e 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