

accounts of the messengers would no doubt grow in alarming descriptive

detail as they saw how much importance was attached to their words.

Their accounts would also be exaggerated by their own unwarlike nature,

and by the indistinctness with which they had made out the temper of

Esau's followers, and the novelty of the equipments of war they had seen

in his camp. Could we have been surprised had Jacob turned and fled when

thus he was made to picture the troops of Esau sweeping from his grasp

all he had so laboriously earned, and snatching the promised inheritance

from him when in the very act of entering on possession? But though in

fancy he already hears their rude shouts of triumph as they fall upon

his defenceless band, and already sees the merciless horde dividing the

spoil with shouts of derision and coarse triumph, and though all around

him are clamouring to be led into a safe retreat, Jacob sees stretched

before him the land that is his, and resolves that, by God's help, he

shall win it. What he does is not the act of a man rendered incompetent

through fear, but of one who has recovered from the first shock of alarm

and has all his wits about him. He disposes his household and followers

in two companies, so that each might advance with the hope that it might

be the one which should not meet Esau; and having done all that his

circumstances permit, he commends himself to God in prayer.

After Jacob had prayed to God, a happy thought strikes him, which he at

once puts in execution. Anticipating the experience of Solomon, that "a

brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city," he, in the

style of a skilled tactician, lays siege to Esau's wrath, and directs

against it train after train of gifts, which, like successive battalions

pouring into a breach, might at length quite win his brother. This

disposition of his peaceful battering trains having occupied him till

sunset, he retires to the short rest of a general on the eve of battle.

As soon as he judges that the weaker members of the camp are refreshed

enough to begin their eventful march, he rises and goes from tent to

tent awaking the sleepers, and quickly forming them into their usual

line of march, sends them over the brook in the darkness, and himself is

left alone, not with the depression of a man who waits for the

inevitable, but with the high spirits of intense activity, and with the

return of the old complacent confidence of his own superiority to his

powerful but sluggish-minded brother--a confidence regained now by the

certainty he felt, at least for the time, that Esau's rage could not

blaze through all the relays of gifts he had sent forward. Having in

this spirit seen all his camp across the brook, he himself pauses for a

moment, and looks with interest at the stream before him, and at the

promised land on its southern bank. This stream, too, has an interest

for him as bearing a name like his own--a name that signifies the

"struggler," and was given to the mountain torrent from the pain and

difficulty with which it seemed to find its way through the hills.

Sitting on the bank of the stream, he sees gleaming through the darkness

the foam that it churned as it writhed through the obstructing rocks, or

heard through the night the roar of its torrent as it leapt downwards,

tortuously finding its way towards Jordan; and Jacob says, So will I,

opposed though I be, win my way, by the circuitous routes of craft or by

the impetuous rush of courage, into the land whither that stream is

going. With compressed lips, and step as firm as when, twenty years

before, he left the land, he rises to cross the brook and enter the

land--he rises, and is seized in a grasp that he at once owns as

formidable. But surely this silent close, as of two combatants who at

once recognise one another's strength, this protracted strife, does not

look like the act of a depressed man, but of one whose energies have

been strung to the highest pitch, and who would have borne down the

champion of Esau's host had he at that hour opposed his entrance into

the land which Jacob claimed as his own, and into which, as his glove,

pledging himself to follow, he had thrown all that was dear to him in

the world. It was no common wrestler that would have been safe to meet

him in that mood.

Why, then, was Jacob thus mysteriously held back while his household

were quietly moving forward in the darkness? What is the meaning,

purpose, and use of this opposition to his entrance? These are obvious

from the state of mind Jacob was in. He was going forward to meet Esau

under the impression that there was no other reason why he should not

inherit the land but only his wrath, and pretty confident that by his

superior talent, his mother-wit, he could make a tool of this stupid,

generous brother of his. And the danger was, that if Jacob's device had

succeeded, he would have been confirmed in these impressions, and have

believed that he had won the land from Esau, with God's help certainly,

but still by his own indomitable pertinacity of purpose and skill in

dealing with men. Now, this was not the state of the case at all. Jacob

had, by his own deceit, become an exile from the land, had been, in

fact, banished for fraud; and though God had confirmed to him the

covenant, and promised to him the land, yet Jacob had apparently never

come to any such thorough sense of his sin and entire incompetency to

win the birthright for himself, as would have made it _possible_ for him

to receive simply as God's gift this land which as God's gift was alone

valuable. Jacob does not yet seem to have taken up the difference

between inheriting a thing as God's gift, and inheriting it as the meed

of his own prowess. To such a man God cannot _give_ the land; Jacob

cannot receive it. He is thinking only of winning it, which is not at

all what God means, and which would, in fact, have annulled all the

covenant, and lowered Jacob and his people to the level simply of other

nations who had to win and keep their territories at their risk, and not

as the blessed of God. If Jacob then is to get the land, he must take it

as a gift, which he is not prepared to do. During the last twenty years

he has got many a lesson which might have taught him to distrust his own

management, and he had, to a certain extent, acknowledged God; but his

Jacob-nature, his subtle, scheming nature, was not so easily made to

stand erect, and still he is for wriggling himself into the promised

land. He is coming back to the land under the impression that God needs

to be managed, that even though we have His promises it requires

dexterity to get them fulfilled, that a man will get into the

inheritance all the readier for knowing what to veil from God and what

to exhibit, when to cleave to His word with great profession of most

humble and absolute reliance on Him, and when to take matters into one's

own hand. Jacob, in short, was about to enter the land as Jacob, the

supplanter, and that would never do; he was going to win the land from

Esau by guile, or as he might; and not to receive it from God. And,

therefore, just as he is going to step into it, there lays hold of him,

not an armed emissary of his brother, but a far more formidable

antagonist--if Jacob will win the land, if it is to be a mere trial of

skill, a wrestling match, it must at least be with the right person.

Jacob is met with his own weapons. He has not chosen war, so no armed

opposition is made; but with the naked force of his own nature, he is

prepared for any man who will hold the land against him; with such

tenacity, toughness, quick presence of mind, elasticity, as nature has

given him, he is confident he can win and hold his own. So the real

proprietor of the land strips himself for the contest, and lets him

feel, by the first hold he takes of him, that if the question be one of

mere strength he shall never enter the land.

This wrestling therefore was by no means actually or symbolically

prayer. Jacob was not aggressive, nor did he stay behind his company to

spend the night in praying for them. It was God who came and laid hold

on Jacob to prevent him from entering the land in the temper he was in,

and as Jacob. He was to be taught that it was not only Esau's appeased

wrath, or his own skilful smoothing down of his brother's ruffled

temper, that gave him entrance; but that a nameless Being, Who came out

upon him from the darkness, guarded the land, and that by His passport

only could he find entrance. And henceforth, as to every reader of this

history so much more to Jacob's self, the meeting with Esau and the

overcoming of his opposition were quite secondary to and eclipsed by his

meeting and prevailing with this unknown combatant.

This struggle had, therefore, immense significance for the history of

Jacob. It is, in fact, a concrete representation of the attitude he had

maintained towards God throughout his previous history; and it

constitutes the turning point at which he assumes a new and satisfactory

attitude. Year after year Jacob had still retained confidence in

himself; he had never been thoroughly humbled, but had always felt

himself able to regain the land he had lost by his sin. And in this

struggle he shows this same determination and self-confidence. He

wrestles on indomitably. As Kurtz, whom I follow in his interpretation

of this incident, says, "All along Jacob's life had been the struggle of

a clever and strong, a pertinacious and enduring, a self-confident and

self-sufficient person, who was sure of the result only when he helped

himself--a contest with God, who wished to break his strength and

wisdom, in order to bestow upon him real strength in divine weakness,

and real wisdom in divine folly." All this self-confidence culminates

now, and in one final and sensible struggle, his Jacob-nature, his

natural propensity to wrest what he desires and win what he aims at,

from the most unwilling opponent, does its very utmost and does it in

vain. His steady straining, his dexterous feints, his quick gusts of

vehement assault, make no impression on this combatant and move him not

one foot off his ground. Time after time his crafty nature puts out all

its various resources, now letting his grasp relax and feigning defeat,

and then with gathered strength hurling himself on the stranger, but all

in vain. What Jacob had often surmised during the last twenty years,

what had flashed through him like a sudden gleam of light when he found

himself married to Leah, that he was in the hands of one against whom it

is quite useless to struggle, he now again begins to suspect. And as the

first faint dawn appears, and he begins dimly to make out the face, the

quiet breathing of which he had felt on his own during the contest, the

man with whom he wrestles touches the strongest sinew in Jacob's body,

and the muscle on which the wrestler most depends shrivels at the touch

and reveals to the falling Jacob how utterly futile had been all his

skill and obstinacy, and how quickly the stranger might have thrown and

mastered him.

All in a moment, as he falls, Jacob sees how it is with him, and Who it

is that has met him thus. As the hard, stiff, corded muscle shrivelled,

so shrivelled his obdurate, persistent self-confidence. And as he is

thrown, yet cleaves with the natural tenacity of a wrestler to his

conqueror; so, utterly humbled before this Mighty One whom now he

recognises and owns, he yet cleaves to Him and entreats His blessing. It

is at this touch, which discovers the Almighty power of Him with whom he

has been contending, that the whole nature of Jacob goes down before

God. He sees how foolish and vain has been his obstinate persistence in

striving to trick God out of His blessing, or wrest it from Him, and now

he owns his utter incapacity to advance one step in this way, he admits

to himself that he is stopped, weakened in the way, thrown on his back,

and can effect nothing, simply nothing, by what he thought would effect

all; and, therefore, he passes from wrestling to praying, and with

tears, as Hosea says, sobs out from the broken heart of the strong man,

"I will not let thee go except thou bless me." In making this transition

from the boldness and persistence of self-confidence to the boldness of

faith and humility, Jacob becomes Israel--the supplanter, being baffled

by his conqueror, rises a Prince. Disarmed of all other weapons, he at

last finds and uses the weapons wherewith God is conquered, and with the

simplicity and guilelessness now of an Israelite indeed, face to face

with God, hanging helpless with his arms around Him, he supplicates the

blessing he could not win.

Thus, as Abraham had to become God's heir in the simplicity of humble

dependence on God; as Isaac had to lay himself on God's altar with

absolute resignation, and so become the heir of God, so Jacob enters on

the inheritance through the most thorough humbling. Abraham had to give

up all possessions and live on God's promise; Isaac had to give up life

itself; Jacob had to yield his very self, and abandon all dependence on

his own ability. The new name he receives signalizes and interprets this

crisis in his life. He enters his land not as Jacob, but as Israel. The

man who crossed the Jabbok was not the same as he who had cheated Esau

and outwitted Laban and determinedly striven this morning with the

angel. He was Israel, God's prince, entering on the land freely bestowed

on him by an authority none could resist; a man who had learned that in

order to receive from God, one must ask.

Very significant to Jacob in his after life must have been the lameness

consequent on this night's struggle. He, the wrestler, had to go halting

all his days. He who had carried all his weapons in his own person, in

his intelligent watchful eye and tough right arm, he who had felt

sufficient for all emergencies and a match for all men, had now to limp

along as one who had been worsted and baffled and could not hide his

shame from men. So it sometimes happens that a man never recovers the

severe handling he has received at some turning point in his life. Often

there is never again the same elastic step, the same free and confident

bearing, the same apparent power, the same appearance to our fellow-men

of completeness in our life; but, instead of this, there is a humble

decision which, if it does not walk with so free a gait, yet knows

better what ground it is treading and by what right. To the end some men

bear the marks of the heavy stroke by which God first humbled them. It

came in a sudden shock that broke their health, or in a disappointment

which nothing now given can ever quite obliterate the trace of, or in

circumstances painfully and permanently altered. And the man has to say

with Jacob, I shall never now be what I might have been; I was resolved

to have my own way, and though God in His mercy did not suffer me to

destroy myself, yet to drive me from my purpose He was forced to use a

violence, under the effects of which I go halting all my days, saved and

whole, yet maimed to the end of time. I am not ashamed of the mark, at

least when I think of it as God's signature I am able to glory in it,

but it never fails to remind me of a perverse wilfulness I am ashamed

of. With many men God is forced to such treatment; if any of us are

under it, God forbid we should mistake its meaning and lie prostrate and

despairing in the darkness instead of clinging to Him Who has smitten

and will heal us.

For the treatment which Jacob received at Peniel must not be set aside

as singular or exceptional. Sometimes God interposes between us and a

greatly-desired possession which we have been counting upon as our right

and as the fair and natural consequence of our past efforts and ways.

The expectation of this possession has indeed determined our movements

and shaped our life for some time past, and it would not only be

assigned to us by men as fairly ours, but God also has Himself seemed to

encourage us to win it. Yet when it is now within sight, and when we are

rising to pass the little stream which seems alone to separate us from

it, we are arrested by a strong, an irresistible hand. The reason is,

that God wishes us to be in such a state of mind that we shall receive

it as His gift, so that it becomes ours by an indefeasible title.

Similarly, when advancing to a spiritual possession, such checks are not

without their use. Many men look with longing to what is eternal and

spiritual, and they resolve to win this inheritance. And this resolve

they often make as if its accomplishment depended solely on their own

endurance. They leave almost wholly out of account that the possibility

of their entering the state they long for is not decided by their

readiness to pass through any ordeal, spiritual or physical, which may

be required of them, but by God's willingness to give it. They act as if

by taking advantage of God's promises, and by passing through certain

states of mind and prescribed duties, they could, irrespective of God's

present attitude towards them and constant love, win eternal happiness.

In the life of such persons there must therefore come a time when their

own spiritual energy seems all to collapse in that painful, utter way

in which, when the body is exhausted, the muscles are suddenly found to

be cramped and heavy and no longer responsive to the will. They are made

to feel that a spiritual dislocation has taken place, and that their

eagerness to enter life everlasting no longer stirs the active energies

of the soul.

In that hour the man learns the most valuable truth he can learn, that

it is God Who is wishing to save him, not he who must wrest a blessing

from an unwilling God. Instead of any longer looking on himself as

against the world, he takes his place as one who has the whole energy of

God's will at his back, to give him rightful entrance into all

blessedness. So long as Jacob was in doubt whether it was not some kind

of man that was opposing him, he wrestled on; and our foolish ways of

dealing with God terminate, when we recognise that He is not such an one

as ourselves. We naturally act as if God had some pleasure in thwarting

us--as if we could, and even ought to, maintain a kind of contest with

God. We deal with Him as if He were opposed to our best purposes and

grudged to advance us in all good, and as if He needed to be propitiated

by penitence and cajoled by forced feelings and sanctimonious demeanour.

We act as if we could make more way were God not in our way, as if our

best prospects began in our own conception and we had to win God over to

our views. If God is unwilling, then there is an end: no device nor

force will get us past Him. If He is willing, why all this unworthy

dealing with Him, as if the whole idea and accomplishment of salvation

did not proceed from Him?

XXIV.

_JACOB'S RETURN._

GENESIS xxxv.

"As for me, when I came from Padan, Rachel died by me in the land of

Canaan in the way."--GEN. xlviii. 7.

The words of the Wrestler at the brook Jabbok, "Let me go, for the day

breaketh," express the truth that spiritual things will not submit

themselves to sensible tests. When we seek to let the full daylight, by

which we discern other objects, stream upon them, they elude our grasp.

When we fancy we are on the verge of having our doubts for ever

scattered, and our suppositions changed into certainties, the very

approach of clear knowledge and demonstration seems to drive those

sensitive spiritual presences into darkness. As Pascal remarked, and

remarked as the mouth-piece of all souls that have earnestly sought for

God, the world only gives us indications of the presence of a God Who

conceals Himself. It is, indeed, one of the most mysterious

characteristics of our life in this world, that the great Existence

which originates and embraces all other Beings, should Himself be so

silent and concealed: that there should be need of subtle arguments to

prove His existence, and that no argument ever conceived has been found

sufficiently cogent to convince all men. One is always tempted to say,

how easy to end all doubt, how easy for God so to reveal Himself as to

make unbelief impossible, and give to all men the glad consciousness

that they have a God.

The reason of this "reserve" of God must lie in the nature of things.

The greatest forces in nature are silent and unobtrusive and

incomprehensible. Without the law of gravitation the universe would rush

into ruin, but who has ever seen this force? Its effects are everywhere

visible, but itself is shrouded in darkness and cannot be comprehended.

So much more must the Infinite Spirit remain unseen and baffling all

comprehension. "No man hath seen God at any time" must ever remain true.

To ask for God's name, therefore, as Jacob did, is a mistake. For almost

every one supposes that when he knows the name of a thing, he knows also

its nature. The giving of a name, therefore, tends to discourage

enquiry, and to beget an unfounded satisfaction as if, when we know what

a thing is called, we know what it is. The craving, therefore, which we

all feel in common with Jacob--to have all mystery swept from between us

and God, and to see Him face to face, so that we may know Him as we know

our friends--is a craving which cannot be satisfied. You cannot ever

know God as He is. Your mind cannot comprehend a Being who is pure

Spirit, inhabiting no body, present with you here but present also

hundreds of millions of miles away, related to time and to space and to

matter in ways utterly impossible for you to comprehend.

What is possible, God has done. He has made Himself known in Christ. We

are assured, on testimony that stands every kind of test, that in Him,

if nowhere else, we find God. And yet even by Christ this same law of

reserve if not concealment was observed. Not only did He forbid men and

devils to proclaim who He was, but when men, weary of their own doubts

and debatings, impatiently challenged him, "If thou be the Christ tell

us plainly," He declined to do so. For really men must grow to the

knowledge of Him. Even a human face cannot be known by once or twice

seeing it; the practised artist often misses the expression best loved

by the intimate friend, or by the relative whose own nature interprets

to him the face in which he sees himself reflected. Much more can the

child of God only attain to the knowledge of his Father's face by first

of all _being_ a child of God, and then by gradually growing up into His

likeness.

But though God's operation is in darkness the results of it are in the

light. "As Jacob passed over Peniel, the _sun rose_ upon him, and he

halted upon his thigh." As Jacob's company halted when they missed him,

and as many anxious eyes were turned back into the darkness, they were

unable still to see him; and even when the darkness began to scatter,

and they saw dimly and far off a human figure, the sharpest eyes among

them declare it cannot be Jacob, for the gait and walk, which alone they

can judge by at that distance and in that light, are not his. But when

at last the first ray of sunlight streams on him from over the hills of

Gilead, all doubt is at an end; it _is_ Jacob, but halting on his thigh.

And he himself finds it is not a strain which the walking of a few paces

will ease, nor a night cramp which will pass off, nor a mere dream which

would vanish in broad day, but a real permanent lameness which he must

explain to his company. Has he missed a step on the bank in the

darkness, or stumbled or slipped on the slippery stones of the ford? It

is a far more real thing to him than any such accident. So, however

others may discredit the results of a work on the soul which they have

not seen--however they may say of the first and most obvious results,

"This is but a sickness of soul which the rising sun will dispel; a

feigned peculiarity of walk which will be forgotten in the bustle of the

day's work"--it is not so, but every contact with real life makes it

more obvious that when God touches a man the result is real. And as

Jacob's household and children in all generations counted that sinew

which shrank sacred, and would not eat of it, so surely should we be

reverential towards God's work in the soul of our neighbour, and respect

even those peculiarities which are often the most obvious first-fruits

of conversion, and which make it difficult for us to walk in the same

comfort with these persons, and keep step with them as easily as once we

did. A reluctance to live like other good people, an inability to share

their innocent amusements, a distaste for the very duties of this life,

a harsh or reserved bearing towards unconverted persons, an awkwardness

in speaking of their religious experience, as well as an awkwardness in

applying it to the ordinary circumstances of their life,--these and many

other of the results of God's work on the soul should not be rudely

dealt with, but respected; for though not in themselves either seemly or

beneficial, they are evidence of God's touch.

After this contest with the angel, the meeting of Jacob with Esau has no

separate significance. Jacob succeeds with his brother because already

he has prevailed with God. He is on a satisfactory footing now with the

Sovereign who alone can bestow the land and judge betwixt him and his

brother. Jacob can no longer suppose that the chief obstacle to his

advance is the resentment of Esau. He has felt and submitted to a

stronger hand than Esau's. Such schooling we all need; and get, if we

will take it. Like Jacob, we have to make our way to our end through

numberless human interferences and worldly obstacles. Some of these we

have to flee from, as Jacob from Laban; others we must meet and

overcome, as our Esaus. Our own sin or mistake has put us under the

power of some whose influence is disastrous; others, though we are not

under their power at all, yet, consciously or unconsciously to

themselves, continually cross our path and thwart us, keep us back and

prevent us from effecting what we desire, and from shaping things about

us according to our own ideas. And there will, from time to time, be

present to our minds obvious ways in which we could defeat the

opposition of these persons, and by which we fancy we could triumph over

them. And what we are here taught is, that we need look for no triumph,

and it is a pity for us if we win a triumph over any human opposition,

however purely secular and unchristian, without first having prevailed

with God in the matter. He comes in between us and all men and things,

and, laying His hand on us, arrests us from further progress till we

have to the very bottom and in every part adjusted the affair with

Him--and then, standing right with Him, we can very easily, or at least

we _can_, get right with all things. And it should be a suggestive and

fruitful thought to the most of us that, in all cases in which we sin

against our brother, God presents Himself as the champion of the wronged

party. One day or other we must meet not the strongest putting of all

those cases in which we have erred as the offended party could himself

put them, but we must meet them as put by the Eternal Advocate of

justice and right, who saw our spirit, our merely selfish calculating,

our base motive, our impure desire, our unrighteous deed. Gladly would

Jacob have met the mightiest of Esau's host in place of this invincible

opponent, and it is this same Mighty One, this same watchful guardian of

right Who threw Himself in Jacob's way, Who has His eye on us, Who has

tracked us through all our years, and Who will certainly one time appear

in our path as the champion of every one we have wronged, of every one

whose soul we have put in jeopardy, of every one to whom we have not

done what God intended we should do, of every one whom we have attempted

merely to make use of; and in stating their case and showing us what

justice and duty would have required of us, He will make us feel, what

we cannot feel till He Himself convinces us, that, in all our dealings

with men, wherein we have wronged them we have wronged Him.

The narrative now prepares to leave Jacob and make room for Joseph. It

brings him back to Bethel, thereby completing the history of his triumph

over the difficulties with which his life had been so thickly studded.

The interest and much of the significance of a man's life come to an end

when position and success are achieved. The remaining notices of Jacob's

experience are of a sorrowful kind; he lives under a cloud until at the

close the sun shines out again. We have seen him in his youth making

experiments in life; in his prime founding a family and winning his way

by slow and painful steps to his own place in the world; and now he

enters on the last stage of his life, a stage in which signs of breaking

up appear almost as soon as he attains his aim and place in life.

After all that had happened to Jacob, we should have expected him to

make for Bethel as rapidly as his unwieldy company could be moved

forwards. But the pastures that had charmed the eye of his grandfather

captivated Jacob as well. He bought land at Shechem, and appeared

willing to settle there. The vows which he had uttered with such fervour

when his future was precarious are apparently quite forgotten, or more

probably neglected, now that danger seems past. To go to Bethel involved

the abandonment of admirable pastures, and the introduction of new

religious views and habits into his family life. A man who has large

possessions, difficult and precarious relations to sustain with the

world, and a household unmanageable from its size, and from the variety

of dispositions included in it, requires great independence and

determination to carry out domestic reform on religious grounds. Even a

slight change in our habits is often delayed because we are shy of

exposing to observation fresh and deep convictions on religious

subjects. Besides, we forget our fears and our vows when the time of

hardship passes away; and that which, as young men, we considered almost

hopeless, we at length accept as our right, and omit all remembrance and

gratitude. A spiritual experience that is separated from your present by

twenty years of active life, by a foreign residence, by marriage, by the

growing up of a family around you, by other and fresher spiritual

experiences, is apt to be very indistinctly remembered. The obligations

you then felt and owned have been overlaid and buried in the lapse of

years. And so it comes that a low tone is introduced into your life, and

your homes cease to be model homes.

Out of this condition Jacob was roughly awakened. Sinning by

unfaithfulness and softness towards his family, he is, according to the

usual law, punished by family disaster of the most painful kind. The

conduct of Simeon and Levi was apparently due quite as much to family

pride and religious fanaticism as to brotherly love or any high moral

view. In them first we see how the true religion, when held by coarse

and ungodly men, becomes the root of all evil. We see the first instance

of that fanaticism which so often made the Jews a curse rather than a

blessing to other nations. Indeed, it is but an instance of the

injustice, cruelty, and violence that at all times result where men

suppose that they themselves are raised to quite peculiar privileges and

to a position superior to their fellows, without recognising also that

this position is held by the grace of a holy God and for the good of

their fellows.

Jacob is now compelled to make a virtue of necessity. He flees to Bethel

to escape the vengeance of the Shechemites. To such serious calamities

do men expose themselves by arguing with conscience and by refusing to

live up to their engagements. How can men be saved from living merely

for sheep-feeding and cattle-breeding and trade and enjoyment? how can

they be saved from gradually expelling from their character all

principle and all high sentiment that conflicts with immediate advantage

and present pleasure, save by such irresistible blows as here compelled

Jacob to shift his camp? He has spiritual perception enough left to see

what is meant. The order is at once issued: "Put away the strange gods

that are among you, and be clean, and change your garments: and let us

arise, and go up to Bethel; and I will make there an altar unto God, who

answered me in the day of my distress, and was with me in the way which

I went." Thus frankly does he acknowledge his error, and repair, so far

as he can, the evil he has done. Thus decidedly does he press God's

command on those whom he had hitherto encouraged or connived at. Even

from his favourite Rachel he takes her gods and buries them. The fierce

Simeon and Levi, proud of the blood with which they had washed out their

sister's stain, are ordered to cleanse their garments and show some

seemly sorrow, if they can.

If years go by without any such incident occurring in our life as drives

us to a recognition of our moral laxity and deterioration, and to a

frank and humble return to a closer walk with God, we had need to strive

to awaken ourselves and ascertain whether we are living up to old vows

and are really animated by thoroughly worthy motives. It was when Jacob

came back to the very spot where he had lain on the open hill-side, and

pointed out to his wives and children the stone he had set up to mark

the spot, that he felt humbled as he cast his eye over the flocks and

tents he now owned. And if you can, like Jacob, go back to spots in your

life which were very woful and perplexed, years even when all continued

dreary, dark, and hopeless, when friendlessness and poverty, bereavement

or disease, laid their chilling, crushing hands upon you, times when you

could not see what possible good there was for you in the world; and if

now all this is solved, and your condition is in the most striking

contrast to what you can remember, it becomes you to make acknowledgment

to God such as you may have made to your friends, such acknowledgment as

makes it plain that you are touched by His kindness. The acknowledgment

Jacob made was sensible and honest. He put away the gods which had

divided the worship of his family. In our life there is probably that

which constantly tends to usurp an undue place in our regard; something

which gives us more pleasure than the thought of God, or from which we

really expect a more palpable benefit than we expect from God, and

which, therefore, we cultivate with far greater assiduity. How easily,

if we really wish to be on a clear footing with God, can we discover

what things should be cast revengefully from us, buried and stamped upon

and numbered with the things of the past. Are there not in your life any

objects for the sake of which you sacrifice that nearness to God, and

that sure hold of Him you once enjoyed? Are you not conscious of any

pursuits, or hopes, or pleasures, or employments which practically have

the effect of making you indifferent to spiritual advancement, and which

make you shy of Bethel--shy of all that sets clear before you your

indebtedness to God, and your own past vows and resolves?

"But," continues the narrative, "_but_ Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, died;"

that is, although Jacob and his house were now living in the fear of

God, that did not exempt them from the ordinary distresses of family

life. And among these, one that falls on us with a chastening and mild

sadness all its own, occurs when there passes from the family one of its

oldest members, and one who has by the delicate tact of love gained

influence over all, and has by the common consent become the arbiter and

mediator, the confidant and counsellor of the family. They, indeed, are

the true salt of the earth whose own peace is so deep and abiding, and

whose purity is so thorough and energetic, that into their ear we can

disburden the troubled heart or the guilty conscience, as the wildest

brook disturbs not and the most polluted fouls not the settled depths

of the all-cleansing ocean. Such must Deborah have been, for the oak

under which she was buried was afterwards known as "the oak of weeping."

Specially must Jacob himself have mourned the death of her whose face

was the oldest in his remembrance, and with whom his mother and his

happy early days were associated. Very dear to Jacob, as to most men,

were those who had been connected with and could tell him of his

parents, and remind him of his early years. Deborah, by treating him

still as a little boy, perhaps the only one who now called him by the

pet name of childhood, gave him the pleasantest relief from the cares of

manhood and the obsequious deportment of the other members of his

household towards him. So that when she went a great blank was made to

him: no longer was the wise and happy old face seen in her tent door to

greet him of an evening; no longer could he take refuge in the

peacefulness of her old age from the troubles of his lot: she being

gone, a whole generation was gone, and a new stage of life was entered

on.

But a heavier blow, the heaviest that death could inflict, soon fell

upon him. She who had been as God's gift and smile to him since ever he

had left Bethel at the first is taken from him now that he is restored

to God's house. The number of his sons is completed, and the mother is

removed. Suddenly and unexpectedly the blow fell, as they were

journeying and fearing no ill. Notwithstanding the confident and

cheering, though ambiguous, assurances of those about her, she had that

clear knowledge of her own state which, without contradicting, simply

put aside such assurances, and, as her soul was departing, feebly named

her son Benoni, Son of my sorrow. She felt keenly what was, to a nature

like hers, the very anguish of disappointment. She was never to feel the

little creature stirring in her arms with personal human life, nor see

him growing up to manhood as the son of his father's right hand. It was

this sad death of Rachel's which made her the typical mother in Israel.

It was not an unclouded, merely prosperous life which could fitly have

foreshadowed the lives of those by whom the promised seed was to come;

and least of all of the virgin to whom it was said, "A sword shall

pierce through thine own soul also." It was the wail of Rachel that

poetical minds among the Jews heard from time to time mourning their

national disasters--"Rachel weeping" for her children, when by captivity

they were separated from their mother country, or when, by the sword of

Herod, the mothers of Bethlehem were bereaved of their babes. But it was

also observed that that which brought this anguish on the mothers of

Bethlehem was the birth there of the last Son of Israel, the blossom of

this long-growing plant, suddenly born after a long and barren period,

the son of Israel's right hand.

Still another death is registered in this chapter. It took place twelve

years after Joseph went into Egypt, but is set down here for

convenience. Esau and Jacob are, for the last time, brought together

over their dead father--and for the last time, as they see that family

likeness which comes out so strikingly in the face of the dead, do they

feel drawn with brotherly affection to greet one another as sons of one

father. In the dead Isaac, too, they find an object of veneration more

impressive than they had found in the living father: the infirmities of

age are exchanged for the mystery and majesty of death; the man has

passed out of reach of pity, of contempt; the shrill, uncontrolled

treble is no longer heard, there are no weak, plaintive movements, no

childishness; but a solemn, august silence, a silence that seems to bid

on-lookers be still and refrain from disturbing the first communings of

the departed spirit with things unseen.