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?