Genesis 28:3-9
And God Almighty bless thee, and make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, that thou mayest be a multitude of people; And give thee the blessing of Abraham, to thee, and to thy seed with thee; that thou mayest inherit the land wherein thou art a stranger, which God gave to Abraham. And Isaac sent away Jacob: and he went to Padan-aram unto Laban, son of Bethuel the Syrian, the brother of Rebekah, Jacob’s and Esau’s mother. When Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob, and sent him away to Padan-aram, to take him a wife from thence; and that as he blessed him he gave him a charge, saying, Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan; And that Jacob obeyed his father and his mother, and was gone to Padan-aram; And Esau seeing that the daughters of Canaan pleased not Isaac his father; Then went Esau unto Ishmael, and took unto the wives which he had Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael Abraham’s son, the sister of Nebajoth, to be his wife.
Isaac now speaks over Jacob the blessing of Abraham. Fruitfulness. Multiplication. The land. The covenant line. Jacob is sent away with the blessing of God resting on him, even though he is still very much a work in progress. I like that because it reminds me that God’s calling on a man does not mean the man is finished. It means God has begun something He Himself intends to complete.
Then the camera shifts to Esau, and the whole thing is sad.
Esau finally sees that the daughters of Canaan did not please his father. He sees that Jacob was sent away to find a wife from another place. He sees the outward pattern. But he still does not understand the inward issue. So what does he do? He goes and gets an Ishmaelite wife, as though adding one more marriage to the mess will somehow fix what is wrong.
Poor Esau.
He is still thinking completely in the flesh. He is still dealing with spiritual problems in a carnal way. He is still trying to repair the situation by external action without any real inward brokenness, insight, or repentance. He is reacting, but he is not understanding.
And that happens all the time.
A person can see the consequences of sin and still not grasp the heart of the matter. A person can notice what went wrong and still respond in a way that goes even farther wrong. Esau realizes his choices have grieved his father, but instead of coming to God with a softened heart, he simply rearranges the furniture in a burning house.
That is what the flesh always does.
The flesh never solves the problem it created. It only makes new versions of the same old sorrow.
And notice this too. Esau steps deeper into polygamy, and later Jacob will too. Scripture is honest about that. The Bible tells the truth about the lives of the people it records. It does not airbrush their failures. It does not clean up the family stories to make everybody look noble and polished. It simply tells it like it is.
That is one of the reasons I trust the Bible. It is painfully honest.
But just because the Bible reports something does not mean God approves of it. The Word records polygamy, immorality, deception, jealousy, and divorce, but recording a thing is not the same as endorsing it. Scripture is not saying, “This is good.” It is saying, “This happened.” And as the story unfolds, you see the grief these choices bring with them.
That is important because people sometimes point to something in the Old Testament and act as if the mere presence of it means God smiles on it. No. Many times the sorrow that follows is the commentary. The heartbreak is the sermon. The fractured home, the rivalry, the bitterness, the striving, the tears, that is the fruit of stepping outside the heart of God.
Esau is a warning here. He is close enough to the family of promise to see what is happening, but not close enough in heart to understand why it matters. He can imitate a piece of obedience without ever really surrendering. And there is a big difference between the two.
It is possible to make a move that looks religious and still be completely carnal.
It is possible to adjust behavior without yielding the heart.
It is possible to say, “I will fix this,” and yet never once ask, “Lord, what are You really after in me?”
That is the issue.
God is not merely after outward adjustment. He is after inward surrender. He is not looking for us to patch up appearances. He is looking to change us from the inside out.
So when the Lord puts His finger on something in our lives, may we not respond like Esau. May we not try to solve spiritual problems with fleshly wisdom. May we not just shuffle things around externally while the heart remains untouched. May we come to Him honestly and say, “Lord, do the deeper work. Not just around me. In me.”