Esau and repentance

There are some spiritual lessons we can learn from the example of Esau, Jacob's elder brother. In those days, it was customary for the eldest son to inherit the father's wealth and blessings. But one day as a young man, when Esau was tired after a hunting trip, he casually traded his birthright to Jacob for some porridge. The Bible describes this as Esau 'despising' the birthright. He realised the seriousness of the loss only when it came to the actual time when his father was to bless him. We know how Jacob cheated his father and stole the birthright from Esau. When Esau knew about this, he begged with tears for his father to bless him, but it was too late. Esau's reaction was to hate Jacob and decide to kill him.

But think of what happened. First Esau despised the birthright and gave it away. When the consequences hit him, he blamed Jacob. He found no place for repentance because he was not being honest before God. Blaming someone else is a trait we have inherited from Adam and Eve. But if we want salvation, we need to first acknowledge our sins (Je.3:13). If we will not even admit our sins, where is the question of forgiveness, and victory? First we have to recognise this tendency in us to want to pass on our blame to someone else, and then we must honestly and deliberately face the reality of our situation, standing before God. We can see how deep rooted this blaming technique is in our flesh, when it should have been so plain and obvious to Esau about the bad choice he himself had made. We need to train ourselves to stop doing this, and learn to judge ourselves honestly and fairly.

The commentary the Bible gives on Esau's behaviour is in He.12:16,17, "that there be no immoral or godless person like Esau, who sold his own birthright for a single meal. For you know that even afterwards, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no place for repentance, though he sought for it with tears." In spite of doing wrong, Esau did not want the consequence but desired a good outcome. Isn't this another thing we need to be careful about? Even if we repent and receive forgiveness, we cannot usually escape from the consequences (Ga.6:7,8). Consequences help us to humble ourselves and learn from our mistakes. But Esau did not acknowledge his mistake, and he could not tolerate the consequences.

If we read the passage in Hebrews casually, we might get the impression that Esau sought to find repentance with tears, but could not receive it. The original passage in Genesis makes it clear that what he sought with tears was the blessing, and not repentance. Repentance was for him to choose, but since he could not see any need to repent, he was fighting to change the consequences, if possible. Even the fact that Jacob had cheated him should not have excused him from repenting from his own blunder in throwing away the birthright in the first place. We need to learn from this and avoid the same mistake in our life.