life. A sad, stricken, broken man, halting painfully on
his thigh, he went on his way, but ennobled, purified, and saved. His
life is a revelation of the way of God in the discipline of our spirits;
how power gets educated and purified, and made meet at last for the work
and the joy of eternity. So Judaism, as it struggled on and suffered,
lost some of its baser elements, and came forth, developed, into a
higher region of experience and power, in the life of the Christian
Church.

The study of the character of these two men is full of the richest
interest and instruction; but our present purpose is with the elder, and
this profoundly sad passage of his history. There is much, in the matter
of both the birthright and the repentance of which our text speaks,
which is frequently very grievously and even disastrously misunderstood,
which is supposed to present ideas of the dealings of God with man which
contradict the fundamental principles of the gospel, and casts no
trifling stumbling-blocks before the steps of faith. That we may
understand it truly let us consider--

I. That the rejection of the elder, and the election of the younger to
honour and power--to all that the election of God could bring--by no
means stands by itself in the history of the Divine dispensations; and
it illustrates an important principle on which we will dwell for a
moment before we pass on.

We are tempted to think that, on the whole, Esau was a hardly used man,
and that we have here an instance of the exercise of the Divine
sovereignty which is harsh, arbitrary, and unjust. In the natural course
of things, Esau would have had the birthright and all that it was worth.
It is made to appear that by a purely arbitrary act Esau was robbed of
it, while Jacob was endowed with it, having no sort of superior claim.
Paul, in Romans ix. 10-13, is careful to insist that whatever the
principle may be which is at work here, at any rate it is not merit, for
the decree was pronounced long before any questions of merit could have
force. The sovereignty of God is here the keystone of his argument: it
is worth our while to discern, as far as we may, the reason on which
this act of sovereignty rests. Of course the sympathy which we extend to
Esau is based upon some idea of the rights of the elder born which seems
to be instinctive in the human heart. This opens a wide question into
which we have no need in this place to enter. The principle is
recognised plainly