Why Did No One Tell Me the Truth About Esau?
Genesis 25; Romans 9:13; Hebrews 12
Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated. We’ve all heard of Esau, Jacob’s brother — but do we really know who he is? Are we underestimating one of Scripture’s great villains and enemies of the godly? I want you to see Esau as he really was, and then enable you to identify the Esau spirit in the people in your life. Recognising the Esau spirit, and coming to terms with the tremendous threat it poses to you, is the first step to gaining victory over it and claiming your God-given inheritance.
Hello, my name’s Nathan and this is God’s World, God’s Way — Episode 1 of Season 1: Jacob the Perfect: A Guide for God’s Strugglers. This episode is sponsored by CR101Radio.com, where you will find dozens of free audiobooks, e-books and podcasts for the discerning Christian.
Esau Fought
The question is: what was Esau really like?
Rebecca, Jacob and Esau’s mother, was so disturbed by the war going on inside her — Esau and Jacob wrestling each other in her womb — that she cried out to the Lord for an explanation. Genesis 25:22 records: “The children struggled together within her, and she said, If it be so, why am I thus? And she went to enquire of the Lord.”
Esau was not play-fighting. He fought against Jacob, and Jacob fought against Esau. This doesn’t mean Jacob was just as bad as Esau, however. Esau was fighting against God’s chosen man. Romans 9:13 reads: “As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” Jacob was God’s chosen one, his elect. Esau, in other words, was militantly anti the chosen one of God from birth.
Jacob, by contrast, was fighting the good fight of faith, as St Paul said in 1 Timothy 6:12. We cannot be neutral, therefore, about Esau — and about all the Esaus that surround us. Those who carry an Esau spirit actively fight against God’s chosen people to overcome them. Esau’s victory would have been Jacob’s defeat. As for the Esaus in your life, their victory is your defeat.
Esau the Hunter
What else do we know about Esau? Genesis 25:27 says: “The boys grew, and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field.”
Cunning means skilful. He was a skilful hunter. How long does it take to become skilful in something as demanding as hunting? Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, argues that mastery takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice — the equivalent of 417 days straight without rest, sleep, or pause. Mastery in hunting, therefore, would have taken Esau years of consistent practice in isolation, despite the fact that the Lord had said it was not good for man to be alone.
But so what? Hunting can be good and godly recreation. The real question is what it meant for Esau to be a hunter. When you’re too poor to buy food, devoting yourself to hunting full-time makes sense. But Esau wasn’t poor. His family had a very large livestock operation. Isaac owned great flocks — thousands upon thousands of sheep, goats and cattle. Genesis 13:2 says of Isaac’s father: “Abraham was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold.” And Isaac became even wealthier still.
So Esau, by devoting himself to years of practice to become a cunning hunter, mastered a skill that had zero economic value. When Jacob, on his mother’s instruction, took a couple of young goats from the herd for Rebekah to cook, Isaac — who loved to eat what Esau had hunted — couldn’t tell the difference between Jacob’s goats and Esau’s game. All those thousands of hours Esau had spent mastering hunting: for nothing.
Esau wasn’t serving anyone. Instead of productive work and service, he cultivated a relationship with a powerful patron — Isaac, who loved Esau because of the game he prepared. Power relationships, strategic alliances as opposed to work and service: that was Esau’s way.
Jacob the Servant
How does that compare with Jacob? Esau came in from days of hunting, ready to die — and what was Jacob doing? He was engaged in the humblest aspect of the family business, obediently preparing food without complaint. Jacob was a servant.
Jacob devoted himself to dwelling in tents. What does that mean? Genesis 4:20 tells us: “Adah bare Jabal. He was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle” — that is, livestock. To dwell in tents was to be in the cattle business, the business of Isaac and Abraham before him.
Jacob had his own ten thousand hours of mastery, and it wasn’t spent doing what he wanted to do. He did what he needed to do in order to inherit and run his father’s livestock operation from top to bottom. Instead of mastering an economically useless skill, Jacob learned his father’s business.
Three times in his life, at crucial points — once with Esau, twice with Laban — Jacob faced powerful enemies, made a deal, and came out on top. As soon as he arrived at his uncle Laban’s house, he began giving orders for the welfare of the flocks, and, like the blessed man of Psalm 1:3, whatever he did prospered.
Where Esau coasted, confident in his patron’s favour, Jacob assumed nothing and mastered every aspect of the business that duty and inheritance called him to. Jacob’s power alliance was with the Lord, who had promised him the inheritance while he was still in his mother’s womb.
Esau’s refusal to work, by contrast, was active rebellion against God. The first command God gave to man was: “Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Esau rejected the most basic task of manhood — dominion — when he chose hunting not as a hobby, but as the defining activity of his life.
Jacob, meanwhile, had such mastery over animals that, despite all of Laban’s scheming, he was able to breed speckled beasts from the white. No one knows how he did it to this day. Jacob was a devoted dominion man. He let the Lord define his life by accepting the yoke of the dominion mandate and his lot in the livestock business.
Esau the Wild Man
The more we read the texts, the more we uncover Esau’s rebellion. At his birth, Genesis 25:25 records: “The first came forth red all over like a hairy garment, and they named him Esau.” There is no sin in being hairy — but this carefully recorded detail indicates that Esau was marked from birth as a wild man.
Who else in the Bible was a wild man and a hunter? Genesis 16:12 and 21:20 speak of Ishmael, older brother and rival of Isaac. Ishmael was a persecutor of the godly. Genesis 21:9 records his habitual, cruel torment of the true heir, Isaac. Ishmael was a real threat.
Esau is Ishmael — the wild hunter — copied and pasted into Isaac’s household. Ishmael, Isaac’s half-brother, is the spiritual father of Esau. Jacob, by contrast, was Isaac 2.0: the second-born son, dutiful and obedient, ready to take the yoke of dominion and dwelling in tents that his father and grandfather had borne before him.
But Ishmael wasn’t the first hunter in the Bible. That was someone far more powerful. Genesis 10 introduces us to Nimrod, whose primary kingdom was Babel — Babylon — the first recorded attempt at one-world government, of Tower of Babel fame. Nimrod was a self-conscious enemy of the Lord God. He hunted in God’s face, defying him. Enemy of God, enemy of piety, enemy of pity. Nimrod, the mighty hunter, was the spiritual grandfather of Esau, the cunning hunter.
Can we really say Esau was like Nimrod, just because both were hunters? Genesis 27:41 answers plainly: like Cain, the first murderer, Esau hated his brother and plotted to take his life. Jacob’s father, who still favoured Esau, took the threat so seriously that he sent Jacob hundreds of miles away to safety.
Esau the Would-Be Murderer
Esau didn’t mellow with age — he grew more dangerous and more ruthless. Genesis 32 records the chilling report: “He is coming to meet you, and there are four hundred men with him.” Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed. The hunter had become a would-be murderer, and the would-be murderer had now gathered four hundred armed men to pursue God’s chosen man.
Jacob prayed: “Please deliver me from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I fear him, that he may come and attack me, the mothers with the children.” Esau — enemy of God, enemy of piety, enemy of pity — sought to kill his rival, eliminate his line, and seize his possessions. He was now an expert in a different kind of hunting. He was, indeed, another Nimrod.
But where do we find Jacob going wild and turning to violence? Nowhere. When threatened by Esau, he chose obedience to his father’s command and courageously walked a perilous journey to an unknown land alone. When he arrived at Laban’s house after a long trip on foot, he practically flung aside a great stone covering a well, allowing the thirsty sheep to drink. Jacob funnelled his power and strength into his dominion calling.
When he faced Esau’s war band of four hundred armed men, what did Jacob do? He prayed. He made a plan. And having fought in prayer, he fought his brother with a bribe — putting into practice the wisdom of Proverbs 21:14: “A gift in secret pacifies anger, and a bribe behind the back, strong wrath.”
Esau the Weakling
When Esau was doing what he wanted — hunting — his body became agile, his senses acute, his arm strong enough to bend a bow of bronze. But indulging yourself, always getting what your flesh desires, atrophies the inner man like an arm in a cast. Esau became a greater physical threat, yet was easily deflected from his course.
His own mother reckoned Esau would forget his rage in a few days. He had assembled an army against his brother — but at the sight of 580 animals, weak Esau folded. Taking the herds was far easier than having to fight for them. This was the man who had sold his birthright for a bowl of soup and a piece of bread.
Pathetic. But big, strong, macho Esau had a yet more shameful secret: he was a crybaby.
Esau never said no to what his flesh wanted, and as a result he remained a toddler in a man’s body. What does Esau do when he forfeits the blessing? He cries like a baby. By contrast, Jacob’s path to secure the birthright and blessing was years of diligent labour in the house of his father, learning the business, and above all, believing the divine promise that the older would serve the younger.
Esau’s way was: do what you want, and then throw a tantrum when you don’t get it.
There’s something else in the Genesis 27 incident. After Esau cried, he started pointing the finger at Jacob, giving his own spin on events that turned the whole situation on its head. Genesis 27:36 records him saying: “Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has supplanted me these two times — he took away my birthright, and now he has taken away my blessing.”
When he says he was supplanted, he simply means: I lost to my younger brother. He calls it my birthright and my blessing. But the birthright wasn’t his — it was Jacob’s, as we shall see in detail in the next episode. The blessing, by prophecy and by the evidence of Jacob’s godly life, belonged to Jacob. Esau was guilty of precisely what he accused Jacob of: taking what was his.
Esau the Profane
These themes carried into his adult life. Hebrews 12 calls Esau a profane man and a fornicator: when he wanted to satisfy his sexual lusts, he did so. He joined himself in marriage to two Hittite women, steeped in the practice of sexual cult rites from an early age.
Esau couldn’t control himself for five minutes. Jacob was willing to wait seven years to build up the bride price fit for the hard-working and beautiful Rachel. Jacob had appetites too, as every man does, but he funnelled them into work and godly marriage.
Ultimately, Esau was weak because he was profane. Profane means outside the temple — he didn’t believe in the power of God and his covenant on earth. He believed instead in the power of man. He strengthened his arm through hunting. He built alliances through pleasing his patron Isaac with game, and through marrying into powerful Hittite and Ishmaelite families.
Strength, for Esau, came from man. Like Mao, who said power flows from the barrel of a gun, Esau believed power flowed from the sword. So he sought it in the sword — and with his four-hundred-strong force of armed men, he believed he could easily overturn the words of divine prophecy and divine blessing on Jacob and Jacob’s seed.
Esau was the enemy of God’s chosen son, and he was a serious enemy.
The Esau Spirit Today
Esau is long dead. But the Esau spirit is alive and well. What marks an Esau? How do you identify the Esaus in your life?
An Esau fights against the righteous to rob them of their God-given inheritance. God told Rebekah: the older will serve the younger. Anyone who works to rob you of your inheritance, who insists that you ought not to seek to rule in your own little corner of God’s world, is an Esau. They are dangerous people. They want to steal what God gave you.
An Esau refuses to serve others in the marketplace. He is devoted instead to mastering his hobbies, whatever he likes doing. Anyone who spends hours on end in solitude mastering computer games is an Esau. Those who dedicate years of their lives to Tolkien lore are likewise Esaus. Those who recommend giving your childhood and youth to the Greek and Roman classics are Esaus. These are all strangers to the service of others in God’s name.
An Esau exchanges productive dominion work for power alliances. How many politicians have sought power and self-enrichment through backroom deals? Your local and national governments are filled with Esaus. Weak people who join powerful fringe movements — to burn, loot, assault, and even kill their political opponents — are Esaus. Dangerous people. And yet, inexplicably, also zeros: cardboard cutouts with no personality, non-playing characters.
This is readily understandable when you think about Esau’s life. He never cultivated inner strength by saying no to his desires. His character never grew from the toddler stage. And so the Esaus of our own day cannot control their sexual appetites, are prone to fits of rage, cannot stay on task without checking their phones, and when faced with a setback, sob uncontrollably. Esaus are emotional toddlers in grown-up bodies.
When they fail, they accuse us of doing what they do all the time. Esaus stink of blatant hypocrisy. We are surrounded by such people. They are useless and dangerous.
The master sin of Esau was his profanity. He despised the things of God. And so the Esaus of our day snicker at Christ. They mock and deride holy things. They ridicule God’s word and trust in their own power instead. Some vandalise or burn down churches. Others attack and murder ministers of religion. They parade about as if they owned the country, insisting that Britain and America were never Christian nations — founded instead by other profane Esaus like themselves.
They hold the key positions in civil government, entertainment, education, and the great foundations and think tanks. They firmly believe the future belongs to them.
But the truth is this: if we are Christ’s — as St Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3 — the present and the future belong to us. Esau will always be denied the blessing at God’s appointed time. And Jacob, God’s faithful people, will inherit the world.
Keep listening and you will discover how God’s chosen one Jacob overcame Esau — and how you, loved by God, can overcome him too. There is so much more to say about Esau, and we will continue to examine his life and character in the weeks to come.
Next week we’ll be looking at Jacob. Do we know the real Jacob — or has the truth been hidden from us?
In the meantime, please reach out with questions and comments. God bless you. Until next week, this has been Nathan Conkey for God’s World, God’s Way.