Bible Commentaries

Malachi 1:2-3

I. There is no impiety in this inquiry. Granted that God may prefer whom He will; that it is for Him, if it please Him and as it please Him, to put one man before another; yet, if in so doing He allows the reason to appear, there is nothing wrong; nay, rather it is our duty to mark that reason, for it helps to confirm us in our conviction that the Judge of the world will always do right. Now, in the case of Jacob, that reason is not far to seek. There was one quality in him which Esau had not, that must, we believe, have recommended him to God's favour, and that was religion. Jacob, with all his faults, was a religious man. Esau, with much in him that attracts us, was not a religious man.

II. To Esau the present was everything. So that he had abundance of this world's goods, plenty of corn and wine, he was content to forego the hope of the future. We see this stamped on all he did and on all that is written of him in the Bible. He was open-hearted and open-handed, and these are qualities we all admire and ought to admire. But the one thing most needed was wanting in him. He had no religion—no love, no fear of God, no reverence for things holy; he gave no sign by anything that he did that he believed in a life to come. With Jacob it was quite otherwise. With him the future, and not the present, had the most weight. God was continually in his thoughts: he depended on God, and loved to ask counsel of God; and did not feel that he was sufficient of himself, but that his sufficiency was of God. And this piety will account for the preference accorded to him in Scripture over Esau.

R. D. B. Rawnsley, Sermons in Country Churches, p. 64.

The character of Jacob is not presented to us as a noble, still less as a perfect, character. It is represented as a character which in spite of many stains and apparently habitual weakness God in His wisdom saw fit to bless and to adapt for His own purposes.

I. What, then, was the difference between the brothers? It amounts in substance to this: Jacob, with all his faults was a religious man. He did believe in God. He did believe that his life was to be a life of obedience to God. He did believe that the God of his fathers had called him, even him, to be His servant and His witness. Even his ungenerous and dishonest efforts to obtain the birthright prove that he at least attached a meaning and a value to these privileges. He believed in something and some Person beyond and above himself.

II. Thus, then, we have two men brought before us for our instruction. The one has much that is attractive, much that commands our sympathies, if not our respect; and yet he has nothing in him on which the Spirit of God can fasten so as to make him a blessing to the world. On the other hand, we have a man subtle and self-seeking, capable of offences which seem most removed from the noble character, and yet he communes with God. He rests upon God. He asks God's guidance. He believes in God's calling and God's providence; probably he confesses to God with shame and sorrow the sins by which he seems to the outward eye to have thriven. Surely you do not deliberately doubt as to which of these brothers was in the main right, and which was in the main wrong. Learn from the text that you must come to fear and think of God. You cannot, you dare not, live a life of mere animal enjoyment, however innocent it may seem to you to be. You dare not subject yourself to that solemn sentence: "I hated Esau; I could not make of him a chosen vessel for speeding the coming of My kingdom."

H. M. Butler, Harrow Sermons, 2nd series, p. 12.

References: Malachi 1:3.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 526. Malachi 1:6.—W. Braden, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vii., p. 152. Malachi 1:8.—Homiletic Magazine, vol. vii., p. 263. Malachi 1:11.—H. D. Rawnsley, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxii., p. 358; J. Irons, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. x., p. 89. Malachi 1:13.—J. Norton, Golden Truths, p. 455. Malachi 1:13.—R. W. Evans, Parochial Sermons, vol. ii., p. 315. Malachi 2:1.—J. Hiles Hitchens, Christian World Pulpit, vol. v., p. 363.