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sermonette: The Sin of Esau

Charles Whitaker (1944-2021)
Given 14-Aug-10; Sermon #1006s; 16 minutes

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Well, I'm going to ask you to turn to Revelation 11, but I'll just mention it very quickly. Sometimes God sees geography in a slightly different way than we do. I'm going to just read 11, uh, Revelation 8 verse... 11, and John is here speaking of the two witnesses. He says, their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city which spiritually is called Sodom in Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified. Well, it is clear here that the city of which God speaks is Jerusalem, where Christ was crucified. Yet He says Jerusalem bears the spiritual names of Sodom and Gomorrah. I'm sorry, Sodom and Egypt. Now, a geographer might have a little bit of trouble with all of that. For Sodom did not exist in John's day and does not exist in ours because God destroyed it a long time before that. And indeed, it was not even located particularly near Jerusalem. And Egypt, well, Egypt is even further away. It's not even a city, but it's an area, of course, made up of a number of cities. Today, I want to talk about spiritual geography, if you'll accept that particular term. What warnings are there in God's word for us about spiritual geography, because of spiritual geography? Please turn with me to Ezekiel 16. Ezekiel 16. And here we will see a rather extended, a good example of what I call spiritual geography. Jerusalem is again the target of Ezekiel's comments. Verse 3 makes that absolutely clear. I'll begin in Ezekiel 16 verse 3. Thus says the Lord God to Jerusalem, He is speaking to Jerusalem, your birth and your nativity are from the land of Canaan. Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. Well, let's stop there, brethren. While there may have certainly been some individuals of Amorite or Hittite lineage claiming to be Jews living in Jerusalem at the time, the Jews were, of course, descended from Abraham through Judah. And if you were to study into the matter a little bit, you would see that the Hittites and the Amorites, well, they descended through totally different lines. But God even repeats His statement down in verse 43. He says, your mother was a Hittite and your father an Amorite. So this is a second witness to what must be something that is rather important and an important point. So let's back up to verse 44 of Ezekiel 16, verse 44, to see how God is using family relationships here in this particular context. Verse 44. Indeed, everyone who quotes proverbs will use this proverb against you: like mother, like daughter. You are your mother's daughter, loathing husband and children, and you are the sister of your sisters who loathe their husband and children. Your mother was a Hittite and your father an Amorite. Your eldest sister is Samaria, who dwells with her daughters to the north of you, and your younger sister, who dwells to the south of you, is Sodom and her daughters. Well, as we read on, brethren, it becomes obvious that God is not talking about blood relationships here, and He's not talking about physical geography, but about sinful practices, about things that people do associated with various peoples and with groups of people. Verse 47, verses 47 and 48. You did not walk in their ways nor act according to their abominations, but as if that were too little, you became more corrupt than they in all of your ways. As I live, says the eternal God, neither your sister Sodom nor her daughters have done as you and your daughters have done. God is clearly talking about, brethren, how people act, not their lineage, not their genealogies, and not geography. Note also, God is not talking about how one person acts in a nation, but about the practices that seem to characterize an entire nation, an entire group of people. So we could say that God is profiling. Verse 49, verse 50, continuing on: Look, this was the iniquity of your daughter, of your sister Sodom. She and her daughter, and that reference to daughter there is probably Gomorrah, she and her sister had pride, fullness of food, and abundance of idleness. Neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy, and they were haughty and committed abominations before Me, and I took them away as I saw fit. So Sodom was materialistic, was rich, and oppressed the poor. And later on, God destroyed her for a number of abominations. Yes, brethren, people can have a characteristic or a national sin. So let's talk a little bit now, change gears a little bit, and talk about the national sin of Edom. Edom, what profile, if I can use that term, does Edom fall into? What was the root, historically, of his sin? Ezekiel 25:12, I'm not going to ask you to turn there, connects that with vengeance against God's people. But you see, brethren, vengeance doesn't happen in isolation. There is a cause for it. It may be a very irrational, it may be an unjustified cause, but there is a cause for, for, you know, any type of vengeance or any type of anger like that. Notice Jeremiah 49. I'm not again going to ask you to turn there, but here the prophet connects the fall of Edom with the sin of Esau. It says very clearly, this is Isaiah 49:8, flee, turn, turn back, dwell in the depths, O inhabitants of Dedan. Now, Dedan is an area in Edom. For I will bring the calamity of Esau upon him, the time that I will punish him. Well, brethren, Esau is involved in Edom's fall, and it is a downfall, brethren, so great that Edom is no more. That's what it says. That's what it says at the end of verse 10. It's going to be a great fall. The end of verse 13 says that Esau's descendants will find their cities perpetual wastes. Whatever is going to happen prophetically, brethren, to Esau is going to be forever. Well, what did Esau do to bring such calamity on himself, and by extension, on his peoples? What chain of events did he start, that is to, to, to culminate in his descendants taking vengeance on Judah and reaping a whirlwind of anger from God? Genesis 25 tells the story, and of course we are not going to turn there because we all know the story very well. I'm going to begin in about verse 33, though. It tells us that Esau swore to Jacob, selling his birthright to him for bread and lentil stew. He ate, it says in verse 34, and drank, arose, and went his way, as if the birthright were such a little thing, such a little matter. Thus Esau despised his birthright. Esau, brethren, devalued God's promises. Those fantastic promises of national greatness, of wealth, of vast populations, the promises that God had promised to Abraham, Esau simply sold for a meal and went his way, showing his contempt for them. And brethren, make no mistake about it, Esau was not ignorant of those promises. Genesis 18:19 is very clear on the subject. It tells us that Abraham was committed to teach his children and his descendants after him. It says his household there, God's ways. He taught them God's commandments. So it is no stretch of logic at all to imagine Abraham teaching his grandchildren, that is Jacob and Esau, about the promises he himself had heard God utter. Esau was 15, Jacob also would have been 15, when Abraham died. And I firmly believe that Esau and Jacob knew what the promises were, having heard them from Abraham's own lips. But he really did not listen to them, Esau did not. He really did not listen to his grandfather. He had other things on his mind, and as a young man, he was then in his early twenties, he walked away from those promises. Hebrews 12 adds another point, a poignant point, to the story. Hebrews 12:17 tells us that Esau came to a certain point later on in his life where he rethought this whole matter. Yet when he wanted to inherit the blessing, it says there, he was rejected, for he found no place for repentance, though he sought it diligently with tears. And that, brethren, should give us pause. Esau, living in the bleak land which God had given him, came to the place in his life where he sought forgiveness diligently, it says, but to no avail. And I've often speculated, brethren, if the kindness that Esau later on showed to Jacob, his brother, when he was returning to the land, perhaps very sincere, I'm not sure about that, but if that was his attempt to become reconciled to his brother, to somehow find forgiveness from God through that particular reconciliation. Genesis 33:4 relates how Esau, apparently with enthusiasm, it says, they ran to meet Jacob and embraced him and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept. And if you read the story carefully, you get the idea that Esau envisioned joining the two peoples together, the people of Jacob and the people of Esau. In verse 12, Esau offers to journey with him, he himself, in taking a lead. By the way, it says, which is an interesting point in itself, is that if you can't fight them, join them, so you can get in on their wealth. Note what it says in verse 15, where Esau offers to leave some of his men with Jacob, perhaps to influence Jacob's thinking, because he wanted to, to, to be a part of the, of the, of the, of the whole formula. So Jacob wanted none of it at all, and he separates from Esau, traveling, it says there, to Succoth. And Esau, it says in verse 16, returned that day by way of, to, to, to Seir, rather. And his mission was unaccomplished. He failed to secure repentance or forgiveness from God. Jacob and Esau separated, and apparently they did so forever. There was to be no detente, brethren. There was to be no healing of the breach. Esau had walked away from God some years before. It was a done deal, period. And that was his sin. Poignantly, the writer of the book of Hebrews calls him profane. That's Hebrews 12:16. And that means that he was not holy. He was not sanctified. He was not set apart for God's use. Having chosen the course of action that he did when he was 22 years old, and that's about the age that the genealogists placed him when he sold his birthright, having rejected at that time God's goodness, that was about 7 years after his grandfather's death, he could do nothing to rectify that situation. Later on, he found no repentance. But brethren, I'll conclude with a factoid about China. Now, that may seem irrelevant to my point here. I think you'll see the connection later on. China's economy has grown at a rate of about 9%, that is a year, since 1979. And that growth rate is projected to continue to about 2025. That may not be, it may not be what happens, but that is the projections, OK? Now, as you know, economic growth is cumulative. It builds upon itself, and so it follows the rules that govern compound interest. This means that China's economy doubles every 7 3/4 years. That's simply because of the compounding effect of this growth rate of 9%. In the 46 years between 1979 and 2025, China's economy will double almost 6 times. Now, I do not mean that it's going to be 6 times larger in 2025 than it was in 1979. No, what I mean is that it will double 6 times, doubling as in the progression of 1 doubling to 2, doubling to 4, doubling to 8, doubling to 16, doubling to 32, and then finally to 64. That is a remarkable growth, brethren. China's economy, according to these projections, will be 64 times greater in 2025 than it was in 1979. But brethren, here is what's really interesting about that, at least interesting to me. If both America and China grow at their projected rates, they may not, but if they would grow at their projected rates during the same time frame, China's economy, measured in GDP in 2025, will be still only 30% of America's. That's less than 1/3 of the size of the American economy. And that, with China's almost 4 times greater population than the United States. Why do I bring that up, brethren? Well, simply because of this. When God makes a promise, He fulfills it, and He fulfills it in a big, big way. Jacob's prophecy about Joseph appearing in Genesis 49, we know it very well, is not just pretty poetry. Joseph, and of course that means America. It says then in Genesis 49:22, is a fruitful vine, a fruitful vine near a spring whose branches climb over the wall. And that poetry, brethren, has translated into the reality of the vast material wealth that America enjoys today. God's birthright promises to Joseph have materialized into the wealth that surrounds us. And that fact, brethren, should be an encouragement to us, and it should be an inspiration to us. If God fulfilled His physical birthright promises so liberally, so fantastically, how much greater will be the fulfillment of His spiritual firstfruit promises to us. The actualization of those promises, brethren, will absolutely astonish us, astound us. And so it is that Paul, we will not turn there, but in I Corinthians 2:9, he writes: no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has imagined the things that God has prepared for those who love Him. Esau thought lightly of God's promises. He devalued them, and as a result, he irrevocably, irretrievably lost them. He took the wrong course of action as a young person, and though he ardently sought to turn the situation around later in his life, he could not do so. And brethren, we dare not make that same mistake of devaluing God's promises to us. In America's wealth, God has demonstrated both His commitment and His ability to make good on His promises in a fantastic way. We, like Jacob and Esau, know what those promises are. But if we take Esau's course of action, if we devalue His spiritual promises, if we treat them lightly, we could easily find ourselves on the outside looking in, and the result could be permanent. Let us, brethren, as Christ said in Matthew 6:33, seek first the kingdom.