“He found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully
with tears.”—HEB. xii. 17.
We have shown in the last discourse that a close examination of the
question of the birthright lightens some of the deeper shadows which lie
upon it. Comparing the outward and visible aspect of the two men—the
man who sold the birthright and lost the blessing, and the man who won
them both—it would appear that the balance of worldly prosperity was
altogether on Esau’s side. Esau lost just that which his soul despised,
and he won what his soul lusted after, wealth, power, and the position
of a prince. He lived prosperously and splendidly, and died peacefully
we may believe, with few regrets. There is certainly nothing in the few
words which are devoted to his subsequent history to suggest that he
lived a disappointed ruined man. On the contrary, he seems to have
displayed on his meeting with Jacob that magnanimity and generosity
which shallow natures are wont to manifest in a prosperous lot. It is
just the glow of the sunlight reflected from their lives: the rippling
shallows make a braver show in the sunlight than the still deep pools;
and Esaus are gayer objects to look at, when all goes well with them,
than the careworn halting pilgrim, who bears on his brow, and no
sunlight can efface it, the marks of many toils and tears. But be that
as it may, there can be no question that the Bible does not picture the
life of Esau as a broken and ruined life, as far as this world is
concerned. The man grew rich and powerful, so rich that he could afford
to make light of Jacob’s presents, so powerful that Jacob’s company was
helpless in his hand. It is written that once the children of Israel
cried for flesh, and “_God gave them flesh, but sent leanness into their
souls_.” Something like this was the history of Esau, and of how many a
worldly-hearted man whom fortune loads with gifts, while the springs of
his higher life sink low and die. And his race prospered. As Jacob was
to Esau, quite the weaker and more dependent of the two, so when
centuries passed was Israel to Edom. The descendants of Esau had
attained to such strength and political influence that they were able to
bar the gates of their land against the elect host, pilgrims through the
wilderness like their sire, angel-led, and saved by hope. On the whole
then, for himself and his descendants, his life must be pronounced a
worldly success.
Jacob, on the other hand, had to reap life-long the bitter fruits of his
craft and fraud. His life was a weary, wasting struggle with selfish
craft and evil passion in all who surrounded him. He spent the best
years of his life in exile, and stood before Pharaoh, in his own
judgment prematurely aged and decayed. He won a name and a place which
called him to submit to a searching discipline, to live the life of a
pilgrim, to dwell as a stranger in his promised land, and to die in
exile at last. The world was fuller to him of sorrows and toils than of
benedictions, and the crown which the Prince of God at last was able to
bind around his brow was set with many a thorn. But he won the power to
follow the Angel, the Angel which redeemed him from all evil; his life,
halting as was his step, was a noble spiritual progress from strength to
strength, from victory to victory, till he passed up to receive the
prize of his conflict in a world and from a hand which Esau “despised.”
Looked at in the light of this world’s interests then, some of the
darkest difficulties vanish as we read the record of this birthright
lost and won. But then there is Esau himself, the man who despised his
birthright, who counted himself unworthy of the honour to which God had
ordained him, incapable of the glorious toil and patience to which God
had called him, and careless of the prize which God had placed within
reach of his hand. The life of this man, from the higher point of view,
was as sad, wretched, and faithless, as was the pilgrim Jacob’s from the
lower. He won his wealth and his princedom by his energy of hand and
will in all things that pertained to this life; but he let all the
interests and hopes of the higher life fade out of the horizon, and the
crown of his spiritual manhood slip from the grasp of his careless hand.
He touched it, but he could not hold it. What good shall this birthright
do to me, he moaned when the mess of pottage steamed before his hungry
senses; and the crown rolled in the dust. There is the man Esau, under
all his possession and princedom, in the sight of God a very wretched
and poverty-stricken outcast of the kingdom whose citizens believe in
truth, duty, spiritual effort, conflict, prayer, self-sacrifice, heaven,
and God. About the case of Esau personally there are many heavy
difficulties. His course seems to have been in a measure marked out from
his birth: “_The elder shall serve the younger_” was said of the twin
brethren while they were yet in the womb: and some such relation of the
two seems to be involved in the destiny which a higher Will had from the
first decreed. And this opens the vision of an abyss of mystery, into
the depths of which no finite intellect can search—the relation of
connate constitution and temperament to character, and the measure in
which this bears on the supreme fact of man’s being, responsibility.
Responsibility, implying freedom in the largest sense, we hold to be the
corner stone of our dignity as men. If man be not free, with the
everlasting crown of freedom within his reach as the prize of all his
toils and struggles, why! there is not a cur that prowls about the
streets whose lot is not more enviable. In that case man would be a
combatant by a profound instinct of his nature, struggling sternly
life-long against innumerable evils, with nothing after all to struggle
for; pressed, crushed, by the weight of intolerable ills, with no hope
to sanctify and no harvest to repay his pain. Who would not “rather be a
dog and bay the moon,” than such a creature? For freedom, and the
responsibility which it brings, as the fundamental spiritual fact of our
nature, we contend earnestly, yea vehemently, as for the only
justification of God’s constitution of the human world, the only key to
the woes which He lets loose to afflict it and the discords with which
He allows it to be torn. And for the reality of this moral freedom we
shall have to do stern battle with the school who are urging now, with
great subtilty and force, that all the moral phenomena of man’s nature
are just the finest efflorescence of the nerve matter of which his
intelligence is manufactured, the cream of the milk of his natural law.
But it cannot be questioned for a moment that men appear to be under
various conditions of advantage, as we might call it, with regard to the
exercise of their freedom and its fruits. The differences arise partly,
but not we believe chiefly, from circumstance. The child of a household
of thieves or vagrants, for instance, seems to have but a poor chance in
life compared with the children who grow up, pure, cultivated, comely,
and pious, in your serene, happy, and orderly homes. But the more
serious source of this inequality is to be found in character and
temperament, inbred lusts, passions, tempers, and proclivities which may
make the life of a man one long agony of struggle and failure, while
another man more fairly endowed may find from the first the way of
wisdom a way of pleasantness and all her paths paths of peace. A man
born with a brutal nature and feeble spiritual energy, or with a native
propensity, as far as we can see, to certain forms of sin—the
temptation to which exercises the kind of fascination over his will
which the serpent’s eye is said to exert over the victim bird, but which
another man would burst through as easily as Samson flung off the withes
of the Philistine harlot—is, one is tempted to think, at a terrible
disadvantage in life’s battle, compared with the man who has a halo of
saintly glory around his brow from his birth. It is a dark, sad mystery,
much of which, after all our brooding over it, we must leave in trust
with God.
I believe firmly that inequalities arising out of circumstances are
after all far less real than they appear. The facilities and
opportunities for a fair unfolding of life are not so uneven, in
the various classes and callings, as they seem. There must be some
deep meaning in the Saviour’s words, “_Blessed are ye poor_,” and
in the terrible sentence, “_How hardly shall they that have riches
enter into the kingdom of God_.” There is an amount of practical
Christianity—daily, hourly trust in God and ministry to each
other—developed by the circumstances of the lot of the poor, which
we may fairly set against the intelligent beliefs, the doctrinal
correctness, and the measured charities of the richer class, as in
the sight of God of equal or of higher price. There is nothing in a
workman’s lot or toil, to remove him farther from the gate of the
kingdom than rich men, nobles, priests, or kings; nay, the balance
is altogether in his favour. But, alas! there is a class far below
the workman, a vast class, vastest in the great cities where
Christian civilization is at the height of its splendour and power,
whose lot it is terribly difficult to comprehend in a theodicy, and
of whom it is hard to believe that they are not from the first at a
fearful disadvantage as respects nearness to the gate of the
kingdom of heaven. But the gravest side of the difficulty is not
circumstantial; it concerns nature and temperament. Though perhaps,
if we could search a little more deeply, we should see that each
type of character has its own peculiar class of difficulties and
temptations; and that the most beautiful and saintlike have their
dread perils of shipwreck, which make their course as arduous as
that of the souls which bear about with them a great load of
fleshliness and groan under the bondage of tyrannous passions
and lusts. Still it is a truth which is not without its awful
significance, that temperaments, passions, and powers, are very
variously distributed to men, while the burden of existence is laid
equally upon all, and “every soul must bear its own burden” in time
and in eternity.
These things lend infinite meaning to the word “Father” when uttered by
Divine lips. Like as a father pitieth his children, the Father pitieth
and beareth with us: “he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are
dust.” It is a father’s compassion, tenderness, and equity which we
need, to be the basis of our confidence and hope. A father considers
with fatherly care, interest, and love our individual endowments,
difficulties, and temptations, in ruling and in judging us; and He will
ordain our eternal state with a merciful wisdom, which has to satisfy
not a rigid justice only but the hopes and yearnings of a paternal
heart. If it were not for the belief that the bar of judgment before
which we shall stand is a wise and righteous fatherly heart, the best
endowed might well faint under the burden of existence, while the worst
would moan under its agony and curse the day on which they saw the sun.
There are some very terrible sentences in the word of God, which utter
the moan, not of the worst men, but of the best and noblest with whose
history it deals. “_After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day.
And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the
night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. Let that day
be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light
shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a
cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. As for
that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the
days of the year; let it not come into the number of the months. Lo, let
that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein._” (Job iii.
1–7.) “_Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto
the bitter in soul; Which long for death, but it cometh not: and dig for
it more than for hid treasures; Which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad
when they can find the grave? Why is light given to a man whose way is
hid, and whom God hath hedged in? For my sighing cometh before I eat,
and my roarings are poured out like the waters. For the thing which I
greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come
unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet;
yet trouble came._” (Job iii. 20–26.) “_Cursed be the day wherein I was
born: let not the day wherein my mother bare me be blessed. Cursed be
the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, A man child is born
unto thee; making him very glad. And let that man be as the cities which
the Lord overthrew, and repented not: and let him hear the cry in the
morning, and the shouting at noontide. Because he slew me not from the
womb; or that my mother might have been my grave, and her womb to be
always great with me. Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see
labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?_” (Jer.
xx. 14–18.) These were not bad men, crushed under the burden of their
own iniquity, but just, upright, and God-fearing men, who felt that
existence was too terrible for them under conditions which hid from them
the Father’s ruling hand. And if they shrank from the burden of
conscious responsible being, how shall weaker men escape its terror, but
by taking refuge under the shield of a Father’s equity and love! But
these thoughts lend a most blessed meaning to the words of the Saviour:
“_Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto
you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do:
for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. For
the Father loveth the Son, and showeth him all things that himself
doeth: and he will show him greater works than these, that ye may
marvel. For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even
so the Son quickeneth whom he will. For the Father judgeth no man, but
hath committed all judgment unto the Son: That all men should honour the
Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son,
honoureth not the Father which hath sent him. Verily, verily, I say
unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me,
hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is
passed from death unto life. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is
coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of
God: and they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in
himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself; and hath
given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of
man._” (John v. 19–27.) “THE FATHER HATH COMMITTED ALL JUDGMENT UNTO THE
SON.” “BECAUSE HE IS THE SON OF MAN.” Because He can take a man’s
measure as well as a Divine measure of a man’s weaknesses, perils, and
temptations; can measure, as a man, man’s need of mercy, and utter the
Divine Father’s judgment from pitiful human lips. Few words, as we pore
over these dark mysteries of existence, are so full of consolation and
hope as these words of the Saviour upon judgment. We can bear the
darkness, we can bear the anguish, if we are called to pass through it,
because we know that the ordering of our destinies is in the hand of One
who mingles with a brother’s sympathy and tenderness the Divine Father’s
equity and love.
But the text does not touch upon these difficulties of Esau’s history.
It treats him broadly as the typical instance of the reprobate, the man
who by his own base acts has cast himself out of the position for which
he was born and trained; who by one decisive manifestation of his
character and propensities has shut himself out from a high career which
opened fairly before him, and who finds no means of reversing the decree
which excludes him, though he seeks it carefully with tears. It opens a
very terrible vision of the inexorable rigour with which deeds done,
facts when they are once fairly established, react upon our lives. But
the words are often perverted to yet darker meanings—suggesting visions
of unpardonable sins, of fruitless agonies of personal repentance,—with
which souls under strong conviction not seldom torment themselves, and
with which the text has absolutely nothing whatever to do. A man seeking
change of heart with an agony of tears, pleading with God to renew him,
to restore him, and to cherish him to new life and hope, yet spurned
from the gate of mercy, flung forth accursed from the arms of love, is a
picture which, blessed be God, has no original in the Divine word. No!
thus runs the gospel: “_Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me;
for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your
souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light._” “_Ask, and it
shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be
opened unto you._” “_For every one that asketh receiveth, and he that
seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened._” “_If ye,
being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much
more shall your Father which is in heaven give the Holy Spirit to them
that ask him?_” “_Whoso cometh unto me I will in no wise cast him out._”
“_This man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood;
wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto
God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them._”
If any who reads these words has ever made this text a stumbling-block,
has ever suffered the devil to thrust the thought into his heart that he
has sinned too deeply for repentance, and wandered too far for
return—that he can but lie moaning and weeping like Esau, and pleading
with anguished heart for repentance, to find his moans rained back in
anathemas, and his tears with the fire of the wrath of the Lamb,—let
him sweep back the thought as an unholy thing to the devil who inspired
it, and cling to the outstretched hand of Him who “_will not break the
bruised reed, who will not quench the smoking flax, but will bring forth
judgment unto truth_.”
The text has literally nothing to do with personal repentance before
God. No man can spiritually seek a place of repentance carefully with
tears, and fail to find it, for the very act is an act of repentance. I
do not care to discuss the question whether the repentance here spoken
of is a change in the mind of Isaac, or of Esau himself. In either case
the meaning is substantially the same. He found no means of reversing
the decree, of winning the blessing of the firstborn, of inducing his
father to recall the benediction which had been treacherously diverted
to the younger, though he sought it carefully with tears. If it were
possible that this text, in all its dreadful meaning, could bear on
personal repentance for sin, and frighten men from it lest after all it
should be hopeless, it would deny the fundamental ideas and promises of
the gospel; nay, it would itself “_trample under foot the Son of God,
and count the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified an
unholy thing, and do despite to the Spirit of grace_.”
No! the text is a very solemn and even terrible warning of the
irrevocable character of deeds done in folly or frenzy; the inexorable
character of the fate which takes possession of them when once they have
gone forth from us, and which makes by them, it may be in spite of our
tears and prayers and desperate struggles, a complete revolution in our
lives.
Esau’s history is but the repetition of the history of the fall. And it
is a history which we all constantly repeat in the critical moments of
our lives. Esau fell as Adam fell, and fundamentally for the same
reason. Adam despised his birthright, and thought that there was a
readier way to the satisfaction of the desires of his heart. Esau by one
act changed, not his own history and destiny only, but the destiny of a
great nation; Adam changed, by his one sin, the destiny of a great
world. “_Wherefore_,” says the apostle, “_as by one man sin entered into
the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men_.” (Rom.
v. 12.) Adam, like Esau, saw through the eyes of Eve that the “_tree was
good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be
desired to make one wise_.” What good shall my birth-right do to me, he
said practically when he saw the forbidden fruit, and he sold it; and
that moment’s work for him, for you, for me, for all the myriad human
generations, can never be recalled in time or in eternity. There is
something very much nobler here than in Esau’s profaneness. It was not
in a moment of sensual lust that our first father sold his own
birthright and ours. The desire of wisdom, or what he took for wisdom,
had much to do with the force of the temptation; but the essence of the
matter is the same: Adam and Esau both chose, in the place of the good
which God had provided for them, a good which they provided for
themselves. Bitterly Adam, like Esau, repented of his folly, and sought
to undo his work. When the wilderness lay cold and bare before him, and
the flaming sword of the cherubim guarded the backward path to the
bright abodes which he had lost for ever, he measured for the first time
the full significance of his transgression. And when the sun set angry
and lurid on the wilderness, and the moaning winds swept hoarsely over
the waste, while a shudder shook the breast of nature as the tempest
clouds gathered in the sullen sky, Adam caught the infection of the
tremor, and watched with quivering eye the awful conflict of the forces
which had broken loose from his allegiance, and which seemed to come
thundering on as the doomsmen of the death which his Judge had decreed.
Think you that then his heart did not cling to the memories of the
splendours and serenities of Eden with passionate longing; think you
that he did not prostrate himself in an agony of frenzied supplication
that the barred portal might be unclosed again, that the fiery sword
might be sheathed, that the flowers of Eden might again spring beneath
his footsteps, while the balmy breezes whispered a blessing as they
played around the field of his labour and his bower of rest?
And what has been the long and bitter cry of man’s sad history? O God,
reverse the sentence, reopen the gate of paradise, revoke the curse, let
the sunlight of Eden shine once more on a holy, peaceful, and happy
world! This is the great burden of human literature in all its deeper
and more sacred utterances; it is the meaning of all the world’s great
poems, the refrain of all its immortal hymns. Recall the curse! let life
again become pure, peaceful, and blessed! Men, nations, ages have
agonized, over the sentence; but they have found no place of repentance,
no means to change the mind of the Judge or their own condition as the
subjects of it, though they have sought it carefully with tears. Esau
was the rejected of the birthright; you and I are the rejected of Eden.
Sinners we are by nature and proclivity, with a sinner’s burdens, a
sinner’s experience, and a sinner’s doom. And there is no way to change
the past, to rid us of the burden, to cancel the sentence, to mitigate
the anguish of a life on which the devil has seared the shameful brand;
no way to force the barred gates of paradise, even by the banded
energies of a pain-racked, sin-tormented world.
And I suppose that the private experience of most men furnishes the key
to this. Who has not known something of the agony with which one dark
deed of passion, lust, falsehood, knavery, baseness, can torture a human
heart? Look back. Is there nothing in the past, rising up at this moment
in the full menace of its hateful form, clear as the ghost of Banquo
before his murderer’s sight, which you would give your wealth, nay, some
of you would give worlds if they had them, to undo; if conscience might
but recover its serenity, and life its brightness; if the leprous flesh
of their experience might again become, like Naaman’s, fair, pure, and
sweet as the flesh of a little child. It is not every Gehazi whose
leprosy comes out in his flesh, and makes him loathsome to his fellows.
How many Gehazis move about among us, burying their leprosy within, but
none the less plague-stricken and perilous! Happy those who have no dark
chambers in their being, haunted by the skeletons of their dead lusts,
sins, or crimes—skeletons which never fail to come forth at their
banquets to scare them, choosing ruthlessly the hours of their festivity
and triumph to murder all their joys. There may be some readers of these
words who know this in all its horror, in whom the anguish of the
irrevocable and irreparable has killed all the joy of life—a word
spoken, a passion indulged, a deed done, which in one brief moment has
drawn a brooding shadow over the once sunlit landscape of their lives.
And you have wept and prayed, lying prostrate on the cold, ground,
beseeching the merciful God that He would blot out the record from your
memory and from the lives which it has embittered and cursed; but “the
heaven has been as brass, the earth beneath has been as iron.” The word
“irrevocable” has forced its meaning upon you in all its terrible
sternness, and you have needed no commentary to expound, or preacher to
drive home, the meaning of the sentence, “_Beware lest there be any
fornicator, or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold
his birthright. For ye know how that afterward, when he would have
inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of
repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears._”
And if there may be some readers who know this experience in all its
horror, there are a multitude who know it in its more modified forms,
and who find it terrible enough even then. Who has not had forced upon
him the misery of regrets or remorse, the causes of which remain
unalterable, fixed as the stars in their orbits, and the fruits of which
leave deep traces on the experience and the destiny through time, yes,
and through eternity? Did David, think you, ever look coldly or
carelessly on his bold soldier’s bloody grave? Was there no sad shadow,
to his eye, around the beauty of Bathsheba’s child, which no murmured
“Jedidiah” could chase away? Was his home ever free from the shadow,
from the hour when Nathan’s “Thou art the man” drove conviction home,
and wrung from him the most bitter cry of a sinner’s anguish which has
found record in the literature of our world? Few things in the book of
history are more terrible than the sorrow which entered David’s home,
the discord which rent his kingdom, the anguish which pierced his heart,
from the hour of his great transgression. A sad, careworn, broken man,
he finished his course and went down to his grave. Compare the David of
1 Kings i., ii., with the young shepherd in his early prime, if you
would estimate the havoc which one great sin may make in a noble life.
Ah! in a measure we all know it, in some form or other; words, deeds,
outbursts of passion, which have wrung dear hearts with anguish,
sundered precious bonds of love, have sullied reputation, clouded
prospects, withered hopes, or blighted the promise of lives which we
were bound to cherish, or of our own. And we would give worlds to blot
out their record, and to repair the evil which has been wrought; but it
remains engraven with an iron pen in the rock for ever: man cannot
obliterate it, and God will not.
To complete the subject, let me ask you to consider two thoughts.
1. These dread seasons of crucial trial, on which the future of life,
nay of eternity, is hanging, never come upon us in a moment.
It would appear from the text that one morsel of meat settled the
question of the birthright; that one hard, hot morning’s chase settled
the destinies of peoples for all time. That is one side of it, the
outside. But the real settlement of the question was made already; any
trifle will serve to disclose what has already established itself as the
permanent character within. Esau had nursed his contempt for the
birthright by a thousand daily lustings and cravings; many a bitter
scoff too he had flung at Jacob’s pious and meditative mood. Things like
this never stand alone. The life of the chosen family is described in
words of wonderful beauty and power in Heb. xi. 8–14. “_By faith
Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after
receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither
he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange
country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with
him of the same promise. For he looked for a city which hath
foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Through faith also Sara
herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child
when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised.
Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as
the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea
shore innumerable. These all died in faith, not having received the
promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and
embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on
the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek
a country._” This life Jacob believed in profoundly; this life Esau as
profoundly despised. He despised it all, and made his contempt
abundantly apparent. “_And Esau was forty years old when he took to wife
Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Bashemath the daughter of
Elon the Hittite. Which were a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah_”
(Gen. xxvi. 34, 35). This shows how thoroughly out of sympathy with the
spirit of the chosen race he was from the first, and remained through
life. All his sympathies and associations were with the pagans around
him. Jacob was the true heir of the promise, for he believed in it; Esau
its outcast, for he despised it, and had despised it from the first. His
every act had expressed his contempt of it, and the sale of the
birthright for a mess of pottage but completed the witness that he was a
profane person, a pagan at heart. These moments mark the crises for
which a long train of thought and habit has prepared. Many a secret sin,
born of luxury and nursed by royal power and splendour, broke out into
the daylight when David looked upon Bathsheba, and filled his life with
unutterable sorrow and shame. God takes no man in a hasty moment and
brands him reprobate. A thousand daily touches through long years have
shaped the image which there reveals itself, and on which is moulded
the everlasting destiny. The little sins of life are busily, hour by
hour, creating the great sins. The small habits and actions, which we
allow to pass unrebuked—they seem to be such trifles—soon pass away
beyond the power of memory to recall; but they leave their ineffaceable
trace on our constitution and character, and lay silently the train of
some great outburst of lust, passion, or wickedness, like Esau’s or
David’s. Then is written a record on our nature and destiny which one
day we shall agonize to blot out; but the inexorable eye looks coldly
down on the frenzied pleader, and the stony lips fashion themselves into
a voiceless “Too late!” Meet sin, meet all the devil’s seductions and
enticements, sternly on the threshold, and the citadel remains for ever
sure.
2. The irrevocable is not the irreparable, through the abounding mercy
and grace of God.
_Things_ cannot be obliterated or abolished. They remain, and their
record remains, for ever. But, blessed be God, they may be transmuted,
and wear Divine forms of beauty and joy. And this is what redemption
means. Eden is closed for ever. To abolish the condition of man as a
sinner, otherwise than by one grand sentence of doom which would abolish
his existence as a creature, is beyond the power even of heaven. A
sinner’s lot you inherit, a sinner’s experience you must know, a
sinner’s agony you must taste, a sinner’s horror of darkness you must
pass through—to the pit, if the birthright never again seems to you
beautiful and glorious, a thing to be won by toil and tears and prayers;
but if your soul pines in its rioting, if it sickens in its worldly
wealth and splendour, if the question forces itself upon you as it never
seems to have forced itself upon Esau, “_What shall it profit a man if
he gain the whole world and lose his own soul, or what shall a man give
in exchange for his soul?_” then the sinner’s anguish, from which there
is no escape for any one of us, may be made by Christ’s dear love the
strait gate to the splendour, the glory, the bliss of heaven. And this
is Redemption. Divine love, love that could die, love that _did_ die,
that its beloved ones might not die, is the solvent which transmutes all
the shame and pain of sin to heavenly glory and bliss. “_Where sin
abounded, grace did much more abound; that as sin had reigned unto
death, even so might grace reign through righteousness, unto eternal
life, by Jesus Christ our Lord._” Here is no reversal, no obliteration
of the past, mark you; the thing that was is and shall be; no power in
the universe can blot out its trace. The experience of a sinner is part
of your being, and in its transmuted form must remain part of your
being, through eternity. These wounds and sores of sin, suffused by
Christ’s great love, become the lustrous pearls of heaven. Nothing in
the past, I care not how dark or damning it may be, is irreparable by
the love which “_endured the cross and despised the shame_,” that it
might win the right and the power to redeem. There is no sin whose
stains may not be wept out at the Redeemer’s feet. There is no life
which may not win “She hath loved much, for she hath much forgiven” as
its record, earnest of a rapture of eternal bliss. But dream not that
the path can be an easy one, and that penitence can transmute the sorrow
into joy by a word. You have done that whose issues could only be undone
by the agony and bloody sweat of Gethsemane, the cross and passion of
Calvary; and you too must die, die to sin, that you may live to God. The
flesh, which has despised your birthright, must be mortified, crucified,
by grace. “_I am crucified with Christ_” you must learn to say; you must
know the fellowship of the sufferings of your Master, and taste the cup
of which He drank the dregs, or the lost birthright is lost for ever,
and the deed done on earth remains irreparable as well as irrevocable
through eternity.